Ambarvalia

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Clara doesn't really notice anything wrong until she gets on the bad side of Pussy-puss.

For the fattest Persian on this side of England she has ever seen, Pussy-puss is that sweet little ball of sunshine that Clara desperately needs after a hard day of teaching…or escaping death. The two are not mutually exclusive. The cat always comes and nuzzles her calves, a steady motor of purring bubbling up from beneath all that fur.

Today, though, that fur is raised, the ears are flattened, and Pussy-puss is yowling at her. Clara, alarmed, scans the block for danger. Her fingers instinctively curl around her cell phone. But there is no one there.

"What's gotten into you, then?" she asks the cat. Pussy-puss gives a long, hateful hiss. "I don't speak cat," Clara says. But I know someone who does.

Pussy-puss continues to shriek, the sound setting Clara's own hair on end.

The second sign is the TARDIS, baleful old witch that she is.

"I know she doesn't like me much, but was it supposed to be that bumpy?" Clara pants, hair hanging in her face. She feels queasy, chalking it up to the fact that they just travelled through four star quadrospheres in six seconds and that she hasn't eaten in…well, she can't really remember. Strange.

The Doctor squints at her, craning his neck forward. "The TARDIS only tries to throw people off if there's something wrong with them," he says. The console's lights choose that moment to give a foreboding flicker. "Anything you want to tell me, Clara? Any…disturbances? Are you a ganger, perhaps? Or, or, perhaps you have vortex poisoning and—"

"What?" Clara frowns. "No, Doctor, I'm fine!" She blinks and crosses her arms, thinking. "Well, there was that cat…"

The Doctor raises an eyebrow. "Cat?"

"Look, I'm sure it's nothing," Clara replies, waving a hand and using the other to fiddle with a lever on the console. She breaks into a grin. "Now I thought you were going to show me the ah, sweet falls of Rajipee-pee—"

"Rajinopitron," the Doctor corrects happily. "Yes, waterfalls of natural glazed honey! Of course you'll love that. Rock-climbing is strictly prohibited because people tend to slip, and don't go near any Apoideans for a while after. Especially bees."

As Clara practically skips out the TARDIS double doors, the Doctor shoots her a final, suspicious look and his lips purse together in a frown.

It isn't too surprising when he gets a call from her a few days later, hysterical. He arrives in a wheeze of exhaust engine to see her circling her bedroom and talking faster than even he can manage on a good day.

"I don't know what's wrong, Doctor, but look, just look, I can't see," she is saying, and if only she'd tell him where to look he would.

"What, what can't you see? Your eyes are enormous; I don't see why you can't see." He leans in. "You haven't gone blind, have you?" And oh, she's starting to cry a little, and that's never good because he's terrible at the whole "cheer" thingand it's always sort of awkward.

Clara finally stops to take a deep breath. "Look," she says, pointing to her three mirrors. "You see that?"

His eyes narrow. "…no…"

Clara's hand falls back to her side with a slap. "Exactly! There's nothing there! How can there be nothing there?" She's standing in front of that ridiculous trio of mirrors, where he's supposed to see three of her, and…oh.

"Oh," the Doctor says. "I see your point. Well actually, I don't see it, but there are a number of possibilities as to why you have no reflection."

"What is happening, Doctor?"

"The cat, the cat. Earlier, you said something about a cat," he remembers.

"Yeah, there—there's this big cat, my neighbor's," Clara replies, confused at the apparent non sequitur. "It's nothing. She—she just sort of hissed at me. Doctor, what are you thinking?"

He has begun to pace her room, muttering, fingers twirling in midair like they always do when he's thinking hard. "Animals not liking you, the TARDIS trying to throw you off (she has great instincts by the way), and…" he inhales sharply. "It can't be!"

He grabs her shoulders, expression positively Sherlockian. "Tell me Clara, last week, when we were on Noxconnor. Did you get bitten, by any chance?"

The question throws her so that for a moment Clara forgets she is supposed to be distressed. "What, when we were being chased by those mosquito things because you decided to ask them for directions? I, um, I dunno…" she offers a tentative grimace. "Maybe?"

And that's the story of how she contracts alien vampirism. The sonic confirms it with a buzz that sounds like it is laughing at her.

The whole thing is annoying enough that Clara literally wants to bite something.

"My blood would kill you stone dead, so don't even try," the Doctor had warned. "Any blood of a time traveler has enough Void radiation in it to fry your circulatory system within the hour. It's not pretty."

Clara looks confused. "I thought I didn't have a circulatory system anymore."

"No, no, you do," the Doctor answers, glaring at his monitor screen at the console. "It's just been slowed down by about two hundred thirty-eight percent. It's why your skin feels cold now, and why you don't get hungry."

