A/N: Short one. I've missed you guys. Here we are, some time has passed and Clara catches up with reality. The things we'll do for a little relief, hm?

Chapter Thirteen: Selfish and Surviving (You've Changed)

694 words

Clara and the Doctor

1 year after escaping the police station

She couldn't tell you precisely when things started to go truly downhill. One moment, she was crying with laughter in the Doctor's arms and the next, lying next to him in the dark silence of a live-in rehabilitation clinic. Rehabilitation for what, exactly? She also couldn't say.

There was simply too much to be rehabilitated from.

3 months before rehab

The Doctor grinned lazily at the dusty light streaming through a gap in the curtains. A slight groan escaped his mouth as he shifted his arm from under Clara's shoulders; he was still quite sore from the... passions of the night before. The madman let his eyes rake the majestic effortless quality her hair held as she turned away from the light. He found that quite amusing; even in her sleep, she was stubborn.

She woke leisurely at 3 in the afternoon, yawning and stretching elegantly like a rich woman's cat. Propping her head up on the pillow with her elbow, a tightly-rolled cannabis joint smoldering away between her slender fingers, Clara asked him the usual question.

"What's our little mission for today?"

He smiled that devilishly crooked smile of his.

"Yet another blonde whore-for-hire. Name's Sabrina, or something of that nature. Apparently she owes some ratbag small-time drug dealer a little more than her money. Well... essentially she got into serious debt and tried to pay it off with her mouth, if you know what I mean. The wife found out, so now she's angry. Good thing we always have enough to pay 'em back, eh? We're not like them, are we darling?"

Clara nodded with a grin, and replied, "That's just too bad. They say your debts haunt you even in the afterlife."

They laughed together before falling back onto the pillows in unison. Clara wondered if he'd meant what he said last week about getting married.

"Sweetheart..."

"Yes, Doctor?"

Her voice was short and breathless, full of pointless expectation.

"You're lying on my arm again. I'm going to need my circulation to strangle Sabrina."

Clara tried not to sink back in disappointment, and forced light into her voice.

"I – oh, of course. Sorry dear."

She rolled away from him. What was she expecting? Her boyfriend wasn't a married-with-a-house-and-three-kids kind of guy. Maybe he would've been, she decided.

When we were still young.

It turned out that the young prostitute's name was not, in fact, Sabrina – but Sierra. "Not exactly an improvement," Clara had remarked rather snidely. Drugs have changed my Clara, the Doctor thought, She's been... different, as of late. Colder, much colder. But I like it – actually, I think I love it.

That night, the blonde was so high on cocaine of questionable quality that she couldn't even scream for help when the Doctor clamped his hands around her windpipe and squeezed. When she stopped struggling, Clara stabbed her in the eye with a strong, latex-gloved hand. It was quick and silent, and the wads of crinkled cash arrived in the mail the following morning. It was assumed that the woman had been venged upon by the spiteful wife of the drug dealer in question. She went to jail; Clara having used the wife's kitchen knife with her prints on them.

It was always better to have someone to blame than to just leave the case open. It was safer for them that way.

The afternoon of their pay day, Clara flipped lovingly through her false identification papers. Cards and birth certificates, photos and marriage certificates of all the lives she'd lived in the past eight months. How they'd flown by.

Life does fly by when you're having fun, she thought happily.