Here is where they start again:
He kind of throws himself at her as soon as the TARDIS doors close behind them.
"I thought you weren't a hugging person," she says, laughing into his chest.
If it were anyone else, he would be embarrassed by his sudden neediness, by his absolute inability to not wrap his arms around her and keep her close. This is Clara though, and he thinks she probably understands. He tightens his hold on her briefly before pulling back to look at her.
There are snowflakes in her hair and in her eyelashes, and he realizes suddenly, painfully, that he wants to kiss her warm. By some miracle, he manages a simple grin instead, mouth stretching wide. "Welcome back," is all he says.
They're sitting under the bright Long Island sun, drinking lemonade and watching Jackson Pollock put the finishing touches on Autumn Rhythm. It's one of those surreal moments when Clara realizes that this is actually her life, that, if she wants to, she can spend all day talking to a famous painter who was dead decades before she was even born.
(Sometimes she wonders about fate and luck and coincidence - hazy, inchoate terms that form a tangled thing in her chest, somewhere near her heart.
She wants to believe that all of this was meant to be.)
"Four hundred and twenty-three," the Doctor says suddenly, startling her. He's doing this thing where he's decided it's a good idea to make bets with Jackson Pollock, and currently their wager involves the final number of individual paint splatters in his painting.
"I'm not done yet," Jackson grumbles, flicking more paint onto the canvas as if to prove his point.
The Doctor shrugs. "Just keeping you up on the running tally."
For some reason this launches them into a debate over whether or not a piece of artwork is ever truly finished; Clara mostly just ignores them and instead draws swirls and splotches across the outside of her glass. She's trying to mimic Jackson's painting as best she knows how, dragging the tip of her finger through condensation and hoping for some vaguely artistic result.
She stops when it all begins to run together into one big, incomprehensible mess, and when she finally looks up, the Doctor is beside her, his eyebrows drawn together in what she thinks might be a bemused squint. It's hard to tell.
"He's something else, isn't he?"
Clara pauses, trying to figure out whom exactly the Doctor is referring to. When he gestures over at Jackson she nods in agreement. "Somehow he's exactly as I imagined he would be, but also...not." Her gaze drifts back to Autumn Rhythm. "He's certainly different," she adds, because how can you invent a whole artistic movement and not be different? But -
"There's nothing wrong with different," the Doctor says, moving now so that he's standing right next to her, his arm brushing against her shoulder.
She smiles. He's managed to complete her thought without even knowing it. "No, there's not," she agrees.
They lapse into a comfortable silence after that, both more interested in watching Jackson paint than in talking. He's started adding lighter colors, layering whites and tans until he almost has what will become the finished product lying at his feet. Clara feels something inside of her shift and fall into place.
"Thank you for this." She makes a sweeping gesture at everything around them, including Jackson Pollock, bent over, dripping paint onto a canvas. "I've really...I've enjoyed this trip." The words get all tangled in the back of her throat. She can still remember what it was like, sixty-two years of missing him. Sixty-two years of feeling that claustrophobic ache of regret pressing down into every line of her body.
She can't mess this up.
"Just...thank you." It sounds lame and so, so insufficient. How do you thank someone for showing you the universe?
He shuffles around awkwardly, hands slipping into his pockets only to come right back out and flutter near her own. "You could travel with me," he says eventually, his gaze dropping shyly from hers. He pretends to be intensely interested in the can of black paint sitting a couple feet away. "Full-time, I mean. If you want."
The sky is vast and blue overhead, she can taste the New York summer in the air, and he has just offered her all of time and space with his hearts in his mouth. How can she resist?
What she wants to say is, Forever. I'll be with you forever. You're the only person I want to spend the rest of my life with. But the sentiment feels cursed, somehow. Instead, Clara settles for wrapping a hand around his fidgeting fingers and simply saying, "Yes."
He walks into the console room on a Tuesday only to find that something has completely and irrevocably changed.
"What did you do to your hair?"
The person who he thinks is Clara given that she still has Clara's wide eyes and Clara's funny looking nose cuts a glance at him over her shoulder. Amusement presses into the corners of her mouth. "I cut it," she replies simply, brushing her fingers along the much shorter ends of her hair.
His eyebrows furrow at the same moment that his mouth scrunches upward. "I don't like it."
This new Clara doesn't seem too offended by that. "So you liked it before." Not a question, a statement. She's grinning now.
Ah. This is, what's the word, a trap. A trap that has been rather alarmingly well laid too. And he's supposed to be really good at getting out of these - that's his thing.
The Doctor opens and closes his mouth several times.
Clara's still grinning at him in a way that makes his skin feel uncomfortable and too tight.
"Uhhhhh," is all he finally manages to say. (He thinks it's probably one of his least successful escape plans ever.)
