11.
They were incredibly blue, that was the first thing she noticed. The Doctor opened his eyes and squinted against the white light but at the same time it sparkled in his irises in such a way that they appeared almost silver. They were alien bright but she had never seen them look more beautiful. She let out a sigh of relief and leant down to kiss his forehead.
'Clara…' he said, smiling softly and focusing on her. He reached up to touch her face. 'My Clara.'
'Shh, shut up you idiot,' she laughed. Clara squeezed him in an awkward hunched over embrace and he struggled unconvincingly in her arms.
'Clara!' he protested weakly, wrapping one arm over hers to squeeze back.
Clara beamed and alternated words with more small kisses. 'Oh thank God, you scared me there, you really scared me. Promise me something?'
'I'd promise you anything Clara, anything you could ever want,' he said, stopping his wriggling and gazing up at her as though she was the only star in the sky.
'Soppy git,' she said, 'You should have your brain explode more often...'
A look of utter confusion crossed his face and took root there.
'What?'
'That's what I want you to promise by the way,' she shifted to let the Doctor lean at a more comfortable angle against her lap. She had been kneeling on the fake-clinic floor for at least an hour fretting, and asking the TARDIS to check the Doctor's life signs. 'Promise you won't try that again, no more moving moons, no more crazy telekinesis…' she waggled her hands in the air.
'Clara?' he looked lost.
'Just ignore me next time,' she went on, 'You were right to be cautious and I pushed you, don't deny it. You did it for me, you always do it for me, the extra mile and I'm so sorry. You'd think we'd have learned. We didn't need to interfere, and I mean Justra didn't even want us to…'
'Wait… who…?' his brow wrinkled in pain.
'Justra, you know…' she stopped, frowning down at him, 'Doctor are you ok?' He blinked at her owlishly.
'Head hurts a bit,' he confessed, struggling but finally managing to sit up. He kneeled next to her on the tiles, took some of his weight on one arm. He touched the blood which was drying now in his beard and across his cheek; looked at it oddly, turned his hand over smearing it between fingertips. 'Bit woozy. Sorry what were you saying?'
Clara snapped her fingers for attention in front of his nose. 'Doctor, important question, who am I?'
'You're Clara, Clara, don't be ridiculous,' he said eyeing the back of his left hand curiously. He prodded the ring he wore. 'Ring?' he asked himself. 'Huh.'
'And where are we?' she asked.
Apparently focusing back on her voice again he looked around the relatively blank room, noted the medical equipment the TARDIS had just produced for them. 'Um… some sort of hospital somewhere. You're from earth so… a hospital on earth… maybe?'
'Um… not quite,' Clara looked at him more carefully. 'Doctor what have you just been doing, why does your head hurt, why did I mention the moon?'
He winced at rubbed at the space between his eyes. 'So many questions, Clara, slow down,' he swept his hand over his hair and massaged the back of his neck. 'Now what were you saying again?
'Doctor what have we just been doing?' she tried to keep a high pitched note of alarm out of her voice.
'Well that's…' he stopped in his tracks. 'I mean we were probably… some sort of…'
Clara widened her eyes at him.
'Adventure?' he ended uncertainly, peering at her through half squinted eyes. 'My head really does hurt,' he added absently, 'Is this a hospital then? Why are we on the floor?'
'You've forgotten,' Clara said.
'Forgotten what?'
'What you've just been doing.'
'Could just be concussion?' he tried. 'Did something hit me on the head? Was it that guitar?' he looked across at the abandoned instrument, all that remained of the telekinesis experiment when the TARDIS shifted the environment, due to it being the personal property of the Doctor.
'No, nothing hit you on the head,' Clara muttered. She leant forward and fiddled in his jacket pocket for a second until she found his sonic screwdriver. 'You wired your skull into two dozen Fenders and tried to move a moon with your brainwaves.'
The Doctor laughed suddenly, and then winced and held his temples, 'That is utterly ridiculous, Clara, nice try… now what really happened?'
