A/N: This fic opens with a flashback to 'The Cold War', will then become post-Trenzalore.
North Pole, 1983
Clara's POV
I lost my footing on the slippery metal flooring of the submarine, and my breath was abruptly stolen from my mouth by icy, numbing water. I sank further, deeper, and my blurred vision started to darken at the edges. I was tired, so tired, and started to close my eyes as I felt many hands gripping me, pulling me from my chilled aqueous prison. After eternity passed, I could faintly feel warm air on my skin, but it left me too tired to heave in that critical gasp of air I needed, and I fell into the impending darkness.
"Are you sure you don't want anything, sir? I don't expect you will have much longer," I told him warily, and he smiled up at me. His wife Amy stood across the hospital bed from me, and we shared a look of understanding.
A loud grating noise sounded behind me, and I ducked out of instinct, using my body to protect them both. The source of the noise was a flashing blue box, here one second, gone the next. It seemed to stabilise and a curiously dressed young man with quite a dapper bowtie and a rather – prominent – chin stepped out of it, and rushed to my patient Rory's side. "Sir, you can't-" I started, but the man had already grabbed Rory's hand and was holding it like he would never let go. I didn't know what to do, I wasn't trained for that kind of situation. Whatever the man was saying, Rory spent a good deal of the conversation staring at me, and I couldn't help but stare back. It was undoubtedly the strangest encounter I'd had working as a nurse in Manhattan's busiest hospital.
The man seemed to have finished speaking, and strutted his way over to his big blue police box, just stopping to wave before disappearing into thin air in the same way as before; only in reverse. I looked back at Rory in utter perplexity, and he just smiled in that knowing way of I'd come to be so familiar with in those last months. He beckoned me back to his bedside, and I followed the gesture expectantly. The last words he said, he said to me, and he whispered them to Amy so she could repeat it at an appropriate volume. Her eyes widened, and she watched me with wide eyes.
"He said to... please find Cal Aima."
I felt Amy's hands on my shoulders, shaking me, but they were far too large and manly to be hers...
I awoke with a sharp inhale of sweet, clean air, immediately aware that there was cold water dripping from my flyaway hairs. The Doctor's hands were still on my shoulders and his eyes searched mine. I nodded at him dumbly in acknowledgement of my consciousness, and he sat back to exhale in relief. The world was a spinning disco ball of flashing lights and too many sounds; all I wanted was to go back to sleep, but I couldn't. The Doctor needed me.