Summary: "It's not until the Towers that he goes back for her journal. And not for a long time after that. For a while, after, he hides away and tries to hate the universe for robbing him of someone so important. He gave River both his hearts and she is buried with them in the Library. He doesn't care anymore. Or so he tries to tell himself."

Notes: Eep. I don't even know what I'm thinking. Now here I am, trying to write the Doctor. *wrings hands nervously* The alternate title for this work is: "How the Doctor studied Archaeology (and liked it)," and I hope it will actually be more fluffy, once it gets going. Title is from Shakespeare. I know: hopelessly pretentious.

Rated: M

Betwixt mine eye and heart

It's not until the Towers that he goes back for her journal. And not for a long time after that. For a while, after, he hides away and tries to hate the universe for robbing him of someone so important. He gave River both his hearts and she is buried with them in the Library. He doesn't care anymore. Or so he tries to tell himself.

But once he is cajoled and threatened and generally tricked (if the universe would just stop handing him mysteries all wrapped up in shiny boxes! He loves mysteries - it's one of the reasons he loves River so) into rejoining the universe and saving it all over again, he goes back for her diary.

It's not that it has stopped hurting. It really, really hasn't. Every time he hears his hearts beat he always starts a moment in surprise - certain that they're no longer in his chest. There is a painful emptiness where her heartbeats should echo his.

But he is trying to be the man he used to be, the man River made him want to be. He was drifting a long time before River. Since the Time War his patience has been shorter, his hearts heavier. He keeps losing things. And now he's lost her. He's lost himself. If he's going to start gallivanting across the universe again, just a mad man in a blue box, he needs River.

So he collects her diary. He parks the TARDIS right up against the ledge. He cracks the door open and feels along the railing with one outstretched hand and his eyes squeezed shut. When his fingers skitter nervously across the bound leather of her diary, the shock of pain almost brings him to his knees. He just manages to stay upright, grabbing her diary and his screwdriver just long enough to get them in the TARDIS, slamming the door shut, and reversing back into the vortex before he can't move or do anything anymore.

When the flurry of activity is over, he finds himself even more drained than usual. It's so much work lately, to keep up the mask. To be the Doctor. He slides haphazardly down on the floor, back against the reassuring hum of the console, and simply stares at the little blue book for so long that even he loses track of time. It feels somehow wrong to touch it. Even the brief memory of the leather under his palm burns him with images of River's fingers stroking where his have just been.

Finally, weary, he gathers up the fragile old book and lets the memories engulf him. This is what he came for. To find her again. To mourn and to love and to laugh and to remember how to be the Doctor. Too much of the time he hates himself, more than anything. But River has always loved him, in spite of and because of all the parts he hides behind too-quick smiles and enthusiasm he doesn't really feel.

When he starts to turn the pages, reliving their lives in her order, it is everything he could have wished for and more. The pages are full of sprawling notes and hastily scribbled margins. The first few - her time in university - he hasn't lived yet. And he hastily scrolls past, hearing her warning, "Spoilers!" clear as day, and torn between a sort of giddy excitement and hollow ache.

He knows that he will visit her, from vague spoilers River has already let slip, from their wedding, from their lives. He wonders how long it will take him to be able to see her at her beginning without feeling the ragged gaping hole left by her end. He wonders if it will be at his end. Truly back to front one last time.

The date and time of his death at Lake Silencio take up an entire page in bold strokes. It stabs at him until he realizes that this was before she went. These are notes. Some sort of academic and research interest, perhaps a part of her thesis. Such an archeologist. He shouldn't like that, but he kind of does.

After that, he settles in for their adventures. The pages are full of them. Written in pen and laser and charcoal and lipstick and once or twice in what certainly tastes like River's blood. That makes his aching hearts stop, reminding him painfully that they're still there, no matter how much he wishes otherwise.

Sometimes her entries are nothing more than a carefully curated word and coordinates, as though at any time one of them could go back and relive it. Sometimes there are pages sprawling full of highly detailed depictions of their times together, leaving him rapt and blushing. Occasionally she just writes, her thoughts spilling across the page, usually about him, even though he knows she is not referencing anything in particular. Sometimes she writes her entries to him, as though she has always known that he will be reading them. Half of these are exasperated and half are elaborate love letters in disguise.

About half way through, he realizes that the book is bigger on the inside. He doesn't remember it being that way when he gave it to her, but he rather suspects he should have known. It is somehow comforting.

By the time he gets toward the end, through all the tears and laughter and fond annoyance that River's diary contains, the Doctor starts to feel the same weary dread fill him again. They are headed to the Towers, to the Library, all over again, and he cannot. He barely withstood it the first time.

He's just about to close her diary up again, close himself up again, when he finds the entry.

The Doctor appeared in the middle of my Middle Ancient Earth History (1900-3000 CE) lecture again. That man. I swear he gets some sort of twisted pleasure out of disrupting my classes. If he gets me fired, I'll kill him twice.

The Doctor pauses. Something about her careful wording. Her entries after Stormcage have been more detailed and relaxed, as though she knew the only person she had to worry about reading them is him. So, why then is this one entry so deliberately vague? The more he puzzles over it, the more certain he is. Without even consciously deciding, the Doctor pushes himself up and starts fiddling with controls, nose still stuck in River's diary and trusting his Old Girl to get him where he needs to be. Suddenly, he is positively giddy again, bouncing on his toes and spinning around the console.

Because she said again, "Oh, my bad, bad girl."

Her diary never mentions another visit. The Doctor hastily shoves said diary into his breast pocket and strides out the TARDIS doors the second she lands. River. Professor Song. He is going to be in every single one of her classes. He'll enroll if he has to. Get another doctorate. Because there are missing pages waiting to be lived.