Chapter Text
“Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair? Me here at last on the ground, you in midair.” - Stephen Sondheim
The TARDIS intercepts a distress signal from the space station Orion XI, which is a crying shame, really, because Orion IV is the one with the ice slides and the stardust-infused margaritas.
The Doctor wishes there was someone around to complain about the misfortune with, to lament just how boring Orion XI is—a standard New Age human colony with lots of floors to traverse... but the echoing silence addresses him loudly.
It burns and condemns and ruins him.
No matter how much noise he makes keying in the coordinates or priming the thrusters or putting his ship into gear, he cannot escape the conspicuous absence of Donna Noble.
He thinks about her all the time, even though it’s been weeks now, a month—sees the memories of her mapped all over the TARDIS, flurrying through the air like a child’s nostalgic recollection of their first snow.
Here she was, right over the grille, laughing with unadulterated delight as she flew the TARDIS for the first time.
And there she was—lounging lazily across the faded, white chair—telling him he needed to cut his hair ‘cos he was starting to look like a Beatle acolyte.
“Sideburns ‘n all,” she elbowed his arm, all irreverence.
“Rude,” he stuck his tongue out at her and couldn't be anything else but fond.
And here, she stood with him on the threshold of infinity, staring out into the cosmos as her entire world was born from atoms and violence and primordial dust.
And there, in the exact same spot, she told him to screw the macrocosmic responsibilities of a time traveler for once—begged him to just save someone.
The ash of Pompeii in her hair.
Tears streaming down her face.
Donna Noble.
She was the very best of him.
Brilliant.
Fierce.
Kind.
And now she’s gone.
When he gently cupped her face and destroyed her, when she pleaded with him to not let go and he did it anyway, he wished that he could melt into the ground, into particles, into nothingness.
And the nihilistic impulse still hasn’t entirely faded because he hasn’t moved her favorite mug from the drying rack in the kitchen yet. And he sometimes calls her name down the corridor when his mind is distracted, occasionally forgetting that she just isn’t there. And he doesn’t know what to do with all her suitcases worth of clothes. (Dear gods, she brought so many clothes! How can one person have so many clothes?)
He finds her jackets and scarves on various railings strewn from kingdom all the way to come.
And he smiles wistfully every time that he does because the alternative is slamming his fist against a wall and inviting all the bones inside to break.
And when he smiles those horrible smiles, when his pale skin stretches tightly across the architecture of his alien bones, he thinks about how he’d taken Donna’s presence for granted—like he’s done with every other human who has had the misfortune to travel with him lately.
Her wide grin.
And her loud laughter.
The way she’d curse him out at the drop of a hat.
And the way she never cursed in front of children, soft with them, gentle, always pleading with him to save them.
His Donna.
She never overlooked anyone because frankly, she wanted to save them all.
And he abandoned her on Earth.
Took her memories.
Condemned her to the life she hated just to keep her from dying.
Because the Doctor tends to do that to the people he loves.
He damages them and leaves them behind.
The thoughts continually batter him, the loneliness, the consumptive guilt, as the TARDIS hurtles thirty lightyears and one hundred thousand years away from the Earth he anchored her on. And when the ship skids to a loud halt, it takes him a few concerted minutes to stop white-knuckling the railing, unclench his fingers, and move on.
But he’s not moving on, not really.
He swears, Donna.
He’s simply moving forward, and that’s a different beast entirely—mechanical necessity, the curse of his species.
By the nature of their biology, Time Lords will always outlive the humans they hold dear. Moving forward is just placing one weary foot in front of the other in spite of the ugly fact.
It’s adjusting the rumpled collar of his coat as best as he can, and it’s trying not to think of how Donna would call him a wanker for not ironing it properly after just washing it. And it’s repressing the even more painful memory still of her materializing in the TARDIS in her wedding gown when he needed her the most, when he was aimless and grieving Rose. She told him to find someone at the end of that adventure, unaware that she would eventually become that someone.
