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The Doctor claps his hands together in an attempt at jollity. "So," he says with an encouraging smile, "we're got a few things going for us."
River watches him carefully, not yet willing to be jollied. With a sigh, she says, "We're not dead."
"Exactly!" His thin face lights up and his eyes soften just a bit. She spent twenty-four years on one date with this face yet she's still learning the way the lines move when he forms each new expression of delight or dismay. She loves the Doctor, every single one, but it's always odd to grow into the nuances of another face.
'Not dead' is admittedly a very good start. "You know you have to explain to me how you managed to get the TARDIS into the Library mainframe, yes?"
He stops short which tells her what she already suspected: he doesn't know how he did it. That would account for their current predicament. "Of course." He'll explain when he figures out how this happened for himself. It doesn't matter. The TARDIS loves River as friend and child and pilot. She might have done the whole thing on her own. River is grateful to have a real body again. She'll concern herself with the details later.
"Fine. Not dead, and if I haven't mentioned yet, thank you." She gives him one of her better smiles, knowing without reaching for his hand that his pulse just fluttered. The Doctor loves her piecemeal and out of order and this Doctor adores her with a fervency that impresses and astounds. "But we don't know where the TARDIS is."
"No," he admits, dropping his eyes and turning towards the wall. It's a good wall, nicely blank but for the scrawled esoteric symbols of infinite mathematics he's drawn with a piece of charcoal. The equations tell them the same thing no matter how many times he redoes his math and River checks his calculations for the errors she hopes are hiding inside those symbols: they're stuck. "I'm sure it'll be back soon."
"Define 'soon' for me, sweetie."
"Soon enough," he says but there's already a thick feeling to the air. A few seconds later the wall is blank again, erasing his work. Just like last time. Outside the room, the same four-armed people who have walked by the window fifteen times already start their stroll again. Further off, the red ball a four-armed child has tossed reappears in midair on a downward trajectory that the child doesn't manage to catch, also for the fifteenth time.
The Doctor holds in his sigh. "Sixty-four minutes." Again.
There are worse places to be in an unending loop than dropped on an alien planet with breathable atmosphere. The TARDIS experienced some trouble pulling them out of the Library database right before they wound up here and this is clearly some side effect. River has faith the ship will find them, with or without the Doctor managing to finish his calculations on whoever's poor wall they're using as an easel. This house is empty at the moment, although it is clearly inhabited at some point outside this particular sixty-four minute time period. The owners will not be pleased to see the mess he's making of their décor, assuming time doesn't loop it away again like a temporal hoover.
With little else to do, River counts their blessings on her fingers. "We've alive. We can breathe. We both remember the previous loops. There's food in the stasis chamber that we can eat. Thanks to our predicament, we won't be taking away anything from the occupants of the house and creating questions for later. No messes to clean."
"As I said, we have a few things going for us." He beams at her.
She loves him, but while her Doctor might be the most brilliant man she's ever met, sometimes he fails to think things through to other obvious conclusions.
"They're not home. And while we always seem to reappear in this room, we have the run of the house and as far as we can walk away from it outside in sixty-four minutes." Her last finger taps the air as she counts. "They have a lovely bedroom with a nice, soft mattress." She'd searched the home thoroughly during the third loop after their failed attempts to get away in the second.
The Doctor stares at her, still not catching on.
"They have a lovely bedroom," she repeats, "and we have sixty minutes until the next loop. Which is plenty of time." She gives him a darker smile than before, one full of promise, and she enjoys the moment when it clicks.
"Fifty-nine now," he says, his own internal clock driven by a sense of time more profound than almost anyone can understand, but River isn't just anyone. She takes his hand. The TARDIS will find them eventually. In the meantime she can think of delightful ways to pass the time together in sixty-four minute increments, preferably making good use of the nice bed.
"Let's enjoy every second."