Disclaimer: Doctor Who does not belong to me.
AN: This was written a year ago and I only remembered about it now. I also, just now, through Googling discovered theories of how/why the Doctor remembers Clara after all during the scene in the diner, but this was written before I had given that any thought.
And now I want to rewatch all the seasons before starting onto the newest one. Oh well.
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The first Clara the Doctor properly meets is a Dalek that insists on its humanity (oh and what a sight that was) and deletes him from every dalek's database before dying on a planet covered in snow. He does not know her face but only the tilt of her voice and the sound of her name. Oswin Oswald. (he does not know that this Clara introduces herself by her middle name because entertainment is a competitive job market; Clara likes to have an edge.) She burns a soufflé and dies with her last words at her lips, telling him run you clever boy and remember.
He does not, because the Doctor is ancient and what comes soon after is all-encompassing in its grief.
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The second Clara he properly knows meeting is a bar maid who follows a stranger up a staircase spiralling into the clouds, her heart a hummingbird's wings against a human shell. She breaks through his solitude with a pond and a brazen kiss, and she dies on a planet covered with Victorian snow. The grey sky weeps and Christmas Day comes and she tells him once more, run you clever boy and he does. He runs to Clara Oswin Oswald and he remembers.
There was a Clara on Gallifrey in the robes of a Time Lady who points him to a TARDIS. She says, "run away, you clever boy" and he does, he runs until he finds her again and sets the whole of their lifetime into motion.
There is a Clara who always lives and dies for him like clockwork, his own clockwork girl to save his life when no one else can. She is born for this purpose and she dies to fulfill it. There are Claras who don't remember kissing him and Claras who don't remember falling to their deaths from a top of a cloud. They never know a Clara who is a Dalek chained to a planet as it is destroyed. There are Claras who don't know his name and kill themselves for him anyway; there are Claras who do and do the same. It is always the same, him and Clara, and Clara's deaths. The girl who dies for the Doctor.
The girl who dies for the Doctor sometimes tells him something as she does. She looks at him with her big, brown eyes and says:
"Run, you clever boy, and remember."
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The Doctor does not. The Claras have stopped with the one who is already dead with her life caught between one heart beat and the next, an immortal girl travelling with an immortal girl in a stolen time machine. The Doctor will dream of this girl, who led him around a Dalek asylum. The girl who pointed him at a pond after the Ponds were all gone and said, "help us" and died with the sound of Christmas Day bells in her ears. The girl who let him run away from his planet and then ran away with him, two thousand years in the future. The girl who threw herself into his time stream just so that he would not suffer. A clockwork girl with clockwork deaths that could never be stopped.
He will dream of her voice telling him, "run away, you clever boy."
And he will. He will run away with her voice in his ears and he will never remember her. The impossible girl, the girl who dies for the doctor.
He will never remember her face.