Sometimes, if she focused long enough, she could hear them.
And other times; even when she wasn't waiting, or listening, or even thinking about them, they would arise, slowly, one by one or all at once – and those were the worst times.
She expected to get use to it, to be able to wake up with a thousand hands touching her body; or more so at the echo of touch – the burning, spiraling sensation left by a palm and fingers - but it was still nothing more than an echo by the time her eyelids opened. She expected that one day, she would open her eyes and feel nothing be ease and comfort at those touches, and be thankful for them as they faded away into the morning's light.
She expected to come to terms with the sharp, spurt of fear that came with waking up with a burning mind – engulfed in so many memories; in so many lives, in voices of the past and future all of faceless lovers, distant and up close children; important and unimportant parents, of the people she could have known but never did and of those she did know well.
But she never did – she never got used to it; to the lives that loomed over her shoulder like the surrounding air; slowly becoming mandatory for her survival. And yet, those lives weighed down her footsteps and turned every small step into a run that went on for miles.
She never got used to waking up with a gasp on her lips, and sweat soaked flesh. She never got used to the slow, aching feeling of that heat being pulled away by reality. She did however, get used to the feeling – to the distinct taste of agony – which engulfed her and sucked her under; deeper into the ocean of turmoil, when she rolled over, curling in on herself, and weeping softly for the long dead, faceless, lives of the people she once knew and met, and would.
She got used to harboring it alone. She adjusted to plastering a smile on her face and letting the light – which now just seemed dull and dusty, colorless above all else – back into her eyes, to play nothing but a false façade. She came to live by telling lies and doubting truths. She adapted to the feeling of crawling around in her own skin, shaking with unadulterated fear, which never seemed to have a source. She thrived in tear stained pillow cases, and cold unmade beds.
So of course, it was a surprise when the possibility of letting someone in, letting someone know, came to honest light.
It'd been a Tuesday, which was slowly draining into Thursday (because that's how her days worked, leaping around and swimming in the fluidity of time). She'd woken up with humming lips, slick skin – all familiar - but the plaster of blood on her neck and chest; seeping into the top her thighs, curling around her ankles, was new.
Along with the way it felt to wake up expecting to find bundles of horrified children in her arms, and finding nothing, to know how it felt to take a final breathe in the most horrid way; and that before this her husband and best friend, her godchildren, were already dead – was also certainly new.
She'd been laying there, floating around and trying to grab on – to disperse the feeling of the blood slowly smearing into her skin and attaching to her clothes in ways that shouldn't be possible. She'd try to tell herself this wasn't real, that it wasn't, couldn't be real – but had fallen into the mixture of belief and darkness, that she wasn't real, and that only led to her falling further down. Somewhere amongst her stumbling, and agony, the first real thing smashed into her – directly into the side of her head; shaking her fiercely enough so that she could grab a hand hold before she hit the bottom of this eternal pit.
A shout from outside – from somewhere. She'd gone as far as to open her mouth to give a reply; but nothing ever came. She couldn't recall how to speak. And so in her silence, the next blow came. The door snapped open – flooding her little cocoon of darkness with large, dull glowing lights, different shades of blue and green painted silhouettes in the distance - and smashed against the wall. But the defining sound of the boom it made was blocked by the approaching footsteps, the increasingly louder rustling of fabric as he ran – and the frantic, solid tone of his voice.
She blinked; her eyes stung, and suddenly he was there, a blurry form of colors, shapes, tones and hues hovering thousands of miles above her. She blinked again, and he blinked back. He was trying to speak – he was speaking - but she'd forgotten how to hear, how to listen.
"Clara." He'd hissed in a pleading, sorrow glazed tone; and just like that, she remembered.
Life returned the same moment those vibrating lips started to hum. A hum that grew into a quake; an anguished wail, sharp and pure. Broken not even by her movements – the shove to sit upright, the kicks and flails to remove the blankets that had twisted and wrapped themselves around her form; not even by the flailing of her hands – so desperate for something to hold, and so broken when they found nothing.
He'd started speaking by then, shoveled out words and drawn out sentences. Even though she had remembered how, she chose not to listen to them.
She was still drunk on the dying, choking sounds of her children – on knowing that as some gagged on their own blood that others swallowed down final breaths which were nothing but smoke.
She'd gone with a little of both in the end, more so dragging out her last drops of life so that she could trickle out a few more tears from her eyes.
But despite her wailing, despite the sobs shaking her form and all the weeping she was doing; the sting of fingers which had curled too tightly against the bottom of her palms; she didn't feel alive, she still felt dead. Depleted, like she was still run dry without a single drop left.
Maybe she was.
He was still there – a blurry idea of something, of a distant friend. Now nothing more than a diluted poisoned thought – shaking her. Grabbing her shoulders and repeating words which met nothing to her ears, simply the ringing noise of the echo after bomb dies. He shakes her again when he realizes that his specific ringing has no meaning.
Eventually, he stops shaking her, and just falls; joining her on the murky bottom of it all.
He fell against her, into the vast endless space of her glowing cocoon, created by tangled bed sheets and tear stained pillow cases. He held her against him. She blinked and said nothing. He did the same. She felt nothing and continued waiting, wondering if perhaps, he was Death (going along with her previous, now seeming very real, theory about still being dead). Wondered if this is how it would be from now on, forever laying in his embrace; for all of eternity. She wondered if she should feel safe, if she should feel like she could rest (it was Death, after all) – or if she should just be tired.
She figured she must be doing something right, because she certainly was.
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Relief – even if it is yours, or not your own; instead that of someone close – has a very distinct taste.
Relief can be sweet, sometimes pure or just brimming happiness, the touch of a possibility of freedom and hope.
It's also the chaste feeling of knowing you get to live another day, or that the weight of your burdens has finally been lifted. But what she felt, waking up slowly in his embrace was something that traveled far higher than any form of relief, it sailed above the clouds and drifted along the stars.
"Doctor," She whispers; speaking truly for the first time after so many months - years. And while the information hovers in the back of her mind, just how many descriptives this name truly has and all the ones that revolved around her – they are sweetly unimportant.
She knows now that the only one she has to focus on is the one before her.
Not the man who saved her life in another body, nor the one who took it. Not the one who used the title as an excuse to mutilate those around her; not the thousands of others in that profession she had known.
She got to focus on this one, on this doctor – her doctor. For she was his as well; she'd been the one to save him, and he'd been the first one to return the favor. That rose above it all, and it was also new.
He stirred slightly – his eyelids peeling back to revealing stormy eyes, chipped with gray around the edges of his irises, but a deep, swirling mixture of blue and green danced around his small, seemingly tiny pupils.
He blinked and stared down at her. Snapping back and away a few seconds after eye contact was made, only to swoop forward again after the space had just been created. Without warning he was moving. A hug led to being pressed underneath him – not that it mattered - she was too busy focusing on the frantic flickering of his eyes across her face.
"Clara." He sighed. His voice was still stripped – but it didn't hold that same tone it had sometime in the past; instead it was gentler, softer. Calmer.
She swallowed; and the information had slipped away, she'd climbed back into her skin, and was comfortable within it. The voices and names and images weren't pressing down against her. They were not looming in her very first few minutes of waking, demanding she look at them and remember them.
They were gone.
But the tears at the edges of her eyes were still present, and leaked out when she spoke.
"Doctor," She repeated; swallowing down the cotton ball snuggled within the columns of her throat, and continued. "Thank you."
His eyes shimmered with tears; and the smile that graced across his lips, despite it threatening to rip his face in two; was more beautiful and bright than any sunrise she had ever seen – out of all her lives combined.