But she's always hungry. Food is more of a…a recreational thing now, like maths is for the Doctor and Danny. Food does not matter, since Clara's palate has recently taken a more, shall we say, carnal inclination.

The Doctor seems to sense something in her expression without even looking and asks, "Do you need to go hunting, Clara?"

Ugh, the H-word. Clara detests it. She has an uncle who shoots ducks out of the sky for sport, who had once and (only once) made the mistake of taking her along when she had been six. The memory makes her scowl every time the Doctor brings up the fact that she needs to feed from animals now.

"Yes, I suppose," she sighs, subsequently licking her lips without really meaning to. "Let's get this over with."

"Have you told PE about this?"

Clara swallows.

"Well you said this could only last a couple of weeks, so if I avoid him until next month I should be fine, yeah?" Her forehead wrinkles. "And I thought you weren't calling him that anymore."

Shrugging, he answers, "A couple of weeks, a couple of months, it's hard to tell with humans. Could have it for a year."

It's the rainy season of 1863 in Burma, and they're currently tromping through a forest considered inhabitable by humans. Clara's clogs come to a grinding halt in the mud. "A—a year?" She turns around and meets his eye in horror. "Doctor, I can't have this for a year! Isn't there a cure?"

"Yes," he admits, "but I lost it. Plus, you wouldn't want it. Side effects and all." He pockets his screwdriver and tries for a smile. "Come on, it's not so bad!"

If she looked dangerous before she now looks lethal. The Doctor cringes a little. "Not so bad?" Clara fumes. "I ate a squirrel this morning, Doctor. A squirrel! I had to chase a squirrel, kill it, and eat you have any idea how morally and ethically wrong that is?"

"Yeah, you've still got a little something on your chin," he says, wiggling a finger. Her hands fly up to her face. "I mean, it was your fault for getting bit in the first place, Clara. Didn't you listen when I said to put on the bug spray? Noxconnor is an insect planet, for heaven's sake!"

"I did! And that's not the point! Doctor, I need to know if this is going to be a…a problem, with Danny. And with my job," she adds. "Am I safe around humans?"

They reach the TARDIS, which looks a bit sunken in the moist earth. "Oh yeah, you'll be fine," the Doctor says as he opens the door. "You're mostly attracted to alien blood—"

"Wait," Clara interrupts, "animals aren't aliens." She shoots him a look. "Are they?"

"Not all of them, no. But they aren't human. Anyways, it's only going to be a problem with humans if, well, you know."

"No, I don't."

The Doctor blinks. "No you don't what?"

Clara shuts the door behind her. "No, I don't know. It's going to be a problem with humans if I what, Doctor?" And look here, his ears are tickled red at the tips. That's new.

"If you…" he waves his hands around. "Canoodle."

"What you mean, have sex?" Clara sighs. "You mean have sex, don't you?"

"Well I assume with PE that's not going to be a problem." Clara is silent, but she's staring at him with that look he's come to know as the She's-Sort-Of-Mad-Because-I'm-Thick look. He can't imagine why.

Later, after Clara's left and the only sounds in the TARDIS are the soft whirrs of birling gears it dawns on him, and he sighs. "Ah."

For the amount of (highly unnecessary) remarks on her physical appearance, the Doctor says nothing when Clara's pallor turns pasty and glue-white, nor when the skin around her eyes becomes pocketed and sunken. On the whole, Clara has begun to get this lean, sharp look that can only be described as predatory. It's subtle; little things about her body language and the way she moves through the air like it's the calm still of a lake…and it's more similar to the Doctor than Clara cares to admit.

The Doctor says nothing, but then again, this is the Doctor who has about as much insight into human appearances as Strax does.

No; it's a certain Mister Pink who Clara has to worry about.

An unscheduled parent-teacher meeting, a family crisis (Aunt Maribel just had to leave her walker at home); it's easy for a while to squeeze out of the corset of romantic engagements. Clara feels bad, feels like she did before Danny met the Doctor when her relationship with him had been a sticky gob of lies.

Danny senses her need for space, and he, being the absolute dream of a boyfriend that he is, gives it to her. He might offer a bemused frown when she dons sunglasses on a cloudy day, or ask if she is feeling alright when she turns down her favorite double mocha latte at Smooth Move, but he's easily dismissive and Clara thinks she just might pull this off.

It is fine, for a while, until Clara comes home at ten o' clock with a bag of ungraded papers and a glistening bib of blood down her front. Which would have been kosher if Danny Pink had not been waiting in her foyer with eyes rounder than cricket balls and his jaw hanging somewhere along his collarbone.

