Chapter Seven: Checks and Balances

A fundamental principle of American politics, whereby each branch of government has some measure of influence over the another.

"Did they travel a lot? Your parents?"

"No, not really," he mused, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in tune to the music they were listening to. ('Come On Eileen' by Dexys Midnight Runners would be stuck in Clara's head for the remainder of the trip—but then again, she said that about every song on John's playlist.) "They were mainly invested in their company; it was like their brain child, which left me to be labelled as 'the accidental offspring.'"

Clara laughed, nibbling on a graham cracker. She was really growing tired of eating just graham crackers; they left her mouth dry and they hadn't any bottled water, but it was the only thing in the car and it gave her something to do with her hands.

"What was the company?"

"A computer security provider," he drawled, as if it was the most anti-climactic thing ever. "Gallifrey Anti-Virus, 'universal security at your fingertips.'"

"No way," she said behind a full mouth, turning in her seat to face him fully. "I use that provider!"

"Really?"

"Yes!" she exclaimed, nearly spitting on him. "Been using it for years, it's never disappointed me."

"Blimey, my parents would have loved you," John chuckled, jutting his chin towards the box in Clara's lap. She fished out a graham cracker and placed it in his open palm. "Had they still been alive they would've exploited you for their marketing campaigns."

"Wait, so those people in their commercials aren't highly satisfied customers?"

"More so highly rewarded actors, but I'm glad they came across as so," he remarked, readjusting the sunglasses perched on the bridge of his nose.

It was nearing twelve o'clock and the Nevada sun was scorching down upon them, the air conditioner put on full blast as they traveled down the liquid black road of Interstate 80. Clara had long since tied her hair back into a twist, using one of the empty snack boxes to fan the thin layer of sweat that had appeared along the curve of her neck. Summer was rather dependent on the state, she had learned in the past several hours, for she was not prepared for this sweltering of a heat as compared to the much cooler Californian coastline.

"Did you assume ownership of the company after the accident?" Clara asked out of sheer curiosity, realizing a second later that she had no idea the boundaries John held in regards to discussing money, especially when it was so closely connected to such a fragile topic as his parents. "You don't need to answer that if you don't want to."

"No, no, it's alright," John reassured her; he had expected the question to come up sooner or later. "I did, for about a month or so, before selling it over to UNIT, another popular Internet security agency. The CEO had been close friends with my parents for years, and she of all people knew—or rather, understood why I was in no position to run Gallifrey by myself."

"Twenty-two is a young age to hold that much power," Clara replied thoughtfully. John nodded his head.

"At twenty-two, I was more concerned with what I was having for dinner, or if that girl at the bar was going to call me back—she never did," he said ruefully, earning him a chuckle from the young woman beside him. "I had no idea what to do with the money that was left from me playing shop. I'm still thinking about it, actually. There's charities, but which one? I could open a non-profit, non-profits are cool, but what for? I just...I want it to mean something. Does that make any sense?"

There was a fervor in his eyes that she hadn't seen before, that hint of gold amassed in a sea of green. And she admired him all the more for it.

"So you've been traveling in the meantime?" she asked quietly—any louder and she might have disrupted his thought process.

"Perhaps by traveling, I'll get a better idea of what I want," he responded, his gaze stretching far beyond the road ahead of them. "When I told those robbers that I had nothing, I was lying. I paid to rent out this car, and I can pay off my school without taking out a loan. I can choose to go wherever and whenever I want, and there's nothing preventing me from buying all nine seasons of 'How I Met Your Mother' on DVD and Blu-Ray, except the fact that I bawl like a baby every time I watch the finale."

His tone held not the slightest bit of arrogance. If anything, he sounded overwhelmed by the amount of things he could do. Clara had never seriously aspired a lavish lifestyle, but could see how it would be tempting, especially if the opportunity were right in front of you. Seeing John talk about it now made her realize that he was afraid to use his parents' wealth for the wrong reasons, in fear of turning selfish while also remembering to count his blessings. It was a dilemma she could detect but still decided to question in the end.

"Does knowing you could afford all of that scare you?"

He was silent for a moment, considering his response.

"I'm grateful. I'm grateful for all of it Clara, but...it's not mine. If not for my parent's death, I'd be living off of ramen noodles and tap water. In fact, I should be living off of ramen noodles and tap water if it means I wouldn't feel guilty whenever I pay for dinner or book a last-minute flight to God-knows-where."

"They'd have wanted you to use the money, John."

"Perhaps," he said, furrowing his brow. "I just wish they'd come back for a minute to tell me how."

"Only a minute?" she asked, an amused smile on her lips.

"Heaven sounds like a pretty cool place. I wouldn't want to keep them for too long."

