A/N: Two posted chapters in three days. See, I told you I was faster than Santa Claus.

Also, I think it's only fair to warn you that the situation is this: This chapter is about as far as I've gotten before hitting a wall. Because I've got so much going through my head since the finale that I'm not entirely sure where I now want to take this story. I started out writing it as fun Whoffle fluff, but as Series 8's episodes unfolded, I think Moffat's darkness theme infiltrated my head a bit. Anyway, it may take awhile for the next chapter to get posted, just because I have too many angsty feels and whatnot rattling in my brain, and they need to get sorted first. But I'll do my best. :-)

Hope you enjoy!

MAINS, part 5

"Clara, you've got to be quiet, I'm concentrating!" he says, and she sighs loudly.

"You know, there's a chance that your human teeth aren't going to be as impenetrable to sugar as your Time Lord ones," she tells him, watching the expression of unabashed glee on his face, as he digs through the bag of sweets he simply had to buy when they'd discovered the shop around the corner from the Roman baths.

"Hold on, I think I've found one that tastes like custard," he says, popping another candy in his mouth, as they stroll down the street.

"We're supposed to be finding the Vespiform!" she says, even though it's hard to argue with him when he's almost floating with happiness.

He slurps up another candy, waving nonchalantly. "The shop was on the way back to the Inn," he says defensively. "And fighting monsters takes energy."

She shakes her head, and tries, unsuccessfully, not to find this endearing. How can he be such a child, wrapped in the soul of a brilliant old man, squeezed into a body that's hard and tight and….

"Couldn't we have actual food?" she asks, clearing her throat, snapping herself out of the reverie. "The kind with nutrients?"

He's swinging her hand, almost skipping, completely ignoring the stares of the reserved Georgians glancing furtively at the pair of them, and it takes everything she has not to laugh out loud because this is what she loves. Not the time-travel, the monsters, the wonders, but just this: strolling down the street, happily swinging arms with the man she….

Can't have.

That's what he is, and that's what she has to never forget.

"You can have anything you want, Clara Oswald," he says happily, "Anything at all."

She smiles at him, while her heart breaks in two.

He loves to see her smile. It's right up there with his top five wonders of the Universe. In fact, he thinks how amazing it is that his favorite wonders have increasingly had something to do with Clara, as though the mysteries of her mind, and all the the things he wants to show her, imagining all the ways she might react, are the most intriguing adventure he's ever faced.

He sees her glancing at a family walking towards them, a father and mother, followed by their children, like dutiful little ducklings. The family nods at him and Clara, and the Doctor tips his hat in return, smiling at them. But out of the corner of his eye, he can see that Clara isn't really smiling anymore. She's glancing back at the little family, and then turning back to him with eyes that are overly bright.

"So. Know any place we can get cheesy chips?" she asks, a bit too cheerfully.

He feels his breath come faster, and it's that unpleasant sensation of falling all over again. He holds tighter to her hand, barely aware he's doing it.

"We're almost back to the Inn," he says, for the street has now given way to the green patches of the park alongside them. "We can get something there."

She nods, taking his arm and walking with him again, but the mood is different. And he knows she feels it, too. She's not thinking about cheesy chips. She's thinking about the one thing she'll never have as long as she keeps traveling the stars.

It's the thought that paralyzes him with fear, that this is why she'll leave him in the end. It doesn't matter how clever he is, how brilliant, or even the fact that he can lay all of time and space at her feet. Those aren't the things that his Clara wants. What she wants is what's just passed them on the street, something that he had never, ever considered wanting for himself again.

He'd had it once, so long ago it sometimes seems like the memory of a dream. But if it had been a dream then it wouldn't burn so much to remember. He'd had what she wants on Gallifrey, where he'd held his child in his arms, where he'd held his wife, and one day, where he'd watched Susan toddle through the red fields, laughing and reaching for her grandfather's hand.

Love. Life. Family.

