She wakes, with no idea how long she has been asleep. The pain in her chest is considerably lessened. Disconnecting herself from the monitor, she risks swinging her legs out of bed. The TARDIS lights are low and she feels like an intruder in her dark corridors, colder than she is used to.
"I hate it when you do this," she says, to him or the machine facilitating his sulk she isn't quite sure. Perhaps both. "Stop pushing me away."
A purring hum in response, but no more. The corridors are shifting around her, leading her eventually into the library. The lifetime works of John Smith are spread across the long table, with an almost empty glass of something the smells distressingly like turpentine.
She picks up his journal, her own face looking back at her. Thanks to the TARDIS, the words John had written underneath are readable now. Her fingers trace over the ink.
I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
It's as good a summary of the strange bond between her and the Doctor as she's ever read. She sighs in the dark and closes the journal, padding out of the library to try and find him elsewhere.
This room she has never seen before. Chalkboards line the walls, covered in the Doctor's dusty scrawl. It's almost illegible, scuffed in places as if he has moved up and down, erasing, re-writing. Dates and names and places: Clydebank 1941; Baranable SoT43; Sicily 1943; Aliganza SoT751; Caen 1944…
"Doctor?"
He jumps at the sound of her voice, chalk still in hand. "Clara?" he checks.
"Clara," she confirms. "Are you okay?"
"That was going to be my question."
"I'm okay," she replies, "feeling much better. What are you doing? What is this place?"
"I was… ah, thinking," he says, as if that's any kind of answer. "About what you said. About dying twice. All the names and faces John remembered, I was trying to find out if they were real or not."
She blanches. "Like his wife and children?"
"They were killed in the Clydebank blitz… At least, that's what I remember."
She's almost too afraid to ask. "Did they?"
A shrug. "Does it matter? There were plenty that did. Somebody's wife. Somebody's babies. The names… the faces that I have in my head? I don't know. I think Elias was drawing from Trenzalore. To make it feel real. I can't quite unpick it all. Trying…"
She takes the chalk from his unresisting fingers. "Doctor, I'm sorry. I didn't think."
"You were right," he says; normally a cause for jubilant celebration. Here and now she just feels horribly guilty. "I wasn't being honest with you earlier. I'm not John Smith but who he was…is a part of me. I-I accept that."
So many names on the chalkboards, so many losses. The sheer number of them seems to press down upon them both. She forgets, forgets the weight he carries around with him. Even she is fooled by that grumpy carapace, his armour of disagreeableness. Underneath it he is raw as an exposed nerve; forcing him to confront the reality of their nineteen-sixties sojourn suddenly feels like an act of cruelty.
"This isn't John," she says softly. "This is the Doctor trying to bear all of this. John let the page turn and the past stay in the past. He moved on to the next chapter."
"No, he didn't. He watched the world through a lens, left it where it couldn't hurt him until he met Clara Oswald."
"A version of her," she corrects.
"Yes…" He is very still for a moment. "I suppose we have that in common as well."
She has no reply to this cryptic nonsense. "Well, this Clara is telling you, come away now and let this be. Please?"
"I thought that you were dead," he says instead.
"What?"
"When the crystalline entity hit you, I thought—"
"Doesn't matter. I'm fine. I'm fine."
"One day you won't be."
"One day neither will you. In the end, one of us will have to go."
"I don't want you to go."
"I don't want you to either. So, let's not think about it now, eh? Please." Her hand has, seemingly of its own accord, reached out to cup his cheek. "Let's just… fly away somewhere. You and me."
"Fly away…"
He nods. His fingers fold over hers, bringing her hand to his mouth. Blue eyes rake her face, and she remembers that look, sat on the floor of the Ritz hotel. She leans forward and kisses him softly, before her brain has really registered what she is doing.
It is different to how she remembers, and not just because of the absence of his beard. He is colder than he should be. She can taste, very faintly, jelly babies and not a lot else. He's an alien, she thinks. She's always known it, of course, but it's the difference between thinking a thing and experiencing it first-hand.
His fingers curl around her elbows, pulling her closer. This is more familiar, and it makes her knees tremble just as it did in nineteen sixty-five. She deepens the kiss, expecting him to pull back at any moment, to break apart.
"Fly away," he says again, against her mouth.
Her hand finds where his shirt has come untucked instead, inside his jacket. Fingers ghost across the bare skin of his back as she arches into his body, standing on tip toe, trying to even out their difference in height. It feels so familiar, like they've done this before—
She breaks the kiss. "Doctor?"
He nods.
"Just checking," she says.