A/N: Capaldi. Just. Capaldi.
Some things, it must be said, have changed, and some things, it must also be said, have not. Take, for example, his apparent inability to choose his hair color. He's gone from rude and not ginger, past rude and brown, on to ruder still and sort of grey. It isn't that he particularly wants to be ginger, at this point, but his continued difficulties in being so strikes him as downright incendiary.
Though, that could be the Scottish talking.
And another thing. It isn't just the touching, the hands-touching and the hugging, which he has decided he is firmly against. Over the last few regenerations, he's grown accustomed to this sudden habit of humanity of attacking him, in a fairly friendly way, face-first. He doesn't like the taste of his own mouth, except possibly in the sharp mintiness that follows cleaning his teeth; why humans should assume that he'll welcome the taste of theirs is beyond him.
"That explains this face, then," says Clara when he complains, at length, about this. "You put it on special, to keep people from wanting to kiss you all the time."
He wants to say no, so he does; but he only wants to say no because she suggested it, and, on second thought, she may very well be right. It's all well and good, Maid Marian bussing him on the cheek and moving on. But humanity as a whole is getting too personal. There's no level of thanks that he wants that needs to be conveyed beyond, possibly, a good hearty handshake; and, if he's being honest, he'd be content with a wave. If that. A simple sudden absence would also do the trick. Silently, would be favorite.
"Why are you scowling all the time?" Clara wants to know.
"I'm not scowling all the time," says the Doctor, scowling.
"Regenerated on the wrong side of the Tardis, did we?"
"I'm not scowling all the time," stresses the Doctor, pedantically. "Sometimes, I'm asleep."
It's true, though, he isn't exactly a Jolly Jim these days, or a Mirthful Moe. A Happy Harold. Sometimes, he has to admit, he's barely even a Reasonably Pleasant Ralph. The world's got an awful lot of glee from him over these last few regenerations, though. Why should they expect more?
Does he miss the feeling things used to give him, the sights and sounds and the beauty everywhere, the things that used to make him throw his arms wide and spin around laughing at the sky? Nowadays, those things just make him gently nauseated. They make him want to curl his lip. Especially people who throw their arms wide and spin around laughing at the sky. He could curl his lip so far, it would roll up like a carpet on a dancing floor.
It isn't that he doesn't see the beauty, really, because on some level he does, because he's the Doctor, and the universe will never stop surprising him. It's just that, these days, he wishes the universe would have rung him up first instead of just dropping by like that.
He still doesn't like it when people die. At least, when people die who shouldn't. It makes him angry. And, yes, granted, a whole helluva lot makes him angry. He doesn't sleep, but he spends his nights in a dressing gown, seated at a desk, making lists of the things that make him angry. Everyone needs a hobby.
But he doesn't like it when the wrong people die. Which happens all the time. Leading to more anger. It's a vicious cycle. Sometimes there's slime involved. Viscous cycle. Snails.
Snails also make him angry.
He writes about them instead of the people who have died who shouldn't, because at least he can do something about those little buggers.
The first time he laughs, Clara looks genuinely frightened.
"I prefer the scowling," she says. "You look so—"
"Jovial?" prompts the Doctor, abruptly dour-faced once more.
"Bitey," says Clara.
He almost never bites Clara.
There was that one time.
He apologized, though. Oh, not right away. Sometime later that week. Or the next month, he might have put it off a little. Actually, he can't remember whether he ever got round to it at all.
It didn't get infected or anything, though, so no harm done. He doesn't see what all the fuss was about.
"When you said you weren't my boyfriend," says Clara.
These are the opening words to a conversation he never, ever, ever ever, wants to have, ever.
"I don't have these kinds of conversations anymore," he tries, though he knows it won't work. It's useless. He's doomed.
"I just wanted to ask," says Clara. "You didn't mean just me, did you."
Which was an unexpected follow-up to that opening gambit, so he turns his steely gaze on her, and for once the angry eyebrows are more sort of gently perplexed.
"Not just you? What d'you mean, not just you?"
"You didn't mean I'm the only one who isn't your girlfriend. You mean us. All of us. Humans. You let us get too close, and this—" She waves a hand at him, up and down, kicker boots to angry eyebrows and curly grey hair. "This is your way of getting us to back off. Of reminding us that you aren't human. You were too cuddly, and you gave us an inch, and we took a mile. That's what it was, wasn't it? Not me. Not just me."
Again. He wants to brush this off, to tell her she's being ridiculous, or that she's over thinking things, or that the world will end before she has correct conjectures about the inner workings of his psyche. But what he wants to say has no bearing on what actually is, and after a vicious inner struggle in which he is certain he draws blood, he owns that she may possibly be correct.
Her eyes light up.
Him not making her feel like a dunce is a triumph, these days, apparently, and that gives him something to think about.
