Title and an italicized line taken from an A.E. Stallings poem because I had a classics professor who was a huge nerd and loved to share her poems with us. This particular one stuck.
She finds him in the library, guitar in his lap while he tests out a new amp. When he catches sight of her walking between the stacks, he switches from playing something that sounds vaguely like David Bowie to the opening chords of 'Pretty Woman.'
The song brings a smile to her face. She stops in front of him, head tilted to one side, feet dangerously close to a wayward stack of John Keats' poems. "What are you doing?"
The frown he gives her is mock. He continues strumming away, and it makes Clara think of castles, the stale taste of dust and smoke in the air.
"Nothing." The Doctor shrugs. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
She fits beside him on the couch like it was made for just the two of them. It's possible, she supposes, that the TARDIS is reconstructing things around them, widening doorways so that they can walk through them side by side, replacing chairs with loveseats. Could explain why her bed suddenly feels a little bit bigger, a little bit emptier.
"We could do nothing together," he suggests, watching her stare at the couch like she's trying to mentally measure it. He hits the whammy bar and drags out one final note. "Or we could go save a colony of whales. On a Tuesday. While wearing really ridiculous scuba gear."
Clara squints at him. "Will you be bringing the guitar?"
"To the whale colony? Probably not."
"That's decided then," she declares, grabbing hold of his hand and yanking him up off the couch and away. Out of the library, down the hall, around a box of seemingly unnecessary pogo sticks, and, finally, into the control room.
"I thought you liked my guitar playing," he grouses, once they're no longer in motion.
She laughs, fights off the urge to bop him playfully on the nose. "I do. But you're no Roy Orbison."
"You looked that up."
"Might have done," she admits, shrugging. She comes over to stand beside him, bumping her shoulder against his arm. "Anyway, I doubt the whales really appreciate guitar."
"That's true." He flicks several switches and then picks out a sequence on the keyboard, pointing to a lever for her before grabbing one for himself. "They're strictly clarinet enthusiasts, whales."
Clara rolls her eyes at him affectionately, and then, without another word, they both pull their levers home.
Clara heard a story once, about a man who loved his wife very, very much. She can't remember where she heard it, but she remembers the story, and she carries it with her still, like a talisman.
The man loved his wife very, very much, and then, his wife died. Distraught, the man decided to get her back. He ventured underground, through the deep and dark, to the place where dead things come to rest. When he finally came upon the gods of this place, he begged that they return his wife to him. They agreed.
She will travel behind you the whole way, the gods said, peering down at the sad, rumpled man before them, until you taste fresh air and sunlight again. But if you turn around to see her before you return to the earth above, then she will vanish and you will lose her forever.
This was their bargain. The man agreed. The journey back to life began.
But, impatient at the idea of his wife's return to him, the man turned to catch a glimpse of her just before they reached the surface, and so, his wife was lost.
Sometimes, Clara imagines the Doctor telling her this story, wrapping the words in a Scottish brogue and occasionally losing the plot in favor of seemingly random tangents like how much he'd like to get ice cream right now and why she should never play mini-golf with an Ood. ("They cheat," he says, frowning at - for who knows what reason - her knees. "They're horrible cheaters." He sounds as though he has been personally victimized.)
Other times an alien who has four arms and bright gold hair shares it with her while they sit in a park or a greenhouse or, once, an aviary. It's always a song in this version, and so the alien sings to her, low and mournful, about the man who would do anything to get his wife back. Clara likes to imagine stars overhead, keeping both of them company.
When she's feeling especially melancholy, she pictures her mother telling her the story. They wrap themselves in blankets and sit on Clara's childhood bed, or they share a seat at their old kitchen table, and her mother tells her the story of the man and his lost wife like she's trying to teach Clara a lesson.
This is important, Clara, Ellie Oswald says more than once. Listen.
There's something about this planet, she decides, part way through her fourth cider. The people here seem friendlier, the colors of the sky, the plants, brighter than anything she's ever known. Everything feels so warm, and she never wants to leave.
The Doctor smirks when she shares this with him. "How many of those have you had?" he asks, gesturing to her glass with his own half-empty one.
"Not enough," Clara shoots back, snagging two more drinks from a passing cart, and then, feeling quite proud and mature, sticking her tongue out at him.
He just shakes his head. (When he turns away from her to stare at an eight-armed juggler who's simultaneously throwing stars into the air and playing Frisbee with a group of very inebriated clowns, she grabs his drink too, for good measure.)
Five more ciders and a trip to the planet's mini-circus later, Clara's sprawled out on a bench, still feeling warm and loving everybody who passes by. Everybody, that is, until the person who decides to sit, rather rudely, on her feet.
"Oi," she says, because while everyone here is wonderful and at this moment she would probably take a bullet for every single one of them, this is still her bench. She's claimed it. "This is my bench." She tries to swat at the person and misses terribly.
"Clara."
She opens one eye, squints down the bench. "Doctor?"
His hand on her knee, tapping away. "Clara."
She can't quite decipher the way he's saying her name. It's happy, but also strangely longing and bittersweet and -
"Clara, Clara, Clara."
Drunk. He's drunk.
