Weak

Today, he thinks, they are going to talk. The talk. The one they should have had a long time ago. On their wedding night, preferably, but seeing as that didn’t go according to plan (more than a couple of distractions, if he’s honest, and only one of them related to the fact that he’d just managed to get married), well, no time like the present.

Although, while he’s being honest, that saying is slightly invalidated when one is the proud owner and operator, or rather, to be more accurate, the long-time associate of a fully operational time machine. There are lots of times like the present, in point of fact.

And that, he tells himself, that is just another example of the sort of procrastination and poor time management (ironically, considering the previous point regarding the time machine) that resulted in the talk not happening at the time that it initially should have happened, meaning that now…

He is aware of experiencing a kind of light-headedness, almost hysteria, as this lunatic monologue caroms around the interior walls of his mind. He pulls himself together, or tries to, physically drawing himself up and setting his shoulders, taking a deep breath:

“River, have you ever…?” It sounds unconvincing even to his own ears; weak, in fact. He has no idea what it must sound like to her. He tries again, making the effort to sound casual, dropping his voice an octave or two: “So, River, you ever…?”

“Oh yes, darling,” she replies with the ghost of a smirk, stretching like a satisfied cat in the bottom of the gently drifting punt. “Almost certainly, anyway. I have done an awful lot of things, at one time or another.”

“That’s my…girl,” he murmurs, feeling the rictus grin nearly sliding off his face.

“I’ll show you when we get back to the TARDIS, if you’d like,” she tells him.

“Blimey,” he thinks aloud, pushing off with the pole.

Punting seemed like a good idea at the time, although he wonders what it says about the tortuous twists and turns of his psyche. He has to admit to himself that in spite of being a gentleman of the universe, and something of a well-travelled one at that, he has only a limited repertoire when it comes to “dating”, “going out”, daytrips, that kind of thing. He’d never actually been to a zoo that wasn’t getting invaded or used as part of some deadly plot to unravel space and time before they started these little excursions together.

Punting on the Grand Canal of Mars, though, with Deimos and Phobos shining menacingly down at you and Olympus Mons looming on the horizon like, well, like the solar system’s largest blood-red volcano, actually…that’s not like your grandfather’s punting. It probably counts as…extreme punting or something.

They drift along for a long time in near silence, apart from the lapping of the canal against the sides of the boat and the tinny wail of the gramophone. River dozes off contentedly after a while, and as he looks down at her he feels the despair and the desperation eating away at his hearts again. Not just because he knows what is coming, because when you get down to it, as unpalatable as the truth is, everybody dies eventually and as ways to die go, he’s seen and occasionally personally experienced worse ones. No, worse than that, he knows what’s happened already. He knows what he’s done to her, and it makes him feel… He isn’t sure entirely what it makes him feel, but he wishes he could stop, and then thinks that he shouldn’t wish that because he deserves to feel it. He deserves it.

River makes a little sound in her sleep, a happy, almost innocent little exhalation between dainty snores. The Doctor looks out across the red, icy landscape stretching away along either side of the canal and gives a terrible snort of not-quite-laughter. It dies in his throat.

“Isn’t this nice?” he mutters.

Next time, though, they are going to talk.

***

He has done some horrible things in his lives. He would be the first to admit that. On the long lonely not-really-nights aboard the TARDIS when River has been dropped off again and Clara is asleep and he paces the console room alone, he thinks about those things. All of them. And more importantly, he feels every one of them, the pain of each as fresh as the first time he felt it. And that, he considers, is right and proper, because if you ever stop feeling the horrible things you’ve done, that’s the first slippery footstep on the even slipperier slope, and after that…

That’s how you end up like them. The things that must be fought. Or like him, perhaps. The one the other incarnations don’t like to think about. Not because it hurts, but because it didn’t, not at the time.

After the War ended, though, then it started hurting. Worse than anything had hurt before. And he was determined, then, that he’d never stop feeling again. Maybe that’s why he is the way he is now. He’s noticed the change, even if he was powerless to prevent it. Not the kind of change he’s used to, the sort that happens to a Time Lord when he exchanges one life for another; no, the kind of change only something like the War will do to you, the kind that will stick with you no matter how many times you regenerate, even if you live until the heat death of the universe.

The thing is, though – and this is the thing, he tells himself as the time rotor rises and falls and the TARDIS breathes all around him – sometimes you need to do the horrible things. There are times, more times than anybody, even somebody in his game, likes to admit, times when there’s no other option and you’ve got to decide either to take that action or just walk away. Whatever happens, though, is going to be an evil and maybe you should really be trying to make sure it ends up being the lesser one.

He used to be able to take those decisions, if not easily, at least with a more or less clear head. And sometimes he hated himself afterwards, sometimes he regretted it later, but at least he knew he’d done his best. Since the War…he’s had problems. Sometimes he gets it right, but sometimes he acts too quickly, or too late, and people die. More people than would have otherwise. He doubts himself more than he ever did, beyond the point that is probably healthy for somebody who gets embroiled in the sorts of things he gets embroiled in. And he knows it’s the War, just as he knows he’s changed, even if he doesn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. It’s made him…weak, in some ways. Although he doesn’t like to think like that, because in his experience (and it is vast, if he does say so himself) the kind of people who go on about being strong are the same sort of people who don’t feel the horrible things they’ve done.

He does still get it right, though, sometimes. It’s tempting to beat yourself up with angst and pretend you’re the worst person in the universe, sometimes it’s even necessary, but you also have to try and recognise when you’ve had a success. He has no regrets about the Wedding. He would have done the same in some of his past lives and would do the same again in a heartsbeat if he needed to. The whole of space and time was at stake, against which one person – even a person he owed so much – one person’s heart had to come second. It was the only way to get her cooperation, to save all of creation.

He doesn’t regret the Wedding. He regrets what came after, or rather what didn’t come after. He still regrets it every time it has failed to happen subsequently.

Next time, he thinks, they are going to talk. The talk.