She glared at him and pointed the screwdriver at his head. He had the good grace to look a little alarmed.
'Need to run a scan,' she explained.
'Oh… right…Go ahead, I'm pretty sure I taught you how. Yes I remember, after we visited the sea made entirely of silk. That was lovely wasn't it, Clara?' he sounded strangely dreamy.
'Shh. Scanning.' Clara knit her brows and focused on running the investigation while the whole time the Doctor watched her with a strange mixture of curiosity and adoration. She quickly directed the blue light over his brain and then looked seriously at the results.
'What is it?' he asked impatiently. 'I'm sure it's just a concussion… from something. Did I fall over?'
'You've forgotten.'
'Yes.'
'Everything.'
'No.'
'Yes you have, your brain… look at this… all these missing pathways where memories should be…' Clara handed the screwdriver to him and he peered at it, rubbing again at his painful neck.
'I can't have forgotten everything,' he said dubiously and shook the device vigorously like a thermometer before he looked again. 'I'm sure I know the important stuff. Like talking, I'm still talking! I don't usually delete the things that really matter. Or do I?' he drifted off looking puzzled. 'No, no it's fine, I remember, I remember!'
'What do you remember?'
'Well you of course,' he said looking up at her from where he was kneeling next to her on the floor. For a moment Clara just watched him and the softness in his eyes. She'd never seen an expression like it, open innocent unconditional love. It almost overwhelmed her on the spot. She was his absolute focus, bar none. He smiled a little and passed back the sonic, placing it in her palm and covering it with his hand but never taking his gaze from her face.
'You remember me?' she echoed, gradually piecing together the evidence.
'I could never forget you, Clara.'
'But you don't remember anything else?'
'I…' and he stopped, frowned, tried to grasp the memories from the air around him. 'I remember you…' he began again helplessly.
'And…' Clara pushed, 'What's the last thing you remember before you woke up just now?'
'Oh well…' he blushed, flustered, 'That is to say, we um… we'd been apart a very long time, I'm a bit hazy on the details there, but we'd been reunited and we... um…,' he blushed harder and looked away. 'I remember being under the cherry tree with you,' he said quietly. 'And it was wonderful but… you didn't… I wasn't…' he looked down. 'Anyway, cherry tree. Yes… not sure how we got here… is this a holodeck?' he frowned.
Clara bit her lip. 'Yes, this is a holodeck, on your TARDIS, and the cherry tree was a hologram too.'
'It was?'
'Yes.'
'But we… we did… didn't we?' he asked alarmed. 'I didn't imagine that?'
'Yes, we did, don't worry about that now.'
'But I do worry about it, I love you Clara, I want to make you happy, you're everything to me. It meant everything to me.'
Clara stared at his sudden unabashed declaration of love.
'Doctor…?'
'You look surprised, why are you surprised? Don't I tell you I love you? I think it all the time…' he frowned again, 'Maybe I haven't been saying it out loud. That can happen… My words don't reach my mouth. It's a thing, they get distracted. And embarrassed. Sometimes…' he wandered off again.
'Doctor there's something wrong. You've forgotten everything. And I mean everything. Except apparently me and… things we do together.'
'No I remember a lot more than that Clara,' he said with conviction.
'Go on,' she urged.
'I remember being in my own confession dial for millions of years, all of it, over and over, died, came back, relived it all. I remember that alright.'
'You do?'
'Yes, vividly,' he paused and looked down at his hands, held tight onto hers. 'You were all I could think of, you kept me alive. I spoke to you, I thought of you all the time. You were my safe place, my storm room.'
Clara's heart sank. 'What else do you remember?'
'I was in a place called Trenzalore for a long time,' he frowned trying to pick out the memory further. 'You came to visit, got frozen to the TARDIS,' he chuckled. 'Silly girl, silly impossible girl, you saved my life. You always save it, always you, or a version of you I'll be doing something dadt…'
'Such as?'
'Um… I… well I don't remember the details, but you always tell me it was something silly, and then you come to the rescue. You, or an echo of you. You're in my timestream... And you were there… you were there when I changed.'