He’s alone again without her.
Lost.
(Always lost, a madman in an unanchored, drifting box.)
And he’s tired.
Fundamentally, the Doctor is exhausted both beyond his years and after all these many elapsed years, paradoxically too young to feel so old and too old to be feeling grief as keenly as he still does.
But with a gentle prod from the TARDIS—blinking lights, an insistent whirring—he moves forward anyway, pressing his hands lightly against the doors and emerging into a different world entirely, capably appearing as though none of it really mattered at all.
(But it did.)
(And she did.)
(And for a time there, for a shining, brilliant moment, Donna Noble was the most important person in the universe—both the one at large and his personal own.)
He's devastated; he smiles all the same.
The sudden whiteness after the dimly lit interior of his ship blinds his eyes, harsh and unsparing. He uses his hand as a visor against the overstimulating effect of the room he’s found himself in—an entire chamber consisting of white walls, white floors, and white furniture. It’s at least the size of a few football stadiums in width and fittingly cycloidal in shape; however, he can’t really tell how high the ceiling goes, stretching upwards as it seemingly does ad infinitum. There are people here, too, milling about on the sofas or talking amongst themselves. Sometimes, they materialize out of thin air in bursts of golden particles, dressed in entirely white clothes and looking less fazed than they do relieved, touching their own faces, their smooth, unbroken skin.
Because they’re all young, these humans.
Late teens.
Early twenties.
Fledglings.
The smell of freshly cleaned copper clings to their hair—a sharp, metallic tang flirting with the slightest hint of alcohol.
It’s a familiar odor.
Something, something molecular transportation residue, he shrugs absentmindedly. There are more pressing matters to worry about.
For instance, the Doctor feels as though he sticks out like a sore Slitheen—with his long, brown coat and dark slacks, with the crow’s feet that are just starting to edge the corners of his eyes—but no one seems to pay him any mind, only briefly throwing curious glances his way as he locks the TARDIS, gives her a fond pat, and wanders off.
He decides to take this as good of a sign as any and looks around for a help desk or information kiosk. According to the readout from the TARDIS, the distress signal came from Floor 97—only three layers away from the top—and yet, the towering, fluorescent sign embedded in the northern facing wall indicates that this is only Floor 1. The station must have some sort of navigational interceptor which disallows intergalactic travelers from immediately arriving at a higher floor before they check in on the first.
Bloody inconvenient, but the details of his adventures typically are.
Beneath the floor sign, five queues of people in white clothes have formed in front of a long desk, where an equivalent number of Cycarians are typing away at holographic screens. He can tell they’re Cycarians from their distinctively blue hair and slightly luminescent eyes; otherwise, they’re rather humanoid externally. Ten fingers. Ten toes. One heart. Similar building blocks of life. Carbon-based forms and oxygen-dependent respiratory systems. Granted, the similarities mostly stop there. With their advanced neural processing systems—not brains but something infinitely more complex—Cycarians are extremely adept at administrative and organizational jobs, which he supposes explains why they’re managing one of the most preeminent space stations in the galaxy.
He watches them for a few minutes and learns that the process is invariably the same. They talk to the human at the front of the line for a few seconds before keying in a string of code on their screens. A thin, silver card materializes between their fingers, which they then hand over with a concise explanation—smiling, professional, over-practiced. Finally, the satisfied patron proceeds to an elevator to the right of the desk, taps the card against a scanning pad, and is allowed entry into the humorously big lift. Sometimes, a pair (or occasionally threesome) will approach the desk together and receive matching black cards between them, ascending the lift side-by-side, laughing, holding hands… but the basic rhythm remains, the staccato beats predictable.
Questions begin to form in his mind, tentative deductions, bubbling theories.
And a familiar coil of excitement clenches his stomach like a continually winding spring, the tension addictive.
Irresistible even.
The thrill of adventure.
The glorious chase.
Delicious adrenaline electrifying his veins.
