Clara...Clara, Clara, Clara.
She's stuck inside his head like a song stuck on loop, replaying and replaying until the words lose meaning and melody is harsh and grating. He's stuck on her, can't stop thinking about her, about the girl who he's managed to meet three times.
She's not possible. He lies awake while she sleeps thinking, pondering, burning with frustration because he doesn't know. Granted, the lying awake bit is pretty standard for him. Don't sleep much, the Time Lords. Or did they? He can't quite remember. Hastily, he stops thinking about them.
He never does think about them, if he can help it.
But he doesn't sleep much, that's for certain. But Clara...oh, Clara isn't certain, not in the slightest. Why is she here? Why is following him through a thousand years and a hundred stories? What makes her special, impossible? What, why, how...
Too many questions. Too few answers. But isn't that always the way?
Even if she was normal...well, none of them are normal. They're all extraordinary, the people he takes with him. But Clara, even if she was the normal sort of extraordinary instead of the impossible sort, she would trouble him.
He can't get a fix, get a lock on who she is. She holds his hand like Rose did, smiles and laughs with the effusive affection he remembers from the pink and yellow girl. And she's clever, like Martha was. Asks the right questions and figures things out all on her own. But then, she's cheeky like Donna used to be. She calls him out and makes him laugh. She brave too, like Amy, and acts like she isn't scared even when she is, of him, of aliens, of the wide, vast expanse he's offered her.
He can see all of them in her. And maybe that's just the legacy of him living alone for too long, that he finds connections between her and the others that aren't really there. Or maybe they are there. And maybe if he just looks at it harder...
Too many maybes, too few certainties. She's driving him mad, Clara Oswald is. She'd probably laugh if she saw him, pacing the console room and reading through books that time had long ago forgotten. But he can't stop, not until he gets an answer and there has to be an answer.
There's always an answer, if you're brave enough and clever enough to find it. He watches Clara dance through the streets on an alien world and, for a moment, he forgets that she's twice dead. She's here and she's alive, isn't she, and it's fantastic.
Hasn't used that word for a while, fantastic. It reminds him of leather and bad wolves and Rose, just like Clara does sometimes. He's quiet as he watches Clara laugh and discover. Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy...it all seems so long ago, now.
He takes her, his dead girl walking, to the future and to space and then to the past. She laughs and she weeps and he can remember what it was like to see it all for the first time when he looks at her.
They all break my hearts in the end, he thinks sometimes, but he hold her hand anyway. She a maddening, impossible mystery hidden behind wide brown eyes and a smile. He will figure her out, he has to figure her out. But for now, he watches her laugh and smile and it is enough.
A/N: I didn't expect to like Clara as much as I do. But...she surprised me, so here's this thing. She really does remind me of Rose and while I don't ship her and 11, per se, I do think they're rather adorable. Review, if the fancy strikes.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.