There she lay, a speck of nothing in his hands, barely occupying the space between them. Body still as she took breath after breath through half-opened lips, pale without the sun's first kiss upon them. Swallowing roughly, the Doctor exhaled and watched the few strands of her chestnut hair she had waver slightly in that breath just before her nose wrinkled in dissatisfaction and she whimpered. It was a noise barely audible even in the chasm of silence around him, and it broke both of his hearts with the thought he'd disturbed her.
"What will you call her, Clara?"
Charlotte smiled at a month, earlier than most, gummy grin swung underneath excited eyes – wide and dark by her mother's making. Swaddled after a nappy change and a belly full of milk, she raised her delicate chin twice as he stood over her, watching her struggle happily, waiting for him to pluck her up into his arms to nestle against his chest. A tale he would tell her, pacing the living room, and she would coo quietly at him to voice her adoration of his words, his presence, his love.
In a few short weeks she'd wrapped her fragile little fingers around his hearts and she'd taught him that home was a place he belonged. He looked to Clara, asleep on the couch, and he smiled, joking with the girl and waiting for her to scold him. A tease in her mind's voice, he longed for the day he would hear it aloud. Those words that would spill from her, the thoughts and ideas. The hope. He pecked his lips to her forehead, felt it wrinkle against them, and he sighed as she whispered sleepily at him.
"She's mummy and she's mine, like you are."
Face dropping into the blanket, she grumpily cried and then picked her head up again, slowly making her way towards him on unsteady knees. Crawling, Charlotte argued, was tedious. Six months, the Doctor thought. He counted her days in his mind and each tick of time cut at him painfully. Too human to regenerate, too human to live out a life in space, Clara had asserted, too human he reminded himself as she cried. He hesitated and Clara scooped her daughter up, cradling and comforting as a mother should.
He watched them often, no different than he'd watched so much else in the universe. A sun – hair flowing over her shoulders; face glowing radiantly in health and motherhood; body curved just right by the process of it all – spinning gracefully with her solar system held safely in her arms. The Doctor never tired of seeing them together, the mirrored souls and silhouettes, admiring one another as tears were dried, as lullabies were sung. They looked to him in unison, melting away doubts with their loving stares.
"Doctor, come, join us in a dance."
Terrible two's weren't so terrible, he thought as he watched her blow bubbles and then run off to chase them, little dress fluttering as she went. There were moments, he was sure, when he was off on some distant planet. He would get a pang in his chest sometimes, an echo of her anger, then her sadness, before the serenity returned. The Doctor had forgotten those days, of holding a child in his hearts, and there were days the strength of it pulled him across the universe to join in on some glorious event, or help with a moment of discipline.
Clara lay beside him, napping away as her daughter giggled and frolicked. Their picnic would soon come to an end and he'd be knelt on the tile by a tub. Charlotte splashed wickedly and she enjoyed topping his nose with the froth she churned, ducking her head shyly before flashing a decisively playful grin. Her mother, he often thought as he watched her, she was entirely her mother in miniature. Not, he knew, that he would have it any other way.
And before he knew it he'd be tucking her away in bed. Watching her eyes flutter with the beginnings of some dream as her rosy cheeks shifted with unspoken words, showing off the dimples she loved to poke to elicit his laughter. Clara edged underneath his arm as he stood in the doorway and she sighed, thinking the same as him as they watched the little girl lying there, gripping tight to her stuffed bear. He says aloud what they both know and afterwards he spends a few hours with her, asleep in his arms, knowing how the words affect her. Knowing what they mean to her more than him.
"I never think time moves too quickly, and then it does."
Charlotte calls out to him and he coughs a laugh when her weight crashes into his legs as he pushes through the door. Her colors are too bright and it takes him a moment to discern her from her costume – an assortment of items from her closet – as she bursts into a song of chatter detailing her days without him. There's schoolwork and friendships and mud puddles and a spanking for backtalk at mum. Typical five year old days, he understood, nodding and listening and catching quick glances at Clara as she smiled, grading papers and sipping tea.
They hid inside of her fortress – a lavender colored tent with unicorns and hearts and rainbows – and buried themselves underneath a hoard of every pillow in their home, protecting themselves from the monsters that lurk in the night sky. And then she asked about the stars. How many there are and how many hold life and how far they are and how far it all goes and how long ago it started and how long it will last. She has a sparkle in her eyes and an airy quality to her voice – that little whisper of wonder that circles each question as it tumbles out before she went silent to wait for his answer, then interrupted with a quietly breathed request.
"Daddy, I want to go to the stars with you."
Her hands were quicker than his, fingers tapping, palm toggling, thumbs wrestling with knobs that needed oiling and she laughed when the rotor lit up a new color. Every. Single. Time. Clara stood beside her, giving her direction and shared knowing glances with him over the key and boards before them. Their little girl was always meant for this. Charlotte was born to travel the universe and she danced around the console, shouting out to them as she went. More questions and suggestions and contemplations – too many for them to keep up with as she darted about gleefully.
