First "Night"
They always stayed late - not together, mind you. And not on purpose. Sometimes there was no choice: papers to collect, calls to answer, appointments to make on time, computers to shout at. Other times it was a deliberate choice, a preference for the atmosphere. Other professors in the English department didn't stay on campus nearly as long as Professors Oswald and Smith - Doctor Smith, some called him, due to a joke that went misunderstood on his first day's introductions. "The doctor part reminds me I still have debts to pay." Others - Oswald among them - realized the joke and smiled about it into her cup of tea, saying nothing.
On the night before the winter break they both took up residence in their respective offices, as they were known to do so. Professors Oswald and Smith: one a Victorian enthusiast, the other having written his doctorate thesis on Sylvia Plath. They found some common ground to stand on when meeting in the staff room for a caffeine fix (strong tea, no milk, an almost accidental suggestion of sugar stirred in), and when smiling and nodding at each other in the halls. But it was the non-traditional meetings - the meetings of ideas and minds and curious academic passions - that made them both stop and take note. It started when they both, without the other knowing, began to eavesdrop on each other's respective office hours. Oswald smiled in fascination at Smith's enthusiasm, the near-to reverence he had for almost any text supplied to him. How she'd laughed when, weeks ago, she'd heard a student gush, "How did you find a way to make Virgil fun?"
It was his response that warmed her heart the most. "Oh, you know. Bit of a survivor's trick from the undergraduate years. Raise hell if you can't move heaven." She'd looked up the proper quote and jotted it down on the corner of a scrap piece of paper - then cursed up a storm when she realized it was actually the front of an essay she'd set aside to grade.
She wasn't the only one who listened. It was these storm of expletives that held Smith's attention though it had been drawn earlier, from the start of term if he were being honest. Smith would find himself paused, raptly attentive as he sat stone-like and scowling in his chair, listening close as Oswald carefully explained the finer points of Bronte symbolism. Hers was a voice that could charm and soothe for hours. He wondered what it would sound like in a direct line of hearing, rather than through the walls that separated them. And she wondered at how his eyes would light up when he told one of his self-depreciating jokes, sure that there had to be some gleam to the gaze. It would be a direct contrast to his consistently downturned eyes each time they crossed paths, as if he were so far gone in thought it created a sightless anchor for his head.
It was their offices, these separate little rooms that were one step up from the drudgery cubicles, that brought them together. These small little corners of the campus were tailored specifically to be theirs until one day they weren't, and everything that bore their personal stamp could be piled up and filed away to be forgotten. Because on this night - the first night, last of term and first of break - they found themselves as trapped in their offices as their colleagues always said they would be.
It was the locks that did it, if one must be technical. The new locks installed campus-wide to promote safety and prevent theft, succeeding in doing nothing more than frustrating the entire staff, were usually set to lock well past the usual hours anyone would be in the buildings. It being the last day of term before the break, a well-meaning technician had set them to, understandably so, lock a full four hours earlier. Who on earth would want to stay at work longer than they had to? It was the Christmas season, for god's sake. Take it home.
They'd wanted to. Oswald - Clara Oswald, as it said on the placard in front of her door - had gathered up her bag, her uneaten lunch (now a soon to be dinner), and balanced a bulging folder full of last-minute essay entries she was going to grumpily grade before bed tonight. She was in front of her door at the same time Smith - Doctor Smith, or just the Doctor, if you had enough nerve - was at his. As one, not knowing they were, they tried the handles on their respective doors... And were met with resistance.
Clara tried hers several more times, even banging her hand (having abandoned the folder in a trice) against the door, as if more angry force would release it. The Doctor merely glared at his, stepping back to take in the entire damnable wooden frame as if every whorl in the grain offended him. He heard the banging next to his room and took a guess.
"Professor Oswald?"
Clara stopped. He heard quick steps, and then her voice (muffled, panicked, but closer) came filtering through the wall to his left. "Is that you, Doctor?"
"Smith," he corrected.
"Yes, I know your name. Please don't tell me you're stuck too."
He thought about playing a silly joke - saying nothing, simply because that was what she asked - but shook his head. Another him would have gone for that cleverness. The man he was now hadn't the patience. "Afraid so," he said.