***

That’s the other thing. Sometimes it’s not just about doing something horrible in order to prevent something worse. Sometimes it’s about doing something horrible to somebody you have a connection to, somebody you care for. Sometimes it’s about using and hurting somebody you love in order to stave off the greater evil.

And he’s done that before, long before he ever did it to River. He hasn’t hurt River, though, he tells himself. Not yet. And in a way that makes it worse.

He’s found himself revisiting his past a lot recently. He did the farewell tour when he thought he was about to die, then he did the “I’m not really dead but don’t tell anybody because I’m keeping a low profile now; low profiles are cool” tour when it turned out he hadn’t.

That was how, not long ago, he found himself sitting in the offices of A Charitable Earth, talking about manipulation and betrayal over a nice cuppa. As you do.

“Yeah, so Kate said you were involved in that business up at the Shard the other week,” the director of said organisation interjected, almost casually. “You know, like most of the other business going on around here lately.”

“Kate?” He sipped the tea. Needed more sugar. He’d asked Clara if she wanted to come, but she had some top-level emergency child-minding to do. Which in some ways was just as well, in case the topic of conversation happened to shift to her, well, repeated death problem.

“Yeah, Stewart,” said the director. “You know, Trap One.”

“Aahh, yeah…” He pretended he’d only just realised who she was talking about. “Kate! That Kate. UNIT Kate.”

“Yeah, UNIT Kate.” The director grinned delightedly at him, perhaps remembering the sometimes surreal circular conversations they had once had regularly back in the old white-walled console room. “You know, your oldest human friend’s daughter? That Kate. She’s in here most Wednesdays for a brew, to compare notes, you know?”

“And what notes those must be…”

They were sat on the plush chairs around the coffee table near the big windows, away from her impressive desk. The sign on the desk said “Dorothy McShane”, as if that were her real name. To him she’d always be Ace, just like to her he’d always be…

“So, Professor,” she continued in the same almost-casual tone as before, “somebody told me you were married nowadays. This you, anyway,” she clarified, hastily, indicating the bowtie as if it were his primary distinguishing mark.

“Who told you that?” he asked, taken aback without really knowing why.

“Mickey did. He was in here just before Christmas, trying to launder some funds in a hurry. You know, for an op.”

“Mickey?”

“Smith,” she answered. “Yeah, that Mickey,” she said, before he could. “Let’s not do all that again.”

“And who told Mickey?”

Ace’s grin broadened. “Oh, he heard it off that American bloke. Captain Jack whatshisname.”

“He isn’t American,” the Doctor told her. “He’s not even a real Captain, actually. And he isn’t really called Jack either.”

“Anyway, good for you, Professor.” She smiled. “Who’s the lucky person?”

“Nobody you know,” he answered too quickly, and saw her smile turn back into a wicked grin:

“So it is true. I wasn’t sure until you said that, Professor.”

“You’re good,” he conceded as he took another sip of tea and pulled a face. “Very…good.”

“Learned from the best,” she told him, going back to the genuine smile again. They sat for a while, then, companionably enough, drinking tea and eating biscuits, until he managed to put his thoughts together sufficiently to speak:

“And do you remember Maiden’s Bay?” he asked Ace, very carefully, and saw her stiffen for a moment.

The name came out of her mouth without the rest of her face moving, under her breath but vehement. Like a curse: “Fenric.”

“That’s right.” He nodded. “Fenric. And do you remember…?”

“Yeah, I remember, Professor.” She said it very quietly, looking at her tea, or through it. Lost in thought for a moment, he realised. “Still, it had to be done, right?”

“I’d be lying to you if I said it…didn’t,” he said, simply and directly. He could talk to Ace, really talk, he found. She was one of the ones who’d known him before the War.

That was one of the things that hurt the most, even now. He’d had to do it; to break Ace’s faith in him just long enough for the great Haemovore to bypass her psychic defences, seize its prey. No other way to do it, as much as it hurt both of them, but especially her with all of that teenage vulnerability bubbling beneath her hard exterior. And more than that, he’d used her, manipulated her, and her family and her complex feelings towards that family. Partly for her own good, or so he’d told himself, and partly for the greater good, and partly because it was necessary for his plan to work. And quite an elaborate plan it had been, as well.

“Still, we’re cool now, Professor,” she assured him. “And we were cool then, because afterwards, I remember, you told me exactly what you’d done and why you’d done it, and even if it didn’t make it feel better, right then…I don’t know, you respected me enough to talk to me like that, to be honest with me.”

“Was I really…honest with you, Ace?” he mused, genuinely nonplussed, thinking about Gabriel Chase and all of the other chess-master malarkey he’d pulled in that incarnation.

“’Course you were,” Ace insisted. “Even when you were lying to me, at least I was expecting it. And at least you held your hands up afterwards. You know, I kind of knew when you weren’t being straight with me, whatever you might have thought. I wasn’t thick, you know. And you knew that I knew. And I knew that you knew that I knew.”

“You knew that I knew that you knew?” he queried, dubiously.

“Precisely.” She seemed happy that he’d followed her closely-reasoned argument. “More tea?”

“I’m trying to cut down,” he replied, dunking his Jammy Dodger and regarding it in perplexity for a moment before biting it in half.

***

When did he stop being honest with his travelling companions, he sometimes wonders? When did he stop being honest with himself about them? Maybe honesty isn’t the right word for it. Maybe – again, that concept he instinctively rebels at – maybe it’s about being strong and being weak, the idea that the War’s traumas have sapped his moral strength in some way. The him who travelled with Ace, the little Professor, he’d been strong. Maybe a bit too strong, with hindsight, but still he’d known what he did and why and didn’t back down from it, even if afterwards he’d spent decades awake, afraid of the dreams he might have. Dreams of burning Skaro, dreams of Ace’s tears as the Haemovore stepped over her and seized Fenric’s human vessel by the throat.