She hiccups and laughs at exactly the same time, startling the Doctor so badly that he slides off the bench and - blessedly - her feet, and falls onto the ground. He stares up at her from the pavement with wide eyes, like a very befuddled, not entirely sober, owl.
"What was that?" he whispers, sounding awed and also a little frightened.
This time Clara laughs hard enough to send herself off the bench too. Her elbow hits the Doctor on the head on the way down, and that only makes her laugh harder.
The sky slowly turns burnt orange overhead, and Clara has tears in her eyes; she gasps for breath.
When she finally calms down, she can see the beginnings of a huge moon above them, and somewhere, someone is singing. The air tastes crisp; it reminds her of apples and springtime, the beginning of things. (There are many words Clara could use to describe this place, but right now the only one she can come up with is magical.) "Let's just stay here," she says.
The Doctor smiles goofily, and the way the dying sunlight slants golden through his hair makes him look luminous, like a falling angel. "Ooh, that'd be great, wouldn't it?"
"Thank you," Clara says. The words don't feel like enough. She can still hear her voice ringing in her ears, strained and desperate: If you love me in any way, you'll come back. And he did. He does. She watches him now, in the dim lighting of the console room, and feels like she's seeing him all over again. "Thank you for coming back for me."
He looks at her, expression pained. Clara imagines his chest cut open, his hearts spilling starlight onto the floor between them. He admits, "I would tear the universe apart for you."
They aren't more careful after that. Clara thinks it's probable that they should be, that they should both take a moment to just sit and breathe - any ordinary person with as many near-death experiences as they've had in the past few months would certainly find that an acceptable course of action. But. This isn't ordinary. This is -
Addiction, Clara whispers to herself, late at night. She closes her eyes and pictures comets falling through space, twisting and turning, burning brightly, and then dying out. How could she stop and rest when there's so much more to see, to do? Planets to save and villains to beat, miles and miles of dark corridors to run down.
So.
There are more adventures. There are talking squid people and a blasphemous trip to watch the Boston Tea Party. There's a king from future England who wants to marry her and make her queen. There's a planet where, for no reason at all, she and the Doctor eat a truly obscene amount of pudding and then, afterward, save the planet with little more than a hat, a sugar bowl, and a very disapproving librarian.
One hundred and one places, people, strewn across all of time and space, but always there is the story. It trails behind her like a shadow, like a tickle at the back of her throat that she can't quite get rid of.
The man loved his wife very, very much, and then, his wife died.
She will vanish and you will lose her forever, the gods whisper in Clara's ear, omniscient and fierce.
When Clara dreams, she dreams of descents. Down mountains, down stairs. Down into the center of the earth. She tries to run up in these dreams, up toward the birds and the sky and the stars, but somehow she always ends up moving in the direction she does not want to go.
She ends up in the library.
If this story exists - and it has to, it absolutely has to - then she'll find it somewhere on the never ending shelves of the TARDIS library. She can already picture it too: a well-worn, leather bound book, touched and read by every version of the Doctor, in every part of time. There is something about this that feels infinite, timeless. A hundred years from now this story will be an ache in someone's bones the way it is in hers, right now.
"Clara?" He's on the opposite side of the bookshelf she's currently examining, peering at her through a gap in the books.
"I'm looking for a story," she explains. "It's about a man and his wife, and she dies, so her husband goes on a quest to bring her back." It's important. She doesn't know why it's important. "I think you might have read it to me one time. I'm not sure."
The Doctor frowns, thinking. He looks a bit ridiculous, framed by a colorful treatise that promises to make your astral garden ten times more fruitful and a dog-eared collection of a children's detective series. Eventually he shrugs. "A lot of people have stories like that. The ancient Greeks. The Romans. The Tesselaxorians. In their version the male character has two heads and a proclivity for baking."
"Which one do I want?"
He shrugs again. "I have no idea."
"Do you know where I could find them?"
"Ah." He reaches for a book and flips through it rapidly, avoiding her eyes. "No."
"No?"
He puts the book back, shuffles a bit, flaps a hand. "The TARDIS isn't really a fan of order in this case. Or the Dewey decimal system."
A noise that sounds vaguely like a burbled agreement echoes overhead.
Clara moves around the bookshelf so that they can actually see each other properly and frowns, first at the ceiling and then at him. "That makes things a bit difficult, doesn't it?"
"A bit, yeah," he agrees, giving her a look that says, but sentient space-time capsules - what can you do? "But." He punctuates this with a finger, reaching suddenly for a book that he's spotted near her elbow. He slides it neatly out of place, smiles when he sees the title; it's a quantum mechanics book he had spent all of yesterday looking for. "She does have a habit of bringing me exactly what I need, in the end."
Later, over plates of croque monsieurs and chips:
"People like that kind of story."
Clara blinks, a chip halfway to her mouth. "Sorry, what?"
A minute ago they hadn't even been speaking. In fact, they had barely spoken at all since they had sat down for lunch fifteen minutes ago. She puts the chip down and squints at him, trying to remember if she had happened to mention the books she was thinking of teaching this month.
