A/N: So, in answer to a question about why Spencer may be seeing his teammates while gallivanting around Space and Time with The Doctor and Clara: Spoilers ;)
Also. I'm a bad girl. I said spoilers through DW7x15... I really meant spoilers through DW8x11/12.
I have at least three more chaps written just waiting to be proofread and edited. I'm doing that between finishing the actual fic and RL. Thanks for the patience. Glad you enjoy!
"Unfortunately, a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares."
- Sir Peter Ustinov
It took Clara some time to locate the hot water kettle and something passing for either strong tea or weak coffee – Spencer wasn't quite sure which was the better description.
"You get used to eatin' and drinkin' all kinds of different foodstuff when you keep company with him," she said as he made a face at the bitter taste of his drink. They had been unsuccessful at locating any sweetener packets. "Why are you so keen to believe he's a lie of your mind?" she asked, suddenly changing the subject. "I mean… I get it. Time traveling alien from outer space who happens to be a stuck-up ponce most of the time, but is generally a good guy… That'd be hard for anyone to swallow. But, what about me? How am I so unbelievable?" She looked hurt when she said it, and he knew instinctually that it was genuine.
He opened his mouth to answer, then, almost immediately closed it again. She let him take his time as she sat cross-legged on the floor next to him sipping her tea. They were leaned back against the front of the oversized sofa in the 'upgraded, executive suite' that they would share during their time here – whatever that meant. The decor was plush and extravagant, a lot like a casino hotel room would be expected to be, but certainly nothing like what he would imagine in an extraterrestrial world. He wasn't sure if that meant it was more believable, or less so.
That was the problem. Clara Oswald – teacher, Miss Clara Oswald – seemed real. And completely believable.
"So… something I guess you need to know about me… to understand my reluctance to… No. Okay. When I was a kid there was nothing, literally nothing in my daily life that was normal. And that was what I grew up knowing. I was a child prodigy attending a Las Vegas public high school at the age of twelve years old. I graduated from MIT at fifteen. And the first time I realized my mother wasn't… that my mother had a mental disorder, I was seven years old."
"Oh…" Clara breathed out softly.
"My mother sees people who aren't there. She hears voices that aren't speaking to her. And she imagines herself to be playing a part in vast, grandiose fantasies that could never possibly take place. Now… schizophrenia is… unpredictable."
"But just because she has it, doesn't mean…" Clara started, but he held up a hand to silence her.
"So… let me put it this way. If you were trying to tell a lie – a really big lie – what would be your best chance to get someone to believe it?"
"Oh. Okay." She sat still for a moment with her eyes closed, seriously considering his question. He smiled at her sincerity in spite of himself. "I would… establish some sort of trust first. Make myself a reliable source – someone… believable… Oh my stars." She looked up at Spencer with a profound expression of disappointment on her face. "That's why you don't believe me. I'm too good to be true. Too true to be real. God, now I'm starting to sound like him. Like the Doctor."
"Most schizophrenic delusions are wrapped up in just enough truth to be believable. It's the minds way of protecting itself against a full psychotic break." He sat his drink to the side as she shook her head in defeat. "So, Clara, what I can believe about you is one of three things: You, and all of this are real; you are part of a sequence of events created by my subconscious to allow my overtaxed brain to rest; or… this isn't real, and this isn't a dream, and the only reason you're here is to protect me."
"Bollocks," she said flatly. They both chuckled, her words breaking into the tension created by his impromptu confession. "Maybe it's not so bad, you thinking I'm a dream. Could be worse. Oi! I get to be the girl of your dreams," she finished with a smile.
"Yeah… I guess so."
A few hours later, the doctor was still gone with his police box and Clara had convinced him to look through Earth Classics Television on the suite's entertainment console. She said she'd wanted to catch next season's episodes of Sherlock ahead of time, if she could find them. It was apparently one of the perks of traveling with The Doctor – early previews. But for some reason they didn't have the show at all and Clara agreed to watching classic Star Trek with him instead.
"Doctor?" she said from where she was lounging on the sofa next to him. He started looking around the room, expecting to see the blue box and the obnoxious man back in one of the bedrooms. "No, silly. You-doctor! Doctor Spencer."
"Oh," he smiled sheepishly as he turned his attention back to the screen. It was an episode he'd watched many times as a kid, and had resulted in his wanting a cat for about a year – The Trouble with Tribbles. "What's up?" he asked, trying to be colloquial.
"The Doctor mentioned that… well I guess he alluded to that… I dunno, you'd had some trouble or something recently."
"He did." It wasn't a denial, but he wasn't confirming anything with it either.
"Wanna talk 'bout it?" She was so calm and casual in her manner with him, that he almost felt obliged to answer as if Morgan or Penelope had asked the question, not a five foot two inch tall girl from Blackpool – he was pretty sure it was Blackpool. "I take your silence to mean a polite, yet firm no. See it's just that I had this sort of… episode, you might call it, last spring. I failed to make a supremely perfect soufflé, I opened the post, and then I fainted. Like I never did! An' then when I woke up, I was off followin' the Doctor… to the place of his death."