He’d done that to Ace, who meant the universe to him, and didn’t flinch, because it was necessary to prevent the greater evil, and yet afterwards he’d told her why, let it sink in, let her move past it. He’d respected her that much.

I’ll tell her this time, he thinks as River comes down the steps of the university building, ready for their outing. Clara and anybody else who happens to be travelling with him gets dropped off somewhere before outings; they are strictly one-on-one affairs. The better to have the…the talk he thinks, and has just enough self-respect left to feel shifty about that.

She is wearing something black and lacy, her hair a cascade of golden bubbles in the strong orange light from the triple suns. Beautiful; he can’t deny it, can’t deny the instinctive biological urges she awakens in him with her curves, her smell, her knowing laughter, but in his waking, intelligent, conscious mind…

All the terrible things I’ve done to you, he thinks. And some of the worst ones you don’t even know about…because I’m too much of a coward to tell you.

“Ready?” he nevertheless asks, giving her an approving smile as she twirls for him, showing off the jet beads sewn into her skirt and bodice.

“I was born ready, sweetie,” she announces, slipping an arm through his as he whisks her towards the waiting TARDIS.

“Oh, I know you were…” And he does. He knows that all too well. All too well.

This time, he thinks. It’s going to be painful for both of us, but it was for Ace and me at Maiden’s Bay, and we got through it and we’re still friends. It’ll be better in the long run. Better.

This time we’re going to talk, he tells himself. The talk, that is. Really talk.

***

Maybe it isn’t strength he’s thinking about. Maybe it’s courage. Courage is a more admirable character trait than strength, isn’t it? Honesty takes courage sometimes, he tells himself, and maybe that’s what he’s lacking now. The War was enough to turn anybody into a coward, a weak, dishonest coward. It was enough to burn the courage and strength and honesty and all of the other positives out of anybody, even him; especially him, maybe, because he seemed to feel it all so intensely, so painfully, leaving behind it…well, whatever he is nowadays.

Who is he trying to kid, talking about honesty? He’s always been a liar, he thinks, always been a manipulator, but in those days he controlled the lies rather than the other way around. He could give it up…any time he wanted, he tells himself.

He lied to his Sarah Jane, once, for the best of reasons as he’d thought at the time. There was, strictly speaking, no rule preventing him from taking his human companions to Gallifrey, while Gallifrey was still there. The very idea was so outlandish, presumably, that the High Council had never seen the necessity of legislating for it. No, the reason he’d told Sarah she had to stay behind was the same reason he’d spent that incarnation and the one before that doing the Intervention Agency’s dirty work at the drop of a spangly ceremonial hat. He’d been…afraid, afraid of the High Council and its black-and-white-robed guard dogs. After what they’d done following the affair with the War Lord, what they’d done to him, and more importantly what they’d done to Jamie and Zoe, he had no intention of letting Sarah anywhere near them.

Why he didn’t tell her the truth at the time, that’s more complicated. Probably because she would have argued, perhaps because he was ashamed of the reality of Gallifreyan government and what it was capable of doing. Afterwards, though… He likes to think if he’d ever had the chance afterwards, he would have told her the truth had she asked. He likes to think that. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the chance until after the War. And then…

He isn’t sure why the version of their parting Sarah remembers is so at odds with what actually happened, but that’s humans for you. Maybe he did, in his blithe Time-Lordly way, underestimate the emotional impact upon her, but at the time he’d genuinely thought they’d parted amicably, parted as best friends. He remembered saying goodbye to her, he was sure. Not that his memory was always wholly reliable after all these centuries, but he would have banked on it, before the reunion, and then…

He likes to think that one of his older selves would have set her straight, in a friendly way. A bit of humorous banter between old muckers, perhaps; not agreed with her, not wallowed in it with her and said sorry for something he’d never done. That wasn’t healthy. He didn’t know why Sarah had felt that way, but it had surely had more to do with her life on Earth in the intervening thirty years of subjective time than with anything that had passed between her and his earlier incarnation.

It didn’t start worrying him until he’d regenerated again, that reaction. In some ways, with the benefit of hindsight, it was a worrying foreshadowing of his current predicament.

When did he start believing his own lies, that’s the question? When did he start living them?

***

They’re walking on a beach on a planet slowly drifting into a black hole. In a million years from this moment, it won’t be there. But then again, neither will he or River. He’s pretty sure of that.

She’s found something in the surf, something black and shiny and angular, and is giving it her professional consideration: “You didn’t say there’d ever been a technological civilisation here, my love.”

“Well, you can’t expect me to remember everything,” he grumbles, looking out over the sea. That ring of fire in the night sky, that’s the Hawking radiation emanating from the invisible star-remnant’s event horizon, interacting with something in the interstellar medium. It’s the ghosts of all the dust and gas and stars and worlds the black hole has eaten and is still eating, shining forever, or as near to forever as matters for mortal beings. Trapped in time, just like… It’s beautiful and terrifying, anyway, he decides, like most of the things in the universe that are really worth seeing.

Speaking of beautiful and terrifying… River secretes the shard of whatever-it-was somewhere about her person and turns back towards him, leaving bare-toed footprints in the wet black sand.

“You know, River,” he says, or hears himself saying from somewhere outside of his body, “we need to talk.”

“Not right now, darling.” She kisses him. And to his shame, he kisses her back…in that way. Not a peck on the cheek, in other words. There are…tongues involved. Ew. Except not really “ew”. If it was “ew”, that would be easier. In reality it’s…not bad, really. Not bad at all. Nevertheless, she must have felt his initial flinch because she breaks contact to glance up at him suspiciously:

“Is there something wrong?”

“No,” he insists, straightening the bowtie. “Don’t be daft. It’s just…you know. Kissing. With girls. Not used to it, really. A bit out of practice, you might say.”

“You said we needed to talk,” she points out, having the good grace not to observe aloud that his last statement was really the most outrageous falsehood.

“And you said “not right now, darling,”” he responds, leaning in for a bit more tonsil hockey. That seems to kill off the conversation for the foreseeable. Phew. But not “phew” at the same time.

