A/N – This chapter took forever, and I'm so sorry. But I quite like it, I think, and I had an amazing time writing from Clara's perspective. Hope you enjoy :)
Thud. Thud. Thud.
I clamped my hands across my chest, hardly daring to breathe, cursing the adrenaline hammering my heart. I'd never known it could beat so loud – but then I didn't think I'd ever been so alert, every sound deafening, every vision sharply crystalline. Focus. Focus. I kept my eyes on the black velvet sky hanging heavily above me, watching the white of my breath sharpen and fade as it burned like ice in my lungs. Not long now. Not long. I promise.
And somewhere, I told myself, the stars blurring like scattered snow through my watery eyes, somewhere out in that sky, this is all over.
Walking back to the junkyard that evening, Clara really didn't know why she'd taught what she had. It wasn't as if she'd been planning to – in fact, she'd had a whole piece on Romeo and Juliet worked out for Year Nine, complete with slideshow. And, even after all these years, she still loved teaching Shakespeare (though admittedly not as much as Austen; she was, Clara ruminated, as skilled an author as she was… other things-er) so she couldn't even excuse it like that to herself. No, today it had come completely out of left-field, her mouth lying fluently as her mind had reeled in as much astonishment as the children. Clara did teach these types of lessons sometimes, she couldn't help herself, but so far she'd taken care to do so just once or twice a term. This class hadn't been due theirs for another fortnight. She wouldn't have taught one like this anyway, not since the feminism debates she'd led at Christmas had attracted so much more of a buzz than she'd wanted. When Clara had first stipulated doing this, Me's one and only term had been, 'no incongruous prominence'. And although even after three thousand years together, she still had no idea why Me insisted on using the longest words possible, her meaning had been clear. Clara shouldn't- wouldn't- couldn't- Make A Name For Herself.
Unfortunately, however, she didn't think the result of what she'd done today could possibly be anything else.
It had begun ordinarily enough. She'd strode in on her trademark black heels (which she wore, as she reminded Me every morning, because they were twenty-fifth century Parisian, extremely comfortable and very highly fashionable, and not because otherwise she'd be stuck at the chin height of most of Year Ten and Eleven), her chest raised and her shoulders thrown back in the façade of confidence that had become almost as natural as breathing in the last ten months. (Although that was a purely figurative expression for her, wasn't it?) She'd taken her usual one glance at the photo of the Doctor she had stuck above her desk – the only photo she had, the only glance at it she allowed herself. Once a day. She didn't miss him if she looked at it just once a day.
Clara hadn't even been thinking about him, anyway. The glance was habit, surely, nothing more.
In fact, now she mused on it, there were lots of things she hadn't been thinking about. The raven, for a start. Gallifrey. Trap Street. Their TARDIS, Me's TARDIS, gapingly, glaringly empty. Dying.
Yes, she hadn't been thinking about dying. She hadn't been heaving great breaths, trying to remember the rejoicement of her lungs at the air, the gentle thump of her heart, the wonderful lightness of her shoulders without the ache of their raven-shaped anchor weighing her to the ground. She hadn't been wondering, madly, whether that might have been why she was still only five foot one; maybe if she was unpaused, and living, and breathing, she'd be well over five foot five by now. She hadn't been thinking about any of that, of course, because she never did. Never, ever, ever, Clara promised herself – although it was becoming more and more of a struggle to believe it.
Still, it had been normal at least at that point. Utterly normal, boringly normal. Them chattering, her sighing, Beatrice or Zac making some crass remark or other – business as usual, and wonderfully so; until she'd opened her mouth.
Clara had, she reckoned, always been a bit of a borderline case for foot-in-mouth syndrome, but, really, this had taken it to a new level of spontaneous.
"Right!" she'd said, pacing up and down the shabby carpeting in what was simply a restless attempt at exercise, and most definitely not a way to try and recall how it felt to wear out her limbs, "I hope your October so far has been successful and productive – note how I do not say 'fun', Zac," she'd pointed out to a particularly audacious student, who the week before had shouted down her 'incorrect' usage of the word, "- as I'm sure our lesson today is going to be. Soraya, thank you for the thought – my Lord, I bet you're the light of your mum's life – but you can, actually, put the books back, seeing as we're not going to need them. I have… something else lined up for you today."
That was when the gasps had sounded, Clara just barely suppressing her own. Romeo and Juliet, you daft woman! she'd chastised herself. My God, that's a bit of a mispronunciation!
