A TARDIS, The Vortex, Undefined Date
Clara's eyes blazed like black fire as she strode down the round white corridor, throwing glances over her shoulder half to check there was no one following her and half to convey her irritation towards anyone who might be. Well, she said 'anyone'. Really there was only one person who could be. And that was one person she did not want to talk to right now.
"Clara!" Her pace quickened at the sound of her name. "Clara, please, can you just listen to me!"
"No, I can't! I bloody well can't!" Clara shot back, without turning round or pausing in her step. "Ashildr," she added as an afterthought, just for an extra sting. Normally, the two of them went to extraordinary lengths to avoid the usage of Me's long-ago name; she hated to be reminded of all the days that had been reduced to faded ink on curling pages, brown with age, the ghost of a whisper; but today Clara was so angry she refused to even try and care, determinedly ignoring the soft murmur in the back of her mind telling her this was unfair. All she wanted to do was strike where she knew it would hit home.
After all, she reasoned, how are you supposed to feel when your best friend of who-knows-how-many years won't stop telling you you should run like the wind to catch up with your death?
If the use of her name had had the effect Clara had anticipated, Me did admirably to keep her poker face unsullied, instead assuming the look of quiet, martyred worry that Clara had come to despise. "But the timelines-" she started.
"The timelines are fine!" snapped Clara, swinging round at last and glaring. "It's you, with your paranoid little habit – no, sorry, obsession – of logging every little dip and twitch and moan, that nobody else would even bother about, who isn't! You want to send me to my death, to stand up in front of that raven and scream, because of a tiny bloody flick or two! Go on, Clara! Run, hurry up! Might not make it in time, you wouldn't want to miss it, it's not like we've got a- a time machine, or anything…"
She stopped when her voice began to crack. Let me be brave, she pleaded. Oh, let me be brave. As she closed her eyelids against the tears prickling behind them, she wondered how long she'd lived by those words for. Not long enough, something inside her couldn't help whispering.
"Clara," Me murmured, her tone coloured grey with the desperation that dominated so many of their conversations nowadays. "Clara, you know what it means. You know why this has to happen. And you know…" She broke off delicately, but they both knew exactly what she'd been about to say. And you know you can't outrun it.
Clara sighed, a long, resigned sigh, and sank against one of the softly humming white walls. Of course she knew what it meant. Of course she did. It had been a very long time since she'd thought about anything else. For a while now, the timelines Me monitored had begun to show 'scars' – tiny tears in the fabric of the space and time they covered. At first, they'd tried not to think the worst. These did just occur sometimes, Me had reassured Clara. It didn't necessarily mean anything. In doses as small as they'd been in then, the scars weren't even harmful. Nothing to lose sleep over, she'd said. But the numbers had steadily climbed, until recently they had reached what Me deemed 'a dangerous level'. And Clara had done her best to keep a pair of determinedly deaf ears for all this to fall on, dismissing it as ridiculous and unreasonable and an utter waste of time to pay attention to; because she knew exactly what it meant.
Her time was up.
She turned her face away as she felt the first tear trail hotly down her cheek. Oh, for God's sake. Let me be brave.
"I thought you weren't scared," Me said softly.
Clara closed her eyes and tried to breathe. In, out. In, out. In, out. Brave. Brave. Be brave.
"Of course I'm not scared."
Me waited, cocking her eyebrow, coolly confident she knew perfectly well what was coming.
"Who said I was scared? I have never been scared, not ever, not of that. But I'm dying for God's sake, I'm dying, I'm going to die. I'm never going to think again, or- or talk, or run, or laugh, or dance. I won't even know what I'm not doing. There won't be an 'I' to know it! There won't be anything! My story will be over, all the stories, all of them, for me. For ever. And I have to do that, I have to put myself in there. And I don't think I can. And I try and I try to be brave, I always try to be brave, but-" Clara broke off and swallowed, trying to choke down the lump rising in her throat, then jutted her chin up and wiped her streaming eyes defiantly, looking straight at Me with at gaze that could have seared through stone. "Yeah, of course I'm scared. I'm bloody terrified."