Next time, he tells himself, very insistently. Next time for sure.

***

The spacetime around Manhattan really is in a pretty poor state, shattered by interwoven paradoxes, crackling with wild Blinovitch energy. That’s what happens when you really start monkeying about with cause and effect; the only place he’s ever seen anything comparable is around some of the old Wartime battlefields. Some of those time-wounds were created deliberately, either by the Daleks or more worryingly by his own side as the anti-timeship equivalent of those fields of concrete dragon’s teeth they erected as obstacles for tanks in World War Two; the general effect in this case is pretty much the same. Trying to travel to New York City in a TARDIS nowadays would be an act of suicidal madness.

So instead he goes to Allentown, Pennsylvania, any time between about 1940 and 1980 for preference. He parks the TARDIS in a little public park near the bus station like some kind of weirdo modernist sculpture and catches the Greyhound to the Big Apple; NYC; New York, New York.

It seems a bit creepy even to him, sitting on a park bench with a homemade perception filter in his jacket pocket, letting them walk past without seeing him. It took him a long time, though, to screw up the courage even to do that. It takes a titanic effort sometimes not to jump up and call out to them and rush into their arms. The Ponds, his best friends, or two of them anyway; he owes them so much, so much, how can he just stand by and…?

He manages to stay silent, though, for the same reason he didn’t just get them back when they first ended up in late-30s NYC. He thought of about six different escape plans at the time, and more since then, and only two of them require the use of River’s vortex manipulator. And only one of those would be considered cheating by old Borusa back at the Academy. Most of the rest are some variant on the time-honoured “catch a bus and travel outside of the area of spacetime interference to get picked up by the TARDIS” method, with the only difference being the means of actually communicating the plan to Amy and Rory. There are ways and means, though, as anybody who’s seen Back to the Future III, or even better attended lectures (occasionally; at least a couple of times a term) at Prydon Academy, can attest.

He hasn’t done that, though. He’s even made a point of visiting them, without their knowledge, in different times of their lives, from when they are just like he remembers them to when they’re old and grey. And now that he’s seen that, it’s fixed. He can’t take them out now, not without throwing a causal spanner into history’s works and making some Very Not-Good Things happen to time. Because while books can lie, and gravestones can lie, and even that old black-and-white photo of US Navy Medical Corpsman Rory Williams wading up the beach at Okinawa can lie, he’s seen them now with his own eyes, living that life. Close enough to touch, if he could allow himself to do so.

If he was being honest with them.

Unless they’re actually Teselectas, but he doesn’t think that’s true in this instance…

And it’s not a bad life, he tells himself, the one the Ponds got in the end. Successful author married to eminent surgeon; they even adopted little Anthony (and what a life he gets – just look him up sometime, under Professor A.B. Williams). Better than their likely fate if they’d kept travelling with him.

He’s said as much to poor old Brian, sitting drinking even more tea in his little living room. Leaving out the bit about possible escape plans and secret visits, of course, so really he’s lying to Brian as well. And the thing is, Brian’s a surprisingly complex and lateral-thinking sort of character, underneath it all. He seemed genuinely happy for them last time the Doctor went to see him; he’d even bought some of Amy’s old novels online and Rory’s war memoir (ghost-written by Amy, Brian had opined, because Rory had never been able to spell that well). Needless to say, he went away from that visit feeling particularly ill-at-ease with himself, even if Brian had been looking forward to his next jaunt to New York to see Anthony.

He knows perfectly well, however, why he didn’t help the Ponds escape from New York, even though it would have been a trivial matter for him, even if in the heat and emotion of the moment he had not been thinking straight. Afterwards, after he had regained some composure, it was still there on the table, an option. No, the reason was that it was easier, in the end; easier for him and easier for them, because the way they’d been going was only going to end in tears one way or another.

He has travelled by now with a great many people, many of them humans. And as is the natural order of things, these acquaintances, friendships, love affairs, they don’t last forever. What does? Sometimes they’ve left him, and sometimes he’s left them, and sometimes it has been by mutual agreement or one or other of their respective free wills, and sometimes it has been a little more problematic. He lied to Sarah Jane, a little (but he said goodbye! He’s sure he remembers saying goodbye!); he shut the TARDIS doors on his own granddaughter because it was the only way he could see at the time to give her the life he’d felt she needed and deserved. He tried doing the same to the Ponds, more or less, but thanks to the Daleks it didn’t stick. It wouldn’t have stuck anyway, Daleks or not; he knows the truth of that in his hearts.

Susan was a special case, though; she was all he had left of his family, his own flesh and blood. He couldn’t have thought straight where she was concerned had his lives depended on it. In the case of all of his other travelling companions, though… Never once has he had to resort to stranding them in history and then deliberately cutting off his own means of getting them back. Not that he can remember off the top of his head, anyway.

Him and the Ponds, though, he couldn’t stop travelling with them, and they couldn’t stop travelling with him; the way it had developed between them, it was like an addiction. And it was harming them, he could see that and so could they, but nobody could actually take that final step and part ways. And sooner or later, if they travelled with him for too long, something was going to happen to them. It’s a cold, unkind universe out there, as beautiful and wondrous as it can also be. He’s lost friends before during the course of his travels, and like the unpleasant deeds he has committed he’ll never stop feeling those losses. As wonderful and exciting and necessary as it is, having friends to share his travels, he doesn’t want to feel that again if he can help it.

Clara’s…a special case. And one he’s going to get to the bottom of, but every time they go anywhere he fervently hopes against hope that he won’t have to feel that for her either. Not again.

He practically struck lucky with Rose, he thinks with bitter hindsight, and even with Donna. There it was taken out of his hands by circumstances before anything fatal happened to either of them. He wonders, though, whether if they hadn’t fallen foul of interdimensional vortices or the blowback from his abortive almost-regeneration, how long he would have clung to them and whether he wouldn’t have resorted in the end to something equally contrived with them too, for their own safety as he would have seen it. Martha walked away, though, of her own volition and he let her; in a way he feels almost proud of that.