She hadn't really been worried, though. Slips of the tongue like this were probably just a symptom of the ageing; when all was said and done, she was getting on for three thousand and six. No, what had worried her was when the lies had kept on coming, melting off her tongue one by one, thick and fast as a snowstorm and at least three times as obstructive. Her carefully planned lesson on the effects of toxic masculinity on the feud's longevity – very nice and normal, she'd thought – had soon lain buried beneath them like grass under winter's whiteness, thrust to one side like a memory you wished you could erase. (And she'd had her chance, actually, hadn't she?) Out, instead, had come something very different; and maybe that might have been where it had started to rear off track.
Without knowing quite what she was doing, but gripping the black marker like a lifeline, Clara had stretched as far up the whiteboard as she could reach, and had begun to write. The room had spun around her, the floor tilting and swaying in great waves, her frozen heart lurching in a way usually reserved for the rockiest of their take-offs (and she meant hers and Me's, she definitely meant hers and Me's), but her hand had been steady, careful black letters settling into careful black words that she seemed to have no control whatsoever over.
What are you doing? she'd asked her hand silently (and hey, Clara thought, at least she hadn't said that out loud). The complete lack of lucidity surrounding every action was something that, having a physicality like her own, she didn't think had happened since the last time she'd got hammered off her tits on hypervodkas in that bar on Ruelta Seven (then woken up the following day beside a very suave American by the name of Captain Harkness, but that particular incident was most definitely better off left thoroughly alone); and that did worry her.
Then she'd stepped back.
Had she been in possession of a heartbeat, Clara was certain beyond certainty that the realisation of what it was that her hand had been drafting would have stopped it dead in its tracks. And now she thought about it, this was absolutely definitely where her lesson had gone so sickeningly wrong, because those were her words, all they made her think of were the things she couldn't, and what had happened at the end had been like no one but the man in the picture she wasn't allowed to spare another glance towards.
Tomorrow is promised to no one, but I insist upon my past, was the phrase that stood out in Clara's bold black printing just above his head.
She'd talked without stopping, going on and on until her voice changed, fading soft and dreamlike, creeping into every crevice and pooling like candlelight in the corners of the room until it began to sound like the only noise that had ever been there. She hadn't paused. She hadn't been able to. The words had poured out of her, quietly, soothingly rhythmic; balm on a wound; a mother's lullaby.
Her children had just watched, just sat there. No whispering or sniggering or hastily scrawled notes for her to turn a blind eye to. No quick checks of Instagram or scrolls through YouTube or ridiculous animalled selfies on Snapchat; nothing at all, not even from lippy Beatrice. They'd just listened, their previous silence record (four minutes seven and a half seconds, by Clara's count – why teaching wasn't an Olympic sport was beyond her) smashed to shards. They had looked, for want of a better word – although perhaps there wasn't one. Wasn't this her job, after all? – hypnotised.
What she'd said had been this.
"Do you know, any of you, do you know what the largest, the widest, the saddest, and undoubtably the most amazing word in this whole large, wide, sad, and incredibly amazing language is? And, no, Zac, no, Beatrice, before either of you ask as we are all fairly sure you will, it is not 'antidisestablishmentarianism' or any of those other frankly quite ridiculous words that I have never heard used either in a serious context or outside the eleven to sixteen demographic – and not even then when it comes to your writing, I've noticed. No, this is a different word. Quite a short one, I suppose, in terms of the number of letters, but – like me! – it more than makes up for the fact in other areas. Such as meaning. I could never, Year Nine, not if I had" – she'd paused to laugh, mirthlessly – "not if I had three thousand years, explain to you the meaning. It's the biggest word in the universe; in fact, some might say it is the universe. It's ancient and always, filling our lives with its ghosts since the beginning of everything. It's wild and mad and daft and impossible, and the most incomprehensible thing ever to exist.
"Time. The word is time."
Clara had written it down, the four small letters that said so little and meant so very much.
"It's bigger than even you'd think. When a moment is over – like this one, like right now – it's not done. It doesn't just go, slip off into the darkness of memory along with all the others. It's not gone. Well – maybe for us.