They were all gone now, along with a piece of his soul. It was the only adventure he had promised himself he would never again pursue, because to chase it again without his hearts breaking would have been unequivocally impossible.

He lets himself glance at Clara, and sucks in a breath with the force of what he feels for her. Clara, who understands the weariness of his soul, because she's watched him live it, all twelve centuries of it, who has seen him at his worst and still looks at him with kind, gentle eyes. Clara, who makes the impossible, possible again. That's what he'd told her. And it was exactly what she was. But more than that, she'd made him believe anything was possible, almost from the moment he'd met her.

"Is it?" he says out loud, staring at her lovely face, daring to wonder.

"Is it what?" she asks, biting her lower lip.

"Is anything possible?" he says. "Is that what you want?" But she frowns at him, her brows knitted in confusion, and he knows he's making no sense but tells her anyway, "Because I could want it again with you. I could, Clara."

"Doctor, I don't know what you…" she's shaking her head, not understanding, but before she can get another word out, she's suddenly no longer at his side.

"Out of the way!" he hears the voice at the same time that he sees the flank of a horse inches from his face, as a group of three red-coated soldiers comes galloping between them, nearly knocking him off his feet.

He hears Clara shriek and when the horse moves past them, he sees she's fallen into a sodden bit of grass, covered in mud.

"Oi!" he shouts at the soldiers, rushing over to her. Automatically, he reaches for his sonic inside his breast pocket, curses when he remembers it isn't there. "Are you alright?" he asks, checking for broken fingers, toes.

"I'm fine," she assures him, a bit breathlessly. "Just… completely filthy," she says, holding up arms that are dripping in wet mud. "Guess karma got me for you and the baths," she tries to smile.

He shoots an outraged look at the soldiers, who stop to turn and see the image of Clara, now on her hands and knees, covered in wet, black earth. They're laughing. The bastards are laughing, and the Doctor suppresses the urge to pull out the flask of lemon-tea-whiskey, drink it on the spot then find the TARDIS and destroy them from space.

As if she senses it, Clara puts a delicate hand on his arm. "I'm fine, Doctor. Really, just help me up."

Since her voice is the only thing in all creation that can quiet his rage, he does as he's told. Gingerly, he puts his arms around her waist and lifts her up again, trying to brush some of the mud off of her, and only succeeding in getting it all over himself, as well.

By the time he looks up, the soldiers have gone in a trail of dust. He's still glaring at them, and in seconds, has thought of at least nine thousand ways he could slowly, painfully wipe the laughter right off of their ugly, arrogant faces.

"You poor dear," Mrs. Noyes is fussing over her, pushing Clara's muddy hair from her face.

It's an unexpectedly familiar feeling, she thinks, the sensation of motherly hands touching her skin, wiping away her aches and scrapes. She hadn't even realized how much she'd missed that. She smiles gratefully at the landlord's wife, who is still clucking over her.

"Some of these new soldiers who have come into town…," she says angrily. "If the King only knew."

"I'm alright," Clara tells her, setting down her mud-soaked shawl, just as two servants bring in a small copper tub, setting it by the fire and wrapping the dressing screen around it to keep it warm. "Oh, no, you really didn't need to send up a bath," Clara begins to protest, "the basin is fine."

But the older woman is waving her away, undoing the laces of Clara's muddy dress for her. "Nonsense, child. It's the least we can do. My husband wanted to send for a Doctor!"

Clara bites her lip to keep from smiling, and glances over at her own Doctor, sitting stony-faced in the corner. The sight makes the smile fall from her lips. She can't tell if he's furious or pensive or both.

"I've got a Doctor already," she says, and Mrs. Noyes sighs and hands her a damp towel.

"Well, don't you worry about the bath," she says decidedly. "We got it for our daughter, but she's visiting my sister in London." She gathers up some of the muddy towels, and smiles fondly at Clara. "You get some rest and those black eyes of yours will be shining again by morning."

Clara smiles back. She'd almost forgotten that she doesn't look like herself, not to anyone but the Doctor. She glances at him again, and frowns, because he hasn't moved. Still as a statue, she can almost hear his teeth grinding.