Why hadn’t he been able to just leave Amy and Rory, though, if he was so concerned? Why couldn’t he have got them back from New York and taken them home…and then said goodbye and parted from them as their best friend? It would have been hard, but he’s done it before. Before the War, he…

That’s the truth of it, though. This weakness, cowardice, this dishonesty even with himself, whatever you might call it, this…change he’s noticed in his most recent incarnations, it’s down to that, he’s sure. The non-escape from New York, his marriage, it’s all part of the same thing.

***

It’s not all trips to the zoo and canoodling on beaches, this marriage business. Sometimes it’s more fun than that, as the fields of burning spaceship debris currently littering the surrounding farmland and orchards as far as the eye can see will attest.

The Warrior-Poets of Vangax IV, they’d thought they were pretty hot stuff. They thought they were going to invade yet another peace-loving colony world, put it to the sword and then write gods-awful epic verse about it afterwards. Well, not on this Doctor’s watch, fellas.

“Well, sweetie, that was fun,” River beams, holstering her laser-pistol and watching the last of the invasion ships leaving orbit in a hurry; from down here, it looks like half the stars in the sky are running away.

“Here you go,” he tells her, tossing her the defused and now-inert Subatomic Warhead with which the Poets had hoped to bring the garden planet of Clunj to its collective knees. She catches it easily. It is, after all, somewhat smaller than your average soft drinks can, even if when operational it can theoretically crack planets in half. “Souvenir,” he tells her.

It feels good, winning at stuff. Too good, maybe, because it makes you want to win at more stuff, and in the end…well, it never ends; that’s the point.

“We should go back to the TARDIS,” River suggests, turning the warhead over in her hands a few times before sticking it into one of the pockets of her figure-hugging silver space coverall. “After all that action, we probably need some sort of…debriefing…”

“Debriefing, eh?” He returns her smirk, even as renewed guilt and self-loathing eats at his insides, quite deflating the sense of a job well done he was relishing up to now. “Like…naked debriefing, you mean? You know, involving actual briefs?”

“That’s why I married you, for your subtlety and sense of understatement,” she tells him. “Well come on, then.”

He had been going to talk to her before the whole invasion thing kicked off, really he had. He’d picked Clunj precisely because it was the sort of peace-and-quiet backwater where they’d be able to talk – have the talk – undisturbed. Or so he’d thought at the time. Now, though…

There’ll be a next time, definitely. They’ll talk next time. Now he has to go and find something else to do in order to delay the naked debriefing.

***

The closest they’ve ever come to having the talk, funnily enough, was the time River asked him about the Master. It was actually work-related for her; she’d told him she was researching the sudden and unexplained collapse of an entire global civilisation on the planet Anubis, and he’d let slip that, well, he’d kind of gone to school with the culprit.

He remembers sitting with her in the TARDIS library. This had been when he was between other travelling companions; Amy and Rory were probably in the middle of one of their failed attempts to just settle down on Earth without him. The lamps were dim and yellow and the old books seemed to sigh along to the TARDIS’s subtle pulse as it ran through the floor and walls and the air all around them.

“So you two go back a long way?” River asked, reclining on the rug in front of the old stone fireplace. He was in the rocking chair, oscillating back and forth with an open copy of The Time Machine in his lap.

“A long way?” He looked into the flames, hearing a thousand silent screams, blaming himself for every one of them. “Yes, you could probably…say that, yeah. I don’t think I’m bragging when I say I’m probably the most important person in his life.”

“Oh, I have a rival?” she asked, raising a wry eyebrow.

“He might well see it that way,” he replied. He looked up at River, thoughts swirling inside his head, jostling each other to get his full attention: “The thing to bear in mind, though, is that just because you’re the most important person in somebody else’s life, it doesn’t mean they’re the most important person in yours. I don’t think I really thought about him much after we left the Academy, not for a long time, not really until I got exiled to Earth and he made a career out of trying to destroy it.”

River gave him a conspiratorial smile: “And this was not entirely a coincidence, I’d be willing to guess.”

He nodded: “I took me a while, to be honest, before I realised, but then… It dawned on me one day that all of the terrible things he was doing, all of those insane schemes, all of them were intended, on some level, either consciously or unconsciously…to impress me.”

“Impress you?” She almost laughed.

“I don’t know if that’s the right word,” he admitted. “He was trying to get a rise out of me, maybe, or a reaction; to get my attention, perhaps. To make me notice him, you could say. And when I understood that, I also understood that…all of the things he’d done, all of his horrendous crimes, they were in some sense my responsibility. And as long as I was alive…and he was alive…he’d never give it up.”

“So why didn’t you…?” She hesitated, he recalls, because she had been about to say something like “why didn’t you kill him?” Her years of conditioning and training by the Silence had instilled some habits and modes of thinking in her that she would never shake, even though she knew how much they disturbed him.

“It’s complicated,” he told her. “Like you said, we go back a long way. When you’ve been running into somebody for that long, got involved with that kind of business with somebody enough times, well…friends, enemies, love, hate, all that stuff, it tends to run together in the end, doesn’t it? It’s just…emotion, in the end. Attachment. You don’t even know what to call it and you can’t imagine it ever ending, what it would be like living without that feeling, not because you like it but just because it’s…there.”

“It was like that in the orphanage,” River said, very quietly, looking into the fire too rather than make eye contact. “They showed me pictures of you, every day. They made me watch and listen to recordings of you, all of your different faces and voices, until I knew you more intimately than anybody I’ve ever known. They made me kill you every day, again and again, in a thousand horrible ways, in those simulations they used to run. And in the end…”

“In the end?” He asked, uncomfortably hearing the raw emotion in her voice, able to imagine the tears in her eyes even though she had her head turned away. He didn’t think she’d ever spoken so candidly about her childhood.

