Time Heist and Love Actually! Please? Just the titles of these have me going feral at the possibilities.
Time Heist is an AU of the s8 episode, where instead of another of the Teller’s species, they find River in the vault. I wrote the entire first chapter, but I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it next - why she was there, what happens after, etc. But here’s a snippet:
The door releases finally, and it’s dark, so dark, and he remembers screams cut off by sheer force of will and nights with her hair drenched in sweat and her body trembling and his fingers against her spine, his voice in her ear, Gallifreyan love songs in his weak, scratchy voice the only benediction. He hears her gasp, hears chains rattle - anger spikes up his spine to the back of his head and his hands clench - Come on, come on - and then it’s open, just enough for him to slip inside.
River.
Her name doesn’t quite make it into the air, caught in his throat, his hands shaking. Her hair is matted and her face swiped with dirt, arms trapped inside the same orange jumpsuit, ankles chained to the floor - there’s a collar around her neck that attaches to the wall and a bruise on her temple still caked with blood and his eyes are burning, blurring so badly he can barely see.
“River.”
His fingertips to her cheek make her flinch back into the darkness.
“Don’t touch me,” she snaps, her voice scratched and brutal and oh, so beautiful, the anger and fight still in her.
“Well, that’s nowhere near the perfect sentence,” he murmurs, keeping his hands by his sides until she blinks against the light, tilts her head up to see him. She winces against the bright and he wonders how long, how many hours, days, anything beyond that unimaginable.
“Doc—Doctor?”
“Need a taxi, dear?”
She makes a sound he’s never heard before, broken and guttural and relieved and wounded and he scrambles for his screwdriver, unlocking her ankles and the metal around her throat, peeling her out of the suit with hands that shake, until her arms are free and the suit is pooled around her waist.
“How—?” she tries, but he hushes her, takes her hands, horrified when she gasps, pained - when his hands come away with flakes of blood. Lines around her wrists and neck, and more he’s sure, and all he sees for a moment is white. White light. White nothingness. A white rage he hasn’t felt in so long, since the last time, since he pulled her from the lake. Since he watched her burn.
“Can you walk?”
She nods, but she’s unsteady, fingers digging into his shoulder as he loops an arm around her waist and helps her from the shadows.
“You can keep your eyes closed,” he murmurs, too low for anyone to hear. “I’ve got you.”
-----
and then for Love Actually, I honestly just REALLY wanted a River/12 version of that scene with Laura Linney and Alan Rickman, so here it is so far:
“How long have you worked here?” she asks, a rather non-sequitur, considering she was just talking about the weather.
“Ballpark or exactly?”
“Exactly.”
John barely thinks about it. “Seven years, five months, ten days, and…” he glances at his watch. “Three hours and twelve minutes.”
Kate nods, and he expects the usual lecture. Expects her to insist he get his “act together” - he’s heard it often enough. That he can’t give lectures about poetry in an astrophysics class, that taking the students on a field trip to Stonehenge doesn’t have anything to do with cosmic inflation.
He knows Kate doesn’t really care. It’s why he likes her so much. She talks the talk of being a typical, uncompromising department head, but she cares more about students and research than she does about politics and money, and when he tells her he needs something she genuinely listens.
He was friends with her father, and feels a bit paternal towards her, though he hates calling it that, so he’s thoroughly side-swiped when she takes another sip of coffee and says plainly,
“And how long have you been in love with River Song, our approachable yet enigmatic Head of Archaeology?”
John blanches. He can feel his eyebrows skyrocket into his hairline and he nearly drops his mug. Kate sips her coffee and stares at him like she hasn’t completely upset the incredibly well-cultivated wall around his emotions in one question, and John does his best not to choke on air.
He’d thought he’d been subtle.
Though they’re in different departments, he’s been — some would call it friends, others enemies, others merely “complicated” — with River since he started, a semester after she did almost eight years ago. They often take lunches together, often drop in on one another’s lectures to stand in the back and heckle. Sometimes she drives him so completely insane with her archeology rubbish and her refusal to concede any point and her ridiculous hair and flirtatious laugh that he can’t think straight; in the beginning, she’d driven him crazy, and he’d insisted he wanted nothing to do with her. Now, everything she says and everything she does just makes him want to kiss her senseless.
But how the hell Kate Stewart knows that, of all people, he has no idea.
[ ask me about a wip!]