Spencer hit the pause button on the console controller.
"I met the Doctor's dead wife – didn't even know he'd been married, ya know? And I… did something very stupid. I saved him. I rescued him. Doesn't matter from what. Neither here nor there. But that's when I started mattering. Knowing I was in the right place at the very right time. So… I know a bit about having some trouble, or going through a thing. And I know when I'm in the right place at the right time, though usually it's to save the Doctor, but I think, this time, I'm just here to listen."
"Thanks," he whispered around the lump in his throat. If there was anyone he might unburden himself to right now, it was this girl. This London schoolteacher. He'd already let out more of his past to her in the first few hours of knowing her than he had to his best friends in the first few years of working together at the BAU. But he wasn't feeling steady enough just yet. "So, tell me about the Doctor's wife."
"Oh, golly! So her name is River and he met her for his first time in a library in the fifty-first century when he was nine hundred and something, I think. That was the day she died… And he met her for her first time in 1938 Berlin when she was trying to kill Hitler. He was in his eleven hundreds by then… or maybe not… It's all very…"
"Complicated?" Spencer supplied.
"Nail on the head."
Clara had been sleeping for a few hours by the time Spencer began to feel the weight of sleep pressing on him. But, to be honest, he hadn't exactly been keeping track of time, expecting to wake up at any minute.
She had folded her blazer neatly and wedged it under her head, while clutching one of the many, plush throw pillows to her chest. He'd laughed at that, as the blazer pillow had been completely unnecessary, but she did it anyway.
When he was able to hear the slow, wheezing whisper of Clara's snorting, Spencer switched the entertainment console to encyclopedia mode.
"Garcia would be proud," he muttered to himself.
Under the heading Earth History, he typed in the name Clara Oswald. It was a broad query and he couldn't logically hope for any kind of targeted results, but he felt his eyebrows rise nearly to his hairline when there were nearly a thousand results returned.
"Oh, my sweetly languishing Luddite. Lemme see what might help us out here," Garcia cooed as she leaned over the console controller. "How old is she? Try that."
Spencer typed age 25 - 30 into the search field. Narrowing some.
"What about... Oh! Run an image search associated with her name and age."
Spencer made the appropriate changes to the query.
"There, that's her, right?" Garcia yelped pointing to a staff photo of the young English teacher. "Ok. Search for only similar images."
He looked back at the manifestation of the spunky technical analyst in confusion.
"Right cli... erm, control... No! Oh just hold your finger there and it should bring up drop-down options. Very good, Doctor," she encouraged. "Now toggle back for information containing only similar images."
The list of results shrank again to a little more than three dozen.
"Afraid that's the best I can do for you off sight. Hope you find what you're looking for." After a moment of silence, he was sure she had gone, but she spoke again, startling him so that he nearly jumped. "She's a real beauty. Be careful there. I can tell she fights fiercely for what she loves."
Spencer nodded silently, agreeing with his friend.
"She's bossy, though!" Her voice startled him again and his pulse jumped a bit this time, too. "Oh, sorry! Okay. Bye, hun!"
There had been nothing written in depth about her in their contemporary time. A few teaching awards that she would be given in the late twenty-teens, and her CV, which said she'd received her teaching certification in late 2012. That was weird because she spoke as though she'd been teaching a little while already. But... it was only October of '11.
Dream state, he reminded himself.
Scrolling down, Spencer read a small obituary for someone named Daniel Pink - a teacher at her school - that mentioned a Ms. Clara Oswald as his girlfriend.
He glanced back at her, sleeping soundly on the couch behind him. She hadn't mentioned a Dan, Danny, or Daniel. But the obit was dated 2014. Maybe they hadn't met yet.
The next entry was converted from city records of London circa 1892. That couldn't be the same Clara, but as he kept reading he saw a sepia photo of a young Victorian era beauty. With the high silk collar and the hair twisted up on top of her head, it took him a few more moments to realize... but that couldn't be her.
She was memorialized in the paper as 'beloved governess and faithful friend', Clara Oswin Oswald, aged 26. She was declared dead of exposure to the elements on 25 December, 1892.
Oswin. He'd just scrolled past the blog of an Oswin Oswald from the year 4686. She had been Junior Entertainment Manager on the lost Starliner Alaska.
And her picture...
In the very small allowance that this was somehow not a dream... it would be impossible.
My impossible girl, the Doctor had called her. Could that be what he meant?
Spencer scrubbed his face with his hands, feeling the familiar pinpricks behind his eyes that meant he needed to catch at least an hour or two of sleep.
Glancing behind him again, he saw her, sound asleep. Maybe she was a mystery. Maybe she was something new he could puzzle out…
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Just for a while.
"Clara!"
She opened her eyes and groaned at the sound.
