First off I wanted to start with something other than an apology. I wanted to thank anyone who has stumbled across my story and taken the time to read my horrible writing. Also, I really appreciate all the lovely comments from my loyal fans of this fic, you know who you are and thanks a ton! This story is still going, I have at least the next ten chapters planned out with loads of adventure, flirting, and laughing at authority figures. (So basically everyday life for Clara and Ashildr.)
I may not be able to post every week as I had been, but I am very committed to this story and I want to put in the time to get it right Not abandoning this yet!
Oof this is all Clara's perspective... Maybe that's why it was hard to write, I'm used to switching! oh well.
Though this isn't my favorite chapter, it was pretty fun! Enjoy.
Chapter 12 - Specimen 004568:
"Why does it feel like we aren't getting anywhere?" Clara asked half-heartedly as they walked through the base. In each of their arms were bundles of thick cable that they were trailing through the space station from the TARDIS. "Once we hook the console up to the main systems of the station I will be able to figure out what's going on. ...I hope."
Throwing a long part of the cord behind her to give her more slack to keep walking forward with the bundle, Clara said "it's a good thing we have a time machine and can get back to Bartok soon enough- I wouldn't want to leave him with strangers for too long." Ashildr seemed to be distracted with Oscar trying to chase the moving cable on the ground, but she kept up the conversation alright.
"Me either. At least someone is watching him and he's not crazy anymore." They turned the corner to the control room of the ship and Ash stopped and held up her hand for Clara to do the same. "Tripwire. Remember? Here." She put her length of cable on the ground and slid it carefully under the wire. Then she took Clara's and did the same. They both stepped over the line and picked up their bundles on the other side. Oscar trotted over it with barely a change in his gate.
In the control room Clara held the wire while Ashildr screwed one end of it into a port underneath the glass table. When she was finished, she gestured for Clara to drop the tangle of wire she held so that they could go back to the TARDIS. She did, and the cord fell to the ground with a thump. "It'll be so much easier to figure out what's going on with a familiar interface." They started back to the TARDIS.
"I've decided that saving the day is less interesting after the danger is over." Clara said matter-of-factly. "Most people would disagree with that…" Ash commented. Clara stayed silent for a while after that. They stepped over the tripwire in perfect unison. "Most people haven't traveled with The Doctor."
Ash nodded at her words as they walked. "You are one of the children of time. You don't do normal anymore." Clara glanced at her quizzically. "'Children of time?" She asked.
"That's what The Doctor's companions are called, don't you know? That's what the Daleks started calling all the humans he effected and a lot of other caught on." Ash rattled off the story as they walked with seemingly no trouble of remembering it. "The Doctor's friends are woven throughout history just as he is." Ashildr explained, opening the door to the diner.
"Most timelords like humans, but he has always made friends with mortals. You are the impossible girl, you've changed the universe to." The cable attached to the station trailed through the diner. Ashildr went straight to looking at the screen when they got to the control room.
"Someone's got to sort out fair play, and someone else has to help them." Clara replied nonchalantly. "Now we don't need a timelord at all to save the day!" Ashildr commented. It was true, but that notion sounded very odd to Clara.
It was still so strange to her that she was alive. Clara hadn't realized how much that freaked her out until she'd slowed down and stayed still for a moment. On Trap street she had been brave, but that was mostly because she A, wasn't thinking straight, and B, wasn't scared of dying. Now, though, she had time to think about what it would mean to go back to Galifrey and then to her own timestream.
The impossible girl had died many times before, of course. She'd lived the lives and died the deaths of every Clara Oswald copy, even though her memory of each of their journeys were individually hard to recall. Maybe that was why she hadn't been scared to face the raven. 'I'm still not scared. I'll go back to Trap street, and it'll be fine. We all face the raven in the end, that is the deal.' Ash spun around slowly to give her a questioning look.
Clara hadn't realized she was sharing that with Ash until the shorter woman stopped and stared at her with a completely blank expression. "I'm sorry- I-I didn't mean to…" she fumbled to make an excuse but came up blank. Ashildr blinked at her quizzically and Clara immediately regretted her own clumsiness.
