A/N: This wouldn't be anything without the fabulous beta skills of Muslim_Barbie (you absolute angel!). Warning: Angst Ahoy. I don't own Doctor Who.

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. – William Blake

Clara:

She lives a thousand lives in the same moment - being born and growing old and dying in the space between heartbeats. And every life leads her to the same point: to him. It's always him. Always the Doctor. She's running to save him from a fate that hasn't happened and is happening right now and has already happened over and over.

In that moment, when her lives flash behind her eyes and she's suddenly reborn again in another time, she sees all the times he's had, and all the lives he's saved. All the lives he's touched with faintest brush, going onwards, and becoming brighter for having known him.

And she thinks that maybe – just maybe – this time it won't end the way it always does.

Even though she knows it's useless, because if she can save him now then she won't have to keep falling onwards through the mists of his long long life, and she has to keep going, so really it's inevitable. All her saving and running will always lead her back to this moment. This brilliant shining moment where she takes that step forward into the light (how cliché, she thinks) and hits the ground running towards the next adventure.

(It was always going to end this way.)

She thought it would be like waking up, suddenly living as someone else, like stepping into a new pair of shoes, but it's not like that at all. Every time she has to be born and grow up and find a job and live her life first. It takes time and patience (which she never learnt,) and there is always heartbreak, and family and laughter, before the whirlwind adventure crashes through her domesticity and drags her onwards again. She remembers being a barmaid and a governess is Victorian London, being a computer technician in the 22nd and 51st century, working in a shop in the 1960's. She remembers living in a universe without stars, knowing that this time it wasn't her job to save him, but somehow knowing that he would be saved all the same. She remembers her mother, always dying before it was her time; and her father, always the quiet man who loved his late wife until the day he died. She remembers infinite boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, houses and children. Countless weddings and funerals she never attended are vibrant memories that stand out in her head-full of dreary day to day adventures. She remembers taking up running - and being grateful when her hobby meant she had trainers ready and waiting when she saw her madman – this time clad in the loudest coat shaped quilt she has ever seen - dash past her office window on a cloudy afternoon.

It's always in the instant she sees him that she knows what she has to do. It's not always clear, often she finds herself following the mysterious man on instinct, until the moment she's needed. Then it breaks like dawn on the horizon and she doesn't have time to consider her actions, she simply does what she has to.

She takes his life in her hands and gently shepherds him past danger, sometimes delaying him for a few vital moments, sometimes stepping in front of him and taking the blow meant for him instead. She's never thanked or fawned over. People, especially the Doctor, barely even notice her enough to walk around her in the street. And yet, when she stands proudly between him and the danger he doesn't realise is there, she doesn't mind his ignorance. Praise would only give her an overly large head anyway. It's better, really, just to keep falling and waiting for the right moment to save the man who has saved (is saving, will save) so many lives, even at the cost of his own.

So she falls, she runs and she lives.

Always for Him.