Three people attempt to kiss him within a few days of each other, and as he isn't able to fend off the first two, by the third he has resorted to planting his palm firmly in the other's face and pushing. The little old lady he does this to at first goes flying, and Clara gives him this look.
"She ought to know where she's not wanted," says the Doctor, settling his jacket on his narrow shoulders. "Aren't you always after me to respect people's personal space? Well, what about my personal space, Clara Oswald? Is the autocracy of my mouth any less important than that of anyone else's? Do you see me going around snogging unsuspecting strangers just because they saved my life? Hmm?"
She only shakes her head at him, disgusted, and goes to check the old girl is okay.
"You're not going to make me change effective behavior just by judging me, you know," says the Doctor, but he says it somewhat sulkily, and he doesn't particularly care to speak to anyone much for the rest of the day.
He saves the world, and then he saves the world again, and oh, look, he's saved the world whilst he's been recovering from saving the world, isn't that nice for a change.
Except it is nice, unexpectedly, because he also accidentally discovered a planet without snails, and saved it as well, and in the small private tally ledger he's keeping, he marks that down as an unprecedented success.
He lets her kiss him, once, but only once, and only because he'd done something, albeit accidentally, that reminded her of him. Not him him, or, at least, not him him now him, but the previous him him, the one that was slightly more age appropriate and infinitely more stylistically challenged. Not that he cared. Not that he cares now, but his not caring now is more of a calling card than anything, whereas previously his lack of consideration for how he dressed was more a kind of sartorial anemia.
Anyway, he lets her kiss him, because he was distracted at the time, and in the end, it is so much easier, because after she draws close and after he does not respond, she lets him go and steps back of her own accord and fixes him with her all-eyes face, which was all eyes.
"My mistake," she says, and if it wasn't a reference to their previous conversation, their by-now-long-ago conversation, it was a clumsy thing to say.
So he just says, "Yes," and stays hooded-eyed and dangerous, as per usual.
Later, she says, in a manner that suggests she's clearly been thinking about this far too much, "There's something else you're wrong about."
"Doubtful," says the Doctor, "but out of curiosity. Enlighten me."
"You can't shut us all down," she says. "You can't close us all off. It isn't even a matter of being our boyfriend, Doctor, because that wasn't ever the issue. You can't just stop loving an entire species, not when you've felt like that for so long."
And he doesn't feel like explaining it to her, doesn't feel like explaining that it isn't a matter of not loving humans— you can love someone or something without liking it very much, he's got plenty of experience with that— but a matter of not loving them enough, perhaps. He'll give up his life for them. He's done it before. But to live with them suddenly seems a little exhausting. Everything seems a little exhausting.
Maybe he needs something new.
Maybe that's what this regeneration is all about. Something new.
He hasn't stopped loving them, anyway, and he never will, because he can't, so she's wrong, and he takes a certain pleasure in telling her so immediately.
He dreams of someone in a white hat, and it isn't him. It isn't even really a dream, because dreams are for sleeping people, and he isn't sleeping person. Sleep is for people who haven't got anything better to do. Like Clara, because after the not-dream about the someone in the white hat, he goes looking for Clara, and finds her in her bedroom, in her flat, drowning in pillows and sleeping quite peacefully. There's a kind of idyll to her, hair tossed on the pillow, one bare leg peeping out from between the cushions and the twisted sheets. He eyes her and thinks of beauty and wonders in a sort of casual way if, at some time in the past, this would have made him spin around with his arms wide and shout at the sky. He has the uncomfortable and slightly bitter suspicion that, yes, probably.
But she wakes before he can pursue this thought any further, and she's clearly got past his habit of showing up when she least expects it, because she doesn't act as though this is anything out of the ordinary. He's not sure whether to be pleased with this— when he's lost the power to surprise someone, he's lost a lot of power, but on the other hand, it's so much more convenient when she doesn't spend five minutes chastising him for scaring her out of a year's growth and another three weeks making sarcastic references to his lack of respect for privacy— but in the end he decides to ignore it for the present and go straight to a description of his not-dream, but she's beaten him to the punch and is telling him about what she was dreaming about. Not, normally, the sort of thing he'd be interested in, except—
"White hat," she says, "she was wearing a white hat, and she knew you, Doctor. Not you now, of course, but you in the past. She knew you, and she had a message."
"A message," says the Doctor, and he doesn't grin, though he wants to. "And what did this message say?"
Clara's eyes are fixed on him, and she hesitates only a little.
"Come and find me," she says, softly.
The Doctor repeats, "A message," to himself, quietly, and, yes, he indulges in a bit of a smile. Then he holds his hand out to Clara, and helps her out of the bed. She stands on the cold hardwood floor in her bare feet, her toes curling up convulsively, and he wants to lift her up, he wants to make her hover, he wants to make her fly.
"Well, impossible girl," he says, "what. Do you make of that?"