One of the last things Clara had done before the countdown on the back of her neck struck zero was make an effort to protect Ashildr from The Doctor. He had been so mad at her, blaming her for Clara's stupid choice to take the cronolock. Clara had asked him, the only way she could, to forgive Ash (or at least leave her alone.) 'There will be no revenge.' When they had found Me at the end of the universe Clara at least knew that her Doctor had obeyed her last wish and spared the immortal.
Clara didn't even think Ashildr knew what she'd done. No one but herself and The Doctor would have been able to understand the meaning in the words she had said to him. Not Rigsy, and not Ash.
When Danny died he'd made a promise. When Clara died, she'd given an order. After his death The Doctor saved Clara's soul from killing Missy. Before Clara had faced the raven she had saved The Doctor's soul from killing Ashildr. It was a cycle of painful parallels that taunted her endlessly.
'You will not insult my memory.' Even her own words taunted her. Now that she thought about it, she guessed that she had insulted her own memory by taking it away from The Doctor.
'You don't have to tell me, but if you want too, you can.' Ashildr's soothing voice slid in and out of her head, pushing aside all the painful times she was remembering. Clara acknowledged that the two of them must have stood there not saying anything for a few minutes. "I just…" she began to speak quietly as she looked into Ash's eyes.
Something about the sincerity in Ashildr's gaze made Clara unable to look away. The depths of the eyes of the woman who had seen it all were like endless galaxies swirling with the weight of all she'd done. Yet, they were still kind. After all Ashildr had witnessed, and all the ice walls she put up to protect herself from the universe and the universe from her, she was able to look at Clara with kindness. That was what was so fascinating to Clara. How did she stay herself even after all this? Heck, maybe Ash could teach Clara, goodness knows she would need it if she was serious about taking the long way round'.
Making Clara jump, a loud video call announced it's presence by showing the incoming information on the screen. Ash hurried to see where it was coming from. "Who would call the TARDIS?" Clara asked, following her to the controls, taking a deep breath to steady herself and refocus . "I… I don't know. Answer it!" Ashildr said, and Clara did, standing on her tiptoes to press 'Answer' on the touch screen.
"Hello?" A man's face appeared on the screen looking down at them. "Who is this? How do you have this number?" Ashildr questioned a little over-hostilely. Clara briefly touched her arm as a signal to back down. "I… uh… I don't have any number, this line hacked the company station and I followed it to contact you. I'm Dave, I just work at the desk- I can get the boss, I didn't think I'd get through to anyone, sorry." 'Dave' looked human, and fumbled with the device he was calling on making the video shake just as Clara would expect any old man like him to.
"Please do. Where are you calling from, Dave?" Clara inquired as Ash went back to fiddling with the TARDIS controls and looking at the changing information on the part of the screen that wasn't occupied by the video chat. "From Yero. Ya' know, H.Q." Clara looked over her shoulder at Ash with a raised eyebrow and she quietly explained. "Uh, I think 'Yero' is an Island on the planet below." Clara nodded.
It felt silly to be trying to communicate with someone over what was essentially alien FaceTime. "That's right, we are located on the north side of the planet in the rexzo ocean." Clara smiled when Ashildr shrugged a 'no idea where that is, but ok.' Dave had been carrying his end of the call through 'HQ,' and he pointed the camera at the ceiling when he started to talk to someone Clara assumed was 'Boss.' "You asked me to figure out the bug coming from station 2B? Well, turns out it not a bug, and there actually were intruders on the station." The way he said 'intruders' was so friendly and calm that it sounded like Clara and Ash had been invited to the station.
"What? On the station?" Asked a woman's high pitched voice. "Yes. I attempted contact, and I actually have them on the line here." Clara glanced behind her to see the amused expression Ash was looking at the screen with. "Well, give that to me!" Said the woman. The camera jerked and spun around once and then they could see both Dave and the source of the other voice. The woman was short, and older looking. Her red lipstick and formal pants-suit made her look very authoritative all the same.
"Hello, This is Ava Walker, director of operations at Grantege Wildlife Research Facilities." Clara thought that this lady was awfully calm talking to intruders on her base. "...Who are you? What are you doing on 2B?" Before Clara could come up with a reasonable explanation to their complicated mission in only a few sentences, Ash did just that.