Clara gave the wall a frustrated kick. He didn't think that was too out of line - he'd probably have punched his wall if he weren't becoming more wretchedly paranoid about bone brittleness. She lapsed into silence.
"Haven't got a key?" the Doctor asked her.
Clara scratched her head and sighed. "Yes, but it wouldn't work. Remember the seminar?"
"No," he said flatly, plainly, because he usually didn't remember the meetings they forced him to attend that had little to do with anything he cared about. He thought he heard Professor Oswald laugh.
"Then there's no use asking you about the manual, either. Keys won't work after its been autolocked. You'll need to reset them from the main office."
"Why would it even be designed that way?" he asked, not really asking at all, just wondering. Her answer made him almost smile.
"Cosmic backfiring of some kind." He heard a muffled squeak, assumed she had taken up residence in her chair, and followed suit in his own. "Probably something we did in the past playing catch up now."
"I can't think of anything that deserves this," the Doctor said, though he wasn't sure how truthful that was. He'd had a long life. Sometimes things were forgotten, but mostly there were things he chose to forget. There was an important difference between the two. "Can you?"
"Ask me again in an hour," Clara said. She'd closed her eyes and began to massage her temples with long, aggravated circles. "I'll be a bit more starved and desperate then."
She bit her lip the minute the words were out. She hadn't meant it like that. And he'd been so nice.
Second "Night"
The Doctor started out of his reverie at the sound of his phone ringing. He answered it promptly. "Hello?"
"I didn't mean it like that. It wasn't a brush off," Clara's voice said. Rushed, awkward, slightly muffled. He wondered if she had a habit of biting her nails.
"It wasn't?"
"No, it wasn't."
"What was?"
Clara paused. "What I said about an hour ago."
"Was it an hour?" the Doctor asked, glancing at the clock on his desk. Stark, rigid, a nice, dark blue. And digital. "Feels like a whole night's gone by."
Clara considered this. "Were you sleeping?"
The Doctor rubbed his nose, one of his greatest "tells." His ex-wife and still sometimes companion had caught him in a fair few lies by this little giveaway gesture. But he didn't want to think about her now. "I may have been resting," he said.
"Strange time for a nap."
"What else is there to do?" he asked. No one was in the building's office. He hadn't been able to get through to any of the usual emergency contacts, though that could be for any number of reasons. It didn't have to be a sort of universe-wide decision to ruin what little remained of his happiness. Plus the weather was bad. Storms had a habit of getting in the way of necessary things like safety.
"Talk," Clara said.
"I thought I was."
"No, I meant - that's what else there is to do. Talk."
He wondered where to start, suddenly realizing just how little he had in his life that could possibly interest anyone else. Especially a young woman.
Clara, having chewed off what remained of her thumbnail, began to eye the cuticles with keener interest. "So tell me," she said, wondering at his silence and why it made her uneasy. "How'd you manage to make Virgil fun?"
It took him almost a minute to remember the conversation she was referencing. It was with a Ms. Pond, one of his better students. Fiesty, clever, and best of all a kindred Scot, who had complained at length at the assigned texts for his course - until he'd found a way to tailor the assignments to fit her interests. She had an imagination fit to burst, Ms. Pond did. All it took was a gentle prod in the right direction.
And apparently, Professor Oswald had overheard this.
The Doctor pulled the phone off his ear and stared at it, as if it had began to talk to him in Latin. It was close enough, he figured. "You were listening?" he asked.
"I heard," she corrected, tapping her pen in angry little snips against the side of her purse. "There's a difference."
"Not really," he pressed. "You usually hear when you listen - and you listen to what you hear. So you were listening."
"Yes, alright, I listened."
"I'm not cross," he said at once, as if that mattered. He probably ought to be, but he was just amused more than anything.
"You shouldn't be even if you were," Clara said. "The door was open. Both doors. And your voice distracts. It's the accent," she said, as if that made any sense. It didn't, and she knew it, but the Doctor didn't think to call her on it.
"So does yours," he said. But she hadn't heard this yet.
