Startled by the wave of meowing that greeted her, Clara slammed the door of the Tardis shut, and backed away slowly. "Um, Doctor?" she asked the last Time Lord, who was absently fiddling with buttons on the console. "Where are we?"
"A cat adoption centre, obviously," the Doctor said with a shrug. "Go pick one out."
Clara stared at him, then broke to a huge grin. "Seriously? I can have a cat? On the Tardis?" she clarified.
"Looks like it, doesn't it?" the Doctor said grumpily. "No, not the hugging!" he cried, fending off Clara's attempt.
"Wait," Clara said, suddenly suspicious. "Are these proper cats? Twenty-first century Earth cats? This isn't a mutant alien cat adoption centre, is it?"
The Doctor sighed in exasperation, and walked over to the door. He threw it open dramatically. "Cats. Earth. London. 2015-ish I can't tell you that they aren't mutant aliens, because cats actually are mutant aliens, but yes, proper cats. Do you want one or not?"
"Do you want to come with me to pick it out?" Clara asked, giddy.
The Doctor looked at her, aghast. "No! Why would I want to do that?"
Clara shrugged, and then skipped out the door. "Your loss," she called over her shoulder.
"Make sure it is a good one," he shouted after her.
"I'm going to name him Blue," Clara said, balancing the case on the top of the console. Blue was a fluffy white kitten, with long hair and blue eyes.
"No no no!" the Doctor cried, waving his hands. "Rule one: no cats on the console." Clara undid the latch on the case and pulled Blue out, rubbing her face in his silky fur. Blue looked regally around the room, unimpressed that it was bigger on the inside. She offered him to the Doctor, who backed away in distaste. "Rule two: no touching the Doctor. I'm the Doctor."
"Yes, I know," Clara said, rolling her eyes.
"I was talking to the cat."
"Of course you were. Because naturally, you speak cat."
"Of course I do. But mostly, cats are telepathic. He likes the name Blue, by the way. His real name isn't something you could pronounce-sort of a cross between a sneeze and hacking up a hairball. But he says Blue will do nicely. Rule Three," the Doctor said, going back to addressing he cat, "no leaving the Tardis. If you get left behind, I am not coming back for you. Rule Four, no getting hair on things. Rule five ... when I think of more rules, I'll let you know."
The cat yawned.
Clara was dozing in the library when the Doctor's shout woke her.
"Hrrmh?" she called back, inarticulately.
"Clara, come here!" he yelled. Clara leapt up, heart racing, propelled by the panic in his voice. She skidded around the corner into the console room, expecting to find him crushed by a piece of equipment, or the room engulfed in fire. Instead, he was standing unnaturally still on the second floor, pressed up against the railing.
"Are you okay?" she cried, bounding up the stairs.
"Of course I'm not okay! That thing is in my chair!"
Clara reached down and stroked the napping cat, who let out a booming purr of appreciation and stretched luxuriously across the length of the Doctor's chair, poking his back claws into the leather. Clara wordlessly punched the Doctor in the shoulder, hard, as she walked back down the staircase
"Ow," he complained, and turned a withering glare on the cat. "Rule 14: no sitting on my chair."
"Rule 947: do not bring dead mice onto the Tardis."
"Rule 948: do not bring a live mouse onto the Tardis to toy with, and then let it escape."
Blue watched stoically as the Tardis dematerialized in front of his nose. He ignored the clambering behind him with careful determination, and cleaned his paws with an air of boredom. The mud on this planet was most tiresome.
The clambering got louder. Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate the Doctor's companion!
The Tardis suddenly rematerialized, and a long-fingered hand shot out and grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck before hauling him unceremoniously inside. Blue yowled his displeasure at his treatment as Dalek lasers glanced off the timeship.
"For Gods' sake, Blue!" the Doctor shouted as the door slammed shut, and the Tardis vanished again.
Clara wasn't sure when or how, but the Doctor had finally managed to slip a collar over Blue's neck. Tardis blue, of course, with a bell, and a gold tag. Blue, it said on the front. And on the back, the Tardis's phone number.
