Disclaimer: Recognizable characters are not my own - I just borrow them.

Pairing: River/Eleven

Summary: Touch telepathy is a tricky thing.

Rated: T

Written: 5/22/13-3/7/15

Notes: Title from "Bring me to life" by Evanescence

Thanks to Becs and Beverly for the beta! This started as a tumblr drabble and, after two years, I finally managed to turn it into a full fic.

see into my eyes like open doors

Touch telepathy is a tricky thing.

Mostly it's just surface thoughts, feelings, strong emotions. If he really concentrates, he can literally see the world through their eyes.

But, like any telepathy, it's rude to eavesdrop.

He has built up such thick walls - fortresses, really - that he doesn't hear anything anymore. But some minds have a certain feel - a pull - an energy - and he can't resist. River's mind is simultaneously a live wire and a soothing hum against his own.

He never hears stray thoughts - her walls are thicker than his, reinforced with steel and hidden trap doors - but when they touch, he can always feel her mind there, buzzing next to his. There's a certain harmony to it. She sends his nerves racing in a kind of giddy excitement, while his mind heaves a soft sigh of relief. Of belonging. Long before he knew who she was, he craved that feeling.

He finds himself constantly reaching out to touch her, touch her mind, feel that blazing heat and cool water that drowns out all the background noise - the cacophony of his own thoughts, screaming and jostling for attention in his too crowded head.

Once he knows who she is, it's almost impossible not to touch her. He knows her, knows her mind. He can feel the soft ripples of peace and the red flares of anger. In rare moments alone, they let down some of the walls, and then he can see her, through her, with her, and it's as though he is finally whole in a way he'd forgotten he was missing. His own mind feels empty and lost without hers next to it. Cold.

They're two people who never shut up, lies spinning effortlessly into words and stories and myths, tripping across their tongues like poison. But when they touch, there are no lies. They share the most important truths with one another completely without words.

...River glares, "I hate you," but her shoulder brushes his, giving lie to her words with the soft bloom of love flashing across her mind...

...The Doctor blusters, "An old friend," for the benefit of prying ears, while his mind is filled only with wife, reverberating through the press of his finger to her nose, as intimate a touch between them as any kiss...

When they make love, the energy and heat pulses between them, reflected and refracted through each other's eyes until they are one writhing, whirling creation, singing and screaming out with life and love and pleasure. Whole and together in a way that defies mere words and leaves them spent and shuddering in the wake, clinging to each other and the last flashes of communion between their minds.

Even in those moments, they guard their secrets close. There are always locked doors and treacherous corridors.

The longer they are together, the more the Doctor has to hide, piling things up behind barricaded wings of his mind. Staircases to nowhere and rooms that cannot exist. As River relaxes her mind against his, he must withdraw, careful lest spoilers seep through in the places between words.

Emotions, though, are impossible to hide. Not once they know each other's minds like their own. It eats at him, the pinpricks of hurt that River rushes to hide under swells of affection. The growing desperation clawing through his chest, a countdown ticking out beats like grains of sand.

...A confident smirk, "Oh, I was pardoned ages ago. And it's 'Professor' Song, to you." And the Doctor has to take a moment to bolster his defenses before he can brave touching her. Professor, ticks the clock, time running out...

In the end, he doesn't need the TARDIS or River to tell him it's time to go to Darillium. Their touches have become layered with lies and locked doors. Being with River Song burns to the touch. And yet, he still cannot resist the calming hum of her mind, not for all the storms of emotions they both struggle to hide.

He holds her close and cloaks his mind with how very much he loves her, bathing in memories of long TARDIS nights amongst the stars and River. They make love under the stars one last time, the Towers fading to a quiet hum when all that exists is River and the Doctor, together. He wraps her in his arms and wraps his mind around all the dim, cold spots she doesn't want to share, trying to warm her inside out. They retreat together to a soft space, a mental room full of the Towers' music and their love, and the Doctor refuses to miss the too brief moments when they romped across each other's minds with playful abandon.

He thinks they're both relieved when it comes to one last parting, one last not-goodbye. Her touch brings tears to his eyes and he closes his mind firmly against her questions, allowing only the barest buzzing energy between them.

After that, the silence aches at him - a wound that won't heal. A severed part of him; more painful than the hole in his hearts. He finds that, for once, he doesn't have the words.

Not to face her ghost, haunting him with the absence of her mind even as she stands right next to him. He's too afraid, then, to reach out and not feel the soothing hum of her mind slotted against his.

Left alone with his thoughts, the Doctor sinks under them. He withdraws into the snickering shadows and twisted corridors, running from his own memories.

It's not until he's dying simultaneously across his timelines - dying and being rewritten into infinity, all his past regenerations and all those that could have been - that he stops running.

The pain of it, the noise, is staggering. Even as he is rewritten back into a whole, his synapses shiver and burst with agony, struggling to realign without the excess energy of regeneration.

He's never needed River more in his long lives, all jumbled together in this moment. He needs her to save him. He needs her to touch him. He needs her mind to stabilize his against the damage.

His hand closes over her wrist and a piece of her slots back into place inside him, soothing jagged edges and settling there. It should be impossible, the faint echo of her mind reverberating alongside his, wrapping him up in a warmth he doesn't deserve. It hurts, oh, it stabs and tears at him until being rewritten seems a rather pleasant alternative because he doesn't want to lose this again.

He can't stand to lose River again.

Her mind shivers beside his, cold and lost, and he cannot bear that either, so he does the only thing he can.

He kisses her.

He presses their minds together so desperately across the distance and deaths between them that he loses sight of where the Doctor ends and River begins. No spoilers, no doors. There are wreckages of ruin, rooms doused in sorrow and burnt in rages, long, lonely hallways shrouded in shadow. And all of it, all of it covered over with that warm, aching harmony between them - that feeling that is love and home and belonging and all of those and none of those because words are never enough here.

The Doctor cradles River's mind in his hands and clings to her until their minds tangle and twist and there is no way to part without carrying pieces of each other with them.

There are tears tracking over his skin and lies on his lips and the Doctor knows, even after he breaks away, even after River fades, that there are no goodbyes for them.

River's mind buzzes against his own, echoing the hope fluttering in his chest as he dives headfirst into his own timestream.

It's like ripping his skin off and putting it back on inside out; needles under nerves - scalding white-hot anguish. The Doctor floats in the molten pool of his lives, letting River guide him. They piece each other together with their memories, bit by jagged bit, applying plasters and glue to hold the whole.

He rescues Clara and runs from himself and drags them all screaming out of the void.

The next time he sees River, her touch is solid and her mind shines brilliantly beside his. It feels like coming home.