“They were training me to hate you,” she answered. “Conditioning me so that you were the only thing I thought about, you and how I was going to kill you, but in the end…” She trailed off, not wanting to complete the thought, but he knew what she had been about to say.

“In the end, yeah.” He closed his book. “In the end, you were willing to destroy the universe to avoid carrying out that mission. Because you loved me.”

“Yes.” She rose from the rug with the suddenness and grace of an attacking tiger, wrapping herself around him and making the rocking chair creak. “And now we’re together,” she said, kissing him on the mouth, again and again. “And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?”

And the fire crackled. And the rocking chair squeaked and squeaked as it raced back and forth.

***

That was the essential point, or one of the essential points, anyway. He’s seen the place where River grew up. He’s seen that obscene suit in which they imprisoned her as soon as she could walk and in which she remained for the first years of her life. She was tortured and trained and twisted almost from her moment of birth with the aim of making her into a living weapon. She has suffered more than most people are even capable of imagining; he knows that. She deserves better, now that she is free of the Silence and their cold, dead clutches.

The point, however – the essential point – is that the reason she had to go through that, the reason she suffered so much, is him. She was raised from the earliest of ages to kill him; her sole function. She was designed and crafted to be a weapon with which to make the last of the Time Lords extinct; no more, no less. What they’d done to her was as much his responsibility as any dark deeds the Master had committed in his pomp.

And yet, she ended up loving him, loving him enough to collapse time and space and end the universe rather than carry out that purpose for which she had been forged. And the only way to get her to accomplish that mission, to save everything, had been to deceive her and go through that meaningless ceremony with her. And he stood by the necessity of that, even today, but…

Still he kept it up. Out of weakness, out of cowardice, out of the damage the War had done to his moral sense, perhaps, but at the end of the day, out of guilt. Out of all of the things he has done to the Ponds and their family, all of the prices they had to pay for him, doesn’t he owe them at least that, as unfair as it is, for him, and even worse, also for River?

I told Amy I’d get her baby back. I promised. And yet…

Sometimes lies are justified, he thinks, sometimes lies make things better, whatever people say…but…

Next time. The next opportunity he gets, they’re going to talk. Talk properly. The talk. Next time, or failing that, the time after that. Definitely. Any time now.

***

The Clunjians are, as you’d expect, rather grateful for not becoming the subjects of a truly excruciating Vangaxite victory-poem. They’re even more pleased about still being alive. In spite of the Doctor and River’s best efforts to make their way unobtrusively back to the TARDIS, they are virtually carried into the victory feast and given seats of honour beside the King and his courtiers. There’s food, mainly consisting of charred bits of dead animal. He hopes none of it is charred bits of dead Warrior-Poet. There’s…well, wine, as far as he can make out, that tastes a lot like pine-scented bubble-bath, or so he imagines. It definitely doesn’t taste like the gums.

The King toasts them and insists they spend the night at his keep. Everybody cheers, and drinks more toasts. The Doctor gives an impromptu performance on the spoons, except this body doesn’t have the muscle-memory of his old one and the spoons end up falling in the King’s soup. The King just laughs uproariously and so does everybody else, especially River. Yet more toasts are drunk and the Doctor finds himself being spun around on somebody’s shoulders as the minstrels start playing and the dancing starts.

After that, it’s all a bit of a blur.

He wakes up in a big soft bed with a dry, dry mouth that feels and tastes like the inside of an Osiran tomb.

He’s been dreaming, he thinks, vaguely remembering the same old images in the moments before they slip from his mind’s eye. He’s been dreaming of a little adobe house standing beside a gurgling creek in the middle of a baked-hard terracotta plain beneath a burning orange sky. There is a thicket of trees nearby, bending arthritically over the creek, silver leaves flashing like fire in the light of the sky.

And there’s a woman in the house, slim and dark-haired, grown-up children surrounding her, grandchildren playing at her feet. He hasn’t spoken her name in centuries, not out loud. He realises he can’t even remember what her face looked like, so long ago was it that he lived with her, but he remembers what her voice sounded like, what she smelled like and felt like and tasted like…

His double heartsbeat pounds in his ears as he sits up and finds a pitcher of water next to the bed, taking a huge gulp. At which point he discovers it’s actually more of the pine-scented perhaps-wine. Ew.

And River wakes up beside him: “Mmm, whatmmp mmph?” She is nestled deep under the covers, very sleepy and very naked. She practically drags him down beside her again and rolls onto him, pinning him down as she drops off to sleep again with her head on his bare shoulder. Her curls are tickling his nose.

Humans, you see, they’re a very admirable species in a lot of ways but…they feel funny. Their skin feels too dry and too hot from a Gallifreyan’s sensory point of view and oddly abrasive. Only one heart beating in the body pressed so close to yours just feels…weird. And if he’s honest, they have fairly poor fitness and stamina compared to his own species, again down to the half-power circulatory system coupled with their strangely inefficient respiratory organs. Gallifreyans, the sad truth is, are just better in bed. Or the last remaining one is, anyway, if he does say so himself. Not that the Academy used to approve of that kind of thing, mind you.

That’s not really the issue. Even if it was the best sex in the universe, it’s the idea of it that fills him with foreboding, not that he ever musters the resolve to just say no to her. He resisted for a long time, long enough that it almost forced the talk in the end, but eventually on a night not unlike this one, when wine had been consumed and exciting deeds of alien-fighting committed…

And he always hates himself afterwards, always thinks that of all the things he’s done to the Pond family, this might be the worst, but she always seems so…happy…

The truth of it, however, is that he’s a thousand-year-old Time Lord. He looks a lot like a human, to a casual onlooker, admittedly, and since he started associating with them and travelling around with them, some of their essential…humany-ness…has definitely rubbed off on him. When it comes down to it, though, there are more differences between him and the average human than there are similarities; even a better-than-average human+ like River. He has the knowledge and experience of a hundred humans, and he has a time machine. He can take them and he can show them creation, give them the time of their lives, make them want to throw their old lives away to follow him forever…

In his hearts, he knows that even with those humans he has truly loved, in an intimate way; Rose, River, there have been others over the centuries; the relationship will never be a truly equal one. He has too many advantages, and since the War he does not fully trust himself not to exploit those advantages, to…use the humans he loves, maybe without even meaning to do so. He thinks now about what he did to Rose, and in some ways it was as bad as what he’s doing to River. She hopes she’s really happy now, wherever she is, with somebody who’ll love her without exploiting her.

