River loved him like this.

Every once in a while something happened to strip away the childlike goofy veneer and expose the ancient problem solver underneath.

There was no bomb this time. No daring last minute escape. The situation wasn't immediately life threatening. But he was hunkered down in the lab pouring over possible solutions, his face for once showing the hard angles and mature lines of his age. So beautiful.

His eyes were bright and fierce, his determination palpable. And she felt her hearts swell in her chest. God she loved him so much.

Time apart...different lives...back to front. None of it mattered. This beautiful man, so determined to save lives. The flicker of his eyes showing his mind searching over and discarding solutions, his long fingered hands tapping over computer keys, reaching for different components, different materials. She could almost hear his mind whirring furiously.

An alien nanovirus had lodged itself in this worldship's filtration system. The biological nanobots bred in the filters, swam through the air and were impossible to filter out. They were smaller than any material the ship had access to, passed easily even through the barriers between lungs and blood.

The whole ship population was down with a massive case of hayfever. Not currently fatal, but very irritating, and escalating slowly. Her and the Doctor's Time Lord biology was better at filtering things out, killing off foreign material. But the locals were not only becoming very grumpy (and a bit trigger happy) but were starting to show signs of pneumonia. The youngest children were already becoming listless. The oldsters coughing more than was healthy.

The Doctor had basically forced them to stop at the nearest habitable world and get off the ship and into the fresh air. The local planetary governments were tolerating the influx, in quarantine, for now. But without their worldship, and the colony world of their own they were aiming for, the citizens would become itinerants. Homeless and a burden on a foreign society.

The Doctor was determined to prevent that. Teams of the alien scientists, were working on the problems in the other rooms, River could hear them coughing from here. They'd been working for months with no results, before she and the Doctor arrived. Even flushing the ship's atmosphere into space and replacing all the filters hadn't helped.

"River, hand me that test canister, and a vial of C4," he said without looking up from the microscope.

She didn't mind playing lab assistant, nanobiotechnology was not her field, but she had enough chemistry and other disciplines to be of help.

She handed him the isolation tube that kept their supply of the nanovirus ready for testing. He looked up and made a note in Gallifreyan on the paper pad beside him. He had a frown line between his brows, his eyes dark and old and determined.

She leaned forward and kissed that frown line. She cupped his face in her hand and leaned her forehead against his. Her hearts pounding. Her beautiful husband.

She stood up and noticed he'd closed his eyes too. The frown lines were a bit less now. She smiled and moved toward the wall of chemicals, "Which C4 did you want? The protein or the explosive?"

His eyes snapped to her. She could see the rapid calculation going on in them. "River, that's brilliant! BOTH!" He whipped back to his microscope. "With the two of them together we might just be able to dissolve the nanoviruse's coating, and..."

She smiled to hear the enthusiasm back in his voice, words tumbling a mile a minute, eager, excited, hopeful...

She sashayed a bit as she went to get him what he needed.

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