They continued down the road and gradually settled themselves into his music, John turning up the volume as 'Take On Me' filled the speaker system. It was almost impossible not to sing along as John played air-keyboard whilst managing the wheel, the two travelers doing a terrible job of hitting the high notes but trying all the same. The song ended with them in hysterics, Clara clutching her stomach in the sort of pain that only came from the best kind of laughter.

"Are you hungry?" she asked afterwards, realizing that the pain wasn't just a side-effect of laughing. He almost looked relieved she had asked.

"Starving. My stomach's been growling since Duran Duran."

"Duran Duran—?" Clara turned towards him in her seat, lowering her makeshift fan to make sure he saw her disbelief. "But that was miles ago! How did I not hear that?"

He merely glanced over at her, 'Take On Me' going for a second round as he raised the volume a little higher.

"Can I ask you something, Doctor?"

John looked up from his burger, ketchup dribbling down his chin as he stared at her in dubiety. They were parked outside a Sonic, where it took them six minutes to figure out how to order, and another five to determine what they wanted from the menu that was a culinary equivalent to the last Harry Potter book, or the Bible. It was that extensive.

"Since when did you start calling me Doctor?"

Her brown eyes flicked to his from the top of her cherry limeade. It made her tongue red and would probably give her kidneys hell later, but she was tired and decided that if she deserved anything in this world, it was a beverage that exceeded her caloric intake for the entire year.

"Ever since...now, I suppose," she replied, slurping on her straw as she tried to gauge his reaction. "I dunno, I thought I'd give it a go. Is it too weird?"

"No, no, it's just—" He paused to swallow as she handed him a napkin. "—only Amy and Rory ever call me that, and they're my closest friends." He paused, and then, like a runner breaking out into a sprint, began again. "N-Not that I'm implying that you and I aren't—well, that is, only if you consider us to be. You know. Friends. We've known each other for what—eleven, twelve hours? Does that count—?"

Clara's laugh cut him off, and he didn't know what it was about her, whether it be the equal balance of amusement between her smile and her eyes, or the fact that her lips were stained cherry red, but it immediately quieted him. She put her sweating plastic cup into its holder and hitched her legs up onto the seat; she was small enough to do so without trouble.

"I think that with everything we've been through, Doctor," she said, the name rolling off her tongue as if she'd called him that a thousand times before. "Friendship is definitely on the table."

"Good, good," he nodded, suddenly conscious of the burger in his hands; it was beginning to feel like a stage prop. He took a tentative bite and forced himself to chew.

"Besides," she teased, curling up in her seat. "Anything's better than Chin Boy, right?"

John smiled around his food but kept his eyes trained on the dashboard, as if staring directly at her would only reveal a truth that he wasn't quite ready to admit to himself. He had coined the nickname 'The Doctor' long before he was even accepted into medical school; in fact, he had invented it for himself in Mrs. Montague's year one primary school class—where he had used a set of stubby crayons to depict himself wearing a head mirror and stethoscope on a sheet of tan construction paper. They had presented their drawings to the class, and being the only aspiring physician, he took pride in the role, and dedicated himself to it at a young age.

"Are you okay?" he asked a boy on the playground once during recess time—he had toppled from the balance beam and was now inspecting a scrape on his hand with a pair of scrupulous green eyes. They were like his, only paler. Like the green tea matcha his mum always made for herself.

The boy jabbed a finger at the girl only a few feet ahead, her red hair fiery beneath the blazing sun.

"Amelia pushed me," he said, the words more of an observation than an accusation.

"Did not!" she cried back stubbornly, folding her arms across her chest. John couldn't tell whether she was cross because her hair was red, or if her hair was red because she was cross. "I tapped you on the shoulder and you were so surprised you fell over!"

"Oh," John blinked, unsure of who to believe. Nevertheless, he dug around in the pocket of his school shorts, his chubby fingers clasping around the one thing he knew would make the situation better. "Do you need a band-aid?"

The boy looked from him to his bleeding palm, then back to him again. "Yes, please."

"Aren't you the one who wants to be a doctor when they grow up?" Amelia asked, trotting over to them. Up close, he noticed that she had green eyes, too. Maybe that meant that they were all connected, somehow. His parents were always telling him how everyone was connected at some point in time.

John smiled, glad she had remembered him in such a way. "Yes! Yes I am. I want to take care of people when I'm older, like my parents take care of me."

His parents weren't doctors, but there was a special feeling that settled right in his chest whenever his mum made him soup when he was sick, or when his dad bandaged him up and tucked him in blankets whenever he fell from his bike—which happened rather frequently. He hadn't identified the feeling as being loved unconditionally, but knew it as well as any other emotion. It was so warm and made him so happy that he wanted to extend it out to others so that they could feel it, too.

