A/N Guuuuuuuys! THING!
Steven Moffat, in a behind-the-scenes thing on the series 7 DVD, said quite simply and straightforwardly that the Doctor fancies Clara! That he knows he shouldn't "but he really, really does".
It's.
fricking.
CANON!
(yay now give us some whouffle in the Christmas special or else)
ALSO due to all those EIGHT WONDERFUL REVIEWS I got for the last chapter, this one's early. :)
YES DID YOU HEAR THAT
EIGHT
I LOVE YOU
•••
CLARA
Death was a very strange thing.
An end to life, essentially, is all it was. But in that, it was strange.
What is death? What is life? Is it nothing? Is it everything? Is it only what we think it might be?
Humans design and hold onto their little ideas of what death is like. They have religions, gods, things they believe will unfold after one's heart stops beating.
Perhaps one of them is true. Perhaps none of them are true. Perhaps all of them are true.
Perhaps no one can ever know.
But she wasn't thinking about what happened after death. Not anymore. She remembered pondering it before, though, in the unforgiving grip of the sea. Well, not pondering it. Rather madly searching for it.
But no, now she was thinking about the strangeness of death itself. And what it makes people do, what it makes them think.
What had she thought, in those moments? Nothing truly comprehensible, nothing that made much sense now. She recalled having some deluded conversation, talking with death itself.
She had thought about the Doctor, whether he would meet her in death, one day. She had hoped he would. For his sake.
But further, deeper in the fading black, she hadn't thought about much at all.
Peaceful.
That was how she had described it.
Calm. Serene. Blank.
She was not dead then, but close to it. And it had been peaceful.
It was not peaceful now.
There was pain, spiderwebbing through her lungs. Every breath was too much, and not enough. Her limbs ached with fatigue, heaving and burning. Her mind was scattered, tilting and spinning inside her skull. Agony was everywhere, throat, chest, head, bones, skin.
It was wild, chaotic, racking, frenzied, violent, insane.
And it most definitely was not peaceful.
That's how she knew she was alive.
•••
DOCTOR
When the half-dead girl lying beside him took her first shuddering, gravelly breath, the Doctor first thought he had imagined it.
It cut through his tired, hazy thoughts, and was dismissed as a product of his mad hope.
And then he thought maybe it was /all/ his imagination. Every second of this hell. Clara's frantic, fearful eyes as she demanded to see the TARDIS life scanner. The black message neatly scrawled on the psychic paper. His anger and loneliness and desperation running amok in his mind as he asked her to come to find him for a last goodbye. The dawning, horrific realisation that he had been wrong, that he had led her into unimaginable danger. The look on each of the doppelgängers' faces when he turned them to pure Flesh. The rush of wind as he'd fallen through the air into the sea. Watching himself die, clutching Clara's hand. Seeing her run to the cliffs and throw herself off, giving herself to the ocean below. Diving after her, almost losing both of them in the raging waters.
All of it. Just a hallucination. A terrible, terrible waking nightmare.
But then it came again. The breathing.
Again.
Again.
He stared at her.
She was moving.
She was
alive.
Clara.
Alive.
He jolted over to her and yanked off the mask, leaving her to breathe freely and cough in harsh, wet barks.
She hadn't seemed to realise he was there, holding her hair back from her face as she coughed saltwater from her lungs. She was shivering violently, blood trickling from cuts and wounds all over her body from the crystal, and places where she had scraped her own nails into her skin.
When the fit of coughing and half-breaths finally ceased, her arms gave out and she collapsed to the floor, shaking. But moving. Breathing. Living.
Thank you.
Dear universe, thank you.
Her chest rose and fell as she lay on her side, sucking in deep breaths of air that rattled in her lungs.
Her eyes were squinting open. It was hard to tell if she could see him at all.
When he spoke, the word rasping in his throat, he didn't think she understood. "Clara? Clara, are you alright?"
Of course she was not alright. She had stopped breathing. She had almost...died. For him. She had jumped off that cliff, to her death, to save him.
Now he couldn't stop himself from touching her, knowing that she wouldn't just let go of life in his arms.
He pushed the ropy, dripping hair from where it stuck to her cheeks, wiped the bloody fingerprints from her skin.
She looked up at him.
"Doct-" her words were interrupted by another round of coughing, and he held a hand to her forehead and she retched the last of the killing water.
She was weak, so weak, weaker than him. And he was barely able to lift his limbs.
She fell back against him, and he stiffened at her limpness.
"I'm fine," she whispered. "I am."
No you're not. You could have died. Your death, in my name.
Clara's death, and it would have been him who had caused it.
But he only said, "You're fine. Yes. You're fine."
He had to reassure himself.
Clara was clutching onto the edge of his waistcoat, her eyes were closed again.
She inched them open, and murmured, her words slurred, "It hurts, Doctor. I need...Tired. I'm so..." she couldn't seem to finish.
He sat there for less than a minute, Clara lying across his chest, before he, too, shuffled his body along the ground, leaning against the TARDIS door.
Time Lords didn't need to sleep much. Barely one night in a week or two. Not even. But now, now, every breath was still catching on a rusty nail stuck in his ribs, and just moving an arm cost him. His thoughts were sluggish and jumbled, all he could gather from them was that he was just so tired.
He clutched Clara's lolling, sleeping form to his chest, holding tight to her hand and letting his cheek rest against hers. It occurred to him, somehow, that this was probably a bit inappropriate, a bit too close, a bit too entwined. He thought that maybe the warmth he felt from their closeness- despite them both being freezing and saturated- was a bit too strong for his liking.
But then, as his eyelids weighed shut without him having to force them, without fearing for a lone night in the dark with his memories, he realised. He realised that Clara was here and safe, and anything else he couldn't spare a thought for.
He slept.
Peaceful.
A/N sorry it's short. :(
Thank you again for reviewing (I sound like a particularly annoying broken record here)