Summary: It's an impossible choice left to a teenager, an astronaut, and a school teacher. Clara gets it wrong. (AU Kill the Moon)
Of course, I do not own Doctor Who.
Man on the moon
She wakes up drowning in sweat and twisted bed sheets, the scent of iron still coating her nose and tongue. The taste makes her gag, but only a wet cough breaks the silence, and she thinks of a red well lapping at the insides of her throat, flesh instead of stone.
Danny is still sleeping right beside her, snoring lightly into his pillow. Didn't wake him, then. But she's noticed that her dreams are usually more subdued when she's sleeping next to him. She supposes that his presence calms her at night. Mindful of her movements in the dark, she slips out of the bed, leaving Danny undisturbed in his slumber.
She has to move gingerly as she makes her way to the living room. It's because of the burns, and what the Doctor called "sudden temporal displacement shock" or something of the sort. Funny, how she can't remember his exact words, but the look on his face as he said it will always be seared into her memory. Those thick attack eyebrows were practically standing on end, his eyes gleaming out at her from beneath their hooded brow, and the emotions she saw…
-there was a beginning light, brighter than any star she'd ever seen, and a force came blasting out of it, both pushing and pulling, her atoms caught up in the eddies of a shifting far bigger than herself, and she screamed as she clung onto Courtney, pulling the girl back, screamed so hard and so loud that she heard herself going through and around, meeting her voice on the other side of a white tunnel where there was no air-
…she does not think she can put a name to the mixture, to say the least.
He gave her something for the burns, a salve product produced on a planet with no sun, ironically, and said the temporal shock would wear off on its own. Then it was just to the simple task of hypnotizing Courtney, and he sent them on their way. Told her before he shut the door to not strain herself excessively and then he was gone with a whoosh of the engines engaging, leaves blowing a whirlpool in his wake. She'd stared at the empty space in front of her and wondered how it was that something could disappear so suddenly from existence, barely leaving a trace.
She hasn't seen him since.
It's probably for the best, she decides as she pulls the blanket from the back of the couch and into a bundle in her arms. Seeing him now would not be any easier. Especially since the elapsed time has finally let it sink in. How easy it was in that moment, to forget what she was doing, to say it was for her children, as of yet unborn, un-existing. Difficult, but so easy, to turn dark like the world.
(Only later did it occur to her, after the engines faded to silence and the sun set, when she looked up into the blue that night and saw it hanging there, bloodless and silent, a corpse from futures' past. Only then did the wound begin to burn, which no salve could possibly alleviate. A child, dead. Another child, who cannot remember. And her hands. Her hands-)
-Let go of me, Ms, we have to save the-
He said the shock would go away on its own; all she had to do was wait it out and not strain herself excessively. He said it, so she believes him.
We kill the things we cannot hear scream, her mother told her once, as they sat in the kitchen making a soufflé and there was an egg in Clara's hand, shell pale and delicate, poised over the rim of the mixing bowl, and quickly, now, crack it sharply, split it cleanly the first time, Ellie reminded her, this might have been life.
Might have been. It's an unfertilized egg, but the lesson stands. It might have been, treat it reverently, don't be wasteful.
Ellie's words were always wise. Clara has never hated her mother so much.
-"Goodnight Earth," she said, and hoped and hoped that the Doctor would come back to her, that the blackness was not so dead after all, and repeated in her memory that we don't walk away, but that was another lie, another life, another lifetime ago, and the air stayed silent and the Earth faded into night, so quietly-
(Man on the moon, glaring down from his death-cold sullen perch, watching a planet filled with humans that he so loves and hates – he can sit up there for all eternity, she says, and I won't care. No, I won't care at all -)
But sometimes, between lapses of self-control, she catches herself listening in an absentminded way for that impossible ship, expecting to find it wedged into the middle of her living room as she comes home from a long day at school. But he hasn't popped back up into her life yet. It's just been Danny, the school, and her.
She thinks it might just stay like that.
And if she's honest with herself, she'd be happy if it did. (And if she's very honest with herself, she would be miserable.)
But how about the truth?
The truth. Funny word, that. She hasn't used it in a while.
(The truth would be: She doesn't know. Doesn't know the feelings that are swirling together in her gut, doesn't know if it was the easy or the hard decision she made that brought her here. All she knows is that for the first time in her life the universe does not seem so boundless and impossible. Lundvik was half-right when she said that everything out beyond the blackness was dead; it just simply doesn't care. What lives and what dies are immaterial to it, bargains are not accepted, and the Doctor wasn't there, even though he promised-)
He said the shock would go away on its own; all she had to do was wait it out and not strain herself excessively. He said it, so she believes him.
He's said a lot of things.
The silence groans out around her as she hunkers down into the nest she created on the couch. Sucking a steadying breath in through her nose, she resolves to not fall asleep again. The flashes of red on white and a single child crying out into the vacuum of space while millions more rejoice are sure to haunt her dreams. She cannot close her eyes. Instead, she watches the pitted, imperfect orb float outside her window. The glow sears into her retinas - burns - until the sting resolves into tears, and sitting there in her blankets on the couch, with water making marks down her face, she begins to visualize another world : a place where the year is 2049, and a big friendly reset button is resting in the cup of her hands. (What a wonderful, painful thing, imagination.)
The earth is dark and the moon is covered in blood. Clara cannot sleep.