She sighs, not unhappily, and then reaches toward him to let her fingers trail along his elbow. "You don't have to answer that," she reassures him. "Not really."
There's something happening here, something he's missed. The obvious, his great Time Lord brain supplies. He tells it to shut up.
She looks like she knows exactly what his answer is despite the fact that he hasn't actually given her anything close to a good reply.
"Clara?"
She's walking away from him now, hips swaying in a way that he determines is absolutely not distracting. "I'll be in the library," she says, gesturing in the room's general direction without even turning around to look at him. "There's some reading I'd like to catch up on."
The Doctor stares blankly after her.
Maybe this thing that he's missing has something to do with her haircut? Maybe not. He doesn't know.
He watches the way the ends of her hair brush along the tops of her shoulders right up until she turns a corner and disappears from his sight. It'll take some getting used to, but he does like it. Liked it the old way too. In fact, to an extent that might be worrying, he likes a lot of things Clara chooses to do or say or wear. (He doesn't want to use the word besotted when it comes to her but, well...)
The TARDIS burbles at him but he chooses to ignore it.
New hair, new start, new Clara. He can't help but wonder what else will change. Will they? It's hard to imagine their relationship as anything but what it currently is.
A pipe above his head lets out an angry hiss of steam, making him roll his eyes.
"Don't worry," he grumbles into the air, reaching for the console, "I'm paying attention to you now."
They still bicker - he and Clara, that is. Turns out that hasn't changed at all.
So. They're in 1920s Aldeburgh, Suffolk, and apparently that's as good a time and place for an argument as any.
"I can't believe you dragged me here. In the middle of the night. In the rain."
The Doctor stops waving his sonic screwdriver around long enough to glance at her over his shoulder, only to find that she's completely soaked. Her clothes stick to every line of her body, and her newly shortened hair is plastered to her cheeks. He tries not to feel guilty about it; he did tell her to wear a better jacket. "Clara," he says, patiently. This is the fifth time they've had to have this conversation in the past twenty minutes. "Aldeburgh is a fascinating place, full of rich history and really good fish and chips - "
She throws her hands up in the air, voice hitting a whole new pitch that he's never heard before. "And we can't take part in any of those things because it's the. Middle. Of. The. Night."
"Well, we can hardly hunt ghosts in the daytime."
Clara grabs his elbow, spinning him around so that she can glare more fully at him. "That's what we're doing here? Hunting ghosts? You were just talking about history and fish and chips."
He shrugs. "I was going to get there eventually." Because he was, honestly.
"We said we were going to take a break and have a nice, calm trip. Ghosts," she says, gesturing to the air around them as though it is teeming with not yet departed souls, "are not nice or calm."
The Doctor hums thoughtfully. "What if they're pleasant ghosts?"
"Are they?"
"No."
It sounds a lot like she might mutter something rude about Time Lords under her breath then, but he doesn't really have it in him to be offended.
"Clara," he wheedles, drawing out the syllables of her name, "please."
She rolls her eyes at his tone, but there is something in it that wears her down. How many times before would he have taken her opinion so seriously or would have even thought about using please? She sighs. "Fine, we can hunt ghosts. But," she holds up a finger and gives him her sternest teacher look, "just this once. And afterwards you have to take me someplace really awesome."
"The crystal beach on Xandori Dol? They have two suns," he explains, "and very good cocktails."
"Deal."
They shake on it.
(Things coming together: The feeling he gets in his chest the moment before she swings the TARDIS doors open to a new planet. Their elbows bumping together as they walk side by side. Her feet dangling, barely able to skim the floor, as she sits in his wingback chair.
He can't imagine traveling without her.)
They think he's a magician.
"Well," Clara says, the upturned corners of her mouth betraying her amusement, "at least they asked you to perform for the king and not a child's birthday party."
The Doctor just scowls. "I'm not a magician."
"Apparently your outfit says otherwise." She reaches out and plucks at the front of his coat, flashing the red lining and only making him scowl harder.
"I don't even know any magic tricks," he mutters.
This turns out to be a lie.
Clara gives him a look when he performs the first trick, having the king pick a card and then making it disappear into thin air - only to have it reappear moments later, pressed against the outside glass of a throne room window. The Doctor just shrugs at her. "Sometimes I get bored," he explains out of the corner of his mouth. "And sometimes, when I've run out of interesting books to read or particularly pressing problems to solve, I learn magic tricks."
She rolls her eyes. "Honestly, you - "
Something that sounds vaguely like someone trying to whistle with a mouthful of crackers cuts her off. In front of them, the king is gesturing with four of his six tentacles and pointing repeatedly at Clara.
The Doctor stops shuffling cards in mid-air and just says, "Ah."
"What?"