The exhilaration of a hunt.
But then, just as he starts to move towards one of the queues, itching to be in the thick of it, so impulsive and simultaneously sure, an intelligent voice appears right next to his shoulder.
Warm, lively, and horrifyingly familiar.
“A merit-based floor progression system. Terribly cliché if I do say so myself. Very 98th century. Pity.”
A chill slides down his tall spine, landing somewhere in his gut.
No—
It can’t be—
“You do good deeds and earn credits,” the voice continues, amused with itself, seemingly unaware of what it’s doing to him, the ghost that it’s conjuring.
Impossible hair.
A space suit.
A final smile that nearly killed him.
“Each floor has a minimum threshold of credits you need to progress to the next, and at the top, there’s apparently some kind of mechanism that allows model citizens to start all over from the bottom again. Potentially corrupt in some way of another if people have a lot of money—so I’ve gathered… or if they’re quite good at the horizontal tango—so I’d like to test for myself.”
The Doctor spins around violently, his coat flapping at his ankles, and there she is, inches away from his face.
Dear gods, it’s really her.
He would know those curls anywhere, even if they’re gold now instead of red. When he sleeps—he rarely sleeps nowadays—sometimes, he still nightmares the haunted expression in her pale green eyes just before she died. She told him his name, and then she was gone, burnt up, all body and horrible smoke.
Just another human who had given everything for him, and yet, by the virtue of what she told him and the selfless way she conducted herself and how she so bravely died, he knows that she simply just can’t be anyone.
Not to him.
Maybe not even to this entire universe.
“Hello, sweetie,” River Song smiles at him, her plump lips painted sunset red.
She’s dead in his past and so very alive in his future.
In his present.
It’s devastating and unreal; he wants to run from her, even now, even after the words she spoke to him at the end with all the precious tenderness of the stars. He doesn’t know her, but the magnitude of what she did for him still excavates him. He’s a coward, and he’s selfish, and he’s so very afraid. He doesn’t want to get to know her in fear that his future self will learn to grieve her in the way that she very likely deserves.
His name.
In that blasted library, she uttered his name.
And she pronounced every detested syllable with perfection and love.
“Professor River Song,” he says stiffly, taking a step back to breathe air that isn’t wreathed with her, choked, nauseatingly undone. (That perfume she wears—it’s floral and half-unearthly. He thinks roses and second guesses himself. Ionized lavender? Extractic vanilla? Chrynocian blooms from Atraxas? Parma violets? The inexorable, omnipresent fragrance of Time?) She’s too much—overwhelming. Alive. He deconstructs complex quantum-astrotechnical equations in his head in mere seconds and can’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that this is in her past. She’s dead and she doesn’t even know it. Can’t know it. It’s his little secret. Hush now—spoilers. “You’re looking—”
“Gorgeous?” She raises a mocking brow, always teasing him—or she teased him then, and she’s teasing him now, so he assumes it’s a thing between them. (Or it will be. Or it has been. Or it already was.) “Sexy? Irresistible?”
“I was going to say well,” he grumbles, glancing away, flushing in spite of himself, "but feel free to plug in your adjective of choice as you please. Now, what are you doing here, Professor?”
And how can I arrange it so that you promptly leave?
Silent though this last thought is, his consternation must show in his face because hers briefly falters—the confidence, the innuendo, the easy laughter—all subsumed by the same wide-eyed sadness that she’d briefly let him see when he didn’t recognize her in the Library.
But she blinks and masks this vulnerability quickly, producing another smile that seems a little too strained to be entirely believable.
He lets it slide, though.
He doesn’t know her well enough to call her out on being untruthful and doesn’t want to—can’t bring himself to dig beneath her well-constructed facade.
He’s no archaeologist and never has been, absolutely refuses to subscribe to their central creed.
Skeletons should stay in their closets, he firmly believes.
Where he can’t see them.
Where he can’t feel guilty about where he’s left them to rot.