"And I was never much a Classics fan either, I couldn't get my head around half of it until it was too late to matter. So my heart goes out to Ms. Pond - she's one of the better ones, you know." Clara drew up short, the pen stopping. She flattened it under her hand and turned to look at the wall, as if she were able to see the Doctor through it. "Mine does?" she said.
The Doctor cleared his throat and began to redo a few of the buttons on his coat. He felt a sudden chill coming directly from the Oswald part of the building. "Just a little," he said. "And only when it's less... noisy elsewhere."
"Are you saying I'm noisy?" she asked, as if neatly setting open a trap in front of the Doctor and asking him kindly to jump inside it.
The Doctor thought of her. What he'd seen of her, what little he knew. Kind smiles, a dimple that sometimes creased her cheek. Bright eyes that flashed half-gleeful, half-maddening each time she laughed. But she didn't laugh often, and that made him curious, sad. Quick steps, usually in heels - impressive heels, mostly, as if to make up for her lack of impressive height. She couldn't be a hair's width over 5'1 at best - 5'3, if she stretched. For some reason, that made him smile. But lately she'd been a bit too forthcoming with smiles and cheer, a bit too quick to crack a joke that usually had the opposite effect: driving a room to silence. There were whispers of family troubles, health problems, perhaps a scandal in the making. The Doctor didn't like to think of it. It wasn't his business, her troubles. And he rather thought that whatever skeletons she had stored away in closets couldn't quite compare to the landmine of bones he was keeping track of each time he opened the door to let the ex in. To have and to hold. Quite.
"Replace happy for noisy and you're a bit closer to the mark. And I think you want to seem like you are," the Doctor said, speaking gently, the way he usually delivered unfortunately true news that came from the heart and could crack others. There's nothing I can do to fix this grade. No, I don't want to hear how your new boyfriend is doing. I still love you, but it's a habit more than anything at this point, so don't take it seriously. "Because beneath that clever mask, you aren't. You're too quiet and too thoughtful, so you try to make up for it."
"Was your first love psychology?"
"It's a simple character study," he corrected. He had nothing to say on the subject of love.
"And d'you know what this is?" she asked.
"What what is?" The trap was already set, and they were both stuck in its teeth now. Nothing more to do but rail and rage and see what happened next.
"A simple hang up." And she slammed the phone down. The Doctor heard her pick up the receiver and slam it down again, knowing it was half for his benefit, and half for her temper's. He knew because he had one of his own.
Third "Night"
He timed it to an hour exactly before he called her. It was midnight, with no end in sight to their predicament. Peace offerings must be made, and apologies were well deserved. Besides, she'd fallen a bit too silent for his liking. He didn't want to think he'd had anything to do with that lack of life, not when she had decided to share so much already. And he'd done a bang up job of finding room in his mouth for both feet to fit in nicely, what with that character study tripe from before. The Doctor still cringed to think of it.
Clara answered on the fourth ring. "Yes?"
"This is an apology call," the Doctor said, using a different voice this time. Lighter, softer, a smile. Please see me in my office. Please see me one last time. Please go home before your new one comes round again looking for you, I can't stand to talk to infants. "I'm offering an apology. Do you accept the charges?"
Clara tucked her arm across her chest and began to tap her foot against the ground. She hadn't yet decided whether or not to discard her heels. A miracle could happen, and the doors could open at any time. She wanted to be the first out of them.
"Go on, then," she said, because she rather liked the way he sounded. Half-humbled, mostly joking, with a tone that suggested he was hoping for a smile. And because she had to admit most of her temper was caused by an absolute fear of misunderstanding - and an empty stomach. That, too, had been the worst part of it.
"I'm very sorry, Professor Oswald. It's late. I'm tired. I'm even more tired than I was before the previously interrupted bit of shut-eye."
"So you were napping," she laughed, despite herself. She glanced fondly at the wall again, and gave it a sort of friendly pat. "Does that happen often?"
"Not often enough," he grumbled, running his hand over his eyes and back up to his hair, cradling his head in his arm and leaning forward on the desk. That was a bit of a lie - he was half-way to rest already, though that was entirely out of boredom. And a want of caffeine. His last brew had been ages back. "But still. Point stands. Still sorry. Not the first time I've bothered someone with a pudding brain and a runaway mouth."
