There are obviously far too many stories of the Impossible Girl for anyone to ever tell. Not in a human lifetime anyway, and who'd want to waste any longer than that with trying? After all, Miss Oswald herself told us all we need to know. 'I was born to save the Doctor'. Over and over again, whether he knew it or not, whether she lived or died for it, over and over again. Most of the time, she didn't even know he existed, until she saw him. He'd flash past, never seeing her, rushing by on his way to somewhere new and incredible, and Clara was not invited. He was no more than a glimpse of a polka-dot coattail, the flap of a scarf catching momentarily about her ankle. The only unifying factor in all of these lives was that one act of hers that spared him untold agony and misfortune.
It wasn't until he was very old indeed that he even became aware of those moments. Clara, however, all of her, she always knew. Maybe not that she was saving him or a planet or the universe, but that she was doing something good. There is a moment, in each and every of her countless lives, where her heart swelled until it hurt.
During the Sontaran invasion of Stryz-Gar in the year 4208, when the Doctor was a mere lad at eighty years old, she stood strong, commanding a fleet of starships that destroyed envoys meant for Gallifrey.
In the 1920s, she was living with an elderly aunt in New York. Automobiles were a new-fangled sort of gadget then, and licences weren't so stringently enforced as they are now. She stepped out almost in front of one. Had the gentleman driver not stopped to apologize (and ask her to dinner in the process) two streets away he would have taken a corner too quickly, skidded, and taken the life of Perpugilliam Brown. Saving the Doctor, it seems, isn't always about saving the man himself.
In 2005, her father made her see a grief counsellor. How could she explain to him that the words she found herself writing on every available wall, the ones she scrawled in chalk across a car park in the middle of the night, were nothing to do with her mother's death? Clara wanted to cry in the peace and comfort of her own home, but this, somehow, was more important. Two words that had be plastered all over the city, wherever she could put them.
She didn't know what 'Bad Wolf' meant, but she knew it was important.
There was then, as there always is, a sense of déjà vu. She has done important things before. She will do them again. Over and over again.
But it's not all doom and gloom and child psychiatrists. Sometimes she even gets to have a bit of fun. And to Clara, who wherever she goes will retain her mischievous one-sided smile or be forever lost, there is nothing more worthwhile than a bit of fun.
Take, for instance, one not-very-interesting day in the Halls Of Lost Things. The year was 1506, but please don't expect the Dark Ages. This is the city of Jaipur, in the Long-Ma nebula. The city is a satellite, electrical, burning a thousand shades of neon. Its glow is so bright that no inhabitant has ever seen the sun they circle; the lights bleach it out. Jaipur started out as a pleasure destination, a colony of clubs and casinos.
And in the basement of City Hall, there are the Halls of Lost Things. Not so many people know about that place. But if you're a tourist in this town and something goes wrong, and you're lucky enough to meet an honest police officer, you'll probably end up here eventually.
A citywide lost-and-found department, the Halls catalogue everything from pen lids and paperclips to stray dogs and daughters. And on this particular not-very-interesting day, Loss Officer Clara Oswald is sitting in reception with her feet up on the desk, trying to catch peppermint creams into her mouth. Mostly, they are splattering on the floor over her shoulder.
The door bangs open and she straightens herself very quickly at her post. She slides a shoe out around her chair and it gets green and sticky down one side sliding those little misses away out of sight.
By the time a pale, manicured hand slaps down on her desk, she looks the very picture of a professional young woman, who is not bored, never has been, how dare you imply that she's dying of boredom down here.
She is certainly not bored enough to look at that frustrated, slamming hand and murmur, "I like your bracelet…"
The hand belongs to a woman with long red hair and a fierce look on her face. There's a man standing over her shoulder. He says something along the lines of, "I knew that was a nice bracelet. I wouldn't have given it to you if it wasn't nice. You didn't have to wear it." And maybe they have a small spat about the bracelet and why the lady is wearing it, but Loss Officer Oswald misses all of this. She is, quite simply, looking at him, while her mind whispers in awe, …That nose….