'Yes I was,' Clara said quietly.
'My first face…'
'Yes.'
The Doctor lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it gently. 'The one thing I can never forget.'
Clara hesitated, watched again how bluely his eyes shone and how deep his pupils were as he looked at her innocently. She was everything, all he remembered, from start to present in his long, long life.
'OK,' she breathed feeling increasingly anxious, 'Maybe it has something to do with, I don't know, relationships? Love? Doctor, after we separated, you spent time with someone, twenty four years…'
'That's preposterous I never stay in one place so long!' he protested.
'Who was it?' Clara persisted, 'Who did you stay with all that time? Who could be that important?'
He took a breath and cocked his head appearing to think. He ran his nails through the hair on his cheek. 'I… I don't know Clara… it doesn't sound like something I do. You're probably the only person I know that I can stand to be around long… I don't think it was you, I'd know if it was you.'
'Doctor you had a wife, called River…' Clara drip fed the information waiting for a flash of recognition.
'Did I?' he asked blankly.
'You had four wives actually.'
'That's rather greedy isn't it?' he scoffed. 'That doesn't sound like me? I'm very faithful…'
'Two of them were rather famous,' she pushed, 'Marilyn Monroe?'
'Who?'
Clara rubbed her face in desperation. 'Doctor is clear somethings gone very wrong. You were using telekinesis and now you can't remember anything except me.'
'And my head hurts, did I mention that?'
'Yes,' Clara said. 'None of this is good news. Doctor we're going to need some help.'
'Help? Right,' he looked round the room as though seeking it.
'Do you know any, I don't know… psychic space hospitals?' Clara asked.
'Um… no… I um… space hospitals…?' he looked down at his hand again distracted. 'Clara are we married?'
'What?!' she squeaked.
He looked up at her again, eyes wide. 'I've got a ring on, I just wondered if… I wouldn't forget that would I? Imagine if I'd forgotten our wedding day I'd never forgive myself.' He looked bemused.
Clara sighed and squeezed his hand. 'No you haven't forgotten, and no we're not married.'
He glanced at her naked left hand. 'Why not?' he looked at her quizzically. 'We must be? Didn't I ever ask? I distinctly remember...' he paused and then his face fell. 'Oh, no, I didn't… I wanted to and then I didn't.'
Clara looked at him in curious sympathy. 'Did you?'
'Yes, very much, I was so sure I had, it's a bit blurry...' he blinked. 'We were in the Cloisters.' The Doctor laughed shortly. 'Pathetic really. I'd had four and a half billion years to pluck up the courage, must have rehearsed it so many times I've mistaken it for actually happening. I guess I bottled out when I finally saw you again.'
'In the Cloisters?' Clara said. She thought back to the pair of them, kneeling on the hard floor in the darkness of the Cloisters and the words he's spoken to her for the first time. The feel of his lips and the way they had sat together silently for a moment afterwards, foreheads touching, breath mingling. Just them and the dark, and a frozen moment in time. She imagined him trying to pluck up the courage as he described and then having to leave her again, his question unasked.
'You've still got time,' Clara smiled gently and forced herself back to the present, 'But we need to get this sorted first, I'll ask the TARDIS. She'll be able to find… Doctor! Doctor!'
He'd be fine she was sure, they'd just been talking, the bleeding had stopped and now everything seemed to be going wrong again. Dramatically, hurriedly wrong. The Doctor let out a piercing yell and toppled forward onto the pale tiles, clutching at his head, his fingers digging hard into his temples. He sobbed as he pleaded with the air.
'Clara! Gods! Oh God make it stop!' he curled into a foetal position on the cold floor and held his head tightly, the rest of him squirming from the pain. Clara leaned over him, tried to place her hands on his face to prise his fingers away so she could see, but they came away again heavily bloodied. This time there was more than just a trickle. It spilled from under his hands and across the bright white tiles with horrific vivacity as he continued to cry against the pain. Clara looked up sharply.
