"Another reason that you care," Clara mused, inspecting her raised hand that was positioned high above her head. "You don't have a beard."

His paintbrush scratched against the canvas in two stiff strokes. "I don't see how my apathy correlates to my lack of facial hair, but alright."

"If you really didn't care about anything at all, you'd have given up on appearances by now."

"Well I'm glad my personal hygiene has impressed you, Miss Oswald."

The Doctor had tidied up since their last encounter; he'd pushed his work table against the back wall to make space, swept the floor with his wicker broom. The young ballerina now stood in the clearing dressed in her costume for the Christmas production—a frilly pink ensemble with enough layers to keep everyone in Paris warm during the coldest winter season they'd had in years. She loved showing it off when she twirled, as if the fabric was made especially for it.

He'd insisted that after several pirouettes he'd grown dizzy, and since then, Clara's limbs were locked in fourth position, her figure impossibly still as he worked. It didn't stop her from making the most ridiculous of expressions towards him.

"What's with the outfit?" he had asked her when she walked in just a mere hour ago, his easel still a heap of wood at his feet. Clara had removed her coat and hung it up on the peg he'd installed the previous day, as if she'd been doing it for years.

"I thought you were going to paint me," she frowned, looking down at herself.

"Yes, but I didn't know you were coming dressed like that."

"Look, you can paint me in something else if you dislike it that much."

"Good. Because if I did, I'd have to draw you frolicking in a field. With sheep. You look like a nursery rhyme."

"Stop smiling," he instructed her, mainly because it was distracting him. Her face obliged almost immediately, lips pulling into a frown, and he couldn't tell if she was mocking him or not. "So what exactly are you supposed to be? You look like a child."

"Thanks," she replied airily, huffing a stray hair that had fallen out of her bun. "Like I said, it's for the Christmas Ballet I'm in at the Paris Opera. We're performing 'The Nutcracker' this year."

The Doctor tapped his brush against the easel in thought, only half-listening as he considered which paints to use for the color of her dress. He had a concept in mind—an idea that he'd only expressed as a faint line of charcoal and a few shaded areas on the canvas. But he was ultimately tentative to commit. It was as if every painting on his wall was watching him in that moment, their colors gazing towards him as if they had expected his return since the beginning—and it was all just too much.

Initially, he had only agreed to this as a preventative measure. He knew it in his heart that Clara wouldn't release him until he'd agreed to paint again; if anything, he was only saving his time. But living through it now, bickering with the ballerina before him even though she had stayed impossibly still this entire time, he'd forgotten how much he'd enjoyed it. How less heavy his heart felt when he could pour it onto a canvas. Perhaps it was why he was so resistant. Not because he was afraid he'd lost his touch, but that once he began again, he wouldn't be able to stop.

"Oh, so you're playing the nutcracker then?" he asked without glancing up from his work.

She spared her immobile position to crane her neck towards the floor. All she saw were tufts of pink tulle.

"No, I'm playing Clara," she replied, frowning.

"You're playing yourself? My, isn't that ambitious."

"No, not Clara Oswald, just Clara," the ballerina stated matter-of-factly. "She's a character in the play."

"Oh, the main one?"

He looked surprised. Clara rolled her eyes.

"Yes, the main one," she drawled, as if it could be anyone else. The Doctor merely stared at her, then back at his painting, scratching the back of his head with the end of the brush as if he couldn't quite comprehend the fact—it was like fitting a key into a lock it wasn't meant for. Clara didn't know whether to take offense to this not, but could understand how he might have mistaken her for an ensemble girl. After all, her petite figure wasn't as prevalent in comparison to the lean, long-legged women who performed alongside her.

It had taken her years to realize that she didn't need to fit into their box; she was perfectly capable of inventing one herself. And she would carry that individuality with her for the rest of her career.

"Well that can't be right," The Doctor mused, more to himself than to anyone else. "Clara in 'The Nutcracker' is about twelve years old."

She gestured to her skirts frenetically, hands swooshing against the fabric in near-agitation as she ground out, "Hence why I look like a child."

Something in his brain must have come around full-circle, because the concentration on his face seemed to dissipate into clarity as he said, "Ah, I see now! Your names are both Clara and you're both inadvertently small. Makes perfect sense." He shook his head, as if her casting had been a mystery he'd intended to solve all along. "My, those directors at the Paris Opera sure know what they're doing," he chuckled, dabbing at a bit of paint on his palette.

Clara merely shook her head, her limbs returning to their position as she said, "Just paint, you daft old man."

He didn't need to look up to know that she was smiling.

"I need to ask something of you," he murmured after several minutes of silence. Clara raised her eyebrows, urging him to go on. "I need...more time to work on the music box."

"Disregarding my deadlines, I see," she said draftily. He frowned at her.

"It's not because I haven't been working on it," he claimed, unsure of why he was defending himself against this. "If anything, it's all I've been working on for the past several days. It's the tune, Clara; it's worked itself into my brain, turned me mad."

"I think that's all on you, not the box," she joked, earning her a glare from the old man. She chuckled. "If you can somehow get it to me in time for Christmas, then fine. I'm counting on you, Doctor," she reminded him, gaze traveling towards the work bench, only to find that it was completely bare. She wondered if he was telling the truth.

His promise sounded sincere, but with what evidence? How did she know he hadn't just tossed her heirloom into the waste, deeming it irreplaceable? She'd be lying if she said she hadn't enjoyed coming here these past few weeks, revisiting this strange character of a man she had the audacity to call her friend, but she had a motive in mind when she had prowled the streets looking for his shop, and she wasn't about to relinquish it so easily.