"Well," Amelia said, peering over at her victim as he pat the band-aid delicately onto his injured palm. "You took care of Rory good enough."

John's eyes sparkled in delight; he'd never had a patient before. The boy—Rory—extended his hand out to his two classmates, as if to confer that the band-aid had indeed done its job.

"All better now," he said with a blunt nod of his head, tufts of light brown hair falling in his eyes. He pushed it back with his uninjured hand to smile at his new friend. "Thank you, Doctor."

Seldom did they call him anything else after that.

To them, the nickname was a lifelong fact, a promise he had made to himself to help anyone he could within his power—it just so happened to integrate itself so deeply with his profession. Had he not gone to medical school, Amy and Rory still would have addressed him as The Doctor, for that was what they knew him as. It was more than just a title; it was a name, and like any other name in the universe, it held meaning.

Which was why he was slightly in awe, hearing Clara call him that for the first time. For not only did he see in her a new friend, this captivating young woman whom he wished to have met earlier in life, just so he could get the chance to talk to her more, but a person who had worried for him in a moment when no one else would have. Who held a perspective that was so unlike his own but made perfect sense.

As maudlin as it was, he felt the meaning of the nickname open up to her in that moment, as if she, too, were now a part of it.

"Sorry," John finally blurted out, shutting his eyes tight as he tried to redirect himself to their conversation. (Was it the lack of sleep that had turned his brain to mush—both physically and sentimentally?) "You were going to ask me something."

"I forgot what it was," Clara admitted around her straw, on the near-verge of developing brain freeze as she suddenly exclaimed, "Ah—yes!" She laughed a little uneasily, stirring her ice with her straw as she propped her feet up on the dashboard. "Where exactly are we going?"

It was an unexpected question, to say the least. John's brow furrowed.

"...I thought you knew?" he said confusedly, the crinkling sound of his food wrapper suddenly much louder than usual. Were they talking about the same thing? He decided in that moment to give her tips in case she'd forgotten. "The Big Apple? The City that Never Sleeps? Frank Sinatra loved it so much, he sang it like, twenty times—"

"No, no, I know that," she snapped, frowning at him. "What I meant was, what lies in between? I mean, there are hundreds of miles between now and New York; what do we do with them? Where do we go, what do we see?"

Are you up for an adventure?

The young doctor found himself nodding, the confusion in his eyes slowly dissipating into a clarity so striking it nearly caught Clara amiss as he said, "Well, everything and anything we want, Clara Oswald. With regards to that interview you have in—" He checked his wrist watch. "—how many hours?"

"It's on Wednesday at six p.m."

It took a moment to do the math.

"Fifty-four hours!" John exclaimed, face twisting into a grimace as he suddenly realized the severity of their dilemma. "We can do it. Fifty-four hours of driving. Fifty-four hours of fun."

Fifty-four hours of complete insanity, Clara thought to herself, but quickly shook her head to dismiss the thought. She was twenty-four and traveling—she did not need to be bothered by the possibility that she may clock out one day due to chronic stress, and she certainly didn't need to fret over things that were already under her control. They were going to get there on time, whether time liked it or not.

And in the meantime, she was going to enjoy herself. Even if it was at the bottom of her to-do list.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"That we need to buy more tater-tots?" John asked from beside her, popping the last of them into his mouth. "Because they're gone now, and I'd really like it if they weren't."

"I'm suggesting we have fun while we're at it," she said with a curt nod, as if allowing oneself to have fun was a conscience decision. In some ways, it was. "You're stuck with me for fifty-four hours, you at least deserve a proper holiday."

"We deserve a proper holiday," he corrected her, stuffing the last of his burger into his mouth and crumpling the wrapper into a ball. He tossed it into the back of the car. "And I know the perfect way to go about it."

Shooing Clara's legs off of the dashboard, he opened the glove compartment, and retrieved from it a thick road map. Clara wondered if it came with the car, or if he was just severely prepared, but neither conclusion satisfied the bewilderment on her face as he unfurled it—cities and interstates exploding from the paper in thin veins and stark colors. He may as well have opened a parachute inside the car. The thing was massive.

"Oh," was all Clara could manage, watching as he struggled to open it fully without being swallowed. She knew her five pages of inflexible one-way instructions would be abandoned at some point, but the thought of making the directions herself made her uneasy. "Can't we just use the built-in GPS?"

"The GPS?" John breathed in disbelief. "This is an authentic United States road map—it doesn't get any better than this!" He clutched at the paper as if it were pages of the holy gospel, the passionate look in his eyes unable to cancel out her look of sheer hesitance. He dropped his hands to his lap, Wisconsin and Montana crinkling beneath his palms. "Why not?" he pleaded, jutting out his bottom lip for good measure. "Have you no sense of wanderlust?"