As soon as she snaps out of it, whether they're arguing or not, she says, "How can I help you?" They trained her, when she started here, in how to deal with the frustration of people who have lost things which are important to them, who are having their holiday ruined, who are in distress. She's supposed to give them a sympathetic, affirming smile.
This couple, however, don't seem to need that.
"We're looking for a Tardis," says the woman.
Clara turns to her computer and begins to type. It is just a little bit embarrassing to wait for the monitor to wake up. "And your names, if I'm logging a request?"
"Amy and Rory Williams."
Officer Oswald feels her heart skip a beat. She doesn't know why, except that the feeling is familiar. Her heart has skipped a beat before, and it will again, over and over again. But of course, that was ridiculous. She didn't know these people. She'd never seen them before in her life. There was no reason at all to feel she should help them, at all costs.
She shook it off. "And that item you mentioned-?"
"A Tardis."
"…Is that spelt how it sounds?"
She put it in as one word first. No results. Put it in in capital letters. No results. "If you don't mind my asking, Mrs Williams, what exactly is a Tardis?"
Mrs Williams flounders. Over her shoulder, Mr Williams winces, opens his mouth like he has an answer, closes it, winces again. They look at each other. Clara remembers being trained to be very patient with the people who come to the desk. She folds her hands and simply waits. "Sort of…" Mrs Williams begins, and she starts to shape the concept with her hands, moulding a Tardis out of air. "Sort of… big blue time-machine type thing…"
Clara tries 'time machine'. "I've got two temporal devices on record. It's a vortex manipulator and… this thing-" She turns the monitor around to show a grand old construction of brass tubes around a red velvet wing chair, backed by what appears to be a large fan. "Is that a Tardis?"
It's not. They're very definite on that fact.
"Rory, what are we going to do?" Mrs Williams moans. Clara, sensing another argument, sits back in her chair and turns her eyes away. It's as close to privacy as she can give them. In the open drawer on her left, the open bag of peppermint creams looks invitingly up at her, and did she mention that it's open? How can she get a peppermint cream without looking like she's not taking them seriously? Sneakily. That's the answer. If she can get it sneakily, she might be in business…
Just to keep you caught up on the actual conversation, Rory doesn't know what they're going to do. There's a pause while he hugs his distressed wife. Then he thinks of something to say. Even with two fingers sliding into the rustling bag, scissoring closed on a sweet, Clara knows he shouldn't say it out loud. She shakes her head, but he's started and he'll finish. "Do you think," he says to the already frustrated Mrs Williams, "he's got any food in there? He's got everything else stockpiled but… well, it just seems like the kind of thing he'd do…"
"Oh, God, Rory, what if he starves?"
"Wait, wait," Clara interrupts. "There's somebody in this time machine?" She reconfigures her computer search to check for living beings, rather than just machines. "Name, please."
Mrs Williams dives in, almost across the desk to watch the screen. "The Doctor," she gasps. "Just look for The Doctor."
'Doctor'. "I've got eighty-two of those. Doctor who?"
Mr Williams, starting to look hopeless, starting to look lost. "He's… He's just the Doctor."
Another skipped heartbeat. The name strikes like a bell in Clara's heart, sudden and clear. But again, it's ridiculous. She doesn't know any doctors, except the one who gives her notes when she's too sick to work (or, between you and me, because she has forgotten to book her holidays off). "All these doctors have surnames. And now that I'm looking, quite a few of them are action figures," she tells them. And she is less surprised than she should be to hear an intense sadness on her own voice.
Mrs Williams stands up from the desk, and points over Clara's shoulder at the glass doors to the first hall. "Well," she says, with a sort of desperation, "We'll just go back and take a look, alright?"