Eventually, after a long sleepless night listening to River’s contented breathing, he manages to extricate himself from her embrace. He finds his discarded clothes and dresses in the cold dark blue gloom of the early morning, paces over to the window in time to watch the sun come up over the battle-scarred meadows of Clunj and finishes fastening his bowtie.

They’re going to talk, he promises himself (and her) silently. The actual talk he’s been meaning to have with her since the whole wedding charade, it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. As soon as she wakes up, actually, he decides as the warm rays fall upon him, driving away the pre-dawn chill.

“What are you doing over there?” She puts her arms around him from behind, and he feels her (to him) unnatural body-heat and smells the alluring, arousing scent of her. Humans smell different, too, but definitely not in a bad way, even if they lack the embarrassing and little-talked-about Gallifreyan mating pheromones. The ones actual Gallifreyans of superior Looming used to douse themselves in deodorants and perfumes to suppress, in order not to be thought of as “forward” in polite society. Humans can’t even smell them; not enough receptor-thingies in their noses.

“I was thinking,” he said. “I was thinking…we need to talk. You know, really talk.”

“Well, let’s talk,” she agrees, voice still muzzy with sleep, tightening her embrace.

He opens his mouth and looks out at the breaking dawn. She gives him an expectant squeeze. He shuts his mouth again: “After breakfast, though, eh?” He turns on her, fake grin plastered to his face: “Put some clothes on, Song, and then we’ll see if the King has got any fish fingers!”

Next time. There’s plenty of time to talk. Next time, though, definitely next time, they definitely will.

Definitely.

***

They’re walking in a garden now. There’s a beautiful red sunset in the Western sky and the thick carpet of dry autumn leaves on the neatly-mown lawn crunches pleasingly underfoot as they walk beneath the trees. Behind them, the lights are on in the big house now, dinner probably about to be served. Smells good, whatever it is.

They’re too busy for that, though, the Doctor and River. They’re talking. The talk. After all those missed opportunities and wasted days, today is the day. And so far, it’s going surprisingly well for both of them.

“So how many times have you been to New York?” she asks, sounding more serene about it than he would have thought beforehand. He’d expected anger, surprise; outrage perhaps, not…calm.

“A few,” he admits, before qualifying this: “Quite a few, actually.”

“And you’ve never spoken to them?”

“No, not to my knowledge; I suppose I still could, but…” He squirms slightly, and feels her tighten her grip on his arm. “Well, then I’d have to explain about…”

“You would,” she tells him, still with that ominous equanimity.

“I saw you there,” he blurts. “More than once, with your vortex manipulator; you pop in there from time to time, don’t you? To see them?”

“They’re my mum and dad,” she points out. “Of course I do.”

“What I mean is…well, you’re smart. I mean, smarter-than-most-humans sort of smart,” he clarifies. “If I could work out six escape plans for them before breakfast, then so could you, and yet…”

“You knew that I knew that you knew?” she asks.

“Something…like that, yes…” He kicks the next pile of leaves that they encounter, sending them billowing and fluttering on the chilly evening air like flames or golden tickets. “I thought if you knew perfectly well that I could get them out of there if I wanted to, and yet knew that I hadn’t, then you’d also understand…”

“I understand,” she says. “I know why you did it. For them.”

“Partly for them,” he confesses, looking away from her, at the sunset, at the trees, at the lawn, at anything else. “Partly for me, too.”

“And I think Brian understands,” she adds.

“Brian?” he asks, aghast.

“He reads Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov,” she informs him. “He can work out a good, twisty time travel plot in very little time at all. He knows why you did it. And, well, he took it well, didn’t he, considering?”

“Blimey…” The Doctor blinks. “I…well, that puts a new perspective on things and no mistake. So,” he says to River, “if you figured that out, I thought you would have…”

“What?” She seems mystified.

“River.” He nearly chokes on the word, forcing himself to keep talking, to get it all out. “River, what I’ve done to you… You know, there are some things you can never say sorry for, some things so terrible…”

“What are you talking about, Doctor?” She frowns. “You’ve done nothing…”

“Melody,” he says. “Melody, I told your mum I’d get you back. They took you, a little baby, and I told her I’d get you back, and…” He feels his throat tighten, his eyes stinging, and tells himself to pull it together, for Omega’s sake, because he’s not the one who’s been wronged here. “And…I lied to her, Melody.”

“Don’t call me that,” she replies, frostily.

“Why not? It’s your name. Your real name, that is, before they…scraped you clean and rewrote you like medieval monks reusing…an old parchment. I told your mum I’d stop them from doing that, but…well, it’s like 1930s detective books or gravestones in New York. I’d seen you – Professor River Song, famous adventuress in space and time! – I knew you existed and I knew the things you’d done. If I’d rescued that poor innocent baby I would have been rewriting all of that, un-writing it, remaking history, so…”

“So you left me,” she says, very softly. “You left me for the Silence.”

“I lied to your mum,” he tells her. “I lied to her, and I knew I was lying to her, and I did it with a smile.”

“Whatever you did,” she insists, earnestly, “it had to be done. I know that better than anybody. Whatever you may say about needing rules, you’re a good man. I believe it.”

“I’m not a good man,” he says. “Would a good man marry somebody just as a way of manipulating them?”

There is a moment of silence then, a moment when the air seems to bristle with potentiality, as if anything could happen.

“I said…” he begins to say when she does not reply at once. She cuts him off in mid-word:

“I heard what you said.”

