The Oncoming Storm.

Earth is suffering the ravages of the worst storm in recorded history and Clara suspects an extra-terrestrial reason. But if it's something alien what's it got to do with the Doctor and can Clara come to terms with her own personal tempest of feelings when the Time Lord crashes back into her life?

It's Whouffaldi at heart. With some plot.

M rating for last chapter, the rest is more innocent.

A/N I live in Scotland. It was stormy when I started this fic. It triggered a few ideas

It was all over the news and had been for days. Clara curled on one end of the sofa with her tea and watched the endless coverage with a curious expression. It didn't seem right somehow. Of course after her various experiences of things being not right in the last few years she did have a fairly low threshold for suspicion, but even so the extreme weather conditions took some explaining.

On the TV in front of her was coverage from all over the country, in fact all over the world. In Africa the sun blazed down hotter than records had ever recorded. In India and Pakistan huge floods had wrecked massive swathes of landscape and left thousands homeless. In South America violent lightning storms set fire to rainforests. Everywhere had its problems, and London? Well London seemed to be getting a bit of everything. For nearly a week now rain had poured, sleet had frozen and snow had fallen. It defrosted and froze again making roads treacherous. The wind whipped round her block of flats and howled across open spaces picking up bins and benches and hurling them across the grass outside her home. Car alarms went off all night and the power flickered. She was amazed she had lights and heat at all.

Weird weather. The Met Office broadcast excitedly over the course of each day as records were smashed and gales blew harder than ever before. Newsreaders cut to reporters standing knee deep in water, rain lashing their faces as they showed pictures of flooded streets and torn up trees. Clara could remember a few bad winters in her time but this went far beyond that. She sipped her tea and pulled a blanket over her knees glad she didn't have to go outside. She'd stocked up well, the schools were all off and she had no pressing reason to leave the flat. Even if there was a flood she could sit up there quite comfortably, unless it was a flood of biblical proportions she supposed in which case she'd have to ring the Doctor and see if he could beam her out of there in his TARDIS.

The Doctor. She guessed he would still make the long trip to save her if she was drowning in her bedroom, he was still her friend, but she almost didn't like to ask. For all she knew he was fighting off hordes of aliens attacking Gallifrey or cruising the galaxy with a new companion. Clara's heart gave a little grumble and stabbed at her chest. A new companion. She wouldn't blame him, things were so complex between them over the last year what with him changing and Danny and then the lying, not that he knew about her biggest and last lie to him. No, it would do him good to have someone new in tow, someone who just wanted to go on adventures and see planets and didn't get emotionally torn between doing that and having a boyfriend and a job. She totally got it. But it still hurt a bit to think of him standing at the TARDIS doors pointing out stars to someone new. Or sitting having coffee from a flask looking down over earth. Or…

Stop that. You let him go for a reason. He's home, he's happy. Let it be.

She looked back at the TV to the image of gigantic trees in America being ripped up by their roots and cast into the sea miles away. Definitely weird. Definitely a slight sense of panic to the newscaster's voice now. The storms had been expected to settle in a few days not get worse. It was like an alien force was…

Stop it with the aliens. Not everything is aliens.

She watched the trees bob in the churning water.

Must be aliens. It's like when the Moon was hatching and the tides went crazy and there were storms…

Clara raised her mug to her lips and then pressed it against her chin thoughtfully. It was quite similar, but the Moon-Egg wasn't due to hatch for another 40 years or so. Unless it had decided to come early? No, not the Moon-Egg. But something equally big? Some other force. What could it be? Who or what could be tampering with the planet now?

She lowered the mug again. Where was the Doctor when you needed him? Oh that's right taking care of his own planet's problems for once. There was a bang and the lights went out, the TV dying a second later. Clara puffed air through her lips miserably. Great, this was going to be a long day with no electrics. It was so dark outside all the time at the moment that even in the middle of the day there wasn't enough light to read by so she would be forced to just sit. And think. The thinking bit was the hardest. Not having anything to keep her occupied let her mind wander to places she was really trying so hard to forget about. Like how the last time the sky had been so dark it was raining Cybermen Ash onto the country.

Clara leaned forward and put her mug on the coffee table. She was not going to let herself go down that line of thinking again. About Danny and the day he died. And the second time he died.

But he was already dead.

Yeah and then you had to watch him sacrifice himself in the sky.

Oh and then of course he'd decided not to come back when he had the chance.

So that makes three times. Couldn't just die once, had to go three times.