"I think we should go and look for her," says Clara, which is exactly what he wants to hear, and this makes him want to smile more. Only he doesn't. Out of respect for Clara. Because it's dark out, and she's made too many references to shark's teeth lately for them all to be entirely coincidental. But he holds her hand in a gentle sort of way, in the sort of way that warms her down to her toes, and it's as good as being back in her cozy bed, it's better than flying.
They take off on a new adventure, and search for new things, and though he doesn't fling his arms wide and laugh at the sky at any point, he does— he does— reach for her while they're running. Just to make sure, just to make sure that she keeps up, that she isn't left behind. His hand folds around hers, so much larger, the fingers long and deceptively delicate, and she can feel his pulse pumping double-time, and she thinks, Clara Oswald thinks— you can love someone, even if you don't like them all the time.
All the times.
She feels that she has seen it all, that she has been in the middle of a churning history like a perfect storm, and she owes him so much, and she loves him, and if he doesn't stop smiling like that when they're being chased by what are basically flying monkeys, she is going to kill him, because she isn't sure what she's more afraid of: the screeching abominations that are chasing after her to eat her heart, or the terrifying man at her side who owns it.
The girl in the white hat doesn't kiss him, but Clara can tell that she wants to, which is almost worse. The two of them stand for a protracted moment in what is undoubtedly the longest embrace she has ever seen this Doctor engage in. Given his disapproval and outright rejection of hugging, she wonders he doesn't burst into flame.
She watches them for as long as she can stand, and then she wanders off.
He comes to find her, and the steely light in his steely eyes has transmuted into something that is soft, that glows from within quietly. She wonders if he would be spinning around with his arms spread wide, shouting at the sky, if this were another time, if he were someone else. No point in wondering. She ought to stop.
"Who is she then?" she wonders on, regardless.
"An old friend," says the Doctor, and he's looking down, and he says it with a quietness that she can feel; the thing about the Doctor, the Doctor with this face, is when he says someone is an old friend, Clara believes it. He has had friends from the beginning of the universe. Enemies, too. He is Gandalf.
"Okay," she says. "I'm not asking for details."
If she sounds a little disgruntled, it isn't because she's jealous. It's because she's disgruntled. A person can be disgruntled just for the sake of being disgruntled, they don't need ulterior motives.
"Clara," says the Doctor, and he looks up now, and his eyes fix on hers, and she stands absolutely still. "Do you know what this means, finding her? It means— I'm not alone. Not anymore."
And she knows what he means— didn't he tell her, when she told him about her dream, that it had to have been a Time Lord to be able to extend the message in that way? She was even paying attention at the time— but it makes her feel so terribly sad, so worthless, and she hates for anything to make her feel worthless. He shouldn't. He shouldn't have the right.
So she says, "I never thought you were," and she isn't petulant or disgruntled, she just wants him to know. She wants to remind him. What he means now is, I am not the last, but what she wants him to mean is, Now I have more. I have added to myself. I have me, and I have you, and now I have the other.
He watches her for long enough that she gives up and turns away. Only when her back is to him and everything she fears does he speak, does he say, "Clara."
She doesn't move.
"Clara."
He takes her hand.
"There's lots of room in the Tardis," he says, and his voice is the warmest she's heard it in ages, in aeons, in forever. It is the warmest it has ever been. "Time Lord technology. Bigger on the inside. You may have noticed."
And he smiles, too, and there's a kind crinkling around his eyes that she never noticed before, she was always too focused on the sharpness of his teeth, but the kind crinkling around his eyes, she thinks, is something she likes. She thinks, it is something a girl could get used to.
She does him a favor, because she loves him.
She never says, I miss you.
He's right there, after all. He's been there the whole time.
She does buy him a kilt, though, and though it's mostly a joke, he stands staring down at the cloth for long enough, brow furrowed, that it makes her worry if he's somehow working out how to turn the innocent tartan— inasmuch as a loud plaid can ever really be innocent— into a weapon of some kind, to strangle her with.
All he says, though, eventually, is, "What'm I supposed to wear underneath?"
And it takes all she has to shrug, deadpan, and tell him it's up to him to find out, and when two days later he appears, all casual, in her living room and flings himself gracefully onto her sofa, and she opens her mouth to ask him what he decided, and then gets a good enough glimpse to know that he has found out and that he has decided to go with historical accuracy.
So then that happens.
He strolls round to her place one evening, and stands in her doorway with his hands in his pockets, jacket dramatically flung back to display the red lining, as though he's posing for a picture.
"Romana's been captured," he says, drawing this out, "by giant, sentient snails."
Clara only looks at him for a moment, and eventually he shrugs.
"It was inevitable," he says, and refuses to elucidate.
"Fine," says Clara, "alright, just let me put my shoes on."
He watches her. He doesn't smile.
"You're ready for this?" he asks her, softly. She catches his eyes, and she doesn't back down.
"Always," she says.
They ride off into the sunset, then. She's never minded the dark.