"It's a bit like how the time zones work, here on Earth. In December, when it's New Year's Eve and you're eating far too many Quality Street and watching the countdown on ITV1 with your drooping eyes when you all, frankly, should be in bed, it's only that moment in one place, in this country of grey rain and concrete up here in the dreariest corner of Europe. Down in New Zealand or Australia, it'll already be halfway through the first of January; and across the ocean in Mexico or Miami, they'll hardly have finished their tea. For Canberra, our living moment is just a memory, and for Guadalajara, an anticipation. The time depends on where you are; and it's the same everywhere. Our dead yesterdays are one person's sunny todays and another's hopeful tomorrows. Nothing's gone, nothing. Not ever. Every moment is alive somewhere, for someone, in this great big never-ending stew of days that's all around us, all the time. Somewhere there are the days before we lived, and somewhere there are the days after. In them, we are the yesterdays, the memories, the possibilities. We're all ghosts to someone. All of us, right now. It just depends on where you happen to be.
"It all depends on the position of the stars."
There had been a moment of utter, utter quiet, then. Every eye in the room had been fixed on her, burning, searing, every one of them asking questions she knew she couldn't possibly answer.
Clara cringed at the memory. Why hadn't she stopped herself? Why hadn't she been able to? She must have realised. 9H had never been that silent in their lives – it wasn't as if it hadn't been obvious! But, no, she'd carried on, on and on and on, the whole double lesson, right up until the bell had rung for lunchtime – when surely it had spread through the school like wildfire. Miss Oswald the witch, casting out her spells, she thought, remembering the remark outside the classroom. Yeah, well, maybe I'd like it if I was, Amy. Magic's fun. Magic's easy. If I was magic, I wouldn't have to walk in here every day more terrified than you are.
That was forbidden as well. Clara wasn't scared. She mustn't ever, ever tell herself that she was scared.
Although something else had happened then too, something that wasn't supposed to. Something that maybe, as much as she tried to dispel the thought, fitted in quite well with all that.
She'd turned towards the window, desperate to escape the stares, wanting more than anything just to disappear – and trying to choke down the inexplicable lump that had risen up in her throat. Confused, she'd pulled one of her shaking hands to her face – shaking? She didn't shake! – then just looked, shocked, helpless, when her fingers came away streaked with a glistening wetness. Crying, too? What was this? She never cried. She of all people had no right to cry, no reason.
No, Clara had really hadn't had any idea why she'd done that, either.
Because we're all ghosts to someone, she thought now. Somewhere out there, to someone – most people - her death was over and done with, another ghost to heap on top of the pile. It was gone, and so was she. It all depended on the position of the stars – apparently. And while Clara knew, far too well, that all these things; sadness, terror; dread; were selfish and ridiculous and unreasonable, and she'd long since convinced herself that her outburst about the timelines had been nothing more than the result of pent-up frustration at Me making itself known at the wrong time of the month, she wondered not for the first time whether perhaps they existed in her anyway.
Clara sighed as she turned on to Totters Lane, rubbing the thin material of her coat between her fingers as she tried to concoct an evasion innocuous enough to keep Me oblivious of her rule-breaking. It was surprisingly tricky. Clara had found that when you'd spent the last three thousand years by someone's side, it tended to become unreasonably difficult to lie to them. She hated this at the best of times – Clara needed her secrets, always had done. As a child, she'd invented countless codes and ciphers to conceal things she wanted hidden, reading with fervour about the usage of others in history. As a teenager, her passwords had been the wonderment of Mr Fernanda the IT teacher, as he'd attempted for the hundredth unsuccessful time to crack the easiest. And during her time with Me, they'd both picked up dozens of languages in order that, wherever they went, they could be certain of uninvaded conversational privacy whenever they wanted (even if their reasons for doing so maybe didn't bear thinking about).
But Me herself could read every nuance of Clara by now with one sweep of those stone-grey eyes, and seemingly all the difficulty of flicking through a picture book. She might as well ink 'I AM LYING' on her forehead for all the good trying to conceal anything from Me would do – and yet Me herself, even after all these years, still remained impenetrable to one and all…
Stepping in through the gate of the junkyard, Clara had fallen so deep into her thoughts that she missed how it swung open too easily, the bolt forced by an inexpert hand. She missed the soft, shallow footprints lying beneath her in the watery mud. She missed the scuffed black boot-tips peeking out from underneath the shadowed container.
She missed, in fact, everything apart from what she couldn't have, her ears pricked and her senses sharpened as they were after so much travelling – the sound of high, panicked breathing echoing out into the starlit November night.