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It was not that he had ever been truly asexual. He had been a father; a grandfather. He’d had lovers. Yes, somewhere in the years between losing Susan’s grandmother and finding River that had become complicated and rare. But then again, there had been Good Queen Bess—who was definitely good. And Marilyn, bless her poor, hungry heart. And, well, Cleo—the tigress of the Nile! That idiot Marc Antony had been a fool to let that turn into the bollixed up mess it had been by the end.
But all right—he’d always tended to draw the line with Companions, for the same reason a good teacher didn’t fuck students and a good father stayed away from his daughters and a decent priest avoided the good women of the parish regardless of how lonely and how kind they were. Some lines had to be drawn. He’d longed for Rose, and in spite of Donna’s passionate conviction she did not want him he’d thought more than once that she’d probably be a lot of fun right up until she turned it into a soap opera and drove them both insane. Amy had been a lithe and lovable temptation, and sometimes it was only the complexity of it all—his affection for Rory, Rory’s need for Amy, his own lingering sense of confused fascination with That Woman River…
Well. It’s not like Amy had been less than beloved, and he’d considered it on occasion.
It was River, though, who’d won him. He could still recall the first time she’d brought him to her bed…
He’d never felt so green. It had been centuries on end since he’d felt so young, so raw, so innocent. He didn’t think he’d ever been taken by an “older woman” before, even if she was technically millennia younger than he was. What was there between them changed everything, and he came to her bed a virgin, and she taught him how to love.
Which made it so odd that here, on Darillium, it was so new. Hadn’t they popped that cherry already?
“It’s not a terribly innocent body,” he said. “After all, grey hair. And the eyebrows—they aren’t convincing as anything but experienced eyebrows. Someone taught this body sex sometime or another, even if I don’t quite recall who or when.”
She gave him a look torn between amusement and reprimand. “How long have you had it?” she asked.
He considered. “I am afraid that depends on how you count. By some reckonings I’ve been breaking it in for over four billion years.”
Her brows—those perfect, plucked-sickle arches—rose, and she gave an impressed whistle under her breath. “Four billion? Well, then—I suppose I’ll have to excuse you if you found someone else to test the equipment with along the way. Though…” she sounded sad…”It’s going to be difficult to forgive you for not looking me up sooner. I’d have been happy to help you break it in.” She leered. “I’m good at that.”
“I remember,” he said, gently, fondly, reprovingly. “I’m afraid I was running away at the time.”
“From what? Daleks? Cybermen?”
He shrugged. “The inevitable.”
He’d been running away from her—from her death. From tonight. He’d run and run and run. He’d run to Clara, and when Clara had failed to be the right answer, he and she had run together to anywhere—anywhen—both frantic to escape the grief and the loss. Clara had raced from the empty space Danny Pink left in her life. He’d run from the empty space he knew River was going to leave. So he’d ended their relationship before death could, pretending that if he just ran fast enough tonight would never come, and the dawn and the promise of her death in the Library would never catch up with him.
She was watching him, eyes sober. “I’m sorry,” she said, voice shaking. “So sorry. I’m so very sorry.”
“For what,” he said, voice gentle and doting. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
She shook her head and turned away, hiding what had to be tears, offering only her shoulders cloaked in the black feathers of her stole. “I have never been enough,” she whispered. “Never been right for you. I wish I had been…I’m so sorry I hurt you so.” She bent her head. “If I had understood, I would have found a way to love you less. Or avoid you more.” Then she straightened, and her voice became mocking, brittle with forced laughter. “Of course, Madame Kovarian did make it all a bit complicated, and it really can’t be held as my fault that you were forever hanging around with my p…” her voice choked, and he remembered that for her, the Angels and the sweep of Amy and Rory away from them was only days away. She stood, straight and proud and refusing to cry. “In any case. I’d have done it differently if I’d understood I’d hurt you,” she said. “But then, it was all so tangled at first, and by the time it wasn’t…” She shrugged, sighed, and said simply and quietly this time, “I’m just sorry.” She paced across the room he’d arranged for them. “Do you want a drink?”
He watched her, standing still and studying the strength of her spine, the lift of her head, the courage her stride conveyed.
“Perhaps one drink,” he said, and then followed her, coming to stand behind her, wrapping his arms gently around her waist, leaning his chin on the curve of her shoulder. “There’s nothing to apologize for,” he whispered in her ear. “You are River Song, and that is—has always been—enough. I don’t need you to be anything else at all.”
Which was true, and not true. He needed her not to die…and now he knew without even a trace of an illusion to cling to that she would die, and in a foreseeable future. Sometime between tonight and a century or two from now, at a guess…and this would be their last night together, at least for her.
He might meet younger versions of her in years to come—blunder across her time-line. He’d never again, though, be able to wonder how she’d grow, what she’d become, how she’d blossom from the time he met her. There was only looking back at her history left for him, never again forward to her future. He was out of future. Out of the mystery of what she would become—because now, all she would become in his experience was dead. Beautiful and valiant and amazing and dead.
