Really, intergalactic TV should be more entertaining. Clara Oswald used the latest mind reading remote control to flick through thousands of channels, projected in three dimensional holograms on the other side of the enormous TARDIS built television room. Yet another problem to unnaturally extended lifespans. All the time in the world to catch up on boxsets, but what to do when you finally run out of series to view?
And craft projects to make?
And places to visit?
Well she hadn't run out of those, but it couldn't be adventure all the time.
Clara blew air forcefully through her lips and made a wibbling noise. Until recently she didn't need to be breathing at all but it had helped her express herself at moments like these, so she never lost the habit and it continued when her lungs began to function again. There was nobody around to appreciate the gesture however. It could be a boring existence in a TARDIS, she was beginning to realise. She never once thought when she was 'alive' the first time, that it could even be that way. There was always something amazing happening or just about to happen. Always something to do and marvel at. Always someone…
She stopped her train of thought.
Not helpful, Oswald, don't go there.
But it was too late, her mind had raced ahead. Always someone to talk to, laugh with, share the adventure. She stared emptily at the images in front of her, swallowed back any hint of tears that might threaten to spill.
It was a lonely old existence too.
No, really not helpful. Need to put a halt to this.
She stood and pulled her phone from her trouser pocket, hit dial as she made her way out the room and down the winding corridor to the console and Diner beyond. The tone rang out into time and space. Clara reached the bar and began to put together something comforting with ice-cream.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
'Hey!' Ashildr's voice rang out across the centuries and the miles.
'Hey, I need you to stop me doing something stupid,' Clara said resignedly.
'Oh God not this again, in the background there was a scuffling noise and some grunting. 'Come on we've talked about this. A lot. You can't ring to say hi, you can't accidently land in the same place as him, you can't go there at all. Timelines and stuff. Crossing. Or unravelling, or something bad. Hybrids! There were reasons you two had to split, bad for each other, destructive… Get off me you pig!'
Clara raised her eyebrows. 'Er… are you OK, do you need a hand?'
'No, no it's just this idiot thinks he's some kind of super warrior. He's being beaten up by a girl and getting extra irritated with it. You know how it goes. Get… off!'
There was a heaving sort of noise and a crash and then Ashildr returned to the phone again. 'Look, sorry, this isn't the best time, sort of in the middle of a siege.'
'Where are you?' Clara asked with minor interest.
'Same place you left me, Valmina, just about fifty miles north from where we landed. I joined the dark side and now we're rampaging across the continent.'
'Please don't tell me there's pillaging.'
'Um...'
'Ashildr!'
'I'm a Viking!'
'Look I am delighted you're back in touch with your roots and all, but don't take it too far.'
'Yes, yes. But these guys deserve a pillaging, it's definitely their turn,' a clang of metal rang out. 'So as I was saying, not really got much time right now but stick to the principles Clara, no phoning, no stalking him, no accidentally bumping into one another. Go and eat some ice cream, visit a nice spa planet, do something just for Clara, you'll feel better.'
Great, four billion years old and the best her friend could suggest was comfort food. So much for the wisdom of the ages.
'I don't know,' Clara prodded her melting ice-cream.
'You can't spend eternity thinking about him,' Ashildr warned, 'That chapter's over. I've been telling you this for hundreds of years Clara, it feels like thousands. You're wasting time. You have to discover who you are without him.'
Clara pushed the melted desert across the bar away from her and sighed. Easier said than done. Especially when you're in the time vortex by yourself and feeling lonely.
'When are you coming back?' Clara asked hopefully. 'We could do the spa together, girl time after your siege?'
'I'll give you a bell….' Ashildr said distractedly.
'Rough guess?' Clara queried in vain.
A splintering noise and some cursing. 'I don't know… ten, fifteen years maybe. I'll text you.' And she hung up.
No spa then. She couldn't quite bear going alone, and she was definitely not in the head space to go somewhere dangerous because she could guess it would end badly with her this distracted. Clara tapped her fingers on the bar and then pushed off and headed to the diner door. Outside the glass she could see stars, somewhere in the horsehead nebula. She wrapped her arms around herself and remembered the day he had named them all for her, pointing them out as they sat on the roof of the TARDIS. The memory made her smile, she only learned a handful of the names but the stars themselves were unforgettable. They shone in his eyes.
Every time she thought of the TARDIS she thought of the message she had left on the blackboard.
Run you clever boy…
He was out there being a Doctor just like she told him to, but it was her who remembered.
Memories were torture since her conversion, since the chronolock vanished and she altered forever. When Ashildr wanted to be reminded of something she would look up one of her journals; her own memory unable to retain millions of years' worth of remembrance. Clara didn't seem to have that problem; her memories seem to be as good as new, sharp and unforgiving. She hadn't learned to bring order to them yet. Decades passed by and she remembered every detail. She recalled the Doctor telling her that it was that way for him and how hard that could be, to never have anything slip into the grey uncertain edges of memory; for everything to be exact and unmerciful. To remember every mistake, every person you'd hurt, everything you'd lost.