“River,” he says, with another deep breath. “Melody, River, whatever I should call you, you’re not stupid. You’re very, very, very, very, very not stupid. You figured out the whole New York situation, you must know, surely…” He shakes his head, kicking at another pile of leaves, this time with more venom: “The universe was about to implode! Space and time had been shattered because you refused to kill me, or what you thought was me. I was going to do whatever I had to do in that situation to ensure that reality would survive; surely you must realise that when I agreed to marry you…”

“Why didn’t you just tell me what your plan was?” she asks, in a low, brittle voice. This time it his turn to perform the double-take:

“What?”

“You didn’t have to marry me,” she says, quietly. “All you had to do was let me know it was really a Teselecta. I could have played along.”

“I…” He stops in his tracks, mind racing, hating himself a little: “I…could have done that…” he allows, after a moment. “I…” He shakes his head: “Yes, I could have done that. But I didn’t, because I’m stupid and I’m cowardly and I’m a liar and I’m...I’m weak…”

“You’re not weak. You’re the strongest man I’ve ever met. I…”

“After the things I’d done to you,” he tells her, “to your family, but especially to you, I…I married you for a purpose. I needed your cooperation, but… I like you, River. I like you a lot. You’re my best friends’ daughter, and you’re a kick-arse archaeologist and space adventurer who doesn’t mind bending a few rules. You’re a hell of a girl, my kind of girl, but…”

“Your kind of woman, I hope,” she corrects him.

“Yeah, that too, but…River, it was a tactic. An angle. And I couldn’t muster the courage to tell you afterwards, to put you straight, because after all the things I’ve done to your family, all the guilt I bear…how could I do that? You must know that. You must have known that. Whatever they did to you, however much you love me, you’re brilliant, you’re savvy, you…”

“Does it matter, Doctor?” That – the way she says it with such eerie matter-of-factness – it pulls him up short again. “Didn’t we have some good times, though? The two of us?”

He looks across at her smiling at him, and this time he does not lie to her: “Yeah, we had some good times.”

“And if you accept that, as you admit yourself, I was a kick-arse archaeologist and space adventurer, then, well, don’t you think it’s likely that I was probably lying to you all along just as much as you were lying to me?”

“Well, that’s certainly a point of view,” he allows, wondering whether she is speaking the truth or just trying to protect his feelings, or perhaps her own.

“And do you think my mum and dad would hold it against you?” she asks him. “New York? They know as well as you do that something…something had to be done to resolve the situation the three of you had got yourselves in. And to be honest, they had good lives there, all things considered. People have much worse lives, all the time, all over the place, without you having to do anything to them at all.”

“River,” he says, more than a little desperately. “I’m trying to be straight with you here, trying to put things right between us…”

“As far as I was concerned,” she tells him, “things were right between us, at the time this copy was created. Anything else is beyond the parameters of this operating system. You really should have had this conversation with the master copy if you wanted different answers.”

He sighs, nodding to himself in terrible realisation and self-admonishment. “Yeah. Yeah, I should.” He looks around again at the house, the grounds, the trees, the sunset: “There seemed like…there seemed there’d be other days. So many other days. And I kept…telling myself that, putting it off and putting it off, until…until there were no days left at all.”

She smiles at him again and releases his arm, looking back at the lights burning merrily in the house’s windows: “It’s been very nice talking, sweetie, but I really should go back and have some dinner with the others, and then put the children to bed… You could join us, if you’d like?” There's a hint there, a suggestion in the curve of her lip and the angle of her eyebrow.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, and it isn’t just a pleasantry; he really is. So, so, sorry, as a previous him might have said. “I’ve got to run. Maybe next time.”

“Well, goodbye sweetie,” she says, and gives him another kiss on the mouth, a soft and lingering one. He can feel it. It feels just like the real thing.

“Goodbye Professor Song,” he tells her. “Thanks for the talk, and for your time.” He stands and watches her walking back to the house in that swirling, diaphanous dress, generous hips swaying in silent invitation.

And then he takes off the eyephones and finds himself back in the here and now. He replaces them carefully upon the stand attached to the public comms terminal.

Nobody has really come to the Library since the…incident. The great planet-enfolding landscapes of stacks and galleries stand empty and silent. They echo with a billion ghosts; they smell of dust and dry paper and orphaned memories.

It’s breath-taking, looking along those great continent-spanning processional ways, miles-high shelves dwindling with perspective until they disappear into the misty distance. At the end of the day, though, just like the Taj Mahal, all it is, is a mausoleum, a beautiful and ostentatious grave-marker. The silence here now isn’t the pregnant hush of a galactic civilisation’s worth of stored and catalogued knowledge; it’s just the stillness of death.

The walk back to the TARDIS is a long one, which he welcomes. Plenty of time to think. Plenty of time to regret and to vilify himself and to wish that things had gone another way, before he gets back to Clara and has to put on the brave face again.

He pauses on an abandoned balcony, looks out over another boulevard of shelves, stretching away to a distant window the size of some countries, through which the doctor-moons can be seen shining against the starry blackness. There’s a book there, a thick diary with a blue cover, a unique shade of blue he’s seen in only one other place in all his years of travel, and laid upon the book a sonic screwdriver, almost new. He remembers leaving them there, a lifetime ago. He does not disturb them now.

He told himself he’d have the talk with her, next time. Next time is long gone. He has no idea how much of her remains in the copy saved on the Library’s central processor, whether it is another River or just a computer programme doing a good job of pretending to be her. Whatever it is, it isn’t her, not really. Whatever he says or does not say to it doesn’t really count.

He watches the moons move slowly, almost imperceptibly, across the black sky. He thinks about the things he’s done, and feels them, and hopes he never ceases to feel them. That’s how he knows he still hasn’t fallen down that slippery slope, that however he might have changed since the War there’s still some of him left.

Eventually he turns, head bowed, and leaves this place. He doesn’t know when he will come back.

END?