He held her tighter, eyes shut, remembering his first moment of truly understandind.
He’d been another man then, he thought, without irony. Younger in so very many ways. He’d been that vain one who wore the sand shoes—he remembered being him, but could barely accept the way he’d been, the self-indulgence, the melancholy, Byronic sentiment of that regeneration. But it was that regeneration who’d first begun the long, long walk to loving River Song.
He remembered the hard marble floor of the Library, and the maddening tug and bite of the cuff around his wrist, and the feel of the pipe the cuff was clamped to. He remembered the feeling of anger and horror and mounting dismay that she’d stolen his place, run off with his glorious sacrifice. He remembered kneeling on the floor, struggling to get loose, and watching her…
Watching her…
Watching her, determination burning like a sunrise in her eyes. So fierce, so beautiful, so wise, so sure. She spoke with the conviction of a woman who loved—and who knew she was loved. Who would never in a million years accept losing whatever it was they would have. The woman who knew his name…
That was another thing he’d withheld, insurance against her death. She still didn’t know his name. This River Song didn’t know his name.
Not the way that one had.
He’d held it back from her at their false wedding, and never given it to her after, not even after he and she had become lovers.
She was leaning against him, her hands covering his as he held her tight, as his arms circled her waist.
“We should get married,” he said.
“We are married,” she said, tartly. “Have been forever.”
“No." He was firm and determined. "That was a sham. A sham that worked, mind you—but not the real thing.”
“Amy and Rory witnessed it." Her voice shook at the thought of her parents, lost, but there for her wedding.
“We’re still not done." He straightened, then, and removed his tie. “Time to do it properly.” He reached out, took her shoulder, turned her.
Her eyes stayed down. Her face was empty—the forced emptiness of too much feeling. “Mother. Father. They’re not here to…”
“I think they already gave us permission." He offered her the end of his tie—jiggled it down by her waist, where her lowered gaze couldn’t miss it. “Marry me, River Song.”
Her mouth twitched, caught between laughter and grief. “Oh, you stupid, stupid man…”
“Guilty. Do you want to do it differently?”
She shook her head, curls jiggling around her ears. “No.” It was a whisper. Then, voice breaking, “If we wait much longer it will be too late…”
“I’d like to take my wife to bed.”
“She’d like that, I suspect.”
He jiggled the tie again. “We’re setting quite the tradition with ties,” he pointed out.
“This one’s longer.”
“The better to savor the moment. You remember how to do it?”
She nodded. “The quicky version, like last time? We’re not in a war zone…”
“Life is a war zone,” he said, “And the bombs never stop falling. Quick, quick, we’ll both be gone in the blink of an eye…”
She took the tail of the cravat he dangled in front of her, then looked up into his eyes. She peered carefully at the iris. “You’re not in there again?”
“Only in the more ordinary sense. And no hiring a surgeon to crack my skull open to make sure.”
She sniffed. “Only if you’re carrying a diamond around in there. And by the way, what happened to the diamond?”
“Probably lost in the crash,” he said, lying without so much as a qualm. He wound a loop of his tie around his hand—waited while she did the same. He smiled into her eyes. “River Song, you are my wife.”
She nodded. “I suspect I always have been.”
“From the first moment I met you, you were my wife,” he said, letting her assume it was romance talking, letting her assume he wasn’t waiting for her—that young, mad, Byronic fool who’d never know what he was losing until she was gone… He wound another loop, and she did too. They were almost at the middle—a half-turn more. Their hands lay, back to back, the tie holding them together. He leaned close and whispered his name.
“It is real this time?”
“It’s real.”
She considered, shivering. “Can I use it?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, then leaned forward and whispered it, saying “Come to bed, then, husband—“
“Not before I kiss the bride.” Remembering, he smiled, and said, “I’ll try to make it a good one.”
She chuckled, and in equal memory said, “You’d better…”
His free hand came up and cupped the back of her skull. Her hair tangled in his long fingers. He’d never felt it before—that young fool he’d been had sensed everything differently, understood so much less, confused so much more. That young fool had never understood how rare she was, how precious. He covered her mouth with his, traced her lips with his tongue, breathed promise softly against her skin, pinned their marriage-knot, their bound hands together between them. He opened his mouth and nibbled, tempted, teased, begging her to love this old, wise man—her husband—her Doctor—as much as she’d loved that young moron who’d wasted so much of their lives together on confusion and pride and reserve and grudging, resentful surrenders. He had been an idiot not to find her and hold tight, refusing to let go, refusing to lose one second of what she’d promised them as the energy had sparked off her hair and she’d died to save their future—her past.
“God,” she murmured when he finally let her come up for air. “God. What’s got into you?”