"Hi, I'm Ashildr, and this is Clara. We were on-planet and came across a violent creature that had been driven mad by the tracking device on it's back. When I turned the device off, we were left with a big, harmless animal that doesn't belong on the beach. So, we tracked the signal here, and have been trying to figure out what's going on so we can return the animal to where it belongs."
"One of the creatures with our tracking devices went savage? How could that be?" Ava asked, seeming genuinely concerned. Clara decided that she liked this woman after only the few moments they'd been speaking for, she seemed to care about her job and was polite even when faced with a challenge.
"The noise coming from the tracker was hurting his head. I could hear the high-pitched frequency too when I was wearing our sonic scanning device, and let me tell you I don't blame the creature." Ash replied. "Bartok." Clara corrected. Ava rose an eyebrow. "Clara named him Bartok." Ashildr explained to Ava and Dave, half amused. The director just shrugged.
"You did a scan of the device? Do you still have that scan? If so, I can match it to our database, find which animal it was, and check the specimen report log to see what the latest status update on him was." The Camera view on HQ's end moved again when Dave brought the communication device closer to them to show them Ava's computer screen.
"Yes, I do. I will send it to you now." Ashildr took the sunglasses from her jacket pocket and stuck them in the TARDIS console port. Then she typed some quick and complicated commands I It the keys, and the classic 'swoosh' noise of an e-mail being sent chimed from the controls.
Ava turned to her own screen, squinted at it, and started typing away as well. "You are a rehabilitation center, correct?" Clara asked Dave as Ava worked with the data. "Among other things, yeah. We heal wildlife from all over the planet and if they are well enough to survive the wild once again afterwards we set em' free." The way he spoke about his work with such pride made Clara feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
"Got it. I don't have the most recent status report from the station because you interfered with the data for this file, but I know what was updated as of yesterday. Bartok is Specimen 004568, he's a Mega Chiroptera, three years old and just released back into his natural habitat two days ago after we healed his broken leg." Ava listed all the details of his file while Clara watched Ash not pay any attention to the director.
"Ok, so what was wrong with the scanner? And why did no one around recognize him if he was in his natural habitat?" Clara wondered aloud.
"I'm not sure… we run a very big operation here these days and I can't oversee every release as I used to." She said a little sadly. "Another thing, what's with the tracker only being activated for only about twenty minutes? The scan I did of the tracker showed only his movements from the past few minutes before we saw him on the beach." Ashildr added.
Ava looked at her quizzically. "Only a few minutes? Show me." Ash nodded and turned back to the controls. She sent the map that they'd seen before to Ava's computer. "This… can't be right! What map is this?" Clara was confused at Ava's confusion. "What do you mean?" She asked.
"This is the map that our ship made of the area we found Bartok in. Is it in an unfamiliar format for you?" Ash explained, glancing between her own view of the map, Ava on the screen, and Clara beside her. "No, I mean the map makes sense, it's just the wrong area to where it says Bartok was released. This is…" she trailed off for a moment, her fingers clicking furiously on her keyboard and then silencing when she found what she was looking for.
"This is completely the wrong location. 004568 was supposed to be released in his natural habitat, The mountains of Ornaya, which is relatively near HQ actually. This map is of Selly cove, yes? Cute little town with lots of colours and tall yellow grass almost all the way up to the ocean?" Ashildr nodded, but Clara was a little lost.
'They released him in the wrong place. I don't know what that means about what will happen next, but at least we know what's already happened.' When the two immortals spoke mind-to-mind they shared more than simple words. Impressions and concepts as well as whole understandings always slipped through between each message even when they didn't mean to.
Clara guessed that was why whenever Ash wanted to explain something to her she would do if telepathically. It was also quicker. When she explained about Bartok just then she had expressed how she was feeling about the situation, what some of her budding ideas for solving it were, as well as her judgments of the two new people they'd be working with to solve it. Ash liked Ava too, but thought that Dave wouldn't be extremely helpful.
Clara blinked to clear her head and re-focus on the person talking with actual words, but she also nodded subtlety at Ash's words. "So you're saying Bartok is in the wrong place?" With a very shameful look on her face Ava answered. "...completely the wrong side of the planet."