"Clara! Hello?" There was a small window popped up on the video screen of the entertainment console. The Doctor's face peered out, waving arms invading the edges of the screen. "Hello?"
"Doctor, where are you?" She asked the small picture groggily. "Still sulking?"
"I don't sulk," he declared, but it wasn't very convincing. "I need your help. Now, can you do that for me or are you still too cross?"
"What do you need?" She swung her legs off of the large sofa in an effort to get to her feet. In the process she managed to kick poor Spencer in the face, waking the sleeping doctor.
"Ow!" he muttered irritably, swatting at her feet.
"Oh, wonderful. You're both awake."
"What's happening about me?" Spencer asked, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes as he came fully to his senses.
"How many people did you pass on your way to the suite last night?" The Doctor demanded.
"About a dozen…?" Clara sputtered, trying to remember.
"Nineteen. Thirteen men and six women," Spencer said as he stretched, more sure in his answer than she felt she had the right to be.
"More than likely a few less than half that number were Flesh, or Gangers," he said coolly with a look of nostalgia on his face. "You remember, Clara, don't you? The solar storms?"
"The what? Solar…?"
"Oh… no, that was Pond, wasn't it? Not good, Doctor," he chided himself for forgetting.
"Doctor! Back to it, yeah?" She felt bad for snapping so soon after their row, however small it might have been, but he was like a squirrel herding kittens. And right now he needed her to keep him focused.
"Yes. Sorry. Well, basically the 'Gangers' are the human engineered, genetic double of a person. They hook into a harness somewhere and their 'Ganger' goes to do all of the unpleasantness instead, if need be. But I'm sure in this case it's more an issue of being in two places at once that's the appeal of them."
"'Genetic double'?" Spencer asked with a confused look on his face.
"Yes, yes. That isn't the point. How many children did you see?" he asked from the video screen in front of them.
"None," both Clara and Spencer chorused, glancing at one another, a little startled at the sensation.
"Exactly!" The doctor ran to the far end of the frame and swung 'round the TARDIS console display screen, motioning to it with both hands.
Clara squinted a couple of times, trying to make out the information on the second screen, but it was no good.
"But, Doctor… we arrived in the middle of the night… or night-cycle. Children should be tucked up, asleep."
"It's the Grand Rededication weekend! There should be thousands… just the children, Clara! When you went on holiday with your parents as a child, did you go to sleep when told?"
"No… when I was twelve I snuck out of my… hotel room…"
"Not a single child wandering the halls looking for midnight treats, or a soda machine? Not one?"
Now Clara was beginning to get the picture. "Oh my stars, " she breathed out in a whisper, her mother's words. Words of wonder or shock. Or, in this case, words of dread.
"What do you mean, 'not one'?" Spencer asked, at attention now.
"Well… not none, but not enough. And if it hadn't been for you, Doctor, I would never have begun looking in the first place."
"What are the statistics?"
"What?" Clara asked, still trying to cope with what the Doctor had just dropped on them first thing in the morning, easy as you please. That the fate of other innocents, children, no less, was somehow coinciding with their place at his specific time in the universe.
"Sending them to the controller pad now," The Doctor said, seeming to ignore her question altogether.
The screen of the console's controller pad – the whole thing looked like a fancy tablet to her – lit up with figures. Spencer snatched it off of the end of the sofa and began swiping at the glass a little awkwardly.
"I thought to myself, once I'd got the bed set back to its proper spot… 'What must the psychic paper've said indeed to get us this suite?' So, I took a peek into the registry."
"And?" she prompted.
"Something much more interesting – no, disturbing – something disturbing made itself known to me. Grand Rededication and all that going on, you'd be bound to have a packed house. And by all indications of stories I've heard – first hand accounts of friends, news articles, etcetera – they should be absolutely full up. There should have been no room for little old us but under the kitchen cupboards. There should be people here – loads of people – well… Flesh Avatars, Zephadines, the odd Ood, as well as Humans. Where have they all gone?"
"One million rooms in the hotel, assuming an average of at least two adults per room, with another twenty seven thousand eight hundred and two children collectively registered for childcare or other family geared activities. That's two million twenty seven thousand eight hundred and two people registered to be occupying the hotel by tomorrow. Assuming at least thirty percent don't check in until tomorrow and another eight percent no-show entirely, there should be a total of roughly one million two hundred fifty seven thousand two hundred thirty seven occupants right now."
Clara tried not to be bowled over by the figures Doctor Reid had just rattled off mechanically. He must be out of breath. Though she couldn't help catching the momentary grin on The Doctor's face as Spencer spoke. It was quickly masked by a look of gravity, one she had seen before.
"TARDIS scans for life forms place occupancy at a cool ninety eight thousand two hundred and twenty six."
"That's a deficit of one million one hundred fifty nine thousand and ten people…" Now Spencer looked as awed as Clara had been at his sheer ability to spit out numbers like a calculator.
"And out of all of those twenty seven thousand – nearly twenty eight thousand children… The TARDIS is picking up only three hundred and eight."