The Doctor pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm sorry, can you say that again?" he asked. The Chief Shama'an of the Risek shook his tail spear at the Doctor. Which may have been threatening, had the Shama'an been more than a foot tall.
"One of your crew has violated the purity of the princess!" the Shama'an cried, pacing on his paws. "Reparations must be made!"
"That is really, really quite impossible," the a Doctor said. "Clara isn't the sort. And I don't like it when people, beings, or Risek touch me. So it wasn't ..." the Doctor trailed off as Blue sashayed by in a very satisfied manner.
"Right," the Doctor said with a sigh. "What kind of payment did you say would restore her honor?"
"Clara," the Doctor said gently, "can you wake up?" She didn't want to. It hurt out there. "Clara," he said, more insistent. Clara groaned and opened her eyes. She was tucked into her bed on the Tardis. The Doctor was kneeling beside her. He gently brushed her hair off her forehead, his worried eyes assessing her. "How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Bad," she admitted. "What happened?"
"You took a hard fall into some rocks," he answered softly. "You've been unconscious for a while. On the mend, though." Clara tried to sit up, but the Doctor gently stopped her. Blue, who was apparently the warm heavy thing lying across her stomach, cracked an eye in protest. "Rest," the Doctor said. He stroked Blue's head, and Blue began to purr. The cat's soft rumble washed through her body and immediately made her feel better.
"Cat purrs are sonic," the Doctor murmured. "They have a frequency that encourages healing and relaxation. He'll stay with you."
"You too," Clara mumbled as darkness took her again.
"Yes, me too."
It was a bleary sort of morning on the Tardis. They'd spent three days negotiating a peace treaty between the Mers and the Fish People, and it had taken a lot of swimming. Clara had stripped off her wetsuit and rebreather as she walked across the console room, dropping them as she went, too exhausted to care. The Doctor threw the dematerialization circuit and parked them in the vortex before pulling his own wetsuit over his head and following her to bed.
Unusually, she woke before him, and was cooking eggs and toast when he stumbled into the kitchen, his sea-salt crusted silver hair sticking up wildly. Clara vaguely noted that she needed to give him a haircut. She poked a mug of coffee at him, which he took wordlessly, propping his elbows on the sideboard.
The sudden groan of the time rotors snapped them both out of their lethargy. They shared a gaze of panic before dashing down the hall toward the console room. Clara, who was a step behind, plowed into the Doctor's back as he jerked to a halt, his shoulders shaking. It took her a moment to realize that he was laughing. Clara shoved him aside to peer around him.
Blue was standing on the console, kneading the telepathic circuits with his paws. A moment later, the Tardis came to a thumping halt.
"Where are we?" Clara asked, a little awed.
The Doctor, still chuckling, grabbed the screen, and then laughed aloud again. "Alaska. At a salmon packing factory. Careful when you go out there with Blue, the smell will be spectacular."
Clara had been living full time on the Tardis for nearly a year. She'd taken the Doctor's hand that Christmas Eve, and hadn't looked back. Somewhere, her Dad, and Gran, and Linda were waiting to have Christmas Day with her, but she couldn't face them. Somewhere, her students were waiting for her to come back and teach them Shakespeare and poetry, but she didn't want to. Somewhere, she had a flat, and friends, and a life on Earth, and Clara honestly didn't know if she'd ever go back to any of them.
Sometimes she felt a clock ticking. One year away, and she could probably walk back into her paused life and pretend she'd never been gone. But what if it was three years, or five, or ten? Her hair might be grayer. She might not remember what she had bought anyone for Christmas, or the names of the children who had left on break a few days (years) before. She wouldn't (couldn't) be the same girl who'd run away for good on Christmas Eve.
The longer she stayed away, the harder it was to return. And the harder it was to want to return. Yet, the guilt lurked too. She had visions of stopping by for a last Christmas with her family on the same morning she'd left, looking older than her Gran. Or of never returning at all. She had a few letters prepared in case of that, but she wasn't sure whether the Doctor would be in any state to deliver them.
