*Hey everyone! Happy Valentine's Day! I hope everyone is having a great day, filled with red roses and proposals whatever else people do on Valentine's Day. Anyway, my donation to this fine day is Chapter 7, which sees the return of Dave and the Doctor having to play the Clara role. I really hope you guys enjoy it! As ever, thanks to everyone who has read, reviewed, followed and favourited, please keep reviewing, it makes my day :) TPD*


The train up to Blackpool had been long and arduous. Clara was exhausted and couldn't wait to collapse into the spare room at her dad's apartment. Since his divorce, her father had moved into a smaller, more compact apartment, better suited to his needs. She felt bad for him, but he had seemed happy enough over the phone, although she hadn't seen him in person since he had punched her next fiancé in the face. The Doctor had spoken to him about it and apparently everything was fine, but Clara couldn't help but feel a touch of resentment towards him for that. She dropped her overnight bag beside her and let off a fierce yawn as she knocked on the door. There was no answer. Clara checked her watch. She'd told her dad she'd arrive around half 7, it was 7:38. She knocked again and she heard noises from within but nobody came to answer the door. Slightly worried now, Clara tried the door. Luckily, it opened to her touch and she stepped inside cautiously, to be hit by a wave of smells. The stench of beer and vomit rolled over her and made Clara want to throw up. She ran over the window and threw open the curtains and window, letting fresh Northern air gasp into her lungs as she tried hard not to gag. She opened the next set of windows. She then turned back into the now better lit room.

"Clara?"

"Dad?" she sounded disgusted, unable to hide her revulsion. "What the fuck?"

Her father was lying in what Clara desperately hoped was a pool of beer and not a bodily fluid of some kind, the sofa filthy and almost rotting. The amount of takeaway boxes and beer bottles in the bins told the whole story. Her father had become a middle-aged American cliché dealing with a break up. Clara didn't even bother to try and cover up her distaste as she paced the room. Her father sat up and she looked him up and down. He hadn't shaved in weeks, he looked drunk and terrible.

"Sweetie," her father spluttered, barely cohesively. "I wasn't expecting you until tomorrow. Did I get the date wrong?"

"Yes dad," Clara replied angrily. "You got the date wrong. And frankly, I'm glad you did. Because we clearly have a much bigger problem!"

"We?" Dave sounded confused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, you're my dad!" Clara cried exasperatedly. "And I love you. How can I possibly let you go on living like this?"

"Clara," Dave was slurring his words. "I can explain."

"You don't have to," Clara replied bluntly. "It's obvious what's going on. You're going through a bad period after your break up. But you need to get back on your feet. Now. Cold shower, go. And don't give me any sleep it off nonsense, get in the shower. Then, you're going to clean this mess up."

"Clara, sweetie."

"Daddy," Clara said gently. She hadn't called him that in a long time. "I love you, okay. That's why I'm doing this. You need to pull it together. So sober up, tidy up and I'll make you a nice mug of strong, sweet tea, okay?" She strolled over to him and kissed his cheek caringly, instantly regretting the decision and wishing that she had some mouthwash to hand. While her dad showered, she made two teas and took out the bins, desperate to at least start the cleaning process, so that he didn't feel like he was being punished.

After an hour of joint cleaning, they sat down on Clara's bed in the spare room, with the sofa in the lounge out of action. Clara would take the cushions to be dry cleaned the next day. Her father looked old and ashamed and she felt dreadful for him. She wrapped her arm around him and rubbed his shoulder.

"I didn't realise you were doing so badly," she admitted sadly. "Or I would have come up so much sooner."

"Don't be silly Clara," Dave smiled. "I'm your father; it's supposed to be my job to look after you. And I've done a crap job of that haven't I?" Clara blushed and shook her head frantically. "Look you have your own life now, with the Doctor. Go and be happy Clara, that's all I want from you. That's all your mother would ever have wanted for you."

"I thought you and Mandy were okay?" Clara said quietly. "How did this happen?"

"I'm not crying over Mandy Clara," her father replied with a heavy heart and Clara's mouth formed an 'O'. "I'm crying over the same person I've been crying over for nearly 10 years, the same person that I've spent my whole life crying for and over. The person I let down. The person I should have driven to work. If I had, she'd still be alive. And I've never stopped thinking about her, not for one day in nearly 10 years. Oh Clara, my Clara. I'm so sorry."

And he was crying now and Clara was sobbing beside him, unable to stop. She missed her mum too, more than anything, of course she did. And knowing that her father did, knowing that he still loved her more than anything except Clara herself, and knowing that he blamed himself for what had happened? It broke her heart.

"It's not your fault dad," she said, words she somehow knew she should have said earlier. Part of her wondered if she had blamed her father as well when she was younger. Those teenage years, the ones where she almost ended up in a gutter. She would have if not for the Doctor, probably.

