Clara ducked into the bathroom, her cell phone already out of her purse and in her hand, dialing. She pressed the phone to her ear, tapping her foot impatiently as she waited. "Come on, come on, come on. Please don't be out fighting robots or running from aliens."
It continued to ring, and just as Clara was about to give up hope, she heard the familar voice through her phone. "Hello, you've reached the TARDIS!"
"Oh, thank heavens," she sighed out in relief. "You have to come save me."
She could almost hear The Doctor's demeanor change and his body go rigid with worry through the phone. "Have you been kidnapped? Are you locked away somewhere? What do they look like? Are they green? Blue? Do they have tubelike thing protruding from the top of their head that looks vaguely indecent?"
"I'm not in that kind of trouble," she replied, rolling her eyes. "It's Valentine's Day and I'm on the worst date I've even been on. I simply can't take it anymore. I need you to come get me out of it."
"You want me to take the TARDIS and come save you. From a date."
"Yes."
"Isn't that what your girl friends are for?"
"They're the ones who set me up with him in the first place!" Clara practically shouted, growing frustrated. "They think he's wonderful. And he's so not."
"He hasn't hurt you, has he?"
She smiled softly at the concern in his voice. "No, nothing like that. He's perfectly decent, I guess. Just incredibly self absorbed. He's been talking about his job for 45 minutes."
"Well, that might not be so bad depending on the job," The Doctor said. "I once spent three hours listening to the ins and outs of intergalactic poultry trading. Fascinating stuff. Some really bizarre restrictions."
"He's an accountant."
"An accountant?"
"Yes."
"Oh. That does sound bad."
"It is bad. I just can't take it anymore. I wouldn't have called you for something so silly if I had any other way out of this," Clara begged.
There was a long pause on the other end, so long that she thought he might have hung up on her.
"Sit tight," The Doctor finally said. "I'll be there right away."
Clara sighed in relief. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you."
Sliding into the seat across from her date, Theodore, Clara pasted on a fake smile, which was a little less painful than it had been ten minutes ago now that she knew the Doctor was coming to get her out of this. As Theodore picked up where he'd left off in his story about balancing some restaurant's books, Clara thought about how the Doctor would get her out of this date. She hated to admit it, but she kind of hoped he'd storm in, pretending to be some jealous ex-boyfriend who wanted her back. The night had been so boring that she'd love to cause a scene just to make things a little more exciting.
She nodded along with Theodore's story, having no idea what he was really talking about. He was self-absorbed, boring, and completely oblivious, but she did hope he wasn't too crushed by whatever happened in the next few minutes.
Time ticked on and she started glancing toward the door, growing more and more nervous. The Doctor had promised to come. But it had been nearly fifteen minutes. He had a time machine, it wasn't like he could get stuck in traffic. Clara started to worry that he might have run into some trouble of some kind after she called him.
Just as she was starting to consider heading back to the bathroom so she could call the Doctor and make sure everything was okay, the restaurant's fire alarm started blaring and the sprinklers began raining water down on the entire dining room. Clara jumped to her feet, making sure she had her purse. The ushers and waiters were trying to keep people calm and keep the evacuation orderly, but the crowd had gone into a full blown panic, and were pushing and shoving in an attempt to get out of the building.
Clara turned to Theodore, ready to grab his hand and attempt to calm him down, to find that he was gone. Glancing around the restaurant, she spotted him in the crowd, trying to shove his way to the front toward the door. "Okay, maybe not so perfectly decent after all," she muttered to herself as she turned around, jogging toward the kitchen and out the restaurant's back door.
As she stepped out into the alley, she spotted the TARDIS. She smiled widely, but tried to keep her expression stern as she walked toward it, shivering slightly as the cold wind hit her wet body.
As she drew closer, the door to the TARDIS opened and The Doctor stuck his head out. "Were you able to shake yourself free of the accountant?"
"You couldn't have found a way to get me out of that date that didn't result in me soaked to the bone in the middle of February?" she replied, ignoring the question.