"Alright, as you were," The Doctor said after another half hour of him painting, the canvas turned away from her as his gaze flitted back and forth, as if checking to make sure that reality matched the one he was creating by hand. He gestured for Clara to relax and she did, her limbs stretching towards the ceiling as she bounced on the balls of her feet. For once in her life, she was strangely at ease. She hadn't yet felt the nerves of her upcoming performance, as if anxiety were a hat she deliberately chose not to wear that day.

Massaging the knot that had formed at the base of her neck, she toddled over to The Doctor's side to view what he had done, but he turned the canvas away from her as she approached. Frowning, she tried to look over his shoulder, but he dodged her every attempt at doing so. A few more and she was crossing her arms in frustration.

"Why won't you let me see?" she demanded, the frills of her dress making her all the less intimidating as The Doctor suppressed a smile. He shrugged sheepishly.

"It's not done."

"It's of me," she reminded him, furrowing her brows. "How am I to know if you drew me with two heads?"

"Clara Oswald, I can assure you, I did not draw you with two heads. Though the idea is appealing," he admitted, leaning the canvas against the wall so she wouldn't see. "There are plenty of completed works beside my desk over there, you're free to peruse those all you like," he promised her, practically shooing her away from him as he made a show of cleaning up his work space. She eventually retreated, a suspicious look on her face as she glided across the room, towards the handful of paintings he had disregarded, the dust on their edges becoming more visible as she approached.

She had already grown familiar with the ones he had hung up on the wall; it was all she could see whenever she stepped through the door—but these works were faced away from her, stacked up against one another like folding chairs. Ignored, forgotten. As if by facing them towards the wall, The Doctor would forget they ever existed. Fingertips slowly tracing the edges of the first canvas, Clara carefully took it into her small hands, and turned it around.

It was a landscape portrait, colors of crimson and mahogany blending together to form two towers, two sisters standing guard over a rocky, barren landscape. A blinding sun kissed the horizon at their immediate right, and although Clara didn't recognize the place (she had never traveled very far from Paris), her instincts told her that somewhere in the universe, it existed, that these two towers were living and breathing and real. She set the painting down gently beside her and picked up another.

This time, her eyes had to study the painting for several minutes. It was the warmest of all the paintings she'd seen from him—delicate brush strokes of ivory and pine green depicting a trellis-like structure that bordered the canvas, leafy vines and orbs of candlelight adorning its skeleton like stars did their constellations. And then at the painting's center were the silhouettes, a man and a woman, standing at the end of what appeared to be a balcony, their backs facing her but their heads slightly inclined towards one another—a moment of intimacy so strong it had Clara placing it down sooner than she'd intended. She felt as if she were intruding on a private conversation.

Her curiosity outweighing her hesitancy to continue, the young woman picked up a third canvas. Turning it around, she was surprised to find that it was a portrait, the only one in his endless collection of paintings. She didn't need to recognize the woman to know who she was, or why she was facing the wall.

It was her hair that made her appear so life-like, the whorls of gold curls sprawled across the canvas, framing the woman's face as she smiled enigmatically back at her. Her lips were pulled into the sort of grin that was slow to trust, the gleam of her eyes as mischievous as a feline's as they beheld a deeper expression that Clara knew was reserved for one man and one man only.

She found herself looking away from those striking blue eyes as she heard The Doctor's footsteps, stopping short just a few feet behind her. She knew exactly why they did, and her heart hurt because of it.

"She loved you," she found herself saying after minutes of saying absolutely nothing at all. Her voice was barely above a whisper. The Doctor, whether he heard her or not, didn't reply. "I mean, I've never seen this woman before in my life, but I can just tell by the way she looked at you when you painted this...that she loved you."

Setting the painting down, but not turning it against the wall, Clara backed up from the collection, and understood. The solitude, the silent permission for her to see what he'd refused to face for several years now. The sadness in his eyes that would never leave him. She didn't need to know what happened, didn't need to be educated on every detail, but she understood. It was all falling into place.

"Come to the show this weekend, Doctor."

"What—?" he nearly choked, clearly taken aback by the offer. She may as well have asked him to dance onstage with her.

But Clara only nodded, retrieving her coat from its peg and pulling out a single ticket from the left pocket. He looked at the piece of inky parchment in bewilderment.

"Do you just carry those around with you?"

"I want you to come," she insisted, disregarding the question as she pressed the ticket into his hands. Her touch was warm, almost as warm as her eyes as they peered up into his intently. "Consider it my Christmas gift to you."

"I don't..." he started, his throat suddenly dry. "I don't think I can. I don't think I know how."

"Yes, you do," she promised him, her voice firm. "The only thing keeping you here is yourself, Doctor. Outside those doors is a city you've never even met, because its people are constantly changing—and somewhere out there, there is a little dancer in the Paris Opera House waiting for you to come and see her perform. She is nervous, she is excited, and acutely aware that she looks absolutely ridiculous in this dress—"

He laughed at that, despite himself. Clara's lips curved into a soft smile.

"—and she is your friend. And as your friend, I have a duty of care," she finished, shrugging on her coat and tying it at the waist. The Doctor stared at the ticket in his hands, the mere possibility of leaving his dark and desolate shop terrifying to him. But it was a possibility. And within that possibility lied a small nuance of hope.

"I'll consider it," he finally said, and that was that. Clara smirked.

"What? Have you got other plans?"

He arched his eyebrows in a way that suggested she had gone too far.

"Fine! Alright—I'll get out of your hair," she said, raising her hands in surrender as she backed up towards the door. "But you have to get that music box to me somehow!"

The door was half-way closed when he finally allowed himself to smile.

"Indeed I do, Clara Oswald."