Clara paused and replayed his words. "Now, the way you phrased that just then," she started. But he cut her off.
"Right. Poorly done. Still tired."
"Still forgiven," Clara said, smiling because he couldn't see it.
They paused, listening to each other's silence, wondering when it would be filled.
Clara broke hers first. "Have you called anyone?"
The Doctor thought he heard the real question there. Do you have anyone to call? "No word at the office. Got through briefly to the emergency number, before the line disconnected. It's been engaged ever since."
"Can't imagine why," she said, spinning in her chair slowly, her heels half-way off.
"You know how storms are," the Doctor said, in a tone that suggested he'd been saying this to himself quite a lot over the past three hours, and Clara was only now just hearing the solace spoken out loud. "All that noise and inconvenience."
"Sounds a bit like being engaged," Clara mumbled, closing her eyes and thinking of her recent, latest mistake. He hadn't worn a ring. How could she have known if he wasn't wearing a damn ring? What was the point of getting engaged if you weren't going to show the bloody thing off? But she knew why. She knew why now. Because you wanted to hide.
The Doctor mumbled thoughtfully in response, and then paused. There was another meaning to that word, wasn't there? "Is something... wrong?" he asked, wondering why he was asking, wondering why he hesitated at all. They were three hours in to a rather awkward acquaintance. What could one more awkward question hurt?
"How long have you been wearing that ring you've got on?" Clara asked, beginning to spin counter-clockwise now, scowling as she thought of the man - boy, she corrected fiercely, because no man could certainly act like that and be considered one - that had until very recently been seriously considered as a friend. A fond friend. A fond friend you invited to spend the night and long weekends with. A fond friend you were starting to love, despite yourself. A fond friend who was someone else's fiance - bit of a surprise, that.
The Doctor held out his left hand and glanced down at the golden band. "A while, I suppose."
"Because you made a promise," Clara said, taking a guess.
"Not exactly," the Doctor hesitated. "It's more of a memento to one that was made."
"By who then?"
The Doctor paused. "Do you really want to be talking about this, Professor -?"
"Clara," she said, stopping the chair and facing the wall, wondering what he looked like now. His voice had gone quiet again, but bore all the weight of an anchored heart. "Call me Clara, Doctor."
"Only if you don't call me Doctor."
"What should I call you?"
"John, seeing as that's my name."
Clara hmmed and thought about this. "I quite like Doctor, you know. You worked hard for the title."
"Please, don't bring that up again. The joke should've stayed dead in my head."
"But you shared it and it's in mine now," Clara grinned. "And yes, I do want to be talking about this - if you don't mind talking about it." She paused, pursed her lips, thinking of the ways she'd wormed painful bits of information out of people clearly burdened by them. Not to harbor the secret, nor to have some sort of power over them, but simply because she understand the weight, the awful, plodding tread one's heart could make when there was a hidden ache inside that had no release. "Memory's a curse more often than a blessing," she said.
"Is that from something?" he wondered.
"It might be. I forgot." She didn't forget. She just didn't want to tell him it was from a rather brilliantly clever game that invented as much of Alice Liddell's life as much as it accurately pinpoint the East End in the 1860s.
And then they realized what she said, and the irony to what was said. And they laughed, first in little chuckles, then in growing, flat out, hearty laughs that made them shake in their chairs.
"So do you?" Clara asked, wanting to know, wanting to hear him say it for sure.
"I don't," he said. And then he reflected on this. Why was she asking? In his experience, most people didn't prod still-smarting wounds unless they wanted to hold out their own. A bit like a grim version of the you show me yours and I'll show you mine trade off. He took a glance around his office, at the small variations to the furniture he'd been allowed to make. "Thank god for the mini-bar," he thought - and then realized he'd actually said it.
"You've actually got a mini-bar in there?" Clara mused.
A pause. "Fridge," he said, a child caught red-handed eating one too many sweets before supper. "I said fridge."
"You said bar."
"Clara, please."
"I heard you say it."
"Clara, really -"
"And I am green with envy." She paused this time. "Well, that's one more reason to get out of here."
"You needed one more?"
"Not really. I already have a fair few collected."