The Doctor shakes his head, smiles slowly, patiently. "That story you asked me about. In the library." He spreads his hands out on the table between them and makes a face like he's trying to tell her something important. "People like that kind of story."
"Oh, you mean a love story?"
He frowns, correcting her carefully. "It's not a love story," he says. "It's a story about the power of death - that not even the strongest love can overcome death in the end." He ignores his own half-full plate and grabs a chip from hers, pops it in his mouth. "A cautionary tale, if you will."
"Oh, hello there."
Inside his cramped, dark jail cell, the Doctor jumps, banging his head painfully on the stone wall behind him. When his ears stop ringing and he can actually see properly again, he squints in the direction of the voice. "Clara?"
She's holding, rather bizarrely, a purple umbrella, and grinning at him far too much for someone who's currently standing in the dungeon of the most ferocious pirate lord of the Caborian star system. "Need a hand?" she asks, sounding rather amused.
He raises his hands and shakes them at her, making the chains binding his wrists together clink noisily. "What do you think?"
"Hey, don't get snippy with me, mister." She points a finger, suddenly all teacher. "I took care of fancy Lord What's-His-Face upstairs all by myself. And I may or may not have stopped an uprising of angry tenant farmers in the process too. And then I walked down fifty flights of stairs just to come and rescue you. Gratitude," she adds, drawing the word out, "would be nice."
He catches himself rolling his eyes and stops, tries on a grateful smile that comes out looking more like a grimace. "Yes, sorry, thank you for coming to get me." The tone is all wrong and he utters it too fast, all in one breath. He suddenly can't make his face work properly. The Doctor swallows, scrunches his face up, and tries again. "Clara." It's simple; it's sincere. It's everything he can't figure out how to say. "Clara."
She's the one to roll her eyes this time, but it's affectionate, endeared. She taps the purple umbrella against the hinges of his cell door and waits until they seemingly melt away. Inside his cell she does the same thing with the chains around his wrists. Once she's done and they're standing side by side again, Clara smiles up at him knowingly. "We'll update your notecards as soon as we get back."
He sighs like a burden has been lifted from him, pats his pocket where the current set sit as a reminder. "Thank you," he says, and he reaches for her hand.
A fortuneteller stops her one time, at a carnival somewhere deep in the heart of Kansas. She smells like sage and the wide-open sky, and when she asks if Clara wants her fortune told it doesn't feel like she has much of a choice.
"Sure," she says, nodding. "Sure."
The Doctor frowns, unimpressed. "The Ferris wheel, Clara. We have to - " Clara shoots him a look, and he falls silent.
The old woman grabs hold of Clara's hand, palm up, and begins reading the lines she finds there. Days later Clara can still feel the whisper of ancient fingers against her skin. "You're a traveler," she murmurs. "You travel across months and years - sometimes the stars if you need to."
Beside her, the Doctor fidgets.
The old woman stares at him curiously for a moment and then turns back to Clara. "You're impossible," she pronounces, something like awe in her voice. "And you'll blow away like smoke. Clara Oswald."
"What did you say?" The Doctor's voice rises above the wind and the ringing sounds of nearby arcade games. He pulls Clara out of the fortuneteller's grasp and comes to stand between the two of them. "Where did you hear that?" he demands, and he looks like a storm, like a force of nature.
"Doctor." Clara tugs at him until he turns around. "Doctor, it's just a fortune. It's okay."
He shakes his head vehemently. "Clara, you don't understand," he starts, turning back. He needs answers. He needs Clara, safe and alive and by his side for as long as possible.
The fortuneteller is gone.
Everything you're about to say, I already know.
And she does, she does. She knows. Somewhere in time they're standing on the Orient Express together, watching the stars slide by; somewhere in medieval Essex he's playing the guitar for her like they're the only two people left in the universe. Somewhere, somewhen, they're bouncing around space together, and they're laughing -
Oh God, does she know.
Clara stands in front of him, feeling her heart beat against her wrists, her ribs. She tries to memorize the feeling, the way she can feel blood rushing through her veins. This is what it feels like to be alive and she needs to cherish it. "Goodbye, Doctor."
He looks broken, but the raven is calling now, closer; she can't do this here.
The street then. Cobblestones under her feet, the lingering smell of smoke in the air. She can feel the Doctor behind her, watching silently. She wonders, briefly, what it will be like to go someplace that he can't follow.
There's a moment, a horrific screech. Clara spreads her arms open wide, ready and brave. There is black and feathers and pain and then -
She remembers a story: a man, his wife. Love. She remembers the story, and she thinks, Dying is the easy part.
She wakes up gasping, the universe tearing itself apart all around her. The ground is solid and firm beneath her back, there's machinery buzzing and clicking away around her; everything hurts. She was dead and now she's not.
Beside her, on the ground: a mess of curls, a look of determination, a set of furious eyebrows.
"What did you do?" she asks, still struggling for breath. "What did you do?"
Somewhere the stars are screaming and worlds are melting, crumbling. Everything is dying, but she is alive. She is alive, and that is all that has ever mattered to him.
The Doctor shuffles closer, taking her hand in his. He presses a kiss to her palm. "I saved you."