WHO: Clara Oswald, The Doctor (12) WHEN: A week ago or so WHERE: The TARDIS, outside of EPS WHAT: Clara and the Doctor meet face to face. Neural blocks suck. TRIGGERS: Potential body horror.
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Meet her outside the front of the school, they could talk after she was finished with work. It didn’t take much for the Doctor to locate the building in the Texas town, and he landed the TARDIS at a discreet distance away, close enough to be spotted, but far enough not to be obtrusive. A stranger hanging around too close to a school yard was asking for trouble that the Doctor didn’t need. He would wait inside for her to come to him - after all, she was expecting him, and would recognize the TARDIS.
Through the monitor on the console, he watched as first all the students left, and then waited for Ellie.
It had been ages since Clara had seen her Doctor. Chinboy may have been her first, and she may have fallen for Hair, but Eyebrows was her Doctor. She remembered every instant, every adventure and fight and the painful times when he wasn't there. She remembered letting him down so many times, but he still pushed her to get back up.
The trouble was that he didn't.
So she'd written index cards, the way she used to, with notes on them. They were even in order of how he'd ask, because that was how well she knew this Doctor.
A card read: I'm Clara. Your Clara. The one you forgot.
And then each question as they would come was answered in the next series of cards. The first time around, explaining this, was painful. The second time was even harder with a side of confusion. The index cards were put in order, with the tiny numbers at the top of the cards as indicators. She tucked them into the pocket of her cardigan, tossed her messenger bag over her shoulder, straightened her skirt and headed out.
The TARDIS was easy to spot in a sea of sand and dusty brown colors. With a tiny smile, she headed toward its doors, pausing only to snap her fingers for the doors to open.
The Doctor’s head sharply turned away from the monitor when he saw her snap her fingers, causing the TARDIS door to open. “You must’ve learned that trick from Hair,” he told her as soon as she bounded inside. A ghost of a smile passed across his features, fond but melancholy at the same time. “Funny but, that lady I told you about in the diner? She used to be a school teacher, too. I became the caretaker where she worked to get rid of a rogue Skovox Blitzer, a battle robot with sufficient weaponry to destroy an entire…” He couldn’t finish his sentence because Clara interrupted.
"To destroy a planet. I know." By now this was becoming so commonplace that Clara was thrilled that she had the cards ready for him. She dropped her bag on the spot she always did, turning and pulling the cards from their place in her pockets. "I was there. With Danny. That's when Danny found out about you. About us."
She snapped her fingers again, closing the TARDIS doors. Her shoes clomped across the metal grates beneath her feet. This place, this console room, was so familiar and yet, it had been years since she'd seen it. Clara handed him the cards and said, "Chinboy taught me. After the TARDIS stopped hating me because of all my splinters. Personally," she said, leaning over and giving the console a warm — well, fiddling — "I think she likes me better than she likes you now."
Bewildered, the Doctor held the cards, looking from them to Ellie with a puzzled expression. She was describing personal exchanges she had no way of knowing… except…
He slowly turned his attention to the cards. The first one caused him to blink with surprise, but he remained silent as he moved on to the second one, and then the other, and the other. As he read, he slowly moved toward one of the chairs situated across from the console, and sank down upon the seat. When he finished, the cards dangled from his hand, while his other hand pressed against his mouth, thoughtfully.
“How many times has this happened between us?” he asked, now waving the cards limply in the air, but added in case his question wasn’t clear. “You explaining who you are and me forgetting?”
The answer came in the form of a blur of brown hair and arms around him. He hated this, hugs, but she didn't care at this exact moment. He was here, and even if he would forget who she was as soon as she was gone, she had this moment. There were tears in her eyes, but that's what hugs were for, weren't they? So you could hide your face.
"It doesn't matter, Doctor. Keep those in your pocket. I'll remind you every time you call me Ellie."
A lot of time had passed since the Doctor last saw Clara, and he’d changed in many ways, some more obvious than others. What would be obvious to Clara was his response to being hugged - while his reaction was a fraction slower, he twined his arms around her and held on tight, comforted and relieved she was here. Over her shoulder, he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply before murmuring, “Thank you, Clara.” He gave her a brief squeeze then pulled away to look into her face. “For the record, I’m not upset about what happened. The neural block. It was necessary, at the time.”