"I'll send up some food and tea for you both," Mrs. Noyes tells them, and slips out the door before Clara can thank her again.

Abruptly, the Doctor rises from his chair and moves over to the window, his hands shoved in his pockets, and Clara swallows, her eyes following him.

"You'd think I was just chased by a half-headed robot or a soul-eating planet," she tries to joke, but the Doctor remains silent, still staring out the window. She frowns and moves over to the tub, because maybe he's just trying to respect her privacy while she undresses for the bath. Maybe, but she wouldn't bet on it.

She slips behind the screen and pulls a few pins from her hair, since she can feel dried mud in some of the strands, too. Shrugging herself of her sleeves, she lets the now-loosened dress fall to the floor, so that she's standing in her shift. The air is chilly on her mud-spattered skin, so she quickly unrolls her stockings, slips out of her clothing and steps into the warm water, wishing the Doctor would say something. Anything.

There's so much to say, he thinks.

He knows he should be next to Clara, just to reassure her with his presence, but his brain won't stop whirring, a million possibilities in front of him. He knows the Vespiform are out there and that has to be dealt with. It's all the more imperative now that he knows they've got the minds and blood-lust of the very Romans who conquered Britain and….

He pauses, looking out the window, for he's just remembered something else. Not far from here, beneath the ground, standing vigil, is a Roman he knows very, very well.

Only a half-day's ride away, the Doctor realizes, Rory Williams is sitting beneath Stonehenge, waiting patiently for Amelia Pond to wake up again.

He glances down at the barn beside the Inn, connected by a small cobblestone courtyard. He could borrow a horse, be back again before morning. He could talk to Rory again, at least, Rory who has been alone for nearly two thousand years, fighting against silence and madness, sustained by a force greater than time- his unalterable love for his wife.

The Doctor frowns, looking again at the barn. He could go tonight, ask Rory if he wants the Doctor to come get him in the TARDIS once he's back in his own body, because it was something the Doctor didn't even bother asking the first time. But as soon as the thought forms in his mind, he knows the answer would be the same, the conversation pointless. Rory will never leave Amy.

And what can he say to the Last Centurion about his future, about why Rory and Amy no longer travel with him, about the fact that they had a daughter who grew up to be River Song, a woman who loved and died for the Doctor. Or that Rory and Amy would be taken by the Angels, and the Doctor would be powerless to save them, any of them from their fates. Rory would probably take his sword and run the Doctor through, and what's more, the Doctor wouldn't blame him.

He shakes his head in wonder at the quiet nurse from Leadworth, and, not for the first time, the Doctor lets his envy of Rory Williams wash over him. Not because he'd won Amy. That was how it was meant to be, he'd always known that.

But because in Rory, he'd been shown once again how gigantic humans are to his own puny species, seeing them capable of the kind of love that transcended every obstacle, the kind that kept Rory patiently sitting beside a gigantic, silent box, century after cruel century, because it held the sleeping love of his life inside. Time Lords, by the nature of their existence, hardly ever stood still or kept anything permanent, their lives always in a constant state of change and flux as they moved from regeneration to regeneration. And the Doctor was no different.

Keep going, keep discovering, keep the adventure coming, that was his mantra. Because he knew, from lifetimes of experience, that the pain only started when you stopped moving.

But that was precisely how humanity towered over him. He fled from the pain of life, while Rory planted his feet in the ground where Amy was and endured it. Because humans put roots, not just into a place, but into each other, the kind that held on and didn't let go.

It's what he once said to Clara, he realizes. The trick is to hold hands, and not let go.

He glances over, sees her silhouette behind the screen, backlit in the firelight, and swallows hard. He'd never thought it was in him to want to stop traveling, not once since leaving Gallifrey. When he'd had to stay with Amy and Rory for a brief spell, the Doctor had wondered how anyone living such a repetitive, boring existence didn't go insane within five seconds.

But now….