"He wants me to cut you in half."
Her eyebrows shoot upward. "I'm sorry?"
"Like the magic trick, you know. The assistant gets into a box and the magician pretends to cut him or her in half. I've never actually practiced it though, so there's some potential for this to go horribly wrong. Sleight of hand is just so much more interesting than..." He trails off at the sight of Clara's glare. "Right. I'll try reasoning with him then."
"Good idea."
He starts making the same whistling-through-a-mouthful-of-crackers sound that the king was making a few moments ago, albeit with slightly more gesturing. Although that could just be because the Doctor is well, the Doctor. The king responds in kind, pointing at Clara again and then, once, drawing a tentacle across the part of his body that appears to function as his throat.
The Doctor turns back toward her. "I've explained the situation to him," he says abruptly, trying to sound diplomatic and making a face like he has everything under control because he is a Time Lord and obviously he can handle anything the universe decides to throw at him. "I told him that I'm not really a magician and that you can't afford to lose any more height than you have to."
Clara crosses her arms over her chest, ignoring the jab in favor of more pressing matters. "And?"
This time he's not nearly as self-assured. "Ah. Um...Now he wants to cut both of us in half," he admits slowly. His gaze drifts away from hers sheepishly. "Rather permanently too, I'd say."
She gapes first at him and then at the king and his assembled entourage. "What?" she splutters. "What did you say to him? What did you do?"
The Doctor shrugs, already half reaching for her hand. "Doesn't matter. Just run."
And then they're off, running for their lives down twisted corridors and cluttered, treasure filled chambers until they burst through the TARDIS doors and into the console room, still hand in hand and both a little breathless.
He makes promises now - to her, for her, about her. Sometimes all three. They are carefully spoken, soft and quiet things that he presses into the pages of books or the empty spaces of his chalkboards or even, once, the soft skin of her neck.
The truth is this: he would do absolutely anything for her.
It starts out easily enough.
"Promise me," Clara says, pointing a finger at him and laughing. She has flour in her hair and chocolate all over her shirt; she looks like maybe she found her way into a baking goods aisle and proceeded to get very clumsy. "Promise me that you'll never try to make a..." she trails off, angling herself toward the cookbook he has sitting out on the counter so that she can read it better. "A Tessalarian Volcano Cake ever again."
He sneezes violently. It turns out he might be allergic to the rare Peruvian pepper that goes into the cake batter. "I promise," he mutters eventually, petulant and just a little disappointed with his current situation.
(It's her birthday, and he wanted to give her something special, something relaxed and relatively peaceful, but that ended up not happening at all.
"It's okay, it's okay," she murmurs later, reaching forward to brush some egg yolk off his cheek. "We can do something else."
"Okay," he says, and he takes her scuba diving on Heorot Five, where the ocean is emerald green and the stars overhead burn like sparklers, shooting off streaks of light in every direction.)
The second time, she doesn't ask it of him, but he's standing across the console room from her, watching fatigue shadow her face, and he can feel the promise in his bones.
I'll take care of Clara.
He presses the words into the TARDIS, somewhere in the corner of his mind where the machine is an ever-present being, whirring and wheezing and linked to him forever.
The ship warbles in agreement, not telepathically, but out loud. Clara pauses in taking off her muddied shoes.
"What's she saying?"
The Doctor decides he should try to look busy. His fingers find buttons and poke them at random. "She wants us to know that we're safe." It's mostly not a lie.
"Oh," she says, "that's nice." But he can tell by the look on her face that the sentiment only makes her think of all the people they just left behind who will probably never be safe again.
He rubs both hands over his face and through his hair. Should he hug her now or wait until later? Does she want to talk about everything they just witnessed or would she rather bury it deep and never acknowledge it? He doesn't know. Comforting humans shouldn't be so difficult, right? But he needs to try, if only for her.
Somewhere, distantly, the TARDIS nudges him.
When he looks up, Clara is using a railing to hold herself up, knuckles white, her knees just shy of buckling. She looks like she might cry, so he gives her the one thing he will always have to offer, the one thing he will always understand.
"Let's have a quiet adventure next."
She's confused now, but he supposes that's better than heartbroken any day. "'A quiet adventure,'" she repeats. "Do you do those?"
He shrugs, trying to look nonchalant. "Sometimes. For the right people."
The next time it happens they're sitting in the library, tucked away on Clara's favorite couch, her feet in his lap and his hand on her knee. She's reading The Odyssey and taking careful notes.
"Did you know," he says, staring up at the ceiling and wondering whether or not it would look better painted lime green, "that I almost burnt down Ptolemy's shrine to Homer in Alexandria?"
She doesn't say anything, and when he looks over at her, her nose is still very much buried in her book.