He can't seem to manage words quite yet, so Clara looks at her front, back up at him, and says, "I can explain."

"Please do," Danny says, his voice choked and small.

So she takes him inside, puts on a cuppa, and changes into a cotton tee while the water boils. She removes his shoes and slowly massages his toes through his socks while she tells him that yes, she is in fact a vampire. Temporarily, of course.

He listens, and the first thing he does when she is finished is point to her chest, saying, "But you—you're wearing a cross. What, isn't that sacrilegious, or something?"

Clara shrugs. "Better not tell your mum, she's Catholic," she jokes. Danny chuckles feebly.

"I thought you had to be dead do be a vampire," he says. "And wait," he pauses to swallow, "do you have fangs?"

Clara curls around him on her sofa, catlike, enjoying his warmth. "Nope and nope," she murmurs. "Not dead, and not fang-y. It's actually more like a virus."

Danny sets his tea aside and lifts her chin up with a careful finger. "It's not contagious?" he asks, frowning.

"Only if I…" Clara raises her eyebrows and shows some teeth.

He nods, understanding. "Only if you bite me."

"I won't though, I promise. I've been eating, um…animals." She pulls a face.

"Yeah, trust me, we're going to talk about that," Danny says. "But first, is there anything else I should know? Does this put the kids in any danger?"

Clara arches her back and shakes her head. "No, not at all," she reassures him, stretching. "Let's see. I can see better at night, um…oh, the garlic thing is a complete sham, but the mirror thing's true—apparently my molecules vibrate at a different frequency so that's why they're not reflective in the mirror. And I'm fine in the sun; it just hurts my eyes."

Danny wonders how she manages perfect makeup if she can't even see her reflection. Or maybe she's not actually wearing any. He is familiar enough with popular culture to recall the aesthetic perks of vampirism, but the actual thing does not do it justice. All those legends of succubi and hypnotism have to come from somewhere.

"Well you look, um, good." It's true. It's got to be something science-y with pheromones and whatnot, because it is enough to derail him from the more important issues like possibly blaming the Doctor for this, and the whole blood thing.

"Say that after you've seen me wrestle a groundhog in the mud," Clara grumbles, as if on cue.

"Yeah, well," Danny loops an arm around Clara and pulls her closer, "let's hope I never do."

Famous last words.

In the end it's the invasion of an extremely fat, hormonal hectoped named DeFalcora-X who decides to involve the Earth in zir intergalactic temper tantrum.

Three weeks have passed since the bite on Noxconnor and Clara's not fed in six days. A mistake on her part (there were papers to grade, it was midterms week), but one that ultimately saves the planet. Because when it comes to teenagers, species alike, the Doctor simply seems to goad them on and the actual saint of children Danny Pink is bloody late.

He makes it in time for the show, though.

Patches of moonlight, white like birch tree bark, striate the grass and add an oddly beautiful glisten to the Thames' black waves. The Doctor is sprawled in an undignified heap of tailcoats and satin, unconscious, at the base of a nearby tree. The other alien is whining about mommy and daddy and some oppression or another while fiddling with a doomsday device so clichéd you could cry. Zie has not spotted Clara yet.

Clara almost laughs. She is also salivating.

Danny, meanwhile, is running, breath coming as a fog in the evening chill, phone still aglow with a rather alarming text from Clara that says to get to the Thames river bank now.

"Clara! Clara, where are you?"

There is a shriek that, for a moment, surpasses what is considered possible for human vocal cords, and Danny reminds himself that it is probably not a human that had made that sound. Next thing he knows there is something loping (slithering?) towards him. It's big, and from what he can see looks like a cross between a slug and a large bull. It has five eyes. Danny swallows, knowing that it will probably kill him. He doesn't even know how this happened.

Then he hears an unnaturally calm "Oh no you don't, not him," and Clara is suddenly on top of the alien, clawing and biting with terrifying effectiveness. The alien begins to scream for real now. Danny scrambles to his feet, ready to help, to do something, when a bony hand grabs his ankle.

"Don't," a half-conscious Doctor grates out, still spread-eagle on the grass.

"You can't be serious," Danny cries over that horrid, foreign wailing. He gestures to the creature. "Doctor, it'll kill her!"

"No, it won't," the Doctor argues. "She's—"he groans—"stronger than…" abruptly, his eyes roll back in his head and he collapses again.

Clara, meanwhile, surveys the viscera: shiny, bulbous; blood a filmy silver-gray reflecting the crescent moon, and her nostrils flare. Part of her can't believe she is actually going to do this. Her lips have pulled back from her teeth and her tongue is drumming impatient circles along her cheek walls. She's just starving, that's it.