"I know." Her answer was as watery as her eyes. "One of us had to do it." Her face scrunched up further though she tried to hold it back. "And it was better if it was you. I'd have to go back to face the raven at some point, and you…."
He'd spent four and a half billion years trapped in his Confession Dial after she'd died. That's what the Time Lords had told her. That was when she realized how much she'd truly meant to him, that he could have left any time by giving them what they wanted. But he'd didn't. He'd rather wound himself over and over again.
Clara swiped her face. "I've missed you so much."
“Stop it,” the Doctor mildly scolded her, trying to sound irritated but coming across more as tender. “This, whatever it is your eyes are doing,” he waggled his finger in front of her tear streaked face. :”Your eyes are leaking. That’s never going to do.” He stuck his hand into his pocket and after a moment of rummaging around, he brought out and handed Clara a handkerchief. If they were going to continue their conversation along these lines, his eyes were going to start leaking, too, and the Doctor didn’t want that to happen. Of course he missed her - a day hadn’t gone by without her crossing his mind, exacerbated by the fact that the block prevented him from remembering her fully. But instead, he played it off, jokingly. “Duh. I knew you would. What’s more important, though, is what have you been doing since we parted? That’s what I’m interested to know.”
"Well…" she exhaled, gently wiping her face with the handkerchief he'd given her. "I sort of got pulled into all of this. Me and I were going to go back to Gallifrey, the long way around. I was trying to figure out how I wanted my console room." Definitely brighter than this one, for sure. Clara looked around with a small smile. Hair's console room was bigger, brighter and it had become home. This one was the one she knew like the back of her hand.
She sat down next to him, taking his hand. "Then I got taken to Mount Weather in the future. Post apocalyptic world. We spent a lot of time there. Almost a year."
“So, you got what you always wanted,” the Doctor mumbled. “You became a Doctor yourself, TARDIS and everything.” He sounded sad, because while he managed to have a lot of fun traveling through space and time, being the Doctor carried an awful lot of weight and responsibility. He’d watched through hacking Clara’s optic nerves how she handled the Boneless with little help from him, when he was trapped inside his shrinking TARDIS. She had the experience and brains to handle the stressful situation - she’d made a good Doctor, but being the Doctor meant making decisions that wasn’t good. It was this loss of innocence that he grieved on Clara’s behalf, whether she felt the same way or not. Still, he managed a smile for her.
Somebody had already told him about Mount Weather, so he nodded with understanding. “I heard it was rough, this Weather place. When you say we, you mean…?”
"I mean everyone who was in Mount Weather. There's a lot of us still around." Hair was one of them, and that was how they'd ended up together. Everyone else kept disappearing, and the pair of them just clung to one another. In time, though, it became something new. Or old. Or just out in the open, really.
Clara squeezed his hand. "I wanted to be with you, but things didn't turn out that way. They never really do. In retrospect, we really should have known. We were so close then that we may as well have been interchangeable. How many times had we gone to the ends of time itself for the other. Something was bound to want to rip us apart."
There was a soft, gentle expression upon the Doctor’s face when he told Clara, “But you are with me. He’s just a past version of me.” The corners of his mouth quirked into a brief smile. No, the Doctor wasn’t kidding himself by pretending it was the same, but he had to let go, emotionally, as well as let Clara know he was alright with the decisions she’d made, including the one that placed her in a relationship with a younger version of himself. The only other alternative was to become broken up over it, and after everything he’d been through since Clara and he separated, the Doctor didn’t want to go through with that again.
Besides, “I’ve learned some lessons after you’d gone. It wasn’t easy, but I finally accepted that everything ends, and while that’s sad, I can still be grateful for the memories of the past without being shattered over the loss.” He smiled again. “I’m happy for you.” He paused, and then to make sure Clara understood, he looked directly into her eyes and told her with conviction, “Really.”
