Chapter 2: Her Room
Weeks later, the Doctor still hadn't mentioned Rose and when Clara awoke the next morning, he'd pretended everything was normal so Clara did too and she didn't bring it up again.
She had decided to forget about it when one night Clara suddenly started awake in bed breathing heavily from a nightmare she'd been having. She'd felt it slipping away from her memory already and tried to recall it. She'd been chasing the leaf hidden away in her book. It kept floating away from her, just as she was about to pick it up. She'd been on a beach. It was sort of cloudy and cold. It felt sort of wrong….she couldn't explain it, it was just a feeling she couldn't shake. When she'd finally been sure she would pick up the leaf as it landed on the sand, it flew straight up in the air, out of her reach. And she'd seen her. A girl. At least, she thought it was a girl. It was hard to look at her because she was surrounded by an incredibly bright, golden light. It seemed to be coming from something behind her but there was gold in her eyes, around her hair, spilling from her fingertips. She'd felt terrified but she kept looking, needing to know who this was, what this was. She started to walk nearer to the girl when she bolted awake. She didn't know what any of it meant but she was suddenly very thirsty.
Clara stepped out of bed and walked down the hallway, hoping the TARDIS would bring the kitchen closer to get a drink of water as she now realized the rooms shifted. She paused when she saw a door down the hallway to her right cracked open with a strip of light on the floor coming from inside. She started to walk towards it and was about to push it open further when she heard a noise. It sounded somewhat like a cry, like someone in pain who was trying to suppress themselves from crying out. Her heart stopped at the sound and she stood still listening for it to come again. She heard faint noises that she couldn't define so she carefully peered through the opening of the door.
Clara nearly gasped at the sight of the Doctor, sitting on the floor of a bedroom, knees pulled to his chest and head in his hands. He was gripping his hair in frustration in a way she'd never seen him do before. She considered going in, sitting with him, but started when she heard the same gasp of pain from earlier.
The Doctor was crying.
She couldn't see his face but his whole body was wracking with sobs and his knuckles were white from the force with which he was grabbing his hair, making it stick up in all different directions. The Doctor dropped one of his hands to his side, on the floor, and picked up something that was crumpled there. It was a shirt. A girl's blouse with three different shades of purple on it. The Doctor looked down at the shirt and Clara could see his eyes now. He'd been crying for a while. He was holding the shirt so delicately, as if it were fragile, and rubbed the sleeve with his thumb. With his hair so askew and his eyes so red, and his body shaking with silent sobs he looked half-mad and she wanted to go to him but for some reason she knew she shouldn't.
She looked around the room and saw the bed was covered with a pink comforter and it was pulled back and the pink sheets underneath were rumpled as if it had just been slept in. There were more girl's clothes scattered around the room. There were several strange items scattered across a dresser that looked like they were of some alien origin as well as a lot of make-up. Taped to the mirror was a piece of paper with swirly circles on it that she recognized as the same sort of writing that was written on the TARDIS console. On the walls and on a table next to the bed she saw picture frames. Clara could see a young blonde girl that looked to be in her early twenties or late teens standing with a man in a leather jacket who had rather large ears. She was gazing up at him and he was laughing at something. In another picture there was a very good looking young man with a cheeky grin standing in between the blonde girl and the man in the leather jacket. And another that looked like a candid shot of the woman standing next to a tall, very thin man in a pinstriped suit with red trainers in the console room, their backs to the camera, but they were looking at each other, their faces full of pure happiness and their fingers entwined over a control on the console. Clara's eyes widened and she felt her own heart ache with sadness as she realized this had to be Rose's room.
Another sob slipped out of the Doctor and Clara jerked back from the door. She didn't want him to know she was here and she was pretty sure he might not want her to be. This place seemed private, almost sacred. Clara wouldn't go in but she slunk down to sit against the wall and decided to wait for him there until he left. She couldn't leave him alone.
After quite a while when her eyes had started to droop from tiredness, she finally heard him moving around to get ready to go. Her eyes sprang open fully and she darted down a hallway and found the TARDIS had put the door to her room almost immediately around the corner. She dashed inside and when she left her room hours later to go to the console room, Rose's bedroom was nowhere in sight.
After that night, Clara started to wonder even more what had happened to Rose but she didn't ask and the Doctor certainly wasn't telling.
Some nights when she couldn't sleep she would go wandering the halls to see if the Doctor was in the room again but the TARDIS didn't bring the room to her when she was looking. It was only when she had nightmares that she would walk outside and the door would be there again and she would once more wait outside the door until the Doctor left.
The Doctor didn't always cry. Sometimes she thought maybe he wasn't in there at all but she'd peek around the door and he'd just be sitting in there, in her room, on the floor with his head against the bed, looking at the ceiling, totally silent. Other times he'd stand and look at the pictures on the wall for hours. He stared particularly long at one of Rose standing on what looked like a dark beach staring up at two giant waves, frozen in the air, curling towards one another. She had never heard the Doctor be so silent.
Another time Clara saw the Doctor laying on the edge of the bed with a small picture in his hand, looking at the ceiling and smiling and talking. Those times she didn't think she'd ever heard the Doctor talk so much.
"Remember Rose when I first regenerated and I was still in my leather jacket? It didn't fit me right, I was too skinny." He laughed. "Nah, the pinstripe suit was better. Unless I had the ears I looked daft in the leather jacket. I wear bowties now. Bowties are cool. I wonder if you'd like it…You thought I was a Slitheen! And I tried so hard to get you to smile. You didn't admit it but I know you smiled. Not that proper smile you did but you did smile. Oh! And hopping for our lives remember?"
Not much of this made sense to Clara but she would get particularly confused when the Doctor said things like, "Oh I hope he told you about Donna. She was brilliant, she was! We had so many great times. Not like our times of course but they were brilliant. So was Martha. I didn't treat her the best, though, because you'd just —ahhh anyway I suspect he told you about Jack. You probably blame yourself for that but you shouldn't. Especially when you find out who he becomes! It's fantastic. " Who's "he?" she wondered. She'd thought up until now maybe Rose had died but this made it sound like she'd found another man.
Clara noticed the Doctor's voice seemed to change sometimes when he talked to her picture. Sometimes he'd get this sort of Northern accent and other times he sounded positively exuberant and he'd draw certain words out strangely when he'd say things like, "weeelll." It wasn't just his voice though, she realized, he seemed almost like a different person.
She felt bad for hearing some of these stories, as though she were truly intruding on a private conversation but she just felt like she couldn't leave him so she never did.