“Ah, early days,” she surmises correctly, searching his eyes and nodding to herself, as though she’s confirmed something just by looks alone. She’d said something maddeningly similar in the Library, flipping through a ragged diary that was apparently full of their shared adventures, touching his face like she’s held it so many times before. “You’ve only recently met me, and I must have made a reasonably unpleasant impression.”
“I wouldn’t say it was unpleasant!” He splutters immediately, failing to see how his bluntness couldn’t be construed as anything but disdain. “But—“
River places a slender finger against her lips and says that word he’s starting to hate, especially coming from her.
“Spoilers.”
And she laughs playfully, like their shared time and space is all a clever game, though the gesture still doesn’t quite reach her eyes, which are faintly lined near the bridge of her nose. She looks older than the last time he saw her, but somehow, the Doctor can tell that she’s quite a bit younger, that she’s been hurt by the world and hasn’t yet mastered how not to entirely show it.
“Now run off to your saucer, kitten, and do whatever it is that you do when Mummy isn’t around.” She pats him on the cheek like he’s a naughty schoolchild in a boarding school, giving him whiplash, an inferiority complex, and a petulant compulsion to assert that he's nearly a thousand years old. “I’ve got a mystery to solve.”
And with that, River Song infuriatingly traipses off without so much as a backwards glance, curls bouncing on her shoulders, a sensible duffel bag swinging hypnotically against her side. All motion and expressive dynamism, this inscrutable professor. Joie de vivre. She’s wearing a hip-hugging black dress, he notices—and frankly doesn’t know why he’s noticing—and with each confident step away from him, her stupidly tall heels clicking jauntily against the floor, the Doctor gets the impression that as perfectly discontent as he is with suddenly running into her again, she’s as equally content to let this be the end of their conversation.
She’s even given him a readymade out.
Go.
Get in the TARDIS.
Run away, pretty boy.
(He always does.)
The Doctor’s hand twitches for the keys in his pocket. He intercepts distress calls all the time; he’s got a couple he could be going to even now; it would be a bloody vacation to let someone else handle one of them for once. The galaxy doesn’t always collapse when the Doctor can’t come to call.
He doesn’t trust River, sure, but he trusts that she’s capable. He knows, by virtue of the past, that whatever happens here today, she’ll make it out alive and unscathed. She’ll travel through the stars until one day she winds up in the Library, where he’s already been… where she insinuated that they share stretches of a beautiful future together.
Byzantium.
Asgard.
A whole diary’s worth of adventures.
You and me. Time and space, she murmured, tears in her eyes and unspeakable tenderness, the unbearable primality of love. (How could she look at him with such fondness? How could she know his name—know what he’s done—and not reel away in utter horror?)
You watch us run…
It was more than an aphoristic phrase in her delicately curved mouth.
It was an implicit promise that one day, he wouldn't have to be alone—not with her.
Not when she was in his future, with those ancient eyes and that clandestine smile, spoilers on her tongue, the very secrets of this universe.
Oh, it's so stupid and immoral and selfish—(and every bit as shamefully and deliciously thrilling)—but the Doctor’s feet lurch ahead of him of their own accord.
One clumsy step.
And then another.
And another and another and another.
It's certainly not a run, and it’s madness, really.
Or maybe, quite possibly, it’s fate?
(He still can’t tell the difference between the two variables, the distinction elusive to him even after all these hundreds of years.)
Either way, he’s moving forward.
Mechanical necessity.
The curse of his species.
Following the path the impossible River Song left behind.
Some iteration of him learns to trust this woman one day—and he desperately doesn’t want it to be him—but he doesn’t see how it could be anyone else either.
When he relocates her again—her hair is frankly hard to miss in a crowd—she’s in the middle queue, her arms wrapped around the neck of a tall, young man who’s wearing a white tank top—ostensibly to show off his pronounced physique. He’s got his grasping hands around her waist, and he’s holding her like he knows exactly what he wants to do with her.