Now he feels the weight of his long life upon his shoulders. He's run for so long, and his soul is so old, and for the first time in centuries, he can imagine holding on to something, someone, that's not just fleeing in and out of his life. And not just any someone, but the only someone he can ever imagine wanting so much that planet-hopping in the TARDIS actually seems less inviting than the prospect of sitting in her kitchen, watching her burn yet another souffle.

He feels himself grinning broadly, but just as quickly, the smile falls from his face, as he considers a defeating thought: just because he wants her doesn't mean the feeling is reciprocated. And even if it is, it doesn't even mean that he's the best thing for her.

He sees Clara's arms rise behind the screen, sees her plucking a pin out of her hair so that some tendrils fall down her back, and he feels his hands balling into fists as a wave of protectiveness surges through him. What could he even offer her, a dangerous existence tethered to his, instead of the comfort of steady, human arms and a different kind of immortality that came with the sound a child's laughter.

But then he hears her dress sliding to the floor, and her little sigh of contentment as she steps into the water, and he closes his eyes as all of his noble excuses fly out the window next to the insurmountable truth of his need for her, his mind-stabbing jealousy at the thought of any other man holding her in his arms.

No, it's not just need, nor even merely desire. Because, after everything that's happened over the last two days, he suddenly knows something else: the way Rory feels about Amy… it's the way he feels for Clara.

It's not because she's his first face, or because she's pretty and daring or even because he's grateful to her for all the times she's saved him. It's so much more, as if he was always destined to feel it, as though she'd been designed just for him, at the beginning of time, and he was just as surely made for her. What he feels for her is the simplest, most terrifying thing in the universe.

He loves her. Without condition, without reason, and without any need except one- that she exist. She doesn't have to love him back, she doesn't have to be particularly kind to him, it wouldn't even matter if she betrayed him. All she has to do is keep breathing, and it's enough for him. He loves her.

He loves her.

And he'll never leave her again.

Clara knows the bathing is probably supposed to be done standing, but the water is so warm, and somehow, the Doctor's silence makes the room feel chillier. And fortunately, she's small enough that she can bend her knees and fit her entire body in the tub. She does just that, letting the water nearly cover her, and pulling a sheet across her knees still sticking out of the water. The fire crackles beside her and she lets out a sigh, pushing her arms into the bath and trying to wash off the mud.

She just wishes he would speak. It's so unlike the Doctor to ever be this silent, and when it has happened, it's never been because of something good. Her mind has managed to catalog so many of his actions with the corresponding emotion over the time she's run with him, and nearly every emotion inside of him usually meant movement. Happiness, fascination, even anger, they all meant the Doctor was doing something, and also usually talking at top speed.

It had only ever been when he was still, and silent, that she could see the change in his eyes, the hard edges of his soul that should have unnerved her, but instead made her want to take him in her arms, stroke his hair as though she could caress the pain out of him.

She closes her eyes and wishes so much that she could do something to help him.

"Can I help?" she hears his voice behind the screen, and nearly jumps out of the tub with surprise.

"Oh!" she yelps, pulling the sheet higher to cover herself. "I didn't even hear you walk over."

Two green eyes peer around the corner of the screen and, even though she knows he can't see anything with the sheet covering her she feels a blush creeping up her cheeks.

"Um… sure," she says and when he comes fully into view, his tall body flickering shadows in the firelight, her heart speeds up. He's removed the muddy coat, and is standing only in his trousers and white shirt, open at the neck once more. Her eyes linger on his throat, a part of him that she rarely gets to see because of his penchant for wearing bow-ties, and yet the sight of which she's always found oddly erotic. His neck is long and muscular, and she's imagined running her lips across it so many times she's lost count. But as Clara's eyes travel up the contours of his neck, his jaw, and finally meet his eyes, his expression stills her.

His face is somber and set, as though he's about to tell her something she doesn't want to hear.

"May I?" he asks, picking up the sponge, and his voice is in that low, soft register, the one that sends her blood rushing.