She starts to round the desk. Clara rolls her chair out into her path. "Woah! You can't go back there. We have eighty-two doctors. What does that tell you about how much of 'back there' there is?" But even as she tries to put them off, Clara is getting up. She's kicking the pale green cream off the side of her shoe. She's tying her hair back, because you never come out of the halls looking as nice as you did going in.
Before she knows quite what she's doing or why, she's got her radio in hand, calling for a navigator. She is correcting herself to Mr and Mrs Williams. "You can't go back there on your own."
The Halls of Lost Things, like she just said, are rather vast. And they only get bigger when people don't come to collect. Loss Officer Oswald doesn't have a precise square-footage, but during all that training they gave her she remembers being told it would take three hundred years at least to traverse it all on foot.
Therefore, it is maintained and used by people on programmable platforms. Really these ought to be experienced professionals. So, when one arrives to take the Williamses into the labyrinth, Loss Officer Oswald pulls him down from his place, sets him into his chair and gives him her coffee and peppermint creams. "Just keep an eye on the desk," she tells him. "The computer explains itself and you probably won't get anybody. You look tired. Have a rest. I won't be long." She speaks too quickly for him to protest, and behind her back is waving the waiting couple onto the platform.
The navigator tries to get out of the chair, but it turns beneath him. It gives Clara just enough time to take a running jump onto the platform and head for those glass doors.
The Williamses are baffled, looking over their shoulder at the abandoned guide running after them. Clara, so they won't have time to wonder, tells them, "You might want to cover your noses."
Because the first room, beyond the glass doors, is meant to deter intruders and thieves. It is, therefore, the Hall of Second Socks. They come from hotels and laundrettes all over Jaipur, forgotten and unmatched. Clara moves them very quickly through that gauntlet. After that, in the fresh air of the Dropped Concert Tickets, they stop.
"Did you just hijack a floating robot?" Mr Williams says, but his voice is soft, and it doesn't sound like he's really properly asking.
Clara, rather than answer that, sticks out a hand to be shaken, introduces herself. She does not, however, stick with her training. Training dictates that you have to maintain a level of professional remove, so that you can disappoint people if you don't have their item. She ought to introduce herself as 'Loss Officer Oswald'.
"Clara," she says instead. And in return, she gets to call them Amy and Rory. "And yes, I did just get myself in a bit of trouble, but it's alright. We're going to find your Tardis, with this Doctor of yours in it. You said 'time machine', right? So let's try… vehicles?" She feeds this into the platform, sees the location come up on the display. Tells them, "Please hold on tightly to the rails, tuck in all your limbs and, while you shouldn't exactly need to duck, maybe just be ready to duck if you absolutely need to."
Between themselves, Amy says to Rory, "She'd do alright in the Tardis."
Clara has already pressed the button to launch. They are all nearly slammed off their feet as the platform takes off at rollercoaster speeds. They bank hard on corners, pass through a cavern of safe-deposit boxes full of lost wallets and communicators, sail up an apparently endless pipe lined with little hooks on which hang all the found keys. But Amy said that before they started. Clara heard her. And they were both smiling about it. All along that insane, whiplash journey, she's glowing with it. Clara doesn't know what a Tardis is. You remember, don't you? She was at her desk, and she had to ask them to describe it. She doesn't know what one is, but she's so proud they think she could cope with it.
She can feel in her heart already, somewhere, sometime, this Tardis is going to be a big part of her life.
The garage for lost vehicles is always crowded. These are cars that were stolen and then left where no one could find them. Bikes that were chained to lampposts, and that particular lamppost never found again. There's a forty-seven storey car park in the centre of Jaipur and if you leave your transport there for more than two weeks, it'll end up here. Clara guides the platform slowly around the levels, letting them look. They take a side each, scanning the room.
Again, Clara finds herself beneath their notice. She's just the guide. Thus, under the guise of a guide, as if she just wants more information to work with, she says, "Tell me about it. This Tardis, I mean. Your Doctor friend."
