A/N: Just a little Whouffle drabble because it's really impossible not to ship these two like there's no tomorrow. #yolo, people!
Disclaimer: I have tried to own Doctor Who. I have tried to con it out of the BBC. But alas, 'tis not to be.
Clara liked to notice skies. When the TARDIS landed on some far away planet, she liked to look up around her, not just at the people or the land, but at the sky, which always proved to her that she was looking at something alien, exotic and wonderful, more than the people that looked like trees or had no faces inside their black cowls. The sky on Akhaten was the colour of coffee with bright streaks of caramel and bronze from the star; the sky she saw when they stopped at an intergalactic 'petrol station' was lavender shot with bright turquoise.
But her favourite sky was the one when the TARDIS stopped in the middle of open space, and the Doctor opened the doors and widened the oxygen field, and she sat there with her cup of tea that she had to bring from home because the drinks machine on the TARDIS that the Doctor claimed made anything she could possibly want always succeeded in making something quite definitely not tea. And she had to make the Doctor a proper cuppa too, because even though he didn't want to admit it, even Time Lords need proper tea. So they sat there with their cups of tea that they'd just brought out of the house back in London, floating in the middle of outer space, looking at the universe. She loved this sky because it wasn't just one sky she was looking at, it was the skies of every planet that she could imagine, because there were countless stars and around almost every one was a planet that had it's own sky and it's own air and was it's own entire world. The Doctor offered to take her to every single one, because she could tell that he would do anything for her in the same way that she would do anything for him, though she had considerably less to offer. She said that there would never be enough time, and he laughed at her, because of course the TARDIS was a time machine, and she had to remind him that she wasn't reborn whenever she felt like it, and he looked at her in the way that only he could that made her scared and excited and just a little bit more in love every time.
The space-sky was the colour of prussian blue velvet, that seems black when you brush it one way and almost royal blue when you touch it the other, and it was spotted with white and gold and red and blue stars there were the lavender and green supernova clouds that she imagined looked like the aurora on Earth, which she still hadn't seen. The sky was familiar because she saw the same velvet studded with gems on a clear night at home, so it felt safe even though all the things they had to run from were still there, a billion miles away.
But was it really such a surprise that she forgot about every problem she had ever had before or every problem she would have after? She knew there would be an after, she knew that she would have to let him go. And yet the now was enough to make her forget, and she remembered a story she'd read where once a girl had stepped through the magic door she kept wanting to go back and when the door was gone...
She knew what was coming, because she knew that the little bit of evil that the cyber-planner had made the Doctor show wasn't just part of the cold hard metal. But she couldn't make herself afraid of him, because though there was sadness and darkness inside him, he hadn't let himself be overcome by that. The pain had only made him better, and kinder and more wonderful.
And that proved to her that you don't need human DNA to be human. Because he was the human person she had ever met.