They waited, each for their own reason. Clara for him to catch on, the Doctor for her to spare him the frustration. She didn't. He sighed. "Why is it a reason?" he asked.
"You didn't think I'd trot off out of here without saying a proper hello, did you?" Clara asked, imitating offense and showing nothing but amusement. She could hear him suppressing the laugh through the phone, and it made her grin wider. "No, no. When we get out of here, I'll shake your hand and relive some of these finer moments over the tastiest drink you've got in there." Clara stopped spinning her chair, digging her foot into the hard, run down carpet, a thought striking her "Are you the sharing sort, Doctor?"
"That very much depends."
"On?"
"The company and what's being shared." She heard the muffled sounds of a door opening, of him muttering under his breath, and the clanking cling of cans being collected. "I've got something I think you'll like."
She arched an eyebrow that he couldn't see. "Why do you think I'll like it?"
"Hope," he corrected quickly. "Hope you'll like."
"Well, thank you," Clara said, laughing once more.
"You're welcome," he said, grateful she'd let the matter drop.
"For thinking of me and what I like," she finished.
And he sighed.
Fourth "Night"
And so the Doctor told her. About the ring, about the promise. About the wife he had and the life they shared, and how some time around three years back -
"Three Christmases back, actually," he corrected, reflecting. "Seems this time of year's cursed," - they'd fallen back into a habit of fallen back in with each other.
"That's not so scandalous," Clara said quickly, rushing to give comfort to himself as much as her own needling guilt. "I mean. It happens. It's a thing that happens. Even if it shouldn't."
"It really shouldn't," the Doctor said, sighing, tapping his fingers against his empty glass. "Seeing as she's very much engaged. Again."
Clara gave a bitter laugh. "That's the word of the night, isn't it?" she said. Then she took a peek at the clock on her desk. Old-fashioned. Roman numerals. A gift from her father, from their last Christmas on speaking terms. She adored it. "Let's veto the word right here, you and me."
"Together?" he wondered.
"Why not? A pox on engagements," she cried, mimicking raising a toast, though she had nothing more but an empty thermos of long-cold tea.
The Doctor nodded, gently ahemed, and then realized he couldn't be seen. "A pox," he echoed, raising his empty glass. "So what's your story, impossible girl?" he asked, staring at the wall behind which she was hidden. "What's your problem with the word?"
Clara blinked. "Impossible?"
"Ignore that," the Doctor said, already sure she wouldn't. "It's just a thing I said."
"I know it was. I heard you say it."
"So ignore me."
"I won't," Clara insisted. "But why impossible? Girl I won't question. I'll be quite flattered by that, thank you," Clara said, fluffing the ends of her hair and then laughing at her own little pantomime. "But - impossible? I'll take a pause on that."
The Doctor thought about the word, then thought about Clara. Then he had to remind himself to think about the word again, and how she applied to it. "Because you're speaking with me," he started.
"You talk to everyone," Clara said, remembering all the times she'd crossed his path in the building before this.
"Everyone talks to me," the Doctor said. "Very few of them speak. There's a difference."
Clara chewed on her lip, surprised that he'd found a way to put into words what had been the heart of many an argument with her fond-not-boyfriend-friend. "So. I'm speaking. We're speaking. What's impossible about that?"
Because I like it more than I ought - more than I thought. "Question," he began.
"I thought I'd asked enough," Clara said.
"One more couldn't hurt on my end," he countered.
She shrugged. "Proceed," Clara said, in her most mock-pompous voice.
He grinned. "What's the difference between a conversation and an oral exchange?"
"Oral?"
"Meaning verbal," he corrected, scowling hard at the phone. At least she hadn't giggled. "Have you got it yet?" he asked, gruffly.
Clara twisted the cord of the phone around her fingers and let him wait a few seconds longer, still impressed that he'd phrased it so neatly when she'd found it impossible herself to get the words out. They were too vulnerable, too raw, too much like a plea. Listen to me, talk to me, hear me, please, please, just see me. But her fond-not-quite-a-boyfriend had his own ghosts to keep him company, and Clara simply couldn't compete. "One's give and take," Clara said. "The other's a waiting game."
"Waiting for what?" he prompted, his words like a sharp jab that made Clara sit up straighter.