Three times lost. Three times she'd had to let him go in one way or another, three times she'd grieved a different grief. How was anyone supposed to deal with that? Oh they'd set up support groups for those effected by the Cybermen incident, those with loved ones reanimated, whose bodies were never found, whose ash was distributed across the country. But Danny was different, Danny had remained himself, Danny had had the chance to come back.

Clara got up angrily trying to push her thoughts away with a physical action, and went to the window to watch the storm. There was nothing else to do but watch debris on the wind swirl round the estate. Couldn't do anything inside, couldn't go out. She drummed her fingers on the window ledge impatiently and felt the draught wash over her hand, cold and damp. She picked at the peeling paint. Oh God, she was going to go mad.

And then there was a horrible noise.

At first she thought another bin had gone flying and crashed into the bus stop as it had last night, but the noise just got louder and more metallic, a screeching, screaming, crunching noise of metal mangling and tearing. Clara pulled the curtains back a little further and tried to source it but it was so dark, the impenetrable grey of the storm and the rubbish it whipped up obscuring everything. Maybe it was a car? She'd seen them tipping over on the news in places, being dragged down streets by the wind, maybe things had got worse and now her neighbours cars were falling victim to the storm. But the noise sounded bigger than that somehow, and more… more alive, like whatever it was, was hurting. She craned her neck and tried again to see out across the grass.

And then the light of the TARDIS came into view, flickering, moaning with the effort of materialising. Except it wasn't where it should be on top of the time machine, it was near the ground. Clara squinted against the dark and the fade in, fade out machine. The TARDIS was on its side, lying prone on the ground as it appeared, one door hanging open and half ripped off its hinges and the left hand side which was now serving as its roof battered and torn.

'Oh my God,' Clara whispered and without wasting another moment grabbed her keys from the table and ran from the flat.

In the gale outside her voice became lost quickly as she tried to call the Doctor's name. Clara struggled against the force of the wind and shielded her eyes from the churned up leaves and grit that battered her face. The TARDIS had come to a standstill in front of her and she could see smoke rushing from the open door and immediately being caught up by the wind. Sparks flew across its sides and the light on its roof blinked intermittently, like a dying breath.

'Doctor!' Clara was almost at the doors when he came bursting through them himself, unaware of her, staggering forward a few steps and then falling hard to the ground. His jacket was ripped and hands blackened with a sooty substance similar to the smoke belching out of the TARDIS doors. But it was the blood pouring from one side of his face that Clara saw first. He knelt on all fours on the ground, a hacking cough rattling through him as he gasped for clean air. She made it the last few steps and dropped to her knees beside him, instinctively reaching around his shoulders to steady him as he struggled to breathe. The Doctor's body jerked and he looked up at her through a haze of blood and smoke.

'Clara!?'

XXXXXXXXXXX

There was no explaining while they were outside the flat, the storm being too violent and too noisy around them, so Clara motioned towards her building and pulled him up to his feet. It was even more obvious when he was standing that he was injured as she slung her arm around his waist and noticed that he did not protest in the least, rather leant into her grateful for the help to support his weight. She had helped him forward a few metres when the TARDIS let out a deafening noise even above the storm. Both of them turned to see her lose her cloak, transforming into the carved silver Gallifreyan cube the Doctor had explained to her previously as being 'siege mode.'

The TARDIS stood there larger than the police box Clara was used to by several metres, all entrances and exits sealed, no more smoke coming from its interior. The Doctor's face registered a mixture of emotions, concern, curiosity, panic, pain, before Clara tugged him away. Whatever was happening to the TARDIS, she was just glad it had held out long enough for him to get out. She remembered how he had become trapped before, life support failing, and almost suffocated inside his ship. In her admittedly limited experience the TARDIS was pretty resilient. The Doctor despite his occasionally superior air still needed oxygen and to be not stuck inside a time machine which appeared on the verge of destruction.

Clara kept up the silence until she had him safely in the flat and to be honest it wasn't hard as he offered no words at all during the long climb up the stairs, the lift being out of power. She helped him down onto the couch and stood regaining her own breath while he leaned back one hand over his face, visibly panting from the exertion and pain. She ran her eyes over him in concern, at once worried about his easy compliance and at the same time relieved because that way he might actually let her look at that gash on his head. She nipped into the kitchen to get Time Lord patching up supplies, thankful that she'd built up such a first aid kit during her time travelling with him.

By the time she returned he was staring rather blankly up at the ceiling but his breathing had come back to something like normal. He flicked his eyes across to where she stood waiting with a bowl of warm water and some medical bits and bobs. His expression was unreadable.

'Hello,' she said self-consciously, 'Um… Welcome back to earth?'

He stared at her for a minute and watched as she shuffled her feet on the carpet.

So this is awkward.