"Four and a half billion years, Doctor." Clara looked ahead, away from his face, because if she looked at him, her eyes would do the things he hated. She pulled his hand to her face, pressing a kiss against his knuckles. "If the Time Lords hadn't torn us apart…" It would be him she'd be with. When remembered the pain and the intense emotion she'd felt when she'd discovered how long he'd been in that confessional dial, torturing himself over and over again in her memory.
When she looked at him once more, she had some semblance of control over her expressions. "But thank you. He makes me happy, daft as you both are."
The mention of how long he’d been trapped inside in a constant loop to protect Clara caused him to frown. “If he had to,” he muttered with conviction, “I’d do it for another four and a half billion years. Even now.” He turned his hand around so he could gently cradle Clara’s cheek, his eyes brimming with deep affection. “Don’t dwell too much on what might’ve been. It’ll tear you apart. I speak from experience.” He let his thumb caress her cheek, but decided that this was the only indulgence he’d permit himself before withdrawing his hand, but still holding on to Clara’s.
“Naturally he does,” he said, as a matter of fact. “That regeneration was always a romantic fool.” So was Twelve, but he kept that part concealed for the longest time - it was being with River on Darillium for 24 years that helped bring it out again.
Clara decided she wasn't going to continue on with the line of what she did or didn't do with Ten. He was her constant now, and she'd been beside him almost as long as she'd been besides Twelve. Maybe even moreso since they spent most days together for the last two and a half years. Neither of them could go anywhere.
She bit her lip. "I still don't have a heartbeat. Sometimes I forget to breathe. The not needing to sleep is the weird part. I still try to do that though."
Determined not to wallow in self pity out of guilt for doing this to Clara, or not feel sorry for her and the state she was in, the Doctor played it off with a bit of humor. “Could’ve used that not-breathing bit when he fought those clockwork cyborgs, eh?” He grinned, recalling the first adventure they had together after he’d regenerated with this current body, but it wasn’t without a tinge of melancholy. He quickly went on in a manic way to indicate he didn’t want to think too deeply about what he said. “You get a lot more done when you don’t sleep, anyway,” he said in a blithely dismissive way - Time Lords only needed about an hour to refresh themselves. “And as for no heartbeat? Pft! Overrated. There’s a lot of benefits to your condition, if you think about it!”
"You also get so much more bored when you don't sleep."
That explained some of his mania, at least, and some of her own now. She used her spare time to keep her lesson plans and grading up to date and, well, she and her Doctor went to various places around the world. And sometimes just stayed in. She'd completely moved into his room by then so any sleeping was usually done together.
"What do you think happens if someone tries to kill me? Stabbing me won't do anything really, but what if someone shot me in the head? How would that undo itself? Would it undo itself?"
“It’ll be the same way that happens with Jack,” the Doctor explained. “He temporarily dies, but then he resets himself, and comes alive again. The worse the injury or method of being killed, the longer that may take for the body to rejuvenate, and it won’t feel very nice, either. I’d speak to Jack about specific details, I’m only going by what I’ve witnessed and been told.”
That sounded completely unpleasant. Clara could remember the pain of the raven inside her, and that was not something she wanted to relive. Or redie, as the case may be. Her features screwed up uncomfortably and she pushed herself to her feet. It was still good news to hear, at least; she didn't want to screw up time and space anymore than she already had by not returning to Gallifrey immediately.
She figured it was coming up on time for him to forget her again, and she wasn't going to be able to handle it a second time around. Clara turned and leaned down, placing a hand against his cheek and kissing the other. If only they'd have more time. "Keep those in your pocket. Never take them out. I'll see you soon, Doctor. I've got to head home to mine."
After she kissed him and straightened up to leave, the Doctor’s hand instinctively shot out and grabbed Clara’s, holding tight, not wanting for her to go. The expression upon his face was that of surprise at his own reaction, as well as hesitation - she was no longer his to keep. She belonged to a past version of himself, and he needed to accept that. He smiled for Clara, and slowly released his hold, literally and symbolically. No matter what, they would always be friends.
“I’ll see you later, Clara,” he said. The neural block hadn’t kicked in just yet, but his temples were beginning to ache as he fought against its effects. He tucked her note cards into the inner breast pocket of his coat and promised her, “I will.”