Clara Oswald wakes up one December morning in an unfamiliar place on an unfamiliar bed, a nameless man sleeping beside her, regret clenched like a bitter pill between her teeth.
It's most certainly not the first time something like this has happened.
She stumbles back home in the winter chill and her mother is waiting for her in the kitchen, hands folded and blonde hairdo severe. Her mouth puckers at the sight of her disheveled daughter, smelling of sex and beer just now arriving at their flat. 5:38 AM in the morning, and Clara's already got a cold coming on, teeth chattering as she pulls her threadbare jacket closer around her chest, her arms, to ward off the cold and the intensity of her mother's glare.
There's disappointment evident; it's the most prevailing emotion she's able to sense through the bleary hangover. Mother doesn't speak a word as she ushers the two of them off to the bathroom, stripping Clara out of her dirty clothes and forcing her into the shower. She's told to come out when she's clean. The door slams and then it's just her, shivering in spite of the scalding spray pouring down over her shoulders, washing the taint of the night away and down the drain. Repent, Mother chastises her. Rebuke the temptation. You have been a bad girl, a wicked girl - a slap, cracking across her cheek - you will never do this again, do you understand me? Or you will find somewhere else to live.
It takes all of twenty minutes scrubbing until her skin is red and raw before she's satisfied. She gets out and there's a pile of neatly folded clothes above the sink, and she changes into them gratefully. She doesn't look at the mirror as she passes by. Downstairs, mum looks her over and makes no comment. There's not much that needs to be said, anyway.
Normalcy comes a few years later when she gets a house with a mortgage, buys a car, and takes up work as a teacher. Her father warmly congratulates her. Mother frowns and mutters something about failed ambition and lost potential and she tries to ignore it by biting down on her lip until it bleeds. Dinner is a trial in itself, and she is back at her flat the next day, grading papers and staring out the window.
The lull doesn't last long. Nine months, and there's already another man who calls himself the Doctor. He's mysterious and she follows him one day into a police box, only it's not a police box at all, it's massive on the inside, a spaceship built on physics and architecture worlds beyond their primitive designs. Surprisingly, he doesn't even seem angry or surprised that she's there, only welcoming her into his machine cordially and introducing her to the TARDIS, a word that brings to mind adventure and danger. She tells him as much and he's not surprised at that either, only seems to stare at her (just a little bit) sadly and asks if she'd like to join him and make it a little less lonely. Of course, she accepts. The Doctor kisses her lightly on the head, sending shivers down her spine.
"And what may your name be, love?" he asks.
"Clara," she replies. "Clara Oswald." Impossible girl, his mouth quirks, a title she doesn't yet understand, but he starts up the engines and they are on their way before she has a chance to question the meaning of the words. Impossible girl, says the Doctor, there are things you do not, and should never, understand.
Space is far bleaker than she thought it would be. There is beauty, yes, in creation, but also an unfathomable sorrow where the worlds attempt to meet and fail, millions of miles gaping between entire galaxies. Outside the scratched windows of the TARDIS, she glimpses suns and stars aeons of years old, fragments of forgotten matter, floating ruins etched with archaic ruins drifting through the great black seas, swirling supernovae and the deaths of civilizations. All the wonder opened up to her and the Doctor. He understands it better than she does, it's plain as day in the way he bows his head and averts his gaze whenever they pass one of the ancient sites come untethered from its proper planet's orbit, cast off like a pet spurned by the master. She learns that he is old, and that he once knew life in these fields of death, friends, even family where there now lie corpses. People, beings, they come and go and the Doctor is always, always left behind.
An observation: the Doctor loves everyone, never mind the fact that they're temporary and he's permanent.
It kills a tiny piece of him each time they die.
They travel a bit longer and she starts to fall in love with him, or rather, he falls in love with her and she's simply dragged along. Only this time, it's different.
The Doctor has his back to her when he's at the controls; she sees only the back of his coat, his arms darting out and pressing buttons, pulling levers, charting their next route. He doesn't look at her except when they're in danger, and only then will he dare to gaze into her eyes, something guilty in each prolonged stare.
(Impossible girl - she learns the origins of his nickname for her at a later date, and there, she starts to decipher the meaning of the pain behind his solitude.)
She loves him despite it. Sometimes they glance at each other in a moment of forgotten roles, the lapels of his jacket loose and his hair in disarray, her chest seeming to tighten and her throat constricting and it is all she can do from telling him everything. Clara is not unaware; she knows the Doctor in a way more intimate than time, than space itself can prevent them from simply being. The Doctor knows as well, so he keeps his distance.