Rory speaks first. She's a little disappointed with his answer. He takes her very literally. He says things like, "Blue box. Space travel. A bit mental. Bow tie." Clara is left to guess which of these epithets refers to which item. But it's not really what she wanted to hear. She's trying to think how to rephrase her question without feeling nosy when Amy chimes in.
"You could always try searching for 'man locked in box'." Clara, at first, thinks that's directed at her. A cheap snipe about her reliance on the computer search system. But she's doing her best, really she is. With a warehouse this size and this number of individual items, she needs some sort of system, doesn't she and-… And Amy, thankfully, wasn't sniping at her, but at her husband.
Rory turns around from watching to cry out, "He told me to lock the door!"
"After he got out!"
"I thought he was out! And so did you, so you can't hold that against me. And I was not the one who said," and here he begins to mimic her sharp accent, "Oh, it'll be fine where it is, Rory, let's just leave it…"
"Don't you imitate me. You wish you were Scottish."
Before this can turn into a full-blown domestic, Clara feels the need to interrupt again, "You were double-parked? That actually does help me, if you were double-parked. And it was today?" They both nod. Now that there's hope, they stop fighting. Clara smiles at that. Feels like that's a good thing, like these are the sort of people she'd like to know and be aligned with. "Then I can find him. New arrivals, in the traffic police intake. Easy-peasy." She turns back, and finds it on the display. It's a few minutes journey. Or they could go barrelling along again and be there in seconds. But Clara's still feeling just a little bit seasick from their last trip. "It's not far from here," she tells them. Sets their travel at a gentle pace and turns from the controls to look at them both.
And, well, she has to make conversation, doesn't she? It's only professional. She was trained to keep the clients calm, after all. "If it's a time machine that can travel in space, and if you don't mind me asking, how is your locked-in friend still stuck here?"
The Williamses share a look. Confused, as if she's said something ridiculous.
"He doesn't know where we are," Amy says. "Where would he go? How would he find us?"
Of course. As soon as she says it, it makes perfect sense. Pretending to check on the controls, she turns away from them. Feeling a little weepy, a little teary-eyed. It's been a very strange day, and she's probably just feeling that. She should stop being so silly. "He sounds nice," is all she can say out loud.
Their route takes them slowly over the knee-deep swamp of Cosmetics Found Down The Back Of Taxi Seats, and through the vault of Change That Went Down The Grate, where a series of spouts trickle constantly with a silvery, waterfall rattle and a counter ticks off above it all, counting up past their first billion.
"If you ask me," Rory is saying, "we've got about ten minutes before he starts to try it anyway. You know what he's like. As soon as he gets bored, we'll have one of those montages where the Tardis appears in random places with him yelling for us beyond the door."
"Rory, don't even joke."
"We could meet him at the house."
"This is sometime in the fifteen-hundreds! Do you really want to arrive on Earth in a spaceship in the fifteen-hundreds? Not only will the house not be there, but we'll be burned for witches. I'm Scottish, I'll get burned anyway."
Which sounds a lot like another potential argument. Amy seems to be a lot more stressed out than Rory is. Rory, actually, seems quite a calm person. Clara imagines him to be the sort who saves his anger and energy for righting wrongs, for when he can do something about it. She is trying to help him when she claps her hands and cuts in (an octave or two higher than usual), "So! You're from Earth. I've never been there. It's supposed to be quite primitive, but I'd still like to visit. You're a long way away. Do you travel a lot?"
Finally, she gets them both to smile at once, to laugh at a joke Clara's not in on. Rory tells her slyly, "You could say that."
Clara wants to know more. She has questions. About where they've been and what certain places are like and if they've ever met any sort of fish people, because she's always wondered how they manage to communicate when they don't breathe air and what other times are like and this Doctor of theirs, she'd like very much to know more about him, and oh so many things she could ask them…
…Except the platform turns a corner out of the vault. It takes them into the nursery. Clara, of course, is familiar with the place. She quite likes it. There's soft light and soft music, dozens of little cots and nannies everywhere, feeding and rocking and hushing. It's a happy sort of place. It's always made her feel peaceful. It's a bit empty at the minute. There are maybe thirty children, but that's all.
