Work Text:
Empty Space
I love you, he said, and hoped she believed it this time.
And then she was gone, leaving only stardust and the scent of time in her wake.
*
So many times he thought he saw her curls disappear around the corner, thought he heard her laugh echoing from the next room over. Her scent still hung in the air, her perfumes on the table in the bedroom, her archaeology books still covering every empty surface. He didn’t have the heart to put them away, though he knew now that she wasn’t coming back. Even before, even thinking he might never see her again, he could leave her things out and hope she might come home. He could pretend that she was just around the corner, that maybe, just maybe, she would come back to him.
Now he had no such excuse, but her things still lingered in every room as if they could replace her when really, he knew nothing would ever be able to fill the empty space she had left behind.
*
Some nights, when he was too tired to sleep, the TARDIS led him there. Her room. Their room, he corrected himself, because it had come, in time, to be his as well.
He tried not to remember, but he could not seem to forget.
*
One day, against his better judgement, he had gone to Luna, used the psychic paper to get into one of her classes. She wouldn’t recognize him, would never know that his hearts were breaking all over again as he sat there in the back row, dreaming of better times.
When he was younger, he had seldom visited her at the university. He regretted that. It meant he had never seen her passion for her work, the way her eyes lit up as she lectured, how her hands flitted about wildly in time to her speech.
He had thought that going there would give him closure, help him heal, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. To see her again, so close yet unreachable as Gallifrey, as the life he had left behind when he’d stolen his TARDIS, only made his hearts ache for what he had missed.
Before, he had been afraid. The title “Professor” had always meant the end. It had always meant Darillium, their last night. Now Darillium was past him, and things could never be the same again.
*
Some days, he forgot what it was to breathe until his head spun and his respiratory bypass kicked in. He wondered if it was possible to literally drown in grief.
*
Before Darillium, he had not thought of her in a long time; he had tried not to. I thought it would hurt too much, he had said to her on Trenzalore.
He had been right then, and it was no easier a millennium and a regeneration later.
It had been hard to see her again. In some ways, he had wished he wouldn’t have to see her again, had thought that that half-completed date to Darillium had counted. He should have known better. His River Song had never done anything by halves.
*
He had lost her many times, but this was the last. Every moment was taken up by his younger self, or by her everyday life. She had a life besides him, much as he wished to steal her away from it. He wished now that he had left time for his older self to see her, but he had never been good at planning ahead.
*
As she walked away from him for the last time, she seemed to shine. He was reminded of the first time he’d seen her, of the way she’d burned that day.
He was struck by the thought that fire was beautiful not in spite of its danger, but because of it.
Fitting, then, that she should burn in the end.
She had been beautiful even as her atoms combusted, even as she was torn apart into a million tiny pieces. She was a firework, and like the fire that destroyed her, she had always been both beautiful and deadly.
*
She was the empty space in his hearts.
There was a River-shaped space everywhere he looked, an aching emptiness. It was always this way when she left—her presence seemed to linger, in his mind and in his hearts, long after she was gone—but this time more than ever. This time, he was more keenly aware of her absence, knowing that she would never again be there to fill the space she had left behind.
They had had twenty four years together. He wouldn’t say they were perfect—no, nothing was. But those twenty four years were as close to perfect as the mortal world could provide, and they were certainly more than he deserved.
Twenty four years were enough to make her seem a permanent fixture of his life, to make waking up by her side every morning seem ordinary rather than the extraordinary gift it truly was. Twenty four years were enough to lull him into a false sense of security, so that when the sun really rose, he couldn’t believe the time had finally come to let her go.
Saying goodbye to her had been torture. She would see him again, in her future, but it wasn’t the ending he wished he could have given her. There were so many things he regretted, now that he was older.
It had been his last goodbye to her, the last time he would ever look into those eyes, the last time he would ever see her smile or cry. She had been beautiful, as always, even though her smile had been tainted with tears. He had cried, too, though he had sworn not to. And though he had never told her that this was their last night, she knew. Oh, she knew. River always knew.
She had known him better than he knew himself, like no one had ever known him before.
When she walked away from him, when her hand slipped from his for the very last time, that was when he truly knew how it felt to have his hearts broken.
*
He wished he had had the courage to let himself love her from the start. That was his curse and his blessing, the running. He wished he had let himself stand still and love her from the very beginning. He hadn’t known then what he did now, that every moment with her was precious, that there would come a day when she meant more to him than the universe itself.
He would have gladly given it all for her; he would have sacrificed every star, every planet, if it meant having her by his side again.
*
He could only imagine what her life was like, feeling the pain of things not yet happened. She had always hidden from him just how much it hurt her, just how human she really was. And he hadn’t realized until much too late that her imperfections were what made her so beautiful to him.
*
She had not been his first love. She would not be his last. But she was the one he had loved the deepest.
*
He could picture her, out there somewhere. She was all over time and space, right now and forever. Laughing, crying, dreaming. Sometimes he was there with her; other times, she was alone. That was the hardest to picture: River alone, the times when she did not have to hide from him. There was so much he didn’t know about her, that he would never know about her. Looking back on it, he wished he had told her every second of every day how much she had meant to him. He wished she had known long before Darillium that she was loved.
Because she was loved, more than anything.
*
He knew that someday, he would have to move on. Time did not stop for any being’s grief, Time Lord or otherwise.
Someday, he would pass a night without dreaming of her, pass a day without noticing the empty space she had left behind in his TARDIS and in his hearts. Someday, he would begin to forget her smile, her laugh, the way she kissed him until he couldn’t breathe. Memories only last so long, and pictures are not enough to capture the souls of the departed. Someday, he knew, he would not think of her every day.
Someday, he would learn to love someone else.
But he would never love anyone the way he had loved her.
*
As he gave her one last kiss, salty with tears that neither would acknowledge, he looked into her eyes and knew that he would never forget this moment.
He had been the one to celebrate their first times.
But she had always been the one to cherish their lasts.