#young!river

Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Fandom: Doctor Who Ship: Gen (Amy & Mels & Rory) Additional Tags: Camping, Platonic Cuddling, Puppy Piles, Pond Family Feels (Doctor Who), Young Amelia Pond, Young Rory Williams, Young River Song, Drabble Wordcount: 100 Summary:

Amy & Rory & Mels and the childhood camping trip (in Rory's backyard.)

“Is this how it’s always going to be with us, Doctor? You’ll just swoop down and make a mess of my life without warning—and then walk away?”

He hesitated in the doorway, a grin plastered to his face. Her own lips twitched up in reply, and she realized that was why she would always wait for him, and search for him—because despite everything he could always make her smile. Even with all of the darkness and pain and loneliness and death, he brightened her life and made her hope.

This impossible man who was not really a man, and whose name was the Doctor (except it wasn’t, really), was more than just a man—more than even a friend or a lover. He was life, and joy, and justice. Everything that was praiseworthy and admirable. True, he could be frustrating and exasperating and more than a little dangerous. But he was also love and adventure. He was everything. He was the universe.

And if he wasn’t wholly hers, it was because he was far too big to belong to just one person, not when he could belong to everyone. She had never been the jealous type, anyway.

“Is this how it’s always going to be?” the Doctor echoed, stepping towards her, legs ever wonky and boneless, as if he were a puppet with cut strings. “Nope,” he said, bopping her nose mischievously. There was that sparkle in his eye she loved so much—a tiny supernova of exciting promise. “Sometimes it’ll be you who falls on me, straight out of the sky and no apology. One day you’ll be the one with all the answers, the one in charge.”

“I’m not sure if I’ll like that.”

“Oh, you will. You absolutely will, you mad, confounding thing,” the Doctor said with a fond laugh.

“And you’re sure you have to go right this moment?”

“Yep. Absolutely.”

“But you’ve got a machine that can go anywhere in time and space. You could arrive in the nick of time for anything.”

“Ah, but you know how the TARDIS can be sometimes. She might get it in her head to make me irreparably late. Again.”

“…I’ve got Jammie Dodgers back at the flat.”

The Doctor turned defiantly and started back to the door. “Now, River, you know bribery never works with—”

“Fish fingers, too. And it would take ten minutes to make the custard.”

He spun about abruptly, arms flying. “Well, what’s the point of having a glorious TARDIS that can go to any time or place if you don’t pause to smell the custard occasionally, as I always say.”

“Quite right, Doctor.”

He looks up at her, the surprise obvious. “You slapped me!” he squawks indignantly.

“Seven bloody months,” she counters. “You said you were just popping in on the Alpha Centuri quadrant for a couple days—a couple days, you said. You promised you’d be back in time for my graduation. You said you’d be sitting in the audience, clapping with all the other families, taking embarrassing photos of me as Dr. Herbert handed me my doctorate. You said, Doctor. You promised. So I spent the entire ceremony looking for you in the crowd, trying to find your ridiculous face and that silly bowtie. And I didn’t. Do you know how that made me feel? Knowing you’d broken your promise, another promise, and that no one in that entire amphitheater was there for me?”

He makes no attempt to stand up, lying there sprawled across the old leaves and damp grass with a stricken look on his face. “River, I’m sorry,” he says finally, quietly. “I miscalculated. Again.”

“You’re always miscalculating with me,” she replies coldly. “And don’t you dare blame the TARDIS. She listens to you when you’re serious, when you truly want to be somewhere. She’d make the effort for me.”

“What should I do to make it up to you?” he asks finally, pushing himself up on his arms. “The Pyramids of Giza, 1924? Oscar Wilde in Paris? Sindareen Patouche, the universe’s greatest waterfall on Hydroxen?”

“Don’t think you can just walk back into my life and bribe me with a trip into time and space and everything will be magically better, Doctor,” River replies, tears at the back of her eyes. But even as she says it, she knows it’s a lie: this is what life with the Doctor is. He leaves, he breaks his promises—but he always comes back. Back for another adventure, another slice of excitement, another giddy rush of endorphins and laughter and tears. She’s already realized how difficult this will be, the waiting for him, not knowing exactly who he’ll be when he reappears.

Better to hold on tight while he’s here, treasure the few moments they have together before he spins away again, before their orbits inevitably split apart again. He’s an unstable body, and she’s an unstable body, and there’s only so long that two such planets can spin together.

He finally stands, idly brushes away the leaves that cling to his elbows, and takes a step closer. They stand silently for a moment as he reads the lines of her face, the suspicious brightness to her eyes that she refuses to give way to.

And then he reaches up and brushes her hair back, leaning forward to kiss her cheek softly. “Dr. River Song, I’m sorry I missed your graduation,” he says quietly in her ear, tilting his head just as she presses her lips to his, as if anticipating her move before she thought to make it.

She wraps her arms around him, fingers digging into the tweed of his jacket, breathing in the scent of his hair and skin and the TARDIS, and represses a sigh of relief. He’s still her Doctor, if only for this moment, he hasn’t forgotten…

Yet.