'Do something!' she bellowed at the ship, 'Do something you idiot!'
The room around her flickered once and then transformed into one of the many identical console rooms hidden all over the TARDIS. The Doctor was now curled into his armchair weeping in agony, with Clara standing by his side. She leaned quickly to kiss the top of his head and then raced down the steps, grabbed the monitor and swung it towards her.
'Think, think. Somethings happened, somethings gone wrong,' she chuntered under her breath and she scanned through co-ordinates. 'He used telepathy, he pushed too hard. I don't know anything about telepathy.' She typed frantically into the console. 'Who does? Gallifrey? Not going there…. Wait. He didn't go to Gallifrey to learn all that new stuff. He went to Hogwarts… Telepathy School. They taught him this. They must know what can go wrong and how to fix it. Telepathy School. Where the hell is that?'
She typed into the TARDIS some more and asked for locations of telepathic training. A list of several hundred suddenly ran down the screen. From the balcony she could hear his moans increasing and the intermittent sound of sobbing.
She banged the monitor. 'Well that's no help! There's dozens of them! Where did the Doctor go?' she glanced at the telepathic interface. She wasn't its biggest fan as more often than not she ended up places she shouldn't because of her complete inability to keep her mind from wandering. She was increasingly wary of crisscrossing timelines, especially the Doctors. It was complex enough between them.
'Please don't make me use that thing,' she pleaded thowing her head back to look up at the Gallifreyan symbols on the rotor. 'Come on you took him there presumably, help a girl out.'
The TARDIS hummed and the monitor flashed. Clara looked back down at it.
'Last destinations,' she read out loud. 'TARDIS sat nav huh?' she smiled, Thata girl!'
With her finger she scrolled down the touch screen and even in the current circumstance she paused in surprise. The Doctor really had been curtailing his travel over the last few years, she could see only a handful of places. He'd visited Vastra and the gang a few times, hung around on earth in the early 21st century more than she expected, but from what she could tell he really had been sitting on his holodeck alone.
Except for a rather enthusiastic period a few years ago where he'd headed to another planet entirely in a far flung system and hung about for several years in roughly the same location. A city in a place called Tempis. Clara pressed her finger over the word and the planet spun into view, glorious red and orange and ten times the size of earth. Home of the greatest University in the solar system when it came to the science of the mind, 43rd century earth equivalent. Clara read the details quickly. The telepathic skills of the native species and those attracted to the world were profound, the Doctor had clearly thought that if anyone could help him improve his less than impressive mind reading abilities they would be here. She read down the page. They also specialised in neuroscientific exploration and treatments. Well he needed treatment.
Clara entered the co-ordinates and pulled the lever, racing back up to the Doctor as his trusted ship hurtled across the galaxies towards the planet. She heard the engines roaring with particular desperation and felt the TARDIS's own panic growing. The Doctor was gripping for dear life onto Clara's top as she embraced him, trying to cushion him form the increasingly erratic turbulence as every ounce of power from the ship was put into crossing time and space. He cried out as they lurched and buried his head against her chest.
Suddenly the TARDIS came to a violent halt and Clara staggered against the Doctor and his chair. He was breathing hard, eyes shut, blood coming thickly now from his ears. She quickly tried to calculate how she was going to get him to the door, prayed the TARDIS had landed in some sort of medical facility because she honestly had no idea how she'd move him otherwise.
The TARDIS doors swung open and Clara gasped. Outside the light was bright and warm, orange tinted, and several figures were silhouetted in the doorway.
'Hello?' Clara called, 'Hello? I'm really hoping this is the right place,' she squinted against the light, 'I'm with the Doctor, we need your help...'
Silence.
And then.
'We will bring him to our infirmary,' the voices said in unison. 'He is in a great deal of pain and needs attention urgently. Trust in us.'
Clara's mouth opened briefly and then shut again as she watched the figures enter and approach. They were Oods and they spoke in silence, directly to her.
'Thank you,' she said out loud.
'You're welcome, Clara,' they whispered into her mind.