Inexplicable irritation trills through the Doctor then, jolting each of his hearts.
It’s the tank top, he thinks.
Definitely the tank top.
What kind of bloke goes around wearing tank tops?
“People with joint cards share th' same account,” he says in a fast, breezy voice. He sounds like he sells something to vulnerable strangers moderately well. “So it’s faster for 'em to reach the top. Doesn’t take all too long when two people are tangoing, y’know?”
“Fascinating,” the professor says, a purr low in her throat. It’s so overwrought that the Doctor currently wishes he had a drink to choke on. “And you, Mister, ah…?”
“Aprius Diomedes,” the man supplies, lowering his mouth close to her exposed neck before withdrawing at the last minute, eyeing her appreciatively.
The Doctor’s own eye twitches.
That tank top.
So bloody stupid.
“Mr. Diomedes,” River nods in agreement, pronouncing the name like it’s a delicacy, walking her fingers up his well-defined chest, “have you ever gone through the program with a partner before…?”
He continues to inch towards them, scowling just as Mr. Diomedes flashes a blindingly white smile.
“No, missus, I don’t believe I have...”
When River begins to haul him closer towards her, a positively indecent glint in her eyes, the Doctor forces his entire body between them, even though Mr. Diomedes has at least a foot on him and muscles on top of his muscles.
“And sorry, old chap—you never will! Well, not today, at least. Now if you excuse me, I need to borrow my friend for a mo’ or for however long it takes to get through this bloody queue. Have a nice life. You’ll do great with that handsome face, believe me. I’d cool it on the tank tops, though. They went out of style three centuries ago. Okay, not really—I’m lying frankly—but goodbye anyway.”
And without much ceremony and very little aplomb, he roughly grabs River’s hand and yanks her forward with him to the far left queue. He only looks behind him once to smirk at the thoroughly bewildered Mr. Aprius Diomedes that they leave in their wake.
“Doctor!” River wrenches her hand from his indignantly as soon as they’re standing still, rage supplanting her temporary shock. Her plum colored nails scrape his palm. “Don’t go about being all sentimental! You’re too young for this.”
“Sentimental!” He snorts derisively, crossing his arms over his chest. “I’m just saving you from embarrassing yourself, Professor Song. There are plenty of other ways to get information about this place besides flirting with some nobody who thinks he’s all cool just ‘cos he doesn’t skip arm day.”
“And what if my tactics weren’t just about getting information, Mr. Know-It-All?” She retorts, her sharp nostrils flaring. She ignores the arm day part—probably rightfully so. “What if I was trying to form a tactical alliance so I don’t have to spend valuable weeks of my life trying to progress to Floor 97?”
He stops short at this revelation—all of his tank top related frustration dissipating and immediately becoming a different kind of frustration altogether.
The unsettling recognition that he's being beaten at his own game.
Here he is, flailing all about in his dubiously tied shoes, while she's already one step ahead of him—making tactical alliances with handsome strangers, flirting and cavorting and cleverly engineering her way to the top.
(If anyone should be flirting and cavorting and cleverly engineering on this dodgy space station, it's him!)
“… oh, really now?" He pouts. "Floor 97 then? You're heading there, too, are you?"
The professor rolls her eyes at him.
"Of course I am, you big baby, and never mind how I choose to do it, thank you very much. Got the same distress call you probably did.” She briefly lifts her right wrist, revealing a vortex manipulator that looks rather worn with use, scratched and chipped. “It kept interfering with my travels, redirecting my coords here when I was trying to get to a dig in the 32nd century, so I figured I’d might as well investigate. I have some time to kill before I have to teach next semester.”
It takes him another few seconds to compute what she just said.
He blinks a couple of times, trying to rewire his brain to the alien frequency she speaks on.
“… you teach? ” He asks blankly—perhaps even a little offensively.
Perhaps very offensively.