"I left it back in 1989," she replied dryly.

"Hey, that was a good year," he pointed out. "It was the year of Nintendo's first Game Boy, Back to the Future Part II, and leather blazers!" He said this with such conviction that Clara didn't doubt he owned one for himself. "Tell me that isn't the coolest thing you've ever heard of, Clara. Isn't that the coolest thing you've ever heard of?"

She found herself nodding absentmindedly. "Leather blazers are...the coolest things I've ever heard of."

"Right?!" he beamed, shaking his head in awe. "Technology and fashion may have been on the rise, but road trips...they were meant for getting lost in, for finding yourself in the most unexpected of circumstances and pulling yourself out and finding you've become a slightly better person." He used his hands when he spoke, tracing zealous gestures in the air as if he could create pictures and reference tangible feelings from thin air. It was hard not to be swayed by other people's passions, she realized. "What have you got against using a map?"

Clara mashed her lips together, allowing his deliverance to settle before saying, "Well, for one, you're holding it upside down."

John frowned as he did a double-take at the upended United States. "Oh, I suppose you're right. I knew Cuba wasn't in the Pacific Northwest."

"Secondly," she continued, reaching across the center console to help him flip it; the task was more difficult than it should have been. The corner of the North Atlantic Ocean nearly put her eye out. "I just don't trust myself and maps! They're like those overly complicated mazes of the backs of children's menus."

"I love those," he said quietly.

"So not the point."

"I'll make you a deal, then," John proposed. "We'll use the map for the remainder of the trip, and you can plan it out!"

Clara blinked, waiting for her part of the compromise. "That is literally no consolation."

"No, no—" He resisted the urge to smack his palm against his forehead. "—what I meant to say was, if we use the map, you can decide where we go. We can even have a system!" He gestured frenetically between the two of them. "It'll be like checks and balances: you can tell me when I'm being too spontaneous, and I can tell you when you're..."

She raised an eyebrow. Swallowing the lump that had formed in his throat, John decided that his proposals sounded much better inside of his head.

"...being lovely. As always." He flashed her a smile. Clara sighed, for she could think of a few words she might have used. Sheltered. Cynical. A control freak. "I just don't want you to miss out on anything because you were afraid to try something new," he finished gently, the map rustling as he turned to face her fully in his seat. She was hesitant to look at him, because she knew that if she did, she'd fall into his gaze without ever possibly finding a way out.

It still didn't make matters easier.

"Fine," she said stubbornly. "But if we're going to use a map, then we're going to use it right," she proclaimed, reaching behind her for her backpack and pulling from the front pocket a red sharpie she only used on special occasions—when words and markings were so important she needed everyone within a mile radius to see them.

Snatching the map from his side of the console, she uncapped the permanent marker with her teeth, scanning for Interstate 80 as she felt his gaze at her immediate left. She lifted her head slowly to meet John's eye and she asked, "What?"

He was wearing one of those goofy smiles, derived from the kind of joy that made your head spin and your stomach buzz. It was the way his excitement soared when he flew though a book, the fear of walking into a residency interview, and the intimacy of knowing a secret all rolled into one, and then some. He wished he could capsule the feeling into a pill so he could put it aside and study it later.

"Nothing," he told her. Not because it was the truth, but because he'd make a fool of himself right then and there if he said he was attracted to her—with her hair in a bun, the red cap between her teeth, and that look in her eyes as if she were going to sear her pen straight through the paper.

Wayfarer would be foolish not to partner with someone like her, someone so precise, so driven. He certainly wasn't as driven as her when he was twenty-four, nor had those conditions changed in the past two years. Perhaps he could learn a thing or two from her in these next fifty-four hours.

"Aha! There," Clara grinned from the passenger seat. She had folded the map accordion-style, the parts of the country they wouldn't be visiting tucked neatly back, as if being saved for a later time. The paper was pleated in such a way that if you were to extend it, the entire length of Interstate 80 unfurled at your fingertips in one organized, concentrated line. She was brilliant, and John realized—not for the first time—that he'd made the right decision in inviting her with him.

"I never would have thought of that," he admitted. She tilted her head slightly.

"Of course," she said, smiling up at him cheekily. "It's why you need me."

She pointed to a line she had drawn from their estimated place on the map to their next destination, John squinting at the city she had starred before giving her a nod of approval. She beamed.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"Yeah," he replied with a grin, and turned the radio on.

A/N: This next chapter is probably one of my favorites in this story so far, and I'm super excited for you guys to read it once it's finished! Our two travelers have found a comfortable companionship in one another, but a lot can happen in one night, and Clara will find herself having to be brave in more ways than one. Thank you all for the kind reviews; please continue to share your thoughts and I hope you have a great weekend!