"But what happened to you is my fault," he said fiercely and Clara didn't dare argue with him. "My baby girl, the most important person in my life. And I stopped showing you that. I stopped being the father that you needed, that your mother needed me to be for the both of us. And I let you go out and drink and do God knows what else. And when you were at uni…I just threw myself into Mandy, rather than think about you and what you were doing. I thought that the therapy would be enough, I thought it would fix you so that I didn't have to. So that I could focus on fixing myself. But here we are Clara. And you had to fix yourself, you had to make yourself okay. And I never could. I'm still here, I'm still broken."

"Dad," Clara said softly, and their eyes met. "It was never about being broken and being fixed. The minute I realised that, the second that I realised that all my problems were in my head, they got better. There's nothing wrong with us, we're not broken. We lost her. Both of us and we weren't there for each other. But we are now. We can be now. And you can realise what I realised, that we're people. We're human. We feel sadness and sorrow and loss and we don't know how to deal with it. But that doesn't make us Damaged. It makes us who we are."

"I love you Clara," he whispered. "And I'm never going to let you suffer alone, the way that you did for so long, because of me."

"You didn't take her away," Clara informed him, in a voice that was almost breaking. "You didn't kill her. The world did that. And you did your best, I know that. Maybe you didn't do as well as I'd hoped, but here we are. I'm okay and you're going to be okay. I can't imagine how I'd react to losing the Doctor. I don't know what I'd do, how I'd cope, even if we had a child. I don't know how I'd be able to look at that child and tell them that everything would be okay or that Daddy loves them. I'd want to drink and shut myself away from the world. What you had to do was impossibly difficult, don't blame yourself for not doing a perfect job."

"It shouldn't be this way round Clara," he reminded her and she elapsed into fresh tears at this. "I should have been the one caring for you, not the other way around."

"Well you weren't," Clara said promptly. "And this is what we've got. And I'm sorry Dad, but we're both going to have to cope with it."

And at that, she pressed her head onto his shoulder and they sat up for the rest of the night, crying and talking properly and about Clara's mother and, for the first time in years, Clara felt like she had a real father.


Clara woke long after noon, to the smell of frying sausages and her phone frantically buzzing. She fumbled for it and saw three missed calls from Annabelle. Clara swore loudly. It was the day that Annabelle's book needed to be in. If she didn't get it in on time, then there would be hell to pay. Clara sat up, blinking sleep out of her eyes and running a hand through her bed hair. She quickly thumbed the keypad to call Annabelle off but she didn't pick up. She was probably on the move, Clara realised or maybe in a meeting with her publishers. The reason her phone had been buzzing wasn't Annabelle's calls, which she'd managed to sleep right through, but a text from the Doctor. She smiled at the sweetness of it and texted a quick reply.

Her dad knocked on the door and she bid him enter. He did so, with an apologetic smile and a sausage sandwich lathered in ketchup. He hadn't made her one of those since she was a little girl. Clara gave him her warmest smile and tucked in; him sat on the edge of her bed, watching nervously.

"You've still got the touch dad," she reassured him and he let out a mock sigh of relief which earned him a giggle from his daughter. She was still smiling as she finished the sandwich and then she clambered out of bed, shooing him off so that she could shower and change. Clara felt ready to face the day and then she checked her phone to see if the Doctor had replied while she was in the shower. He had and it didn't look good.

We need to talk about Annabelle xx


The knocking on the front door grew steadily more frantic as the Doctor tumbled down the stairs, losing his footing at the top and rolling down to the bottom. He picked himself up and dusted himself down and shouted to the troubled visitor that he was indeed on his way. He wasn't expecting anyone and Clara was safely in Blackpool, if her text from the previous night was anything to go by. He straightened his bow tie and opened the front door, a smile erupting onto his face when he saw Annabelle and that smile only growing when he saw how happy she looked. She must have finished her book.

"Is Clara in?" she asked, her breath short and her demeanour excited. "I need to talk to her."

"No," the Doctor replied, eager to decipher Annabelle's mood. "She's up in Blackpool with her father until tomorrow, but you're more than welcome to talk to me. Clara thinks I need more practice with other humans anyway."

"Oh relax you, it's only me," Annabelle laughed, patting his arm gently as he showed her into the house and they sat down in the living room. "And yeah, that would be great. We don't talk enough anyway, considering you're fucking marrying my best friend. How's the wedding planning going?"

"It's not yet," the Doctor laughed. "Clara seems to think I'm underestimating how much effort it's going to take, but personally I think Clara's forgetting how annoyingly efficient I am when it comes to organising."

"Oh honey," Annabelle laughed patronisingly. "It's your wedding. Every single stupid little detail will have to be perfect. There is no way in hell that you can plan that off the cuff. No matter how efficient you are. So I'm guessing you'd already worked it out, but I finished the book! In time! The publisher has it now, how amazing is that?" She carried on talking before the Doctor could answer. "I mean, I'm so proud of it, I think that this book will be the one that really gets my writing career underway and I want you and Clara to read my first draft, because it is seriously amazing."

"What's the book about?" the Doctor asked quickly, desperate to get a word in and try to steer the conversation. Annabelle looked a Duracell bunny on cocaine, she was so hyper.