She swallows. "Okay." She turns around and feels his hands sweeping the damp hair from her neck, and he dunks the sponge in the water, then runs it across the back of her shoulders. She closes her eyes, because the combination of the water and his hands is so wonderful that it makes her shiver.

The Doctor seems to sense it, too, because he takes the sponge and then runs it across the front of her neck where some mud is still stuck to her. His hands are unbearably tender, as though she was something precious that might break under his touch.

"Clara?"

"Y-yes?"

"You never answered my question."

She can't think. Nothing exists but his hands on her skin. "What question?"

"About what you want," he says, still stroking her lightly with the sponge. "I need you to tell me."

And Clara pulls the sheet more tightly around herself, because he's going somewhere she doesn't want to follow.

"Oh, you know," she counters lightly, "I want my students to behave so I can teach them something, my father's wife to not be such a harpy, my Gran to get together with that nice widower down the street, and… and… intergalactic harmony." She turns and smiles at him.

He isn't smiling back.

She shifts around. "Look, don't ask me that. We already covered this."

The Doctor moves like lightning in front of her, so that he's at her feet, gripping both sides of the tub. "When, exactly? When did we cover this?"

"At the restaurant. Or rather, in the ocean," she says pleadingly. "I told you what I wanted. To not get hurt."

"And I'm going to hurt you, is that it?"

"Yes," she pleads.

"And what makes you so sure, Clara?"

"Because…" she says fretfully, "because that's just what happens with you." Oh, god, don't make me say this.

"But that doesn't mean it has to be that way this time," he says, and she can hear the urgent pleading in his voice because he wants to believe it, and yes, yes, how she would love to believe it with him.

But companions being hurt by the Doctor seems to be one of those fixed points in time that never alter, because its happened to all of them, just as it will happen to her. She's already envisioned it, the day when he'll drop her off at home, tell her he'll see her next Wednesday and never return. He doesn't know it, but she's already wondered, every single time that he's left her, if she'll ever see him again.

Every Wednesday, Clara has stepped off the TARDIS steeling herself with the possibility that he won't come back. It's why she lights up every time it's turned out not to be true.

But one day, it will be true. She'll hear the wheezing groan of his blue ship fading behind her, and it will be the last time. And she already knows what will happen then. The Clara Oswald that he met, ringing her doorbell and practically knocking down her door, the one whose whole happy life was ahead of her, will have finally faded away. Her hope, her innocence, they'll all have gone, and she'll be something else, a half-alive person who goes through the motions, wearing a mask of her old self to hide a heart that was so sure it couldn't break, but did in the end. She 'll have seen so much more than the 101 places her mother dreamed of seeing, gained knowledge of species and planets that NASA couldn't even begin to fathom, and yet none of it will matter anymore.

And the irony is, it won't be because she's been jaded by seeing the wonders of the universe. It will be because of the simplest, most earthly reason of all: she'll have lost the man she's chosen to love.

The day is coming when her heart is going to be broken, and as she lifts her eyes to the Doctor, seeing his face, so odd and yet so beautiful to her, so utterly loved, looking at her with such bewilderment and hurt, and the pain becomes so big that she wishes, for the briefest of seconds, that she'd never met him. And just as quickly, she takes it back because… oh, she can never wish that.

Even if it breaks her heart, nothing had ever made her feel so alive as loving this strange, wonderful man who stole her away and showed her the stars.

I love you, Doctor, she thinks. And I'll still love you, even after the day comes when you leave me.

"It will," she whispers to him as he holds on to her in the bath. "It's coming and we both know it."

But somehow this only seems to inflame him, as though he's trying to convince her that the earth is square instead of round.

"And how are you so sure? What makes you so all-knowing, Clara, that you're sure that's what will happen?" he demands, his voice rising.

"Because what I want is something I can't have!"

"But just tell me what you want and I'll get it for you!"

"I want you!" she yells, her body quaking. Then, so quiet it's a whisper, "You."

to be continued...