"Waiting for their turn to speak," she said. "That's not what I do," she cut in, an old habit.
"I know it's not what you do," the Doctor said, running his fingers around the brim of his glass. "That's why it's impossible."
"Bit cynical," Clara said. "People can surprise you."
"Not people," the Doctor corrected. "Just a person. And only sometimes."
Fifth "Night"
Another hour's conversation had passed, and yet Clara had been most careful to avoid a particular subject. But the Doctor simply had to know - it was only fair, really.
"You still haven't told me."
"Haven't told you what?"
"About why we've put a pox on engagements."
They were sitting back to back with the wall inbetween, still on the phone, stretching the cords as far as they could go. Clara had kicked off her shoes and created a comfortable pillow of her misshapen bags and coat to rest her head. The Doctor pressed his shoulders flat and back, choosing discomfort over all else. It helped keep him focused.
"Have you ever made a mistake and loved every second of it - and then realized they weren't your mistake to make?"
The Doctor thought about this. It wasn't really fair of her to ask, was it? "Well, you know I have, I told you I have," he said. "Though I wouldn't say it like that."
"How would you say it?"
"I'm not sure," he said. And he didn't. Not quite. Not yet.
It was the late hour that did it to her. The late hour, the heavy heart, the sympathetic ear of a man whose eye she had caught more than once but never knew - all this combined to make Clara more candid than she thought she ought to be. "He might have been a mistake but he was the best one I ever made. The happiest. Sweetest. But sad too, in a way." She paused and closed her eyes, remembering his. "I think he was more sad than me, you know."
"I suppose," the Doctor said, remembering his ex wife's eyes and the look on her face when she thought he wasn't looking. The heaviness, that terrible weight of guilt that cut a hole in the heart and made it ache.
"I could never really place it," Clara continued. "Not til it was over. Not til the end. He was sad because he'd never meant for it to last - never played for keeps. Not him. Not when he was kept by someone else."
"One wonders why he caught you, then," the Doctor muttered.
If it were earlier in the conversation, Clara would have taken offense to this. If it were any other time of night, she might have hated him for it. But now, tired, heartsick, and rather touched by the sympathy she was finding in the man just a few inches away, hidden by a wall and taking the time to build up her trust from behind such a thin, ugly wall, Clara couldn't hate much of anything. Not even herself. "Because he was lonely, I suppose," she said, guessing at it, not quite sure even now. "He was lonely and lost and I wasn't."
"And are you now?"
"Now what?"
"Either of those two. Or both."
Clara shook her head, opening her eyes as she sat up to look at the wall. She held up her hand and kept it there, as if it were the Doctor's back. "No. I don't think I am."
Sixth "Night"
They decided to call it a night, however briefly, and each one tried their best to rest, curled up in their respectively comfortable office corners. Neither one was sleeping, though neither one tried very hard, if they could be honest. Their heads were too full of each other, of words said, unsaid, and still left to say. And a great deal of their time was spent wondering when they'd turned this undeserved imprisonment into a bond-building experience.
Probably around midnight, if both of them could hazard a guess.
So then the next question was why. And neither one really wanted to give an answer to that.
Not until they knew what the other one said.
Seventh "Night"
The Doctor's phone rang, and then Clara's did. An alarm for one, and a surprise for the other.
"Doctor Smith!" the voice on the end of his line said.
He recognized it. One of the custodians he'd been trying to contact during his emergency, slightly harrassed game of phone tag in the first hour of the predicament. Reg, the Doctor thought his name was. A friendly fellow, always quick with a fix no matter what the problem was.
"Got my message?" the Doctor asked, overlooking Reg's panicked bit of over-politeness.
"Got it just now. Mobile's been a bit wank since it fell in the sink, if you'll pardon the French. You alright? Still there?"
"Still inside, yes," the Doctor said, keeping his voice low in case Clara was still asleep - then he remembered the wall, and that he shouldn't have to be so considerate. "And Professor Oswald is, too."
"Her too? Together? Blimey, that's some luck."
"Not like that," the Doctor said quickly, scowling at Reg as if the man could see him. "You'll do something about it, then?"
"On my way over now," Reg said. "Keep your shirt on," he chuckled, thinking himself clever.