The Doctor was another problem, because she knew that he loved her. From the Doctor's perspective, she had been in and out of his life for nearly a thousand years, which was longer than anyone, ever. She also had a feeling that when they had traveled only on Wednesdays, he had waited as long as he could bear before returning to her. A week for her, but a month or a year or a decade for him, stretching the short years of her life to fill his long ones, hoarding her heartbeats. But now that she lived with him full time, she sometimes caught him staring at her in grief. How ephemeral she must seem to him!
His life was eternal, and hers was so terribly short. Living with him full time merely accelerated the process. She'd been part of his life for a millennium, but even if she spent the rest of her days with him, sixty years would pass in a flash, a blink, and she'd leave him alone. She sometimes tried to tell herself that she was being far too egocentric, that he would be fine and move on, but she knew better. He didn't speak of them, those he had loved and lost, but they weighed heavy in his hearts.
Clara had been eight years old when her first cat had died. She'd wept in her mother's lap while mum had stroked her hair. 'Oh, my love,' she'd said, 'this is the price we pay for sharing our lives with them.'
Being the cat in the Doctor's eternity was disconcerting. Even more so, since he had recently admitted to her that he was functionally immortal. He'd tried to tell her once, on the Moon: 'You'll have to spend a lot of time shooting me, because I will keep on regenerating," he'd told the astronauts. "In fact, I'm not entirely sure if I won't keep on regenerating forever,' he'd continued, giving Clara a significant glance. She hadn't been in the mood for listening, then, or for a long time afterward.
He'd been more straightforward later, one evening on the Tardis after a bad day of running. She'd yelled at him for risking his life. He'd stomped away, but then turned back, and quietly told her what the Time Lords had done to him. They'd hedged their bets, doubting that he could rescue them from their pocket universe in one twelve-life cycle. And so they had granted him the terrible immortality of unlimited regenerations, and taken away his ability to choose to die. Unless something killed him while he was regenerating, he would have to live every second of the universe, every moment that ever was or would be.
It was horrible.
Clara had half-joked that he needed to be careful not to die falling into a black hole or in the burning heart of a star, lest he get caught in a loop of constant death and regeneration. He'd blanched at that, and muttered something about having to rescue a 'Jack' from that a time or two.
His new immortality also explained the touch aversion that had puzzled Clara in the beginning, a reaction so different from his earlier self. A Time Lord was bigger on the inside, but he was brimming with the energy of unlimited lives. It burned and pressed and itched in the back of his mind and under his skin. It made him cranky and irritable, and terribly sensitive to a hand on his arm or a hug around his neck. And it was a constant, never ending reminder from the Time Lords: find us, find us, find us. That he accepted her hugs and touches at all was a testament to how much he loved her.
She sometimes wondered if she should insist on going back to their weekly trips, for his sake, but couldn't bring herself to ask. They had the same mad adventures as before, only now, instead of dashing back to her real life, they lived the small moments together too.
He'd blast horrible 28th century punk music while fiddling with the Tardis, and just grin at her when she yelled at him at stop. She'd read in the garden, which she hadn't even realized was there until he shyly showed it to her. He'd make her coffee each morning from one of 157 varieties of beans he kept in a kitchen dedicated solely to the art of coffee. She'd throw his wet towel in the Tardis laundry, because he never, ever remembered to pick it up. He'd sigh dramatically and pull her head into his lap whenever she had a migraine, and then soothe it away with some sort of telepathic massage that left her so boneless he usually had to carry her to bed. She'd talk him into joining her in the hot tub, instead of breaking his fists on the walls, whenever a day went badly. He'd give her five minutes each day to mourn Danny, without comment or criticism, and hug her afterwards. She'd give him the distance he needed when he sat atop the Tardis in the vacuum of space, trusting the Tardis to keep him alive while his alien mind spun in the wild currents of time, and force tea into his shaking hands when he returned to himself.
He'd given her permission to own a cat, because he wanted her to feel at home. And when she found him asleep in the console room with their cat on his lap, she was.
Notes: inspired by Clara's wish in Last Christmas that dream-Danny would let her have a cat.