"Yes, well, that wasn't the intention."
"What exactly did you do?"
He looked down bashfully. "Well, I was going to use this amazing little remote systems device to set off the fire alarm." He held up a little remote control-looking device with so many knobs and buttons that Clara couldn't make heads nor tails of what it was actually meant for. "But I guess I haven't tested it enough. Caused a small electrical fire in the bathroom. Nothing serious. I believe the staff has already put it out."
Clara smiled fondly. "You can't just do anything in a normal way, can you?"
The Doctor pouted. "I wanted to play with my new toy."
She just shook her head in response. "Well, move aside! I'm freezing!"
The Doctor stood back, allowing Clara to enter the TARDIS.
"Not much warmer in here," she muttered, rubbing at her arms.
"Hang on. I'm sure I've got a blanket or a sweater or something," The Doctor said as he darted around the control room, rooting around the mess.
Clara looked around her. The control room looked like a disaster had hit it.
"What happened here?" She asked, suddenly worried about what dangerous things the Doctor got up to when she wasn't with him.
"Nothing much," he said, distracted by the pile of metal he was trying to move around. "Just some cleaning. And then I got distracted from the cleaning by thinking about all the different things I could do with all the stuff I found and I started sketching out some ideas." Clara noticed a pile of papers next to the console, pages filled with sketches and equations she couldn't begin to wrap her head around. "And then nothing really came of any of them, and I ended up with a bigger mess than I'd started with." As he finished his explanation, his face brightened as he found the object of his search. "Here it is!" he exclaimed proudly. "A sweater!"
It was wrinkled and dusty and a little marked up from lying beneath hunks of metal for so long, but Clara was so cold she didn't care. She accepted it and pulled it on, eyeing the Doctor. "That's what you've been doing since I saw you last Wednesday? You've been… cleaning and drawing?"
"Not drawing!" The Doctor said indignantly. "Creating. Well, trying to create."
"You haven't… liberated an alien civilization or… I don't know… saved some astronauts in the future or something?"
The Doctor turned away, walking toward the console. He almost seemed embarrassed. "Yes, well. Things need to be cleaned. Not every day can be an exciting, death defying adventure."
He pressed the buttons, pulled the levers, and the TARDIS set off, away from the restaurant and Clara's bad date. For the first time, the silence in the air between them felt awkward.
"But," Clara finally started, stepping toward the Doctor. "You do, though, right? Other times, I mean. Go on adventures and stuff without me. Right?"
He shrugged, still facing away from her. "Sometimes."
"Doctor-"
"I've discovered over time that I'm not so good on my own," he explained quietly.
"Oh."
"It's not every week. I mean, I don't sit around every week, waiting for you. Just… a lot of weeks."
Clara had been very careful about living her life, about keeping strictly to their 'every Wednesday' schedule, about not waiting for him. It has never occurred to her that he'd wait for her.
"And of course some weeks I don't wait at all," he continued. "This is a time machine, after all. Some weeks, as soon as I drop you off, I just go to pick you up again."
Clara was stunned. She really had never stopped to think about what The Doctor did in his time away from her. She'd just assumed he did all the stuff they normally did, just without her. She had never realized how lonely it must be for him.
"Well," she ventured carefully. "It's not like my weekends are overly exciting. I usually just sit at home catching up on telly. I guess… maybe we could add every other Saturday to the schedule."
"Really?"
"I have been awfully bored."
The Doctor turned around finally, smiling at her. "Saturdays would be lovely."
Clara smiled back. The silence between them was no longer awkward. It was filled with something else now. Something sweeter.
"Now, then," The Doctor said, breaking the silence. "You've just sat through a terrible Valentine's dinner and now you're soaking wet because of me. You deserve a better Valentine's evening."
"Oh, really? What do you propose?"
"There's a planet with oceans of a substance that tastes almost exactly like chocolate. It's wonderful for your skin, too."
Clara's face turned serious. "Take me there. Right now."
The Doctor smiled impishly. "Yes, ma'am."