Down we plunged.
All I could hear was my own heavy breathing as we fell, accelerating every second. Around us the sky was velvet black and pin pricked with stars, below us the planet was rushing upward, getting larger and larger. I could pick out a river and a forest and a vast orange plain.
I laughed, delighted.
I felt pressure building up against the the suit and then, without warning we flipped over.
For the briefest moment I was staring up at the TARDIS growing smaller and smaller and then we flipped again and I saw the green-orange planet and then we flipped once more and the TARDIS was just a speck. We flipped again and again. Head over heels, spinning and falling.
My head felt as if I'd been hanging upside down too long and my vision was grainy. I felt nauseated and paniced. My visor was fogging up reducing my sight even further. I felt the Doctor behind me, twisting and adjusting.
Then we were falling face first again.
I breathed as deeply as I could as we continued to fall.
We free fell for an eternity (4:15 seconds, the Doctor later told me). The lower we dropped, the more the fog in my visor cleared. I couldn't see black space around me anymore, just faint blue sky in all direction. In the distance, where the planet curved away at the horizon I could see clouds, but where we were going it was a cloudless day.
In addition to the river, plain and forest I had seen earlier I spotted a city below us laid out in a circular pattern. The streets reminded me of bubbles all joined together.
"One, two three," the Doctor counted off and then we were jerked back and up.
I tilted my head back (banging my helmet into his chin in the process) and saw a white and blue parachute flung open above us. The Doctor was holding onto the parachute, directing our glide. I looked back down at the planet below and relaxed. I hadn't realized how tense I had been until that moment.
From that point on the rest of the way down was magnificent.
"We broke the sound barrier," the Doctor's voice said in the helmet speaker by my ear.
"What? You're kidding," I said. I couldn't believe that I'd missed something like that. We'd broken it, I later learned, shortly after the Doctor had pulled us out of our spin—when my visor had been a haze of fog and I'd been ready to pass out.
"Better avoid the the city," he said and we swooped across the sky away from the city.
I twisted my head to get one last glimpse of it. It looked like a sandcastle city. It's buildings clustered together like upturned buckets of sand. A perfect forest of cylinders.
The forest and river were beneath us now, but the Doctor avoided those too, aiming instead at the orange plain. The closer we drew the better I could see what it was. It looked like a savannah of orange grass.
I saw the sonic screwdriver out of the corner of my eye and then the Doctor said, "77% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen and 2% miscellaneous."
"Miscellaneous?" I asked.
He then rattled off a list of gasses and when he paused for a breath I asked if we could breath on the surface. I felt him nod behind me.
"Me better than you, actually," he said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
I saw a flock of white and scarlet birds rise up from the ground far below us.
"It's almost the exact same atmospheric composition as Gallifrey."
"Oh," was all I said. I remembered that Gallifrey was his planet. The one that he'd come from that he didn't ever want to talk about. The planet he refused to take me to.
"Is this Gallifrey?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Gallifrey is gone."
Then he didn't stay another word until we were a few hundred feet above the ground when he asked me to lift my legs.
We landed surprisingly well for an uncoordinated alien and a human girl with zero sky diving experience. And when I say "landed well" I mean we ended up in a heap but no one broke a bone, so that was a bonus.
Once we'd disentangled ourselves and fought our way free of the parachute, we took our helmets off. The Doctor breathed deeply but I took only a few shallow breaths until I felt certain the atmosphere wasn't going to kill me. It was silly really, I'd not once worried that the air on other planets was deadly before. I guess I just assumed that if the Doctor could breath the air, so could I. I never considered that his home world might have different air than Earth's.
"Well?" he said, gesturing at the sky and looking at me expectantly.
"That was amazing," I said. I grinned and looked up, shielding my eyes from the glare of the planet's sun. I couldn't see the TARDIS even though I knew it was somewhere above us.
"It was, wasn't it?" He said, his smile wide and his eyes sparkling. Then he turned and looked back towards the forest. The city lay within the forest though we could not see if from where we stood. "Ready, Clara?" he asked.
"I was born ready," I said.
He snorted at that remark.
We took off our suits (my dress was wrinkled beyond hope) and I slipped my satchel over my shoulder. It had survived the fall with minimal damage. The strap looked a bit singed, but everything inside was intact. I reached in a rubbed the little lamp for good luck before we set off through the grass towards the forest.
The Doctor was delighted with everything he saw and his enthusiasm was contagious. The orange grass was about waist high and the blades were broad and soft. Red and yellow flowers bobbed above and amongst the grass and fat bee-like insect buzzed around them. The air had a wonderfully warm spicy smell, the smell of the grass and the flowers. Strange birds sang and I saw more of the scarlet and white birds flying over head.