He’d already known that she’s a consummate time traveler from their last encounter. Somehow, it surprises him even more to imagine her at the front of a classroom, talking about dusty bones and artifacts to a bunch of eighteen-year old snobs. It almost seems a bit mundane for a woman he knows will one day save thousands of people.
“I’m a professor.” She offers a shrug of one of her bare shoulders: sun-kissed, lightly freckled. “It isn’t all research expeditions. Have to build up the next generation, you know. Teach them to appreciate archaeology. Show them how not to stab themselves with a pick.”
“A tedious endeavor,” he immediately quips, and with a pang remembers that within the first two minutes of them meeting each other the last time, he’d ribbed her about being an archaeologist then, too.
Insulted her.
He’d spent so much of their little time together insulting her.
“Well… I don’t expect you to be interested in what I get up to anyway.”
River offers this observation breezily, in the same tone as the rest of her irreverent quips, but the Doctor detects it again—that betrayal of melancholy in her eyes, a hint of his future underneath. Either no one in this wide universe has taken the time to be interested in the riveting particulars of River Song’s life.
Or it’s just him in particular.
The latter sounds callous enough to very possibly be true.
The two of them lapse into clumsy silence then as the queue quickly moves forward, dragging them and their embarrassment along with it. It doesn’t take long to issue a silver or black card, so they’re towards the front of the line now, and it's all the Doctor can do not to run back to his TARDIS, coattail between his legs.
He shifts awkwardly from foot-to-foot, bouncing his heel against the floor, unsure of what to do with any of his long limbs. He plays a little with his sonic screwdriver in his coat pocket, clicks it, twists it, and accidentally makes it beep, which earns him an exasperated eye roll from River. He runs uncertain fingers through his hair and idly thinks about the fact that she’s much shorter than him, even in her heels. He can’t stand her proximity, itches to be five planets and five hundred thousand years away from her. But he also wants to ask her why her hair’s blonde now, and has it always been so springy? And yet, he resists the impulse because he doesn’t want to learn a single thing about her ever again, knowing that doing so is the surest way to invite further hurt over the memory of her impending death.
Oh, these oscillations—so many miserable contradictions swinging like a pendulum between his hearts: confusion, distrust, longing, and aching pain.
Every time he looks at River Song, all he sees are question marks and impenetrable shadows.
The Vashta Nerada.
A cold, dark Library.
“Listen,” she sighs softly, without looking at him, “I was being serious when I said you could go before. You don’t know me, and so this is all very awkward for you. Whatever’s going on here, I can manage it quite handily.”
Her voice is warm and quiet, sad and assured—an echo (a forewarning?)—of the River he knows will sit and die upon that horrible throne.
He gets the urge to comfort her, and he doesn’t know whether it’s out of basic decency or searing guilt.
He ends up arguing with her instead.
“But if you knew me as well as you insinuate that you do,” the Doctor smiles faintly, “then you’d know that this is when I thrive, Professor Song—when things are a bit awkward and uncertain. I love the challenge. Makes things fun.”
He hates himself for saying that last part.
It feels a bit off color to describe a relationship that ends in someone’s painful death as fun.
But River only laughs, blissfully unaware of his struggle, and the sound is lovely where it resides somewhere in the back of her throat.
“Mm,” she shakes her head resignedly, her curls bouncing in every which direction, “you’re such a dork when you’re young... but, oh, fine—on your own pretty head be it then."
He immediately wants to protest, both to her continued insistence on calling him young—he's really not—and the pretty compliment, which he's fairly sure is actually an insult. However, she continues speaking before he can get a word in edgewise, laying out the conditions of their latest alliance in the same casual way that some humans talk about the weather.
"Stay if you’d like, but we should probably promise to try and keep out of each other’s way as much as reasonably possible. This space station’s not big enough for two psychopaths.”
“Oi!” He interjects indignantly, offended by the knowing smirk rising on her lips. Why does she always insist on being so smug? “I’m not a psychopath!”
