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She doesn’t do anniversaries. Not since 11, anyway. She remembers certain dates, for sure, but there is no ceremony to mark them. For one, it is difficult to keep track of things when you’ve been around the sun a couple of thousand times, and two, it’s difficult to keep track of which sun you’re setting your calendar by. Although she has become used to thinking in years as 365 days. Old habit.
So, she doesn’t do anniversaries. Except one. And it strikes her as ironic that this, too, is due to 11.
Marrying River Song changed a fixed point in time, the Doctor’s death, by creating a new one: the wedding of a Time Lord. Lady? Lord.
Her head starts to spin. “Stupid titles”, she mutters underneath her breath, as she inputs the coordinates. As she does, she notices her fingers shaking slightly and a weird sensation in her stomach that she cannot quite place.
One funny thing that nobody told her when she was growing up is that regeneration, despite changing every single cell in the body, retains echoes of former bodies. There is kinship between her former selves, and that kinship has kept on changing as she has kept on changing. In these early days of being who she has become, she finds traces of 11 in herself that she had quite forgotten when she was an old grumpy Scotsman. She felt young, then, even though she wasn’t, and she felt that same sense of restless energy that comes out of a desperate desire to overcome heartbreak. She feels that same sensation running through her veins now.
11 married River Song. And he loved her so much.
She, she corrects herself. And loves. She loves her so much. Her wife. Always. And she knows that to love River is to come back to her. And so, she does. Every year.
Just this time around, things will be different, and as the TARDIS sets down inside the highest security prison in the universe, she finally recognises the feeling in the pit of her stomach. She’s nervous. She has just gotten used to this face, but she still doesn’t quite recognise her own body, let alone knows how it will react when seeing River – let alone knows how River will react when seeing her. She chides herself for being anxious. After all, she’s fairly certain she’ll still be attracted to her wife (who wouldn’t be?), and if she’s not completely mistaken, River has never set much stock by the idea of being attracted to a particular gender. She thinks that throw-away comment about “my second wife” might not have been that throwaway after all.
And coming to think of that comment, it suddenly strikes her that there might be a reason 12 reminded River of her second wife. She catches her breath. “No way. Spoilers, indeed!” And suddenly she cannot wait and the nervousness in the pit of her stomach has turned into something quite different and infinitely more exciting as she skids to the doors of her TARDIS. They open on their own accord, because of course they do, and she takes the time to lovingly pad her ship. “I know. I cannot wait either.”
She finds River asleep in her cell and approaches as quietly as she can. She knows that her wife wakes at the smallest of noises. She knows that this comes with being on the run. She’s the same. So she takes care not to make any noise, because she wants this moment of looking at her wife for the first time in this lifetime. She knows it’s bad manners to watch other people sleep and she knows that River hates the vulnerability of it, but she cannot help herself. She just has to look, to drink in the sight of her wife, curls on pillow, curves just outlined by the blanket, and she imagines her one hand buried in the former while the other traces the latter and wonders whether it still feels so good to touch her and –
“Why don’t you come in and find out then?”
The Doctor freezes. How – ?
“You’ve always been a loud thinker, sweetie. Mind you, louder screamer. Now use that marvellous sonic of yours and let yourself in. Has nobody ever told you that it’s impolite to keep a woman waiting on the anniversary of her wedding night?”
That comment does nothing to soothe the Doctor’s nerves, and with her hearts suddenly in her throat again and her fingers trembling, she sonics the lock open, steps into the cell and, for good measure, closes the door behind her. She still has yet to say a word and River has yet to open her eyes, so the Doctor decides to use the element of surprise to her advantage, shrugs off her coat and her shoes and, her hearts drumming an unsteady rhythm in her ears, gets onto the small cot and snuggles up to her wife until she lies flush against her back.
River shifts in anticipation and then quite suddenly stills. And then she lets out a hum that the Doctor feels deep in her bones and that makes her tummy flip. In response, she wraps an arm around her wife to pull her impossibly closer and nuzzles her nose in her curls.
“Happy anniversary, sweetie”, she murmurs into her wife’s neck.
River’s laugh is deep and slightly shaky as she takes the Doctor’s hand and brings it to her lips. Her tummy flips again as she feels River’s lips around the tip of her finger, sucking gently and then not-so-gently.
“It will be indeed.”