Me jerked her head in a gesture that could have been a nod, the fulfilment of her expectation, but could have been a simple expression of sympathy. "I know. Believe me, Clara, I know, I do. According to my diaries, I spent the first hundred years or so after you came to the village eating, sleeping and breathing the wait for death. It was the twelfth century AD, and the human race were dropping like flies. Every day I thought it would be my turn, and every day I wondered why it was always theirs." There was such a note of pain in her voice that Clara couldn't help wondering whether her memory was really as finite as she claimed.
Then she looked up at Clara, her eyes as blankly, perfectly dead as usual, the ghost of a smile playing faintly on her lips. "Anyway. It's not over yet, Clara, not quite. Your time isn't up. There's still… some of the story left for you to tell."
Her careful pause burned in Clara's mind, leaving one question drumming through her head. She had to ask. She had to. She had to know. "How long have I got?"
The smile dropped. "I don't-"
Clara's eyes blazed in a sudden glare. "Yes, you do. You know and you will tell me. I don't care what the answer is, I don't care how little time I have, so long as you tell me. How long?"
Me breathed slowly. "About…" Her eyes fluttered shut in concentration, hands moving in miniscule motions as if manipulating the timelines themselves, lips pursing as she worked. Clara winced. How long could that mean? A day? An hour? Let me be brave. Let me be brave. Let me be brave.
"A year." Clara jumped as Me spoke into the silence. She sounded almost surprised. "A year, Clara. You've got a whole year."
"A year's not that long," she couldn't help commenting.
Me's smile was back. "Don't be pessimistic. You've just found out you're not going to die." Then, with such painful causticity, "What more joyous occasion could there be?"
Clara looked her straight in the eyes – unfathomable still even after all this time – wondering if she dared say out loud the words hanging so heavily in the air between them; the words she whispered to herself in the depths of the night when the world couldn't seem to let her be brave; the words that had played the tune to the very first time the Rotor had groaned up and down under their hands. Yes, she decided, she had to. "Everyone's going to die."
A hitch in the breath. A tense of the shoulders. Then, "Everyone's going to die, yes. Everybody's raven is out there somewhere. But, Clara, here's the thing. I have been alive for more centuries than you can imagine. Not around, alive. There is a bigger difference than you probably realise. And this is what I have learnt.
"If you want to live, for any length of time at all, you cannot think like that. You can't. It is tantamount to never having been gifted life in the first place if you throw it all away on your death. You don't live life waiting to die, Clara; you live life waiting to see what you can do with it."
She paused, maybe to survey the effect of her words, maybe just to catch her breath, before delivering what she surely knew full well to be her ace.
"After all, what do you think the Doctor did?"
"The beginning," Clara said suddenly, before she could catch herself. For a moment, Me seemed actually thrown.
"I'm sorry?"
"I've got a year. You asked me what I wanted to do with it." She shrugged, all traces of despair rinsed from her face. "I want to go back to the beginning."
"Hmm. A nice thought, but I'm not sure Blackpool Victoria Hospital is accepting midwives this late in the season."
Clara bounced to her feet, eyes alight with excitement, smiling, properly smiling, for what felt like the first time in a very long time. "I'm not sure I said it was mine."
Foreman's Yard, 76 Totters Lane, Shoreditch, London, November 23rd 2026
For what felt like the first time in a very long time, the wheezing and grinding of ancient engines announced the arrival of something long-remembered.
A/N - This prologue is very different from the rest of it, in terms of tone, theme, content, etc. It's just a lead-in really. But I loved writing Clara and Ashildr/Me, and I think it's gone OK, but bear in mind this is my first ever fic so I don't have a whole lot to draw on lol. Cheers if you're reading this, by the way, because it means you made it to the end :) Also, I know how unlikely it sounds, but Blackpool Victoria Hospital is genuinely a real hospital and not just an amalgam of Jenna Coleman's hometown and regal role.