Disclaimer: You know the drill, don't make me say it!
To Give Her the Moon
"What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down. Hey. That's a pretty good idea. I'll give you the moon…"
-George Bailey, 'It's a Wonderful Life'
[The Eighth Doctor was a fan.]
1.
He couldn't stand Rose's boyfriend in the beginning either.
"Is that Ricky? Don't talk, just shut up. How stupid are you?"
But this is untenable.
"He's a PE teacher! You wouldn't go out with a PE teacher! It's a mistake! You've made a boyfriend error!"
Clara – my Clara – no, no, just Clara – should know better.
"It's Mickey!"
"I am not a PE teacher, I'm a maths teacher!"
His teeth grind together so hard when his mouth is shut that it has become painful to stop talking.
"Mickey the Idiot, I might just choke!"
"He's a soldier! Why would you go out with a soldier? Why not just get a dog or a big plant or…"
"Because I love him!"
It is like a being doused in liquid nitrogen. He goes cold down to his bones, like his blood has turned to ice, and freezes, his mouth snapping shut, as the cold settles into a sickening knot of something very like dread in the center of his body. The sudden silence is deafening.
"Why would you say that?" He can hear the minute tremor in his voice, magnified to a humiliating degree in the dead quiet of the auditorium. "Is this part of the surprise play?"
The joke falls flat.
He and Mickey had eventually learned to get along. Sort of.
But Soldier Boy here is not Mickey. The Doctor doesn't abide soldiers, doesn't trust them, actively dislikes them as a fact, and doesn't care how that intractability reflects on him. A soldier… He is frustrated and disheartened. Clara deserves better.
Try as he might, he cannot quite make himself believe that that is the source of this aching disappointment. Nor can he quite convince himself that it is PE's past as a soldier that he finds unforgivable.
2.
"Nothing to do with me. It's not an invasion. So maybe this is it. First contact. The day mankind officially comes into contact with an alien race."
Rose smiled when he said it, dawning wonder playful in her eyes.
But Clara is not Rose.
"Whatever future humanity might have depends upon the choice that is made right here and right now."
Clara is not smiling. She is bristling.
"I'm not interfering because you've got to handle this on your own."
"I can't make this decision for you."
Clara is not Rose, and Clara is not smiling at his faith in her, she is glaring at his intractable refusal to influence human history. He shouldn't let her irritation antagonize him. She is stressed and afraid right now, and remarkable as she is, she still just a young human. He shouldn't let it hurt.
But it does. It makes him feel… common. Used. Taken for granted. What must she see when she looks at him, but a tool, a cure-all that she keeps in her back pocket. Has she the right to take that tone with him the moment he fails to make all her problems vanish?
Perhaps she has. Perhaps he has given her that right, and that scares him.
3.
"That's when the human race finally grows up."
Rose had smiled, color high in her cheeks. She made him promise not to run off on her. He did anyway. Afterwards, she forgave him.
"It's time to take the stabilizers off your bike!"
Clara is furious, color high in her cheeks. She shouts at him not to run off on her. He does anyway. Afterwards, she will forgive him.
Sometimes, he still seems to forget – Clara is not Rose.
4.
"I had faith that you would always make the right choice."
It is the highest praise he knows how to give. Single-handedly saving humanity from itself while teetering on the back of a hatching planetoid-sized egg with a nuclear bomb ticking under her feet; impossible as it seems, Clara is even more remarkable than he thought. His Impossible Girl.
But Clara is crying. It gives him pause. He is almost distracted by the amazement of how deeply it cuts him to see her tears.
"Five foot one and crying… never stood a chance…"
"Why did you do it?" she accuses.
And he can't answer that. Of course he can't. He waffles at her with non-answers and inanity, because he can't answer.
But isn't it obvious? Isn't it?
Clara doesn't appear to have seen the obvious.
"It was cheap, it was pathetic. No, no, no. It was patronizing!"
Her tears are confusing him and her both.
"No! It was me allowing you to make a choice about your own future," he tries to explain, but it hurts that he should have to.
"You've got to handle this on your own, Rose. That's when the human race finally grows up."
"That was me respecting you."
"You don't need me. Go celebrate history!"
Rose had gone, with a smile.
But Rose was not who Clara is. Clara has told him to go away, a long way away, in his lonely bloody TARDIS, and it takes him a while to remember, through the pain of her rejection, what he had momentarily forgotten.
Clara is not Rose.
5.
"What sort of date are you?"
Rose was young. A girl that goes out for chips. Still half a child. Still accustomed to being spoken to as such.
When Clara goes out, it is for coffee, not chips. Not a girl, a woman, and she is accustomed to being spoken to as such.
Clara was a girl once. When he met her, his Impossible Girl. Now the girl is gone, and when he looks at her, a woman stands in her place, and he wonders, almost frantically, where he has mislaid all of the time that seems to be slipping through his fingers like sand.
6.
Very well, alright, so Clara is not Rose! But it can hardly be said that all the fault lies with him! After all, if she is such an adult, why is she acting like a petulant child?
Even so, he continues in faith. She will always make the right choice. She will see, surely she will see, once she has calmed down, why he did it.
Because it's obvious, isn't it?
To make the choice for her, to treat her like a child, is what would have been cheap, pathetic, patronizing.
It is what he might have done to Rose, now that he thinks about it. Because Rose was still half a child.
And Clara is not Rose.
Soon, perhaps even tonight, she will calm down, and she will see. Just like when she first saw him, like a light switch flicking from off to on, she will see this. She will look out of her window, and see the glowing weight of the moon hanging in the night sky, remember what she has done – what he gave her the space to do on her own - and surely she will see.
"You stay there!" Rose ordered him, tripping eagerly towards the door, wonder in her eyes. "You've done this before."
Surely she will see that he did it for her.
"This is mine!"
That he did it to give her the moon.
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You know what? I don't want you to review. That's right, I forbid it! No matter what, I say you are not allowed to do it, you can't do it, and if you did it, you wouldn't be any good at it! Just take your comments and constructive critiques and shoo!
Muwahahaha, the fools! They've played right into my hands! Now they will never be able to resist leaving a review just to spite me! Reverse psychology works every time!
Huh...? What do you mean, typing in italics is the equivalent of a stage whisper, and you can still read everything I am writing...?
...drat. Foiled again.