Twice we saw something fuzzy and dusky yellow scamper away from us through the grass and the Doctor decided to call them "Flubbles" and he wanted to catch one and sulked when I told him he couldn't.
By the time we reached the edge of the forest I was starving. Tea with Captain Latimer seemed like a life time away. When I mentioned as much to the Doctor he reached into his pocket and withdrew a sandwich wrapped in paper.
"Jenny packed us a hamper," he explained.
"Where's the hamper?" I asked.
He patted his pocket and winked. "Bigger on the inside."
I ate the sandwich (egg salad) as we tramped into the trees.
The trees reminded me of mushrooms. The trunks were long and straight and the branches all clustered together near the top of the tree. The leaves were green and silver. I found one on the ground and stopped to pick it up and examine it. The top of the leaf was a dark emerald green while the bottom was a glistening silver.
The Doctor picked up a leaf of his own and scanned it with he screwdriver and frowned before dropping the leaf and letting it float to the ground.
He took my hand and we walked hand in hand amongst the tree branches.
Soon we were deep enough into the forest that we couldn't see the prairie behind us and the branches and foliage above blocked out a great deal of the sunlight.
I reached into my satchel and took out River's lamp. It glowed in the palm of my hand and illuminated the forest floor around us.
"Where did you get that?" The Doctor asked snatching the orb out of my hand. He held it up at eye level and pointed his screwdriver at it.
"Oi, grabby much?" I said. "Your dead wife gave it to me."
He nearly dropped the sphere. "River?"
"You know, I don't think she's as dead as you seem to believe," I said.
He didn't say anything but handed the lamp back to me. I held it out in front of us as we walked.
After several moments of silence, the Doctor began to speak. "A long time ago, a group of Gallifreyans, not Time Lords, mind, this was before the Time Lords, anyway, a group of Gallifreyans colonized planets in another star system."
"Do you think they colonized this planet?"
He nodded, tightening his grip on my hand. "I'd, I'd forgotten all about it. It was just a footnote in history, but the city and the planets and the trees..."
"What about the city?"
"The streets spelled out words in primitive Gallifreyan."
"What words?"
"Peace, prosperity, unity," he said.
"That sounds quite pretty," I said. Then I remembered something he had just said. "Hold on a tick, what do you mean before Time Lords? How can something be before Time Lords?"
"Time Lords were created," he said. "We all started out the same on Gallifrey. No regenerations, a long life though, no time travel. Loads of history happened and time passed. We explored the stars." He swept his arm at the forest around us. "An expedition must have come here and settled. Then there was a war-"
"The Time War?" I asked.
He shook his head. "No that came long after. This was the war against the vampires."
"Vampires!" I laughed.
The Doctor smiled despite himself and then continued, "Gallifreyans from across the galaxy were recalled to our home planet to join the fight. I suppose these people must have ignored the summons."
"Maybe they haven't happened yet?" I said.
"No." He looked haunted. "It happened already."
"So, what happened?" I asked. "With the vampires, I mean."
"We invented time travel to stop them."
"Time travel was invented as a weapon?"
"No! Well...yes, technically." He rubbed his neck uncomfortably.
"No wonder you lot ended up in a 'Time War'," I said, coming to a stop and dropping his hand so I could cross my arms over my chest. "So all of the people here, in the city, they're descendants of the Gallifreyans who had the sense to realize that using time as a weapon was a rubbish idea?"
The Doctor looked put out and he muttered something like, "They shirked their duty."
"Oh?" I asked. "And what's you running away in your box if it's not shirking your duty?"
His eyes flashed and in the light of the lamp I could see anger in his features. He stepped close to me and in a low voice, through clenched teeth he said, "I did not abandon my responsibilities. I came when they called. I did as they bid—even if it meant losing everything and everyone I'd ever loved." For a split second I saw that other him—the war torn one from the timestream—superimposed over his face.
I felt light headed.
I must have looked as if I were going to faint because the Doctor cried out my name and grabbed my shoulders.
The lamp dropped from my hand and bounced across the forest floor.
"Clara," the Doctor said again. He sat me down on a fallen log and scanned me with his sonic. Reality returned with a rush and I pushed the buzzing screwdriver away. I told him that I was fine, just hungry.
He gave me another sandwich from his pocket and retrieved the lamp for me. He sat down next to me and turned the lamp over and over in his hands while I ate.
Notes: I based Clara and the Doctor's jump on Felix Baumgartner's incredible free fall last year. I did take some liberties with what they were wearing as far as protective gear (since the Doctor probably has something from the 63rd century stashed on the TARDIS). If you haven't already, I highly encourage you to check out the videos from Baumgartner's fall-they're incredible! The story the Doctor tells about the war against the vampires is based on the research I did on the history of the Time Lords in the Doctor Who wiki. It's pretty interesting stuff!