Clara leaned out of the TARDIS door and grinned; she recognised the characteristic buildings of Whitehall, and she most certainly recognised the nondescript, yet very expensive car parked surreptitiously near to where they had touched down. Leaning back into the TARDIS to bid a quick farewell to the Doctor, she stepped clear of the time machine to gleefully greet the man waiting for her.
The Doctor didn't bother to look up from the controls as he waved Clara absently out of the door; he knew she had a life outside of gallivanting around the galaxy with him, and he had little interest in it. She had asked him to drop her in a more uptown part of the city than usual (not exactly Coal Hill, this place), which he paid no mind to... until he heard muffled voices and a thud against the door of the ship. Pulling his magnificent brow down into a frown he approached the door with caution, before throwing it wide, locating the source of the interruption, and immediately regretting his choices.
"Doctor!"
The Doctor, that possessor of sound mind and even sounder regenerated body, struggled not to gawp as he found his faithful companion being thoroughly snogged, up against the front door of his ship…
By himself.
He cleared his throat and the other man jumped back as if he'd been zapped.
"Christ!" The doppelganger was now gawping in return, his eyes not leaving the Doctor as he said to Clara, "You weren't kidding, were you?"
Clara, for her part, was struggling to catch her breath and right her clothing. "No. No I wasn't." She took a deep breath and plastered a smile across her face; a forced smile, and both men could tell. "Malcolm, this is the Doctor; Doctor, this is Malcolm Tucker." Her smile took on a frenzied edge as the two frowning men warily shook hands, and for a moment she wondered if the universe was going to implode from some sort of weird paradox. "We were just heading off for dinner, so I'll see you later, Doctor, yeah?" The rictus grin was still very much in place as she held the Doctor's dumfounded gaze whilst dragging an equally dumfounded Malcolm, by the sleeve, towards the parked car. "Pick me up in the morning, okay?" And with that parting statement, she turned and bundled the taller man into his own vehicle amidst a proverbial hailstorm of protests and swearing.
Once in the car Clara watched Malcolm calm down and collect himself with a few more choice expletives; after he'd straightened his tie and run a hand through his neatly styled hair, he raised the privacy screen, cleared his throat, and turned to her. "I'm not your boyfriend, Clara."
She blinked at the abrupt déjà vu and replied defensively, "I never said you were."
"Look, when you told me that I look a lot like the guy you travel around with, I thought it was a bit odd that you kept coming to me instead of going to him, but now I see that this is exactly why we keep getting together like this." He held up a hand to stop her as she looked set to interrupt him. "We have fun, we have a LOT of fun, but if you're just calling me to fill a gap, as it were, then this stops now. Everyone has the itch that needs scratching from time to time, and I thought that this was exactly that, but I'm not your boyfriend. I'm not Him."
Clara smiled. "He's not my boyfriend, Malcolm, I just like to enjoy your company from time to time that's all, there's nothing else going on." She leaned her shoulder against his, winding her arm through his to take his hand, and fluttered her eyelashes up at him, "Now take me for a fancy dinner, and then take me to your bed."
The following morning the Doctor arrived at Clara's flat as arranged, but she was nowhere to be seen. Grumbling about recalcitrant women, he scanned for her biosignature and located her halfway across the city. He input the new coordinates into the TARDIS and rematerialized outside a smart-looking townhouse in Richmond.
Inside the house, Clara had completely lost track of the time, as she usually did when she was with Malcolm. It was always the most amazing diversion spending time with him after particularly fraught experiences with the Doctor; the de-stressing that she felt with him was very welcome, especially this time given the cause for her flight to his arms. Said arms tightened around her as she drowsed, half on top of him in his huge, comfortable bed; he was waking up.
"Well," his voice was rough with sleep and the screaming that had occurred the night before, "that was different."
Clara hummed in agreement and stretched against him like a contented cat, her warm breasts brushing his body as she did so.
He made a low noise of approval, his burgeoning interest also waking up against her hip. "You could almost say that you were prepped before you even got here."
Clara made a face into his ribcage; she really didn't want to be having this conversation with him when she was feeling so mellow and non-Doctor-y. So, she shifted and shuffled down the bed beneath the sheets to address the predicament growing in his groin.
Malcolm sucked in a breath and let it out with a sigh, he hadn't been expecting THAT; this experience with Miss Oswald had certainly been very different to previous encounters with his favourite fiery little brunette. His Blackberry bleeped from the nightstand and he cast it a withering glare.
"Igmorr iff" murbled Clara with her mouth full. She gave him an extra attentive lick to punctuate her brief argument.
He gasped and dropped the phone with a thunk where he had briefly reached for it. The fucktards at DoSAC (it was probably DoSAC, it was ALWAYS bloody DoSAC) could keep it together without him for now. His eyes rolling back beneath his eyelids at her expert ministrations (where had she learned how to do THAT?!), he succumbed to her seduction and panted, groaning in wanton abandon, thankful yet again for the thick walls of his Victorian house. Moments like these made him wonder why exactly he had never made a more serious move with her, she fit him so perfectly. He was careening closer and closer to the bliss that she promised with lips and tongue and throat, when the ding-dong of his doorbell wrenched him back from the edge with an unwelcome jolt. He yelled out a curse and wished, not for the first time, that he'd learned proper Gaelic as a kid, so he could swear with the full weight of his not-inconsiderable ancestral heritage. Clara retreated, releasing him from her prison of control and he could have cried in frustration; he'd been so fucking close, and she was so fucking good! Throwing the covers back with a furious growl he threw on a robe and stomped down the stairs to the front door, shouting the whole way about the myriad methods in which he was going to feed the person on the other side of the door their entrails. He flung the door open in the intruder's face and swore again.
"I might have fucking known." He turned away from the door and motioned for the interloper to enter the house, "Clara! It's your boyfriend!"
Clara came whistling down the stairs as Malcolm disappeared into the kitchen with more swearing and threats of violence for the next person to interrupt his sexy-fun-times, filtering through the thick wood of the door.
"Doctor! What are you doing here?" She tightened the belt of Malcolm's spare bathrobe self-consciously around her waist.
The Doctor raised an eyebrow, "You weren't at your flat. I was worried." He peered over her shoulder at the closed door from behind which there was the noise of clattering pans, coffee cups, and more swearing. "You've been with him then I see."
"Yes. We sometimes get together when I'm not busy."
The second eyebrow raised to join the first, "Do you indeed?" and sidling past her he let himself into the kitchen, making a point of saying more loudly than necessary as he entered, "So, Clara, I thought we'd head out towards the Maldives today, you said you always wanted to go there."
Malcolm glared at the Doctor over the rim of his coffee cup and Clara felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as the temperature in the room figuratively dropped a couple of degrees. Were they going to get into a pissing match? Over HER? She bit her lips in order to fight back a shit-eating, self-satisfied grin.