Something like sadness and longing pooled in his eyes for a moment before the corners of his mouth twitched and he tried to repress a hesitant smile. Clara smiled back and suddenly it broke free of him with a laugh before he winced sharply. 'Oh Clara, welcome back indeed,' he conceded, 'I must say I wasn't expecting the TARDIS to bring me here… of all places.'

Clara perched next to him, relieved the silence was broken if only on a superficial level. 'No? Where were you headed?'

'Into the storm,' he said simply, 'Apparently it got a bit rough up there for the old girl.'

Clara looked at him with suddenly bright eyes, 'I knew it!' she exclaimed. 'I knew this storm wasn't some natural phenomenon!'

'Of course it isn't, look at the state of my TARDIS,' he grumbled and tried to extract some wadding from her hand to tend to his bleeding. Clara batted him away and then pushed on his chest gently to force him back into the cushions of the sofa.

'Let me,' she said, 'Your face is a state. What happened?'

He sighed and relented, looking back at the ceiling while she worked.

'Didn't quite reach the eye of the storm, TARDIS got mangled, not entirely sure why her shields didn't work, interference of some kind. Before I knew it she was spinning in freefall thirty thousand feet. Console exploded, half the room went on fire, she gets grumpy, loses her gravity and chucks me half way across the room…' he waved the memories away, 'Bit of a mess really. Ouch!'

Clara swept the cotton wadding over the gash she had been eying up. It wasn't as deep as she expected and the bleeding was largely stopped so she started to work on removing the drying blood from his cheek and jaw.

'And now she's shut herself down,' he continued, 'She could sit like that for weeks, moping and repairing and I can't get back into her,' his voice sounded oddly lost for a moment and Clara couldn't help thinking that he sounded a little like a child without his mother. 'How am I supposed to stop this storm with her offline?'

'You'll find a way,' Clara said, still focused on his injuries, 'You always do.'

She rinsed the wadding and started on a trickle of dried blood which had run the length of his neck. She tugged back his shirt and wiped where it had pooled in the hollow of his collar bone. He stiffened.

'You don't have to do that,' he said.

'I know.'

The Doctor was silent, and for a minute he let his eyes close as she cleaned him up. Clara watched him and smiled to herself trying to contain the sheer joy she felt at seeing him again after all these months, even if he had crash landed onto the communal grass outside her flat. Even if he was battered and bruised and smelling of burnt TARDIS. He was still here again and the TARDIS had brought him to her when it hit crisis point. Clara smirked. The old girl didn't hate her half as much as she made out.

'Where else are you hurt?' she asked after a while. The Doctor opened his eyes somewhat reluctantly.

'There's nothing serious, I'm not bleeding anywhere else.'

'You could barely stand when she spat you out,' Clara said.

'She did not 'spit me out,'' he said indignantly.

'Yes, she did, she clearly wanted rid of you so she could go siege mode.'

He sighed. And winced. Clara raised an eyebrow at him.

'Oh all right she jiggled me about pretty violently in there, I've probably cracked some ribs, my lower back hurts and I'll have some extensive bruising to my thigh from where she threw me into the bookcases.'

'Ouch,' Clara said. 'Do you want a hot bath?'

The Doctor glared at her. 'I don't know if you've noticed but there's an apocalyptic storm outside that I need to attend to. And beside your power is out… your water will be cold.'

'It's only just gone out there should be enough…'

'Apocalyptic. Storm,' he levelled his steel blue eyes at her.

Clara straightened herself and looked at him sternly. 'Storm has been going on for days, doesn't look like the world is ending in the next hour or so, more of a slow burn apocalypse. And anyway you can't fight the apocalypse covered in soot and smelling like burned engine oil.'

The Doctor looked down at his hands, still grimy with smoke. 'Hmm,' he conceded.

'And you hurt,' Clara said finally, 'You're sore and grumpy and not in the best frame of mind for saving the world, so go and have a bath and give me your jacket.'

'My jacket?'

'I might be able to fix it where it's ripped.'

'Fine,' he tried to lean forward and shrug out of it but caught his breath quickly between his teeth with a whimper. Clara inched closer and gently pulled the shoulders of the jacket back and down, easing it from his arms and being careful not to hurt him further. He shot her a slightly ashamed but grateful look.

'You know where the bathroom is,' she said taking the jacket to the window to peer at it in the limited light, 'Towels are in the cupboard, take your time…'

'Clara?' he said softly from the doorway.

'Hmm?' she picked at a ripped seam with her fingernail pulling away a few tattered threads.

'It's… good to see you,' he said. Clara turned to him with a wide smile but before she could reply he had vanished down the hall.