The Doctor hung up, starting to reconsider his earlier fondness for the man.
After a moment, the Doctor tapped his knuckles against the wall hard enough to draw Clara from her stupor. The alarm had gone off and then been shut off promptly, furiously ignored. But the Doctor's voice had drawn Clara slowly out of her sleep, out of dreams that weren't worth remembering, so she promised herself that she'd forget them.
Clara pulled the desk phone closer to her (it was resting on the floor now, testing the absolute limits of the poor cord) and dialed his number, having memorized it in the department's Rolodex back in hour three.
The Doctor answered on half a ring.
"What news?"
"Good news," he said. "We're getting out of here."
Clara thought about this. She wasn't as thrilled as she thought she should be. "Is it all right if I'm just the tiniest bit disappointed?" she asked him. It was a strange thing, the way phone conversations could make you share more frailty than a face to face exchange would allow.
"Bit of a curious problem to have," he said, frowning as he thought as well. "I could ask why," he added.
"You could," she said.
"I could also guess the reason," he continued, waiting to see when she'd stop him.
"Could do that, too," she said.
"But I rather like being told these things," he finished. Then, unable to help himself, he added, "Helps prevent later claims of miscommunication."
Clara let him wait while she sorted out the words inside her head. They coughed, they shifted, they got settled in a morning routine without being aware of just how strangely intimate it was to listen in on the other doing the same thing. This, if nothing else, gave Clara courage in the end. "D'you remember what you said hours back? About one hour feeling like a whole night?"
"I remember," the Doctor said.
"And we've been in here for about... Seven hours now, yes? Seven hours, seven nights."
The Doctor listened to the way her words ran one into the next, a sort of sleeper's slur. He smiled in a way he hadn't smiled in years, and was rather sorry she couldn't see it. "Just about," he said, and then drew back with a tremendous effort, keeping himself quiet to hear what she might say next.
"Why not go for an even twelve?" she asked, hazarding much with the simple question. Her heart drummed like mad in her chest, and she held her fingers to her throat, counting the timing of it.
"Why? Why twelve?"
"Why not? Half a day, not so bad. I was always fond of twelves." She was rambling. She knew she was rambling. Worse, she thought the Doctor could tell, too.
"You're suggesting we stay here for another five hours because of a preference you have," he said, testing out the words, his brain sluggish with sleep and his need for more of it. But no, that wasn't quite right. That wasn't what she'd said at all.
"I'm suggesting we don't trot off with a nod and wave the second we're free from this joint," Clara said, slipping into her best and worst New York accent at the end of that sentence. That, at least, got him to laugh. Her heart settled at the sound, as if she'd been longing for its comfort all along. "We go get breakfast - well, a late dinner. Then a breakfast. That ought to kill some of those five hours."
"And what about what's left over?" he asked. "There should be a bit to spare."
"That can be worked out later," Clara said. "We'll think of something," she added, and then realized that she'd used the plural.
Then realized again that he'd said it first.
It took more than Clara liked for the Doctor to say, "Yes. Yes I suppose we will."
But she was glad to have heard him say it.
After a moment, a thought occurred to them both.
"Clara -"
"John -"
They paused, each one taken aback by what they'd heard.
"Go on," the Doctor said.
"No, you go," Clara said. "You first."
"Ladies first," the Doctor said.
"Great men precede," Clara replied.
The Doctor snorted. "What's that from?"
"Something. I don't know. I forget. What'd you want to say?"
"Well," he began, suddenly unsure, as if it were the first hour all over again. "It's just - the engagement pox?"
"What about it?"
"Just wondering where that went, in light of our plans."
"Move a bit fast, don't you?" Clara mused, side-eying the wall and wondering at the man behind it. Wondering at how fast she'd become fond of him. Could the heart really be so resilient and stubbornly fluid? Could hers?
"Seeing as there's five hours to find a way to pass, yes," the Doctor said. And he was grateful, just as he was on the first day they met, that Clara got the joke. He was even more grateful to get a chance to hear her laugh - honestly, loudly, and true. She didn't laugh nearly enough for either of their liking, but there were whole hours now to start making up for that lack.
And whatever hours came after that, and after that, and after that.