"It's about this teenage boy," Annabelle said with a smile. "And he finds his one true love and then she breaks his heart. So he spends the rest of his teenage years cut off from the world. Desperate to find another love. Except the world doesn't work that way. So he keeps on hunting and the harder he tries, the more the world beats him up. Until finally, he finds that there is more to the world than true love. He discovers the true meaning of friendship at university. And he resolves to spend the rest of his life helping his friends find their one true loves. But then, tragedy strikes and the boy has to sacrifice himself in the name of true love, so that his best friend can be happy. How does that sound?"

The Doctor had gone deathly pale. He quickly thumbed a text to Clara and he tried to recover his composure. Annabelle seemed completely oblivious. Maybe she genuinely had no idea or maybe she was completely in denial. But she had novelised Tom's life. Or at least: a version of it. A version from her point of view, the Doctor supposed. But this was seriously not good, he knew that much. Annabelle had taken Tom's death so much harder than he had and even to an extent more than Clara had, although Clara almost tore herself apart over it. Tom's death had made Clara who she was today, a teacher. It appeared that it had also inspired Annabelle. The Doctor's mouth opened and shut several times over. He smiled as best that he could but Annabelle was still just staring at him, as if expecting an answer and he didn't know what to give her. This was what Clara was normally good at, how the hell was he going to tackle this.

"Annabelle," he said quietly and Annabelle's eyebrow shot up. "This story, does it sound familiar to you? Does it remind you of anyone?" Her face had fallen now and she looked like she wanted to cry. The Doctor didn't know if he should proceed. What would Clara do? Clara would do the hard thing. And tell Annabelle the truth. "Does this story remind you of Tom?" he said as gently as he could.

Annabelle's face had completely collapsed, into a crumpling heap. Tears had started streaming down her cheeks and she nodded once, a soft motion but it was there. The Doctor bit his lip. He didn't know how to comfort her. He put his arm around her.

"Of course it is," she took a deep breath. "I just didn't want to admit it Doctor. To myself, and certainly not to Clara. She misses him too, as much as I do." The Doctor didn't doubt that. "I thought I'd moved on in my life, but I've not been intimate with anyone in five years and even this book, it just screams desperation. How can I move on from this?"

The Doctor didn't know. He didn't know what to say to Annabelle or how to say it. When you lost someone close to you, it felt like the world was caving in. It had been five years, but he still saw the look on Clara's face sometimes. Like she was remembering and it hurt. It had been nearly ten years since her mum passed and she still wasn't okay with that. Some things stayed with you forever. The Doctor would never forget Craig. He would never stop feeling guilty. He missed his own parents, hated himself for what he had done. But he couldn't tell Annabelle most of that, so he did what he could.

"The orphanage was hell for me," the Doctor said and Annabelle shot him an odd look. She knew about the orphan part of course, but she and the Doctor had never discussed it. "I mean it was terrible, truly the worst experience of my life. We all have our sufferings Annabelle, but do you know how I got through it?"

"How?" her voice barely above a whisper.

"Hope," the Doctor replied with a smile. "I kept telling myself that it wouldn't hurt forever. That there was nothing that the orphanage could do to me, hell nothing that the world could do to me that wasn't temporary. That and I had a good friend by my side every step of the way. Things will get better Annabelle, the second that you start believing that they will. You've been sat in your house, writing away your pain. But you're not any happy for it. Not yet. You need to get out there, Annabelle. Show the world that it can't beat you."

She looked at him, a peculiar look on her face. She kissed his cheek and he blushed and stammered as she laughed. The Doctor tried to compose himself and Annabelle punched his arm playfully.

"I can see why Clara loves you so much," Annabelle said. "You're great at advice giving. But don't tell Clara I said that, she'll never forgive me. She'll spout some crap about me inflating your already gigantic ego or something along those lines. But you really think it'll be okay? Do you think that I'll be okay?"

"No Annabelle," the Doctor replied, his voice warm and his smile genuine. "I think that you will be amazing."


Clara had texted an immediate reply to the Doctor, worry flooding through her. When he didn't reply immediately, panic started to give way to self-reassurance. The Doctor could handle whatever the problem was, couldn't he? The fact that he hadn't already replied implied that he was with Annabelle now, hopefully helping her. Clara tried to force herself to push it to the back of her mind as she joined her dad for a spot of shopping, trying to get his apartment to be less of a "small piece of Hell" as Clara referred to it. He had been offended by that but frankly she didn't care. He needed to sort his life out and step one of sorting his life out involved living in a place that wasn't conducive to rats and reminded Clara strongly of a serial killer's lair. Some nice furniture, maybe the occasional poster. Some working light bulbs would be marvellous, Clara had told him and he had rolled his eyes at her sarcasm. She had almost managed to forget about the existence of the text and if the Doctor had texted back, she hadn't checked, so immersed was she in the world of helping her father. It took her until the evening to actually check her phone again, when she had finally sorted out her father's flat so it at least somewhat resembled a liveable space.

Crisis averted! Doctor out! xxx


*And tomorrow: falling stepladders, teachers playing ping-pong and Harriet Jones.*