Title: Five Moments With Night's Child

Author: Angel Leviathan

Summary: It'd be a better act if it weren't for the warm contentment radiating from her.

Notes: Takes place during the years that follow 'The Husbands of River Song'.

She's two weeks old when he takes her out into the dark of Darillium's night and lets her squalling break the silence of their surroundings.

"You're driving your mother to distraction, you know," the Doctor murmurs. "Which, of course, is my fault. I can see how this is going to play out. When you do something adorable and clever, you'll be hers, and when you're tearing the world down around you, you'll be my little bundle of incorrigible girl."

At the end of a good wail, she yawns.

"But you can't be your mother's daughter all the time, can you?"

The TARDIS settles in the same place minutes after they've left, just Daddy and her, but they're minutes that are noticed by her mother, who looks stricken despite attempts to adopt a calm neutrality.

He sets her down and she instinctively toddles towards her with her armful of wildflowers, and because getting to Mummy is more important than said flowers, only half of them end up in her mother's grasp, the rest strewn across the floor.

"You said you liked them. You know, before she was born."

Her mother hides her face in her hair. "I do. I love them."

"We said one present. One!"

She stares at the little collection of multicoloured boxes, too excited to know which to tear open first.

"What about the tiara? And the crystal mobile? And the music box? And the—"

Her mother huffs and claims, "Trinkets."

"Presents, River."

"Mementos."

"Presents."

Silence. A standoff.

"Aren't you going to help her?"

Her mother feigns frustration as she folds down to the floor and curls in around her, reaching for the smallest of the boxes to put in her hands. It'd be a better act if it weren't for the warm contentment radiating from her.

He shows her the setting again, then presses the screwdriver into her hands and asks her to do exactly as he's done. It takes her longer, her small fingers struggling to replicate the right pattern, but she manages it.

"Good girl," he tells her, running a gentle hand through her hair.

Her mother proffers her own screwdriver the moment the first is gone from her hands. "Now mine," she encourages.

"You got that, old girl?"

The TARDIS hums an affirmative as her child's daughter demonstrates that she can use either screwdriver to make the intergalactic equivalent of a 999 call.

"Daddy's an idiot, isn't he, darling?"

But her mother is laughing and she can't help but do the same, her high-pitched giggles rising over the crackle of sparks that fly from bits of the main console that even she knows shouldn't be nearly on fire. She's learnt that 'idiot' and half a dozen of the other words her mother throws at her father at times like this don't mean anything bad. How could they, when they look at each other in that way they do and she can't feel an ounce of malice in the air?

His laughter joins theirs.

Fin