He sighs loudly and waits, drumming his fingers against her kneecap. Maybe teal. Maybe the ceiling should be teal. Or magenta or sunset orange -
"You know - " she's stopped reading, the book now balanced delicately between her fingers. Her face is doing that confusing thing that he can't read no matter how hard he tries. "When you find Gallifrey again, when you..." she trails off uncertainly, dropping her gaze from his before starting again. "When you make it home, I'd like to be there. With you."
Oh.
"Clara," he says roughly and then, "I promise. I promise, I promise."
There are some things he should not promise her (and this is one of them), but he hopes -
"Thank you," she breathes, and she looks like he has just laid the universe at her feet and said, Here, all of this, take it, please; it's for you.
He supposes, in some sense, he has.
This is a fact: he understands a lot of complex things. He can unravel the complexities behind thermodynamic cycles and he knows how hundreds of different languages have evolved over time - has actually helped shape some of them himself - and he can speak every single one. When he closes his eyes he can write symphonies in his head, tangling musical notes up in mathematical equations and chemical formulas until he has some sort of weird hybrid product strung along the edges of his consciousness, waiting to be put to use. Sometimes he can even taste the very ebbs and flows of time.
Clara, on the other hand, is a completely different story. There's an intangibility to her that he can never quite grasp. An aspect of her being - of the essence of Clara - that, just as he seems to hold it firmly in his hands, slips and swirls away from him.
He thinks he could spend a lifetime with her and still not understand the way she makes his chest constrict or his hearts beat ten times too fast in the hollows of his wrists.
He takes her to visit the Dragon of Kuzhbet, a fire-breathing mobster as renowned for the incineration of his victims as he is for his love of tea. Luckily, the Doctor has decided he'd prefer the latter today. Clara thinks the incineration is probably an inevitable follow-up though.
They make it through precisely sixteen and a half minutes of tea before the Doctor says, "Oops."
"No," is Clara's immediate response, because if there's one thing she really doesn't need right now it's to be roasted over a fire by their host as if they're kabobs or something. She throws a charming smile in the Dragon's direction and then hisses sharply at the Doctor. "Don't you dare tell me you've done something to upset him."
"I haven't done something to upset him."
"Want to try that again?"
Across the table from them, the Dragon sets down his teacup and pushes himself up from his chair. The Doctor says something that might be a curse in Gallifreyan.
"Doctor?"
Both hands are in his pockets now, digging around for something. "I may have um…" he trails off, apparently finding whatever it was he was looking for; his sonic screwdriver is perched on his knees now, the tip glowing as he flicks through the settings. He picks up where he left off. "Forgotten about their tea customs."
"Tea customs," she echoes, eyeing the Dragon in a way she hopes he doesn't find too provoking or offensive. He seems to be stretching now, limbering up like he's about to go for a run. "What is he doing?" she asks finally, curiosity getting the better of her.
"Well, I imagine it's pretty taxing to set fire to one victim, never mind the kind of physical preparedness it would take for two."
She turns to look at him so quickly that she's pretty sure she pulls a muscle in her neck. "But we're having tea," she says. It sounds like token resistance even to her; she knew this was going to happen. "We're having tea and you said it would be okay - "
The Doctor sighs. "That's what I've been trying to tell you. This - " He pauses to gesture at the tea table spread out in front of them. " - is a tea ceremony performed to commemorate the lives of one's victims ahead of time."
"And you've only just remembered this now."
"Yes. You know, that's the problem with having such a vast intellect," he explains. "Things get lost sometimes and - "
There's a crackling like the beginnings of fire, the pop as something ignites somewhere deep inside the Dragon's belly.
Oh, she is so, so going to kill him.
Clara opens her mouth to tell the Doctor exactly how she plans on strangling him even after they've been burnt to a crisp at exactly the same moment that he raises his sonic screwdriver to the ceiling. The lights overhead buzz sharply for a split second before going out completely. She barely has time to think before the Doctor's hand is around hers, pulling her up and away, his voice almost lost in the dark in front of her.
"I think it'd be a good idea to run now, don't you?"
She wants to punch him or maybe kiss him or maybe trip him and then leave him behind for the Dragon to deal with. Maybe all three; she doesn't know.
For some reason she ends up laughing instead. And then he laughs, which only makes her laugh harder, and that just keeps happening until neither one of them can even run, they're laughing so hard. In the end, they wind up staggering down the hallway together, bumping into doors and each other, howling with laughter the entire time.
Clara dreams more when she's on board the TARDIS. She dreams of cupping stars between her palms and tasting ancient civilizations heavy on her tongue. She dreams of the Doctor, eyes deep and dark and beckoning, pressing words into her ear: Come away with me, Clara. Won't you please come away with me?
She always dreams that she says yes.