She was crying, she couldn't help it. This was going to hurt him so much, and to think, that all the time she'd known him, he'd always had this running through the back of his head.

She wired together the last of the connections, the countdown running down beside her. Him handcuffed to the pipe at her feet.

He was begging her not to do this. Her Doctor. Begging. But she had to. She couldn't rewrite time, she wouldn't. This had to happen. It was a fixed point.

But she knew a little about fixed points.

"Hush now," she said, a tear tracking down her cheek. She was so sorry. "Spoilers."

The countdown reached zero. She pressed the two connectors together. There was a blinding flash of light.

She knew a little about fixed points. But he didn't know about the vortex manipulator strapped to her arm under her spacesuit.

She stumbled a bit as she materialized aboard the Tardis. The grating felt unusual against her feet, but the Tardis greeted her as warmly as ever, Sexy knew what needed to be done.

River worked the unfamiliar controls with a surety born of being the child of the Tardis. Her "mother" helped her. She'd set her vortex manipulator for a few minutes earlier, so right now she was still back in that chair. She had seconds to set up the systems to take the load.

She opened the Tardis's memory into the Library's WiFi system, she locked in the signal and watched the readouts as the memory use spiked as CAL downloaded all 4022 people. She breathed a sigh of relief as the usage levels fell back to normal.

She knew the Doctor's screwdriver would have made a copy of her brainwaves in the nanosecond she was connected to the Library, before she'd transferred into the Tardis. That was fine, just one more bit of camouflage to what she was doing.

The Doctor wasn't the only one who could fake his death. She grinned. Oh, she was going to love this. With their timey-wimey relationship, he'd never know where they were in their timestream. She'd been lying for years to keep their timelines intact. Why should she stop now?

She suddenly had the urge to see her Doctor, when he was young, and awkward, and shy, and oh so flusterable. She'd always wondered about some of the things he'd let slip. Things that hadn't happened yet. Now she knew why.

Eventually she'd tell him. She remembered exactly her last meeting with the oldest him she'd met. That had been a memorable night.

She set her vortex manipulator with a naughty grin.

In the meantime, she had flirting to do.

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