The Marriage of True Minds
By Laura Schiller
Based on: Doctor Who
Copyright: BBC
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
"You alright, Clara?" asked Jenny, hearing a sigh emanate from the opposite corner of the room. Clara, giving up all pretense of reading the latest Sherlock Holmes novel in her hands, lowered it face-down and looked up from her armchair with a wry little smile.
"Just thinking."
"What about, may I ask?"
Clara's eyes flicked to the arched wicker chair that was Madame Vastra's special property, empty tonight due to the lady's singular – and messy - way of combining justice and pleasure down in the larder. Jenny sometimes wondered how such filthy creatures as their latest culprit didn't make her wife ill; but then, Silurians were blessed with stronger stomachs, after all.
"I think Vastra was right."
"Of course she was, drat her," said Jenny, with fond exasperation. Clara laughed. "What specifically was she right about this time?"
"Oh, about me. Among other things. No wonder I shouted at her. Nothing worse than hearing someone prove to you how shallow you can be."
She spoke lightly, as always, but her round cheeks were pink with genuine shame. Jenny felt sorry for her; she knew exactly how it felt to be on the wrong side of one of Vastra's judgments, however astute they were. It happened rarely, but it never failed to leave a mark.
"Well, there you go, Clara," she said briskly, focusing on the needle and thread in her own hands. "You're not shallow. If you were, you wouldn't fret about it, would you now? She knows that too, or she'd never have taken off her veil."
Clara sighed again. "Thanks, Jenny. I'm glad you think so. Both of you, I mean." She looked anything but glad, however, as she absently stroked the cover of her book and stared into the fire.
"But … ?" Jenny prompted.
"But I do miss my Doctor!"
It burst from her like rain from a thundercloud. She snapped the book shut, placed it on a nearby table (carefully, since even now, the teacher in her had a reverence for these future classics) and began pacing back and forth as energetically as her corset and crinolines would allow.
"I may not have had any pin-ups besides that stone bust of Marcus Aurelius, but I'm not made of stone myself! I miss his smile, and the way his hair flopped into his face, the way he used to spin around, and his bow ties and that purple jacket and, God, that giant chin I used to make fun of every time we met! I miss him calling me "my Clara", and holding my hand when we ran, and yes, I admit it, okay, I did flirt with the mountain range. And you know what? He flirted back."
Clara took a deep breath, her face red, even the curls Jenny had ironed in herself dancing with intensity. Part of her was touched with sympathy; the other secretly glad Vastra wasn't in the room. Such passion was the surest way to turn her mistress' head.
"We never did anything about it – or even said anything – because again, Vastra's right, it would never have worked. But that's what hurts the most, if you can believe it. If we were together, I think it would be easier to see past the wrinkles and gray hair. The way normal couples do, you know? Only … faster." She shook her head over the absurdity of what she had just said. "Or not. Who knows? But this way, it's like I lost something I never had. D'you understand what I'm talking about?"
Jenny did. Often as a little girl, curled up in bed after one of her father's beatings, she would sob into her pillow not with present pain, but with imagining the love and kindness she might have known. She nodded soberly, put her mending aside, and stood to interrupt Clara's restless pacing by putting both hands on her silk-clad shoulders.
"Believe me, Clara dear, I do."
Though they were the same age, she felt almost motherly toward the smaller girl as she drew her into an embrace.
"You people from the future," she said gently, wiping Clara's tears away with one hand and smoothing her curls with the other. "You've got the oddest ways when it comes to bodies. Remember the to-do we had over choosing this gown? Fancy anyone as skinny as you are afraid of looking fat! Sometimes I do believe if you took as much care for your souls as you do for your flesh, why, you'd make your twenty-first century a Heaven on Earth!"
Clara let out a disbelieving snort.
"Sorry," she said, ducking her head at the look on Jenny's face. "It's just … that's the first time since we met that you sound really Victorian."
"Victorian or not, whatever that means, it's true. I understand you're made of flesh and blood, like all of us. I know you loved him. But listen … you asked me the other day how I'd feel if Vastra changed like the Doctor. Well, I honestly don't know. About the same as you, I suppose. But she'd still be my own Vastra underneath it all, and I like to think I'd love her just the same. And if she changed so much as to … as to not want me for a wife, I'd be her friend, her junior detective, even her real maid, whatever she wanted. She drives me stark mad sometimes, but that's the way it is."
Jenny thought of that infuriating trick her wife had played a few days ago, making her pose for a painting which turned out to be a map for the dinosaur case. Art, indeed! Knowing that Vastra did these things to rile her up on purpose, as a sort of Silurian warrior's form of foreplay, hadn't helped much. Vastra's neck massage, however, had, and so had her heartfelt promise never to make a statue of Jenny again.
She had learned so much about love in these past years. The least she could do was give poor Clara some of her advice.
"Could you?" Clara breathed, hope and anxiety blended in her face. "Could you really?"
"Listen, Clara. Forget the Doctor's bodies, Clara, old or new, and think of what he's done. Who was it stopped that half-faced man yesterday? Who was it took another death on his own suffering conscience just to keep us safe? Can't you love that man still, with a love that's all the better for being pure?"
Clara's eyes widened. A faraway look came over her, as if she were back inside the basement of Mancini's Family Restaurant. She stretched out her left hand behind her, as if expecting someone else to take it, then slowly drew it back and clasped it in her right.
"He had my back," she whispered. "Like he always did."
"Indeed," Jenny nodded, understanding the spirit, if not the letter of the futuristic phrase. "And always will, my dear. He will return for you, I promise."
Clara nodded slowly, the doubts in the knot between her eyebrows smoothing out into a calm, radiant faith.
"I'll ask Strax about my regular clothes," she said, "Just in case."
"Fair warning, though: if they're shrunk to puppy-size or dyed the color of sewage, please don't ask him how it happened."
Clara threw back her head and laughed out loud, for what must have been the first time in weeks. "I definitely won't."