But neither of them have really been quite able to rein in basic impulses. More often than in the TARDIS, she finds herself reaching for his hand on the foreign worlds they visit. He breathes quickly as her skin skims over his own, trying to look at anything but her, but the girl who dies over and over again. Yes, she knows that part, and how it wounds him, but she could care less for the state of her anomaly when he's holding her and she's holding him, both of them companions, something-more-than-friends. The Doctor's lips ghost over her own, speaking volumes in low tones; she listens and she learns.
There is a dispassion to the way he steals the air from her lungs when they kiss, hot and heavy, hands clawing at clothing and at each other under the gritty blue glow of the TARDIS' lights. She tears at his coat, fingers winding furiously through his hair, his lips on the nape of her neck and leaving behind warm pockets of breath as he dips down to her shirt, the swell of her breasts. His movements are stiff, restrained, his eyes fixed on something else as they make love. The sound, the curve of some other girl's name lingers on his tongue, kept in check by the here and now, the realization that she is here. He collapses on top of her afterwards and when they fall asleep they roll naturally to opposite ends of the bed.
Amy, the Doctor mouths to no one in particular. She can see his lips moving to an invisible sound. Amelia.
All through the road back to Earth after Akhenaten, she does not sleep, pulling the blankets up over her chest, concealing the nakedness of herself, the cold, almost cruel observations of his ship chilling her through the sheets. Her mother's voice echoes - whore - through lightyears of treacherous territory, calling to her from the shower, the pile of filthy clothes, the drunken stupor and the slap. A recoil. A warning.
Venom rises up in her at the thought of these things, at the obscenity of the TARDIS meting out judgment, at her mother's unfriendly smile, at the taste of the the name of another woman on the Doctor's tongue. It feels vicious and not at all sweet, not what she'd wanted.
Did you truly expect anything else? the bitter side of her rationalizes. He was old. He had seen things you could not imagine-
I loved him, true.
So have others.
He wakes just as they enter the Milky Way, bare-chested and full of sleep. His arms, sprawled onto the pillows, clutch at her hair as she turns and smiles at him, a thin happiness lying between the space on the bed. He kisses her lightly on the cheek and gets up to brew some coffee, a terribly mundane thing to do in this spaceship.
Clara thinks that nothing has changed. The bed. The man. They are as strange a concept to her as they were back then, before they left. If change is exploration, then she has always been grounded to her home planet, never feeling, never receiving. The Doctor hands her a cup - "Did you sleep well, Clara?" - his face visibly lighter, relaxed.
"Of course."
She lets him rub her shoulder blades, glide over the small of her back and clean up her face. No, nothing has become of them like she thought it would.
London greets her, a quieter friend than before. When did you ever grow so cold, so lifeless? she ponders.
There is no answer from the city, or from him.
Sometime afterwards, he collects her once more.
"Would you like to go on one more adventure?" he asks. He has aged in the months since his last departure; there are new wrinkles, new lines, a new weariness to his former smile. Tired as he may have been, he has never been this, reduced to a mere wanderer begging at her doorstep.
A real flash of spite goes through her. She considers shutting the door and declining, throwing the nameless girl back at him just to see how much more his heart can break.
Then again, instinct has continually dominated reason. Clara takes his hand and forces a chipper grin, like ones she used to put on just for him when they were going places. He bows and takes her into the TARDIS, and they fly.
He dies on Trenzalore, alone and with a hole burnt through his chest. She sees it from the clocktower, how the Daleks surround him and his band of Silence. The priests are killed first. The Doctor is killed last, bowing his head and holding up his arms as they fire. Not once does he look at her as he is falling; not once does he scream her name on the four winds, pleading for her before they shoot. Only the most terrible lack of sound follows, as the whole town falls under a deadly hush.
She flees in his TARDIS, cowardice flowing thick through her blood, the taste of shame filling her mouth as she runs and the Papacy is destroyed. A prior recording of the Doctor appears, barely speaking a single word in its hideous, monotone drone so unlike that of the real Doctor before she shuts it off and cries, her tears spilling down her cheeks like liquid fire, slumped against the controls with her arms curled around her legs.
The universe mourns his passing, a sigh passing through planets and stars too immense, too ageless to fathom. It is a grief not without noise, without an outcry from the millions of lives he saved, nor without celebration from the spirits of those slew. Orchestrator of a thousand deaths, man of eleven lives - the lonely God falls, and she falls with him, as she must. Her duties are finished, and he is dead.
"Go," she whispers, and the TARDIS hums a sad tune, engines wheezing onward.
And now it's time for one last bow
Like all your other selves
The hour of the Doctor is over now
The clock has struck twelve