She was seven, hitting a growth spurt, and loved everything in the stars and in the ocean. Charlotte once said they weren't quite that different. All of this space and not all of it travelled; so many things to explore and discover. Watching her catalogue things in a little notebook pleased him greatly and he reveled in the warmth of her hand within his as they discussed a planet or a people or the color of a sunset. The Doctor smiled gleefully when she brought him an old book, given to her by her mother, and declared she wanted one hundred and two places.
She was adventurous and brave and kind. She was thin and bright and ran. Oh, the Doctor laughed sometimes, oh did she run. Chasing the butterflies that chirped like birds and going over vines and in through tunnels and caves and across fields and beaches and barren desserts. Charlotte ran with them and she never turned back and the Doctor enjoyed those moments, after the Tardis doors had closed on them again, while she sat in a chair around the console, barely looking up at him and Clara as they piloted comfortably across from each other, taking ragged breaths as she scribbled.
"Mum, that was wicked what you did there, and dad, oh dad! DAD!"
Ten candles had been set out on a table, ready to be pushed into a cake that stood lopsided in the fridge. They were the sort that didn't extinguish when they went out and the Doctor thought them funny when he bought them at a market on present day Earth. A wrapped box sat in her room, just at the foot of her bed, inside a dozen notebooks and a pack of fancy pens. It was quiet, just like the day she'd been brought home, and the Doctor sat holding the urn, a speck of nothing that had been everything.
Her name had been engraved and what was left would be scattered to the stars and he damned her for being too human, too quick, too brave. Clara sniffled lightly in the master bedroom and the Doctor settled the urn down to look about the room. The star spattered bed sheets and the chart of the ocean life on the wall. The books on planets and the stuffed beluga and the worn book that sat open atop her desk, a new destination written hastily on a taped in sheet.
Eyes closing, he inhaled the scent of dirt from her boots, of flowers from their pressed books, of must from the novels collected on shelves. There was the ticking of a clock picked up at a charity shop, and the light rattle of the tissue paper she'd affixed to a fan, the deafening silence. And then her laugh, shocking the warmth from his body as he looked to see her perched at the edge of the bed, years older than she should have been, holding tightly to her own ashes and shaking her head at him. Speaking to him without words...
Sitting up in bed, he gasped for air. There were droplets of sweat clinging to his forehead and his clothes hugged too tight against the dampness of his skin. He pulled himself up to sit and jammed his palms into his eyes, pushing them until they sparkled in that darkness and he felt Clara's body shift at his side. He listened to the fabric rustle and he knew she'd sat up, could see the black of his eyesight gain a shade of red as she clicked on a lamp.
"Doctor?" She questioned, her voice blanketed in sleep.
"I had the nightmare again," he allowed.
"Charlotte?"
"She was mine, Clara. Ours. So perfectly ours," he whispered through a constricted throat. "And I sleep and she's there. She's there Clara, so vibrant and brilliant, growing up right before my eyes again in fast-forward, too fast, Clara. And then I wake..." his hands opened and closed, crushing into balls in front of him.
She leaned into him, finishing softly, "And she's not here."
"It's only a dream, you don't have to tell me," he argued, looking down at her tired face as she sighed.
"You keep calling her a nightmare," she responded evenly.
He nodded, looking away. "Her urn is always there, her name etched in like the most horrible promise, just before her tenth birthday. To give us something so pure and perfect and then steal her from us just as she's beginning, it's cruel, Clara. It's the worst nightmare the universe could offer."
Clara yawned and then reached for his hand, pulling it into hers to kiss before dropping it to settle atop her stomach, the baby girl inside instantly shifting towards it, to tell him, "She's there. Right there, Doctor. Just as she's been for seven and a half months."
"What if it isn't a nightmare, Clara?" He hissed, hating himself for questioning it.
Offering a smile, she told him plainly, "I can't live my life waiting for the end at every turn, Doctor – if I did that, I'd have never met you – and I won't have her doing that either. She's going to live a wonderful life and if it's ten years, then it's going to be the best ten years."
"You aren't fearful that perhaps..." he began.
Her hand came up to tap at his lips and she giggled softly, "No."
"Why not?"
Clara shifted back down into bed and she smiled up at him. Her eyes drifted over his face, imagining, he knew, what the little girl she was so close to holding would look like and how she would take after him. The Doctor spread his palm over the thumps just beneath the pattern on her nightie, looking from his wife's content expression to the flesh he slowly revealed, watching for that movement that soothed him after his nightmares. And he understood. Every nightmare he had, he saw little bits of a potential life and every nightmare he had ended in it's premature end, but every nightmare held the same message from a girl reaching out to shake her father from a bad dream.
"Daddy, don't worry, I'm gonna be fine."