Mr and Mrs Williams, however, are not so impressed. They turn a little quiet, and stand at the rail of the platform, watching it pass under them.
A few of the little boys look up waving at the flying people. For the most part, though, these children have been here long enough that they've seen navigators before. They're not as interested as they used to be.
"Why are there children here?" Amy wants to know. She asks, but doesn't take her eyes off them.
To Clara, as a Loss Officer, it's really very simple. The Williamses didn't question why the cars were here, or the coins, or anything else along the way. "Because they're lost."
"And then their parents come," Rory says. He says it with certainty, as if this is an undisputed fact. "Their parents come, and they meet you at the desk, and you put the child's name into the computer, and then they're found again." He nods to himself. There's no question mark.
Clara looks down and says softly, "Most of the time, yes."
They join hands. Again, Clara finds that as much privacy as she can give them is to avert her eyes, and feels like she has to.
Amy says, "They're nice to them. It's okay. Look; they're nice to them."
Clara looks instead at the doors of that room. There's just a short length of hallway and then, "We're here."
This time when the platform stops she hops down. The intake rooms are hiving, always are. There are conveyor belts of items moving constantly back and forth, and attendants taking them to computers to be catalogued, and then they go into sorting boxes, and then navigators take them to where they belong, and there are crying children being guided gently in from the street, and lost pets being scanned for microchips, and suitcases being x-rayed, and rings being studied through jeweller's optics so they can be registered under diamond or 'white stone' and all of this goes on and on.
When Clara and the Williamses arrived, a tall man with a clipboard began to approach them. He's pointing at the platform, and at Clara, as if he's about to bring up the little incident down at the front desk. She doesn't give him a chance to. She steps up with a winning smile and speaks before he can, "We're looking for the police intake. It's a large blue box, it was double-parked, and it's got a man inside it."
She says that and suddenly it's more important than her hijacking. The man takes her immediately by the arm and almost drags her with him while she nods for Mr and Mrs Williams to follow. "Thank God you're here," he's saying. "Nobody knew what do about him. And he's driving us all mad, with the shouting and the moaning and the whinging, oh God, thank God you're here…"
The man with the clipboard deposits Clara at the door of the Tardis. In fact, he deposits her within a few inches of it. For a moment, all she sees is blue. An incredible blue. A blue so deep she feels like she's falling into it, and her head spins.
And then the blue in front of her eyes shudders, with somebody on the other side banging on it. The voice that follows is sighing and dramatic, declaiming, "Pond! Pond, where are you? Pond, your husband has murdered me! He's locked me in with no food! Is there anybody out there? Tell Rory I never fancied her, she kissed me. It's important to me that I don't fade away and die misunderstood in here. Why, oh why, did I ever get rid of the cattle ranch on the third floor…"
He goes on like that. Clara giggles softly to herself. Listening. Reaches out, and her fingertips just brush that blue, blue paint.
But in that same moment, the Williamses rush past her, and Rory has a key in his hand. They're about to free their Doctor friend. Get this Tardis out of here. Clara backs away a few steps. At first, she only means to give them their space. But they are grinning. Amy shouts something to the Doctor, who shouts back and their argument is good-natured. The key sticks. That's another laugh.
For the third time today, Clara feels like she shouldn't be watching. This is different, though; this is more than respecting their privacy.
It's just not her turn.
She can't explain the feeling. Clara just turns, and while they're not looking she gets back on the platform. Has to get back to her desk, doesn't she?
But that box. That blue. She drives the platform quietly, responsibly, until she's out of the room. Then she sets her path all the way down to the front desk again, looks around to check no one is watching her, and then blasts off at full speed, just barely hanging on, crying out with joy all the way, dizzy and with her head full of that all-consuming, delightful, delirious shade of blue.
Not her turn, maybe. Maybe not her turn yet.