Despite what the Doctor had said he still had every intention of fleeing the school as soon as his last class let out. The pain of being so close to Clara's echo while she sat naively by, unfeeling and uncaring, was almost enough to send him storming from the room in self-immolating agony. He was aware of her every minute movement, the juxtaposition of familiarity and alienness setting his teeth on edge. Even while he taught, gesticulating stiffly before the class, his attention was never more than the blink of an eye from Clara.
So focused was he on the grace with which her fingers tapped rhythmically across her desk in a musical little four beat and on how she squirmed every so often, pressing herself into the seat of her chair and shifting almost imperceptibly on her sit bones, that he almost missed the message which they were sending. The tapping, the shifting, constant roaming of her eyes to the clock, the longer the class dragged on the more agitated she appeared to become. He wouldn't have blamed her for being bored, the curriculum he'd been given was uninspired at best, and if Clara's work on the Navier-Stokes Equation was any indication, well beneath her intelligence level. He wished he could whisk her away, show her the stars, even the most ordinary of concepts would seem interesting when portrayed in the form of an ancient black whole or the birth of a star. However, the more he looked at her the more he became aware that it was not mere boredom which had her twisting in her seat.
Was something wrong? The Doctor couldn't help but to ask himself. Perhaps he had been too hasty in his assumptions, perhaps she wasn't as alright as she'd seemed earlier. What if she needed him and he left? Don't be an idiot! He scolded himself, She's safer without you, they all are. And there was no arguing with that, no matter how he spun it Clara Oswald and all her various echoes had been safer before he'd turned up.
Having given to students some equations to work on by themselves the Doctor had collapsed into his chair. He rubbed his hand against his mouth in agitation, he wished his Clara was there now, she'd always been so damn good at solving his problems. He could almost feel her standing behind him as he closed his swollen eyes, her arms stretching languorously over his shoulders to cross before his chest, he could almost feel her breath in his ear whispering some helpful piece of information to which he'd been blind. He strained to make out what it was but the illusion didn't carry that far and the ghost vanished from his mind.
The school bell rang then, sending students shoving from their seats and scrambling towards the door. Clara despite her seeming anxiousness to leave didn't leap immediately from her chair but instead paused for a moment knuckles white from their grip on the desk. It lasted only a heartbeat though, then like the rest she grabbed up her bag and swung for the door. However, it was enough to send the Doctor's head reeling with a kind of overbearing worry.
"Miss Oswin." he called out impetuously, knowing that he would live to regret it.
The girl turned back to him with Clara's familiar deer in the headlights look on her face.
"Sir?" She inquired waveringly.
"Stay behind a moment."
For a second she stood immobile, looking as if she were calculating her escape, but finally her body slackened (if only a fraction) and she turned and stood awkwardly before her desk.
As the Doctor waited for the last of the students to slip out the door he assessed her carefully, noting the way her body seemed to grow in tenseness as the seconds ticked by. He allowed more time than necessary to pass before speaking, hoping that his silence might draw from her the answers to the questions that he had yet to figure out how to ask. She made no attempts to speak however, just stood watching him and pulling at her school tie.
"Is everything alright?" He finally asked steepling his fingers before his chin in an attempt to look more professorial.
"Yeah." She responded suddenly defensive.
"Don't lie to me Clara," Was his stern reply.
"I'm not." She spat back her chin jutting stubbornly.
He let the silence draw out again as a slight feeling of shock prickled a the back of his neck, all that youthful carelessness, which had been in such abundance earlier had suddenly evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet
"Fine," he relented after a moment and he could see her noticeably relax, "Go."
She did, marching hastily to the door.
12
The encounter left the Doctor taught and irritable, and by the time second period let out he had talked himself into both staying indefinitely and fleeing at the next bell at least a dozen times.
However when second bell did ring it was not to his TARDIS which he went but rather to go find Clara for some proper answers. He tracked her as far as the street where his plan was promptly foiled by an old grey banger waiting for her at the curb.