“Me,” he said. “I’ve got into me.” It was true-regeneration after regeneration he’d been blocking himself out. At first he’d been blocking out the War Doctor, reluctant to let that hoary old warrior own even a fragment of his new, pure lives. Then, when he’d made peace with the Old Man, he’d run from all the feelings.
He’d been married once before.
He’d been a father, once.
He’d been a lover, once.
He’d been ashamed of what he’d become, in so many ways.
But he’d come back to himself at last, for her.
He smiled, and slipped his hand out of the rolled tie. He slipped hers out, next, preserving the two coils. “Traditionally you’d tie these with a silk cord, so the coil would never come undone,” he said. “Some people frame them. Some keep them in a box on their dresser—a scented wood box, carved with symbols of luck and eternity.”
“I don’t have a box,” she murmured.
“I’ll get us one.”
“Where will we keep it? We don’t have a home.”
“In the Tardis,” he said, and knew he’d put it in a room and promptly lose it, determined not to know where it was, for fear he’d stand in front of it all the rest of his regenerations, crying over what he was going to lose.
She didn’t know what it would do to him when she was gone, he thought, suddenly angry and bitter. Then he remembered her, hours before, standing in front of that wretched sad-fish Flemming, swearing he had never loved her…believing it. Being just a tiny bit too right…
He loved her now, he thought. He would be brave enough to love her now.
He set her scurrying around the suite until she found a length of twine, and he showed her how to tie it so the coils would never come apart. He located a cut-glass bowl and put the coils, an infinity symbol, in the bowl. Then, gently and slowly, he pulled her close, ran his fingers through her hair, stripped the feather stole from her, kissed her shoulders and neck.
They both shook with it—the desire, the love, the fear, the knowledge that, regardless of what the coils announced, they were not eternal…
His younger self had known her body, but tonight it was as though he’d never made love to her before. His own body, older, responded differently. His eyes cherished what his younger self had barely noticed. His hearts thundered over gestures, flickers of feeling, expressions that came and went like leaf-shadows playing on the sandy bottom of a stream…were there and gone in the way stars seemed to come and go as the Tardis raced through time.
He pulled her to their bed.
“My River,” he said. “My song…”
She dropped beside him, pulled him close with a growl, scraped him with her claws, panted for him, even as tears rolled down her face. She leaned close and whispered his name in his ear. “Mine,” she said.
He let it be true. He gave himself to her—not just body, but every frightened, mourning, helpless bit of him, unable to wrest her from time’s current, already knowing her gone before she was even entirely his own.
Memories folded and folded—kneeling on hard marble, sobbing that there had to be another way as she burned on his horizon and was gone. Kneeling on her prison bed, between her knees, that long young body ploughing her, and her holding him as the sweet, dark earth Goddess always held her lovers. Kneeling between his first wife’s thighs, hands out to catch his daughter—the daughter who would later herself mother Susan…
It had been a good life, that first life, he thought. But then he was lost in River, and the knowledge that this life, too, was good.
And then he lay, spent, and she traced lemniscates over his shoulders, and sighed contentedly.
He cradled her stomach in the palm of his hand.
“I’m not young,” he said.
She snorted. “Neither am I, augmented life-span or not.” She chuckled—a rich, wicked, filthy laugh, filled with happiness and satisfaction. “I’m not objecting if you aren’t, old man. I like the new body.”
“You’re sure?”
“Certain.” Her fingers traced over the lean, hard lines of his hip-bone, counted his ribs. “Gawd, you’re a skinny thing, though.”
“I’ve been skinnier still,” he said, thinking of the younger self crying after she’d died. Only the desperation of the moment had kept him moving. But, then, he’d been a sentimental ass that time around, hadn’t he? And there had been so many to save, and Donna to rescue…and then River’s ghost to entomb in the Library, before he left.
For the first time since he’d run from her marble mausoleum, he found himself wanting to ask her questions. Did she like the life he’d saved her for? Was she a good mother to Charlotte Lux? Had her team kept her company?
Why had he never been able to go back and ask?
He frowned and pulled her tight against him. This time he would, he thought. Let that young moron run—he’d go back and see her, talk to her. Not—what had her ghost once said, that he’d promptly forgotten in his desperate flight back to Clara?
He wouldn’t leave her like a book forgotten on the shelf this time. When at last their night was over, he’d go back to the Library and ask her. He’d find out what he’d done to his lover, his love, his wife…
“It’s time to sleep, now,” he said…thinking not only of her, but of the River still trapped in the Library. “For now, sleep.”
“Mmmm.” She mumbled against his chest, clung to him, sighed happily. “Love you,” she said. Then, slowly, tenderly, with amazed delight, she whispered his name again. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said—for the first time. “Sleep…I’ll be here when you wake.” Then he closed his own eyes, made the same promise to the River in the Library, and slept himself…True husband to his own true wife.