--

"I always thought it was strange," she says, too exhausted and too empty to care that she shouldn't be talking, shouldn't even be thinking like this around him. "A sad, lonely man with too much power and not enough Grace. A man who destroyed worlds and ended lives and purged the Universe in all parts of space and time. A bitter, bitter man corrupted by his own immortality." She smiles at him, but there's no joy, only pain, and he barely stops the hand that reaches for her desperately. "It never made any sense," she murmurs, and he swallows tightly.

"What didn't?"

"That anyone that alone, for that long, would want anything other than a friend."

"River..."

"You lied to me."

He nods solemnly. "Yes."

"You knew. You knew before I did, before I remembered. Everything I became. All that time you--"

She closes her eyes, tears clinging to her lashes. He stares, and waits for them to fall.

"How?" she asks, her voice cracked in two. She looks at him with so much sadness, so much pain, years and years - the Silence. The metal box. The astronaut in the lake. Everything suddenly weighted, all returned. She stares at him like someone so, so broken, and he doesn't understand how through all that grief and all that noise, she only asks one question, steeped in desperation and guilt:

"How could you ever love me?"

Her tears fall and his shoulders fall and he kisses her because for the first time, he doesn't know what else to do.

--


(с) it's the season of grace, by sail_your_sea