Danny watches, slightly impressed despite himself. Dimly, he knows there is something very, very wrong with that. He sees Clara wrap an elbow around the screaming alien's neck. There is a fluid crunch, a hiss, and a gurgle, and the ululation abruptly stops.

For a moment all Danny Pink knows is that he is watching his girlfriend tear someone's head off, and he's not supposed to be enjoying it. This is terrible, this is a problem, and oh, now she's slurping—

"Oh my god," he manages, because he's not so much horrified at what Clara's doing as he is horrified that he's more turned on than horrified because this is not sexy, it shouldn't be. He's been in war, seen people dismembered and suffered quite a bit of soldier's trauma from it, but this is different in a way he cannot even begin to describe.

And now Clara's slinking towards him with blood—silver—rolling down her chin, her arms, her skirt (she wore that skirt on parent-teacher night, Danny remembers), and Danny barely has time to register that her pupils are diamond-shaped before she's flush up against him and there's a wet squelch of innards against his good shirt.

"Clara, um—"

She puts a finger to his lips. "But laughing and half-way up to heaven, with wind and hill and star," she whispers, and traces the stubble along his jawline, eyes on his lips. "I yet shall keep, before I sleep, your Ambarvalia."

"I'm not an English teacher," he mumbles. "You'll have to…enlighten me." It's getting hard to form words again. Clara's breath is unnaturally cool against his skin.

"Third period," she breathes, "Poets. Rupert Brooke."

Danny flinches a bit at the name Rupert, but shakes it off. There's a tear of something silver wending its way down her cheek. Gently pulling away, he takes her hand, frowning as sticky alien blood gets on his fingers. "Come on," he says. "Let's, um, let's wash that off, yeah?"

He takes her to the Thames and helps her get the worst of it out of her clothes and off her face. The Doctor is still out cold, which doesn't seem to worry Clara.

"I suppose you and him should have a few words," she tells Danny.

"Yeah," Danny agrees, "but maybe tomorrow. I'm still not—I'm still a little, uh—"

"Shh, shh, I know," Clara says. Though it's dark Danny can see her pupils are starting to round out again, which he takes as a good thing. "It's okay. Why don't we go home? I think I have something that will help us sleep, and since I just ate a big, fat alien I don't think there's a risk of me biting you."

It takes a minute for what she's said to sink in. Danny starts. "Wait, is that why we haven't…?" He shakes his head. "You never mentioned that sex was a problem."

"Look, I should be fine now," she says, sheepish. "I'm not supposed to like human blood, but I just, I just didn't want to test it because the Doctor said I might…lose control, you know? I've wanted to, so badly, but…"

"Clara." He's smiling, and in that moment she's never loved him more.

She plants a light kiss on his neck. "Fine, we can wait until I'm all better. It shouldn't be long now. Plus," she adds, "I don't think I could handle it if you became a vampire."

"Couldn't handle it in a good way or in a bad way?" Danny asks, raising an eyebrow.

Clara grins, a smooth reply on her tongue, but is interrupted by a faint moan in the distance. She jerks her head in the direction of the Doctor. "Second thought, we should probably get him inside the TARDIS before we go."

Pussy-puss leaves a happy trail of white fur on Clara's black stockings, which is all the confirmation Clara needs that things have returned to normal.

It's been a week since the Thames Incident (actually it is Thames Incident number 6,743, according to the Doctor—6,742 being the Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1899 four months ago).

Her skin still feels a trifle cold, but apart from that, all traces of alien vampirism are gone. The Doctor scoffs at Clara's initial doubt that the bite would only last a month, all the while bustling about his console with vicious determination. There is a healing scab at his temple.

"And this—"he points to the scab, glaring—"is still here because you and your boyfriend just left me there. For hours. Like I was a cripple. What, it, it wasn't like you two had something more important to do; you were a vampire and he was probably scared out of his bloody mind because you're terrifying enough as a human." He stops to squint at her. "Are you two still dating now?" he asks, genuinely curious.

Clara smiles. While she immensely enjoys watching Danny Pink save her, she's also discovered that she equally enjoys saving him. Part of her wishes she'd kept the libido that came with the vampire infection, but she seems to be doing just fine without it. She and Danny both.

And Danny, well, he's discovered a whole new area of foreplay.

"Yes in fact we are, Doctor," Clara says. "You know how things 'bloom in adversity.' It helped." She realizes a split second later that she practically quoted Mulan, and it makes her giggle.

The Doctor frowns. "I have no idea what you're talking about." But he has one of those smiles on. The kind where his face isn't actually smiling but the smile is there nonetheless, hiding.

It is a smile Clara's learned to spot.

End.