Chapter Text
thumb down and starting to weep
He should have seen it coming.
All of time and space, every thread, fixed point, divergence, pulsing under his skin even as he sleeps. The threads he tore, yanked them from their stitch and knotted them back together because he couldn’t bear it anymore, couldn’t live with a ghost or an echo or a hollow promise.
The timelines snarl around the Library and one heart drums fixed point fixed point fixed point while the other hurls him toward anything to salve the pain.
He wasn’t supposed to save her.
He knows that.
He does it anyway.
–-
She comes back shelled.
Her body is whole and her mind is sharp but she refuses to tell him how long. She isn’t used to solidity: bumps her hips on table edges and misjudges distances and burns her hands under the tap because she can’t tell the difference in temperatures. She’s cold, always cold, always wearing layer upon layer and black leather gloves that make her look sinister. Uninviting.
Her voice is still soft and warm and full of love for him and all of his faults but he can’t reach her skin and her eyes keep drifting. She’s always looking over his shoulder when he speaks. She startles at everything.
He finds her most often in his study, curled on the sofa in front of the fireplace, but she isn’t reading. Isn’t working. She sits and stares at the flames and sometimes he holds her and sometimes he doesn’t and sometimes she says, “Let’s go somewhere,” and they do. They run.
He runs, from the look on her face. The feel of leather between his fingers when he grabs her hand.
–-
She doesn’t stay with him long.
He doesn’t know if it’s to hide the damage, or if she thinks there’s no damage to hide, but he follows her:
She doesn’t go home, not to Luna or to Earth. She doesn’t look for work. She flits from planet to planet, desert to forest to new planets to apocalypses, always hot climates. Some so dry his lips crack within hours, some so humid he can barely breathe.
When she finally acknowledges his presence, she insists she’s fine. Just cold. She blames it on readjustment. Corporeality.
He tells her she’s in shock.
She asks from what.
He doesn’t tell her living.
–-
She rips out the pages of her diary.
He finds her on the floor of their bedroom, sitting in the pile with a hand over her mouth that shakes and her eyes are glassy and he doesn’t know what to say so he says nothing. Gathers the pages from around her, assembles them back in order. He’s read it all. There are no more spoilers. No more sneak peeks. He tucks them back within the cracked blue binding and smiles gently.
“It’s okay,” he says, “We’ll make it good as new.”
–
When she leaves the second time, she covers her tracks.
He arrives on planets she’s just vacated - ash and dust in her wake. She doesn’t harm anyone, anyone innocent, at least, but she’s reckless. He follows the stories: the warrior woman who took on an army, who fought off a god, who jumped off a cliff to the ocean below.
–-
It isn’t lost on him that he’s the one to leave her messages.
Love notes carved in stone and coordinates in ancient temples and Gallifreyan endearments on battlefields.
She doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t expect her to. She’s running, not for her sake but for his: the destruction in her wake may not be reprehensible, but she’ll spare him every grief, even now.
–-
It takes him too long to realize she’s fulfilling history.
All the time in the world and only books for company and she knew: every war she was supposed to fight. She’d found herself in the pages of old tombs and picture books and plays and now she’s closing the loop.
He catches up, catches her, tucks her safe in the TARDIS and pilots them into the vortex and tells her to stop. They have time. They have space.
Time can be rewritten.
–-
When she touches him, her fingers are ice against his shoulders, his bare chest. Her lips aren’t much warmer, and he rubs his palms over her back, her arms, everywhere he can reach. He wraps his body around her and ignores the tingle in his skin and concentrates on her: the beat of her hearts and her throaty gasps and her nails raking down his spine. He tangles them in heavy blankets and mouths at every exposed joint and kisses her nose and her lips and her eyelids and when she curls into him, breathing heavy and bones heavy she says she can’t remember anymore what’s her and what’s fiction.
“This isn’t,” he says, his fingers tangling in her hair. “This is real, River.”
–-
She sets the Library on fire.
He should have seen it coming. Felt the timelines converge.
Standing on a far hill he watches her as she watches the flames lick the stones and swallow the tomes. Columns fall into the sea. The wind blows the smoke over Alexandria. He can smell the parchment and ink and leather.
“There were too many stories,” she says. “In the Library, there were too many–I don’t want to go back.” She looks up at him, her hand fumbling for his in the dark. “Time can be rewritten,” she echos. “I can’t–”
“Hush,” he says. His lips find her hair. “Hush, now.”