She hadn't understood at the time. She knew he was lonely, but she never could have guessed how lonely he was. He probably still was now. Clara mapped the stars out in her mind the way she had learned to do. The ship was floating far from earth in a timezone billions of years before she had even been born. All of these wonders, more hers now than ever and it was never enough. There was only ever one thing she wanted. She heard Ashildr's warning voice in her mind and chose not to heed it.
Clara drew a breath and stepped back into the console room, entered some co-ordinates and yanked at the lever. Around her the TARDIS engines started and the monitors tracked her progress. Clara checked the destination and date and drew a slightly shaky breath. It wasn't everyone who could do what she was about to, even Ashildr, old as she was couldn't take this step, but she felt she had to find her way again.
And to do that she had to start at the beginning.
XXXXXXXXXX
Time Lord memories are complex things. For starters a Time Lord can do so much with them. Delete them, hide them, block them, lock them away for a period, extract them again, magnify them, pump up the volume so much it's like reliving each moment when you close your eyes. Time Lords can even download them, along with whole personalities and lives and store them in places like libraries and of course, in Cloisters when they die. Time Lord memories are powerful and directly linked to Time, and only Time, and the Time Lord himself can control them.
Memory wiping technology, blockers and deleting devices which were so popular these days simply didn't touch the sides. Especially if they had been tinkered with by emotional human beings and had been originally set to homo sapiens brains. The blocker did nothing but he had to save her, save both of them, so he lied. The blocker didn't work so he took her image and locked it away in his head, downloaded it and wiped it from his consciousness for a while.
He always intended to get her back. He left a note in his brain as a reminder; he knew she had existed, he knew some basic details, and he knew he had to try and find her.
So it was that Wednesday afternoon that the Doctor was programming his latest invention, a device to accentuate the flow of the current through the console and allow faster upload. To his brain. Life was moving on again for him after a long spell on Darillium. It had taught him more than he had expected it to for someone who had lived thousands of years, twenty-four passed by in a blink. At least they normally would until River taught him the importance of the moment and then later of letting the moment go. It hurt, she explained, but it would hurt more in the longrun if he couldn't do it.
That was where he went wrong, he suspected, all those years ago. All those billions of years driven mad by love and isolation. Well he had learned, by God had he, and now it was time to unpack a memory or two from the safe place he kept them. He had earned it through the years and felt the time had come. He had moderated his passion, he could be trusted to remember, to not destroy the world in a fit of temper, to adore her without obsession. He would remember her; he had loved her and it wasn't right for there to be nothing of her left.
He had talked himself into the decision to resurrect the girl called Clara, ignored the plaintive bleeping of the TARDIS and dropped his new friend Bill off for a while. He was a time traveller, he could be gone for a hundred years and she would never know. He felt his hearts lifting in excitement already and he hadn't even tasted the memories yet. At last the Doctor finished fiddling with the device, slotted it into place, and turned down the corridor behind the console room to where the TARDIS had reluctantly made what he wanted available.
It wasn't a memory palace as such, more a memory warehouse. Stacked high with boxes full of identical square devices on which a thousand memories or more were stored. It bemused his latest companion when she stumbled across it and tried to understand how actual bits of his past could be stored there on a physical object like a USB stick. He assured her the technology was much more complex. But basically memories were just codes and patterns, he explained, like anything else it can always be translated into something tangible.
Not everything is tangible, Bill had said. Emotion isn't tangible. Love.
Why were companions always right? He had a feeling that the one before, the one he knew was called Clara and whose details he had locked away, had been exceptionally right all the time. Well he was about to find out, his curiosity was getting the better of him. He had to know more. The trip to the school, the one with the rift in time and Her name on the wall; he'd never come so close to her since the day in the diner when he hadn't recognised her face. He'd been trying to find it ever since.
He was nervous he realised, hands shaking but he could do this now, he was sure of it. He began shifting boxes, lifting them up and checking the labels. It looked for all the world like he had packed to move house. 'Trenzalore, The Academy, Rose….' He'd been kind to himself and packaged them up. He used carry around all the most painful recollections to remind himself of the things he had done.
Until River told him to stop, just stop. He tortured himself and he didn't deserve it. Pack up, download them, let them fester in the warehouse and free yourself. So he had and his hearts felt lighter at last. She had given him permission to be happier. The Doctor had spent hundreds of years making up for his mistakes. He had done enough now.
River knew he hadn't had his memory wiped by some flimsy bit of technology back on Gallifrey. It hadn't even been blocked. She knew that he had hidden Clara away because of how badly it hurt. She knew that as he'd knelt before Clara in the TARDIS that last day he had taken the decision to lock away her image, pack it up with all of her associations and images and hide it at the back of his mind to later be extracted and stored, in the hope that one day, it would be safe to take it all back. She lived their final years together knowing that when they parted he would do just that. And good luck to him. Live a little.
The Doctor lifted another heavy box and paused, looked at the one beneath, jammed right at the back, trying to hide itself away. He looked at its label.
It read, 'Clara,' and then beneath that in red pen, 'Do not open.' His handwriting, and he remembered scrawling that instruction numbly, shoving the container out of view.
Now he only hesitated for a second before he grabbed the box to his chest and made his way back to the console room; inside it the most precious thing he'd ever known, about to be set free again.
