She was falling, falling through the time stream. Bright flashes of color flew past her as she fell, leaving streaks on her retinas and forcing her to close her eyes against the onslaught of images.

I don't know where I am.

Clara could feel memories consume her – wave after wave of images, now inside her head, depicting various points throughout his time stream that she now remembered living through and remembered dying through. She saw all his faces before the one she had gotten to know – the real her, unless they were all real? The original recipe, she reminded herself. The original. But just a recipe. Not the souffles.

I just know I'm running.

She caught a glimpse of the TARDIS before it was a snog box, experienced herself warning him time and time again of impending doom before taking the fall herself. He never seemed to notice her. Not even when she yelled his name at the top of her lungs, longing for him to just hear her, to realize her existence. Just to show a sign of recognition. Even if she didn't know why she always seemed to know him.

And then she would die, be killed, kick the bucket, cease to live. Again and again and again.

Sometimes it's like I've lived a thousand lives in a thousand places. I'm born, I live...

She caught glimpses of past lives, of herself in thousands of mirrors, each scene different. A tsunami of remembered families, childhoods, lives. Love and loss and joy and pain and so, so many people she knew and yet didn't know at all. They were only echoes, as River Song had said she would be. Just impressions with no form or figure or substance. Just existing and nothing more. Her mother died, they stood at her tombstone, everything seemed to end.

I die.

Hung for being a witch, stabbed in a mugging and bleeding to death, pushing a man out of the way of oncoming traffic and taking the blow herself. Choking on smoke in a fire, getting electrocuted by a damaged transformer. Torture and pain and death. Burning up in Pompeii. Her body forced to move though she had no control, her mind trapped in metal where she should have no feeling, but it hurts and she is afraid. Falling, falling from a cloud to land on shattered pieces of ice. Sent back to the past again and again whenever she tried to escape, distracting the stone statues when she realized they wouldn't move when looked at, trying to save the others she could hear wandering into the building. Choking to death on poisonous gases that came from the cars. Standing with so many others in a frightened bunch, only to have her atoms stretched far and wide across the universe by a bright light. Crashing into a planet populated by frightening metal monsters that took her and trapped her and made her into one of them, but fighting and fighting against it. "I am human. I am human." Burnt alive by the rays of an expanding sun. Saved to the hard drive of a computer in the largest library she had ever seen, saved and rescued and teleported away. Consumed by flames in the centre of the TARDIS.

And always, there's the Doctor. Always I'm running to save the Doctor. Again and again and again.

And with the memories came those that stood out most prominently – chasing after a man driving off in a yellow car, with a ridiculously long scarf, with a stick of celery poking out of his pocket, with blindingly mismatched clothes, with a leather jacket and large ears, with spiky hair and a suit, and, finally, the one she had gotten to know. Her bow-tie loving Chin-boy who had shown her the stars. Yelling his name again and again, only heard a few times.

And he hardly ever hears me. But I've always been there. Right from the very beginning. Right from the day he started running.

Getting him to choose the right TARDIS and keeping him from making the biggest mistake of his life, distracting various monsters, lowering the shields on the Dalek Asylum and erasing every trace of the Doctor from records, racing to save the children and Jenny and Vastra and Strax, creeping through an old, creaky house with only candlelight for company, hacking into the internet and disappearing herself, seeing a large tome and opening it to a page depicting the time war, seeing glimpses of burnt and mutilated figures running through the TARDIS corridors, turning to see the TARDIS disappearing behind her, crouching next to a glowing crack in a wall...

Run, you clever boy. And remember me.

Clara, the Impossible Girl, the Woman Twice-Dead, Souffle Girl.

"She's not possible."

"Clara. Oswin. Oswald."

The falling-through-the-timestream scene just sort of ran into me and shoved a wad of inspiration down my throat, leading to this little beauty...

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As always, thanks for reading. :)