He stopped in the schools entranceway, hiding among the students as he watched her approach the car. The window was rolled down and she leaned over to speak to the driver, a man with a brutal but not unattractive face and shaggy black hair. She appeared to argue quietly with him for a minute, her voice too hushed for the Doctor to make anything out. Then abruptly she straightened her face stained red and her eyes glistening ever so slightly. The Doctor heard a low chuckle from the car before the engine was revved and it sped off away from the school.
The Doctor's first instinct was to rush to her side to see if she was alright, but many years of keeping people at a distance had taught him restraint enough to stay put, a well-practiced look of apathy present on his gaunt features. He watched through his peripheral as she stood looking after the car.
"Clara," a voice behind the Doctor made them both turn to see a couple of school kids come trotting down the stairs past the Doctor.
Immediately a false smile leapt to Clara's mouth as she greeted the two students, the male of the two –lanky, with a pinched, acne ridden face and platinum hair- slung his arm around her neck and placed a kiss at the top her head.
"Leaving without us luv?" the Doctor heard him ask as Clara elbowed him off comedically and the other girl rolled her eyes.
He watched unobtrusively until the trio had moved out of sight, then headed straight to his TARDIS to do some proper snooping through the schools data bases. By the time he'd reached it all thoughts of leaving had been dropped from his mind.
12
The Doctor had not been prepared for the agony that the next few days would bring. Watching Clara as she went about her life, a life which he had nothing to do with, while he sat walled behind his desk, he could think of no crueler punishment. It were as if the universe were mocking him, taunting him with this constant reminder of what he'd lost. Even when Clara was nowhere to be seen he felt as if he could sense her lingering just beyond his reach. And it drove him mad.
The constant awareness manifested itself into a physical ailment, crippling him from the inside. He ached, everything ached to be nearer to her, to hold her in his arms again, to comfort her, to touch her, talk to her. Anything.
But despite his unwavering enthrallment nothing he witnessed could satisfyingly explain Clara's strange fluctuations of attitude. The car -his only lead- and its infuriating driver never returned and the Doctor never got another moment alone with Clara. He half suspected that she was actively avoiding him but had no evidence to prove it.
A few times in those beginning days he had become dangerously close to leaving. After catching a glimpse of her giggling with a school mate or flirting clumsily with one of the college boys, he would storm back to the TARDIS then in a jealous rage, blaming her attitude on hormones or stupidity or the lack of development of the prefrontal cortex, and blaming himself for being a stupid, love-struck, and perverted old man. But his rages never lasted, for the next time he would see her she would have reverted back to her state of undeniable agitation.
It went on this way until finally, by no fault of his own, he found himself alone with her.
He had been taking his lunch in the TARDIS, working out some of his frustration by manipulating the translation matrix. His eyes had been fixed on the screen of one of the consoles retractable monitors when suddenly the HADS gave a shriek of alarm.
"Bloody…" the Doctor exclaimed running, one hand covering an ear, to shut off the emergency system -still a bit touchy from earlier repairs- before it launched him halfway across the solar system. Subduing the earsplitting sirens the Doctor pulled back the screen to see what had spooked his ship.
And there she was.
The supply cabinet he had landed in, and which Clara had subsequently wandered into, was abnormally large for what it was and in turn, the light, which stood naked at the door didn't do much to fend off the darkness, leaving Clara a mere apparition on the screen. Yet there was no mistaking her, with her moonish eyes catching what little light there was and her slender girlish legs whispering through the darkness as she paced, and her arms, which he could imagine so vividly wrapping around his trembling torso, crossed across her lower ribs. There was no ignoring the sudden quickening of his hearts as they worked to divert the flow of his blood.
The Doctor stood in petrified silence as he watched her, fighting the urge to take advantage of her solitude. He wouldn't need much, just the sound of her voice as she talked to him, or the feel of her hand holding his in greeting small and warm and alive would be enough to mollify, if only for a moment, the great sucking pit which Clara had created at his centre.
As he watched, her pacing slowed but her agitation seemed to draw to an apex. Abruptly her strides ceased and she slouched to a sit against one of the walls. She drew her knees up to her chest and her hand dropped beneath her skirt fumbling in its folds. For a moment the Doctor's breath caught in his throat, she wasn't…? But no, her hand pulled away clutching tightly to what was clearly a cigarette. The Doctor's hearts sank.