And frankly, he doesn’t think she’s one either from what he’s had to judge by. She’s a bit reckless, yeah, a bloody fool herself for going around saving people’s lives so selflessly, but he isn’t sure that those actions qualify her as a psychopath. He looks at her, really stares at her, and tries to wrap his mind around how she could come to such a cavalier diagnosis about herself.
He wonders if she’s teasing, as she so often seems to be.
He wonders if she’s deadly serious, habitually subsuming her most sacred beliefs beneath a well-timed quip.
“Spoilers,” she only grins, all knavish delight, something wild in her gold-speckled eyes.
He frowns at her and doesn’t understand her.
He’s starting to question how his future self ever will.
When the next five people receive their silver cards, suddenly the Doctor and the professor are at the front of the line, and the Cycarian is asking them if they want a joint card or a single. There’s a singularly sticky moment when he’s typing something in on his holoscreen, and he frowns before scanning their faces with a sonic probe. The Doctor briefly looks over at River, whose expression betrays nothing of concern, even as the red light glances harshly across her eyes.
“Is there something wrong?” She asks the associate kindly.
“No, madam,” the Cycarian says uncertainly—according to the tag on his neatly pressed suit vest, his name is Ka’lov. He’s a young one by the looks of the pimples dotting his temples in tiny clusters. “It’s just that this appears to be your first time going through the Orion XI Program…”
“And is that a problem?” River prods, still feigning wide-eyed innocence. She’s surprisingly effective at it, laying on the naivety as thickly as she does the flirtation.
“No, madam,” Ka’lov replies again, shaking his head, seemingly reading through thousands of lines of Cycarian script on his screen in less than seconds. Since the text is backwards to him, the Doctor has a little trouble keeping up, but he gets the gist of it: he and River’s biomarkers are nowhere in the extensive system, and it’s triggering all sorts of alarms somewhere up above. “Just a rarity.”
“Immigrants from Orion IV,” the Doctor says in a last ditch effort, flashing his psychic paper that’s currently disguising itself as a certified intergalactic passport. “Me and the wife wanted to come and settle out here. You know how crazy it is on IV, parties all the time.”
Ka’lov is the kind of alien who looks like he’s never seen a party in his life, but nonetheless, he squints at the psychic paper and nods before typing something else in the communication channel with his superiors.
Psychic manipulation detected. What does Control advise?
His hearts clench—it takes a high-intelligence creature to not be fooled by his psychic paper. Within seconds, Ka’lov receives an equally astonishing reply.
Allow them access anyway. Standard procedure.
The Doctor frowns just as the young Cycarian summons his best customer service smile again, shrugging it across his face in the same way someone pulls on a fancy sportcoat.
“Ah… I see! In that case then, welcome to Orion XI! Would you like joint or single cards, Mr. and Mrs. Smith?”
He sounds like a professional sycophant, even as his furrowed brow suggests that he's not entirely convinced.
Eh, the Doctor will take what he can get.
“It’d be faster if we shared an account,” he mutters rapidly under his breath as River searches his face, amusement flashing in her light eyes.
“Are you propositioning me, Doctor?”
“Down, girl,” he grouses, wrinkling his nose. “It’s just like you said about Mr. Hotshot over there. A strategic alliance will get us to the top faster.”
“Oh, so romantic. That’s just what every gal wants to hear,” she mocks him so easily. “Will you be my strategic alliance? ”
“So inappropriate, Professor.”
“Hah! You don’t even know.”
Ka’lov stares between them incredulously, his glowing eyes scarcely blinking. Cycarians aren’t particularly great at banter, too much going on in their incredible heads to bother with the finer nuances of teasing, which they regard as irrelevant to their calculations. The Doctor knows that they might as well be speaking in code for all he’s understanding.
“So… er…. does this mean you two are going joint?”
“Yeah,” they both say at the exact same time, holding out their hands for matching black cards.
