A/N: Ahhh, the beauty of fanfiction! Well, I mean, obviously, I recognized the beauty when I first joined, but writing THESE types of fics really makes me truly appreciate said beauty. Yeah, so I used Clara's being scattered through the Doctor's timestream to change the episode that all of us 10/Rose shippers wish had ended differently. Don't forget, reviews are love!
Oh, and I have my first 9th Doctor fanfic up! It's called "Those Four Words" and it's a short drabble about that moment in the ep "Bad Wolf" when Jack works out that Rose was still alive.
Falling through the scar tissue of the Doctor's timeline was a little disorienting (okay, very disorienting), but she had to admit that she felt a thrill of satisfaction every time that she thwarted the Great Intelligence and rewrote the timestream so that the Doctor came out victorious and alive. Plus, it was quite amusing seeing some of his past incarnations, and she had to laugh when she remembered the fashion choices of some of them, especially that ridiculous scarf and the stick of celery!
Eventually, as she felt that she was nearing the end of the rewriting, Clara felt herself land in a white room with levers on both sides. She screamed as Daleks and Cybermen flew past her into one of the walls and disappeared.
"INTO THE VOID! HA!" She heard the tenth incarnation of the Doctor yell. She looked over at him and saw him clinging onto some sort of black contraption attached to the wall. When Clara looked at his blonde companion, Rose, she remembered, she, too was clinging to a similar contraption. From what she had seen of the girl during her travels through the Doctor's timestream, Clara rather liked her.
But she was not able to reminisce on what she had seen of Rose as one of the Daleks slammed into the lever in front of her, moving back a bit. "Offline," the computer announced as the pull from the Void to lessen, and the monsters slowed in their fall. Clara gasped in horror as Rose began to let go of her clamp to reach for the lever, despite how the Doctor shouted to her not to.
Swallowing her fear that she was too severely changing the timestream, Clara rushed over to Rose's side, shoved her against the wall (thus forcing the blonde to grab the clamp again) before the Impossible Girl continued to the lever and yanked it back to the "online" position. It might have been a bad idea to perform this severe of a rewrite, but she had a sudden bad feeling that, if she didn't move the lever now, Rose would be lost, and from what she had seen of how the two interacted, Clara would never wish that on the Doctor, no matter how much she enjoyed flirting with him in his "Chin Boy" form. She quickly flattened herself against the wall as the Daleks and Cybermen once again sped towards the Void. She sighed with relief as the number of monsters flying by lessened. She moved away from the wall, but was immediately caught by a Cyberman and was thrown into the Void... well, into the Void from the Doctor's and Rose's points of views, but she was really thrown back into the Doctor's timestream.
She landed in front of the door of an advanced laboratory, and when she entered, she was pleased to see that Doctor had not changed his face yet and still wore the pinstripes and Converse, and she was even more pleased to see that Rose was still with him. "You!" Rose gasped, clearly shocked to see her. "But – you were at Torchwood, you moved my lever back online, and you got pulled into the Void, we saw you."
The Doctor, who had been talking about 500,000 rads of radiation flooding a nuclear booth where an older man was trapped, whirled around at Rose's outburst, his eyes widening when he recognized her. "Who are you? Rose is right; you were at Torchwood. The Void should have ripped you into nothing as soon as you entered."
Clara gave a cheeky grin and straightened her back haughtily. "Clara Oswald, and I'm the Impossible Girl! Or, at least, I'm one of them," she winked at Rose, remembering that the blonde had absorbed the Time Vortex and, while the Doctor most likely didn't know it yet, changed her DNA to the TNA of a Time Lord. She practically skipped over to the nuclear booth and basically pushed the Doctor out of her way, fully knowing what her mission in this part of the timeline was. "Don't do it, sweetheart!" the elderly man warned her. "I've tried warning these two, but they won't listen. Just leave me, I've lived my life."
"Like I said, I'm an impossible girl!" Clara retorted, stopping just before she entered the other side of the booth and turning back to the Doctor and Rose. "Trust me when I say this you two, we're going to meet again in your future. And until we meet again, every now and then, spare a thought for me." She whirled back around to face her fate in this part of the timeline. "In fact," she stopped, only turning her head to the team. "Run. Run, you clever pair, and remember me." And with that, she confidently strode into the booth and slammed the button, freeing the man and allowing the radiation to flood her body, killing her in that form and throwing her once again into the Doctor's timestream.
Even though she was certain that there were other times that he had mentioned running into her, such as the Dalek Asylum and Victorian London, immediately after she left the radiation room, she landed hard on some sort of ground. She tried calling out, frightened, but no one answered her. Figures ran past her and she recognized past incarnations of the Doctor. Even though she was more terrified than she had ever been in her life, she still had to allow herself a small laugh when she recognized the Doctor sporting that insanely long scarf. She saw the leather-clad Doctor run by, but she didn't see Pinstripes anywhere.
"Clara!" a voice came through, and she recognized the voice of the Doctor that she had seen with Rose. "Clara, are you here?"
"Clara, can you hear us?" Clara gasped as she recognized Rose's voice. The Impossible Girl turned around and around in the fog, squinting, trying to figure out where the voices were coming from.
"Where are you?" she cried, running around, attempting to see the two.
"Clara!" The Doctor's voice came from right behind her. She whirled around and couldn't decide if she wanted to laugh, sigh, or cry in relief as she saw, not only the Doctor, but Rose as well standing there, and both of them had their arms outstretched to her. She ran to them, throwing her arms around the Doctor, and both he and Rose embraced her as a parent would embrace a child who had returned home.
"Doctor?" Rose asked, and Clara felt her heart twinge when she heard the fear in the older girl's voice. "Who's that?" Clara turned in the Doctor's arms to see another figure with his back turned.
"He's me," the Doctor said, his voice hard as rock. "There's really only me here, and that's the point. Girls, let's get out of here. This is the only time that I'm being utterly serious with this suggestion."
"But, I never saw that one." Clara protested. "I never saw that one, but I saw all of you, even your next self – your eleventh self. When I absorbed the radiation, I must have prevented your regeneration. Ten faces. You're the Tenth Doctor."
"I said he was me." The Doctor confessed. "But I never said he was the Doctor."
"How is that possible?" Rose asked. "He's you, but he's not the Doctor?"
"Look, you two, my name, my real name, it means nothing – it's not the point. The name that I chose is "The Doctor." When you choose a name, it's like you're making a promise." He glanced once again at the figure with steel in his eyes. "He's the one who broke that promise."
Clara could sense that she was growing dizzy after her sojourn throughout the Doctor's timeline, and she barely felt the Doctor gently catch her, or Rose use her Vortex-given powers to open a slight fissure in the Doctor's rewritten timeline so that they could all return. But she had absolutely no trouble hearing the man who broke the promise of the Doctor defending his actions, and the real Doctor declaring that what he did was not in the name of the Doctor. A shudder ran through Clara and she knew, deep down, that that was not the last time they had run into that man, but she also knew that she and the two Time Lords would stand together. They were her new family.
A/N: Maybe it was a mistake to try to incoporate the ending of "The Name of the Doctor" into the ending of this fic, but I had to try to end it on a solid note. At least, as solid a note as the episode landed on. It was an epic episode and everything, but they left us with that huge cliffhanger and we have to wait until the fiftieth anniversary to find out how it ends! Well, I guess that's one way of getting people to watch the fiftieth.