"You stupid child," he whispered beneath his breath as he watched her pull a lighter from the same pocket and catch the tip of the cigarette with a flame that tilted and hopped as it was struck by an exhale from her nostrils.
She took a drag then rested her head against her raised knees, her hands gripping behind her head with the smoldering fag threatening to drop ash into her hair. The Doctor knew how unreasonable his anger was, he had absolutely no right to make any judgments about this girl, whom, was for all intents and purposes was a complete stranger. However, he couldn't seem to shake off the feelings of concern, anger, and disappointment, all so intense it almost felt as if he had raised the child himself.
Clara sat for only a few moments before getting back to her feet. Looking slightly calmer, she stumped out the cigarette on the floor and returned what was left of it to her book bag, her hand shuffled around its contents for moment before withdrawing, something new and small within her delicate clutch. He squinted and as he did Clara rolled the item from the palm of her hand up to sit between her thumb and forefinger. Pushed into the light it became a little pill. Offhand the Doctor couldn't determine exactly what it was but knew from experience that good things rarely came from little pills taken in secret.
Clara balanced it on the pad of her thumb then carefully pressed it back between her dark pink lips.
The Doctor was out of the TARDIS before the pill touched her tongue. He closed the distance with one long legged step and grabbed for the hand still pressed to her lips. Clara flinched hard in his grip, a high pitched yelp of shock escaping her throat. She scrambled backwards to the wall, her wrist trapped in the Doctor's unyielding grip. He could see the whites of her eyes around the full circumference of her oaken irises and her lips were slightly parted over her clenched opaline teeth.
"Spit that out," the Doctor hissed and even he could hear how crazed his voice sounded.
Clara, her initial shock subsiding, gave him a seething look.
"Spit!"
Not removing her glaring eyes from his face she bowed her head ever so slightly and spat the pill wetly into his waiting palm.
Releasing Clara's braced arm the Doctor picked the already dissolving pill from the little puddle in his palm and rubbed it to a damp paste. Clara leaned back against the wall crossing her arms and glaring at him, all five feet and furious. He returned her stare with equal ferocity, whipping from his pocket his sonic and using it to take a reading of the chalky substance between his fingers.
Clara was first to break their stare, her eyes jumping suddenly from his to the sonic, the angry look weighing her features melting away into something more akin to curiosity, awe maybe even. She straightened with a new awareness, her fingers coming up hesitantly as if to touch the thrumming device but in the end she appeared to think better of it and let her hand fall back to her side.
The sonic gave a cheerful little blip as it finished its reading and the Doctor looked away from Clara to it.
"It's a mint," he said sounding somewhat incredulous.
"Yeah," was Clara's quiet unfocused reply, her eyes still searching the sonic, "Coulda told you that."
Then snapping abruptly from her nearly trance like state she asked, "Do I know you?"
The question sent tendrils of excitement thrilling through the Doctor veins. Her eyes were narrowed, searching his face intently.
He didn't answer, just stood. His parted lips allowing only the tiniest of breaths to pass through them as if he feared anymore might scare the girl off. All he could do in that moment was hope beyond hope, beyond rationality and logic, that she would remember him. That she would blink and his Clara would be there, looking back from this girl's eyes, a grin dimpling her face as she recalled all their years spent together and she would leap passionately into his weary arms, burry her face against his shoulder and hold him until he forgot all the hellish years he'd spent without her.
The girl blinked then, shaking her head slightly, "Sorry," she whispered looking away from him, "I guess not."
The Doctor hadn't realized it but his breath had stopped completely in those torturous seconds and now he gasped it in agonizingly. He closed his eyes against the welling of unwelcome tears and in a voice unnecessarily gruff ordered, "Go to class Miss Oswin."
The girl ducked to pick up her schoolbag looking more shaken than ever, then dashed past the Doctor and through the door back into the hall.
He watched until the door swung closed behind her, then stood clutching at his quivering chest as tears spilled silently down his face.
