Chapter 6

"Of course I will!" Clara answered in a great gush of blissful excitement as soon as she could construct sentences again. "As if you even needed to ask!"

The Doctor still looked nervous, overwhelmed, and a bit shy. Clara had never seen anything so adorable and lovable, and so she couldn't help staring shamelessly.

He slipped the ring onto her finger and reasoned with gently amused obviousness, "Well, Clara, it was a proposal. By definition, I did have to ask." He was looking down at their interlocked fingers, and she tipped his face upward with a kiss.

"This is all a lot for you to handle, isn't it?" Clara asked. "After all, you don't do this." The allusion to his speech back in the TARDIS reminded her of the enormity of such a step on his part.

"Yeah, but believe me, I'll manage," The Doctor replied, his anxious and disbelieving features relaxing into a grin. "I am definitely entirely unexperienced with this sort of thing."

"Commitment?" Clara wondered, "Emotional intimacy? Monogamy? Marriage?"

The Doctor chuckled before he replied, "Happiness."

Clara threw her arms around his neck and assured him, "You'll never be without it again. Not if I've got anything to do with it. You've been my hero, always, and I'll be yours, too."

"Partners?" the Doctor translated, quirking an eyebrow and smiling.

"Partners," Clara repeated emphatically.

By the next morning, the Doctor's strength had been restored. Clara came sweeping back into their room on Gallifrey with breakfast food heaped up in her arms, a cup of tea dangling precariously from two fingers.

"Good morning, fiance!" She greeted the Doctor, who was up and had just dressed. He grabbed the cup of tea right before it met its probable destiny of shattering on the floor, and they both laughed.

Clara laid the food on the table, thoughtfully organizing the different fruits and pastries as the Doctor watched her intent, sweet face with thoughtful affection.

"You seem really happy," he observed, the simple words clearly carrying deep meaning.

"Of course I am, what'd you expect?" Clara's voice was warm with reassurance.

"I woke up thinking last night might have been a dream, since that was the only idea that made logical sense," the Doctor admitted. "But there you are, and there's the ring, and there's breakfast and you're here." He cleared his throat, emotional. "You're really here, Clara." He set the teacup down and gazed over at her searchingly. Like a conspiracy theorist looking for holes in the evidence.

Shaking her head, she came close to him and asked, "When are you going to relax and let that happiness you've finally opened yourself up to in?"

Clara touched her lips to his, smiling against his mouth as he gave into the moment instinctively. "Right now seems like an ideal time," the Doctor decided. "Especially since you taste like…" He kissed Clara's lips again, tantalizingly, too briefly. "Blueberry pie?"

"A Gallifreyan variation, all wrapped up in some kind of pastry I could seriously get used to," Clara explained, their lips still inches apart, her body pressing closer to his.

"Did you like the dinner last night?" the Doctor's question was clearly tangential to the sensual body language and sizzling chemistry that was making them increasingly inseparable. Clara laughed softly at his attempt to cut the tension of the moment with a random subject change.

"I did," she replied, still in a coquettish trance mode. "It tasted like chicken. What was it?

"Oh, you ate that part?" the Doctor's eyes widened. Clara frowned.

"What was it?" She demanded.

"Oh, I don't think you want to know," the Doctor said dismissively. Clara scowled and he admitted, "Oh, alright, it was chicken. What makes you think Earth is the only planet with chickens?"

"Doctor, you're not exhibiting chicken-esque qualities yourself, are you?" She draped her arms around his shoulders.

"Oh, yes, I definitely am," he confessed. "See, there's no more lying, no more agonizing repression. No aliens kidnapping us at the moment, though the day is young."

"I see what you mean," said Clara, slipping her fingers under his jacket lapels and grasping them fondly.

"In all of my many years," the Doctor said, suddenly serious, "I don't think any moment ever felt quite as intimate for me as this one. This precipice."

"Precipices," Clara reminded him, "Were meant for tumbling over."

"I've already been falling for so long that I don't think I'll ever stop," the Doctor clarified, running his fingers over her hair, her cheek, breathtakingly tender. "I don't want to."

"Good," Clara replied, using her hold on his jacket to pull him down to the bed, where they landed just in time for her to cover his face in kisses. "How does that feel, Doctor?" She murmured, sitting up, straddling him as his hands went to her hips. He stared up at her with those crystal blue eyes that contained whole universes full of everything wonderful. "You've been through an ordeal, to save me," she added, running a finger down his chest. "So, how are you feeling?"

"Never been better," the Doctor answered immediately, prompting her to slip out of her navy blue sweater and bring his fingers to the laces that formed a bow at the top of her gauzy black shirt.

Instead, he pulled her down and kissed her deeply, reaching his hands under the shirt and stroking her stomach, her breasts, making Clara sigh. The Doctor unclasped her bra and pulled it out from under the shirt, tossing it aside as he finally pulled the laces and Clara's ability to maintain composure apart. The shirt soon joined her bra on the floor, and Clara pressed her bare chest against his much-too-clothed torso.

Impatiently whipping his jacket off, Clara turned to his white button-down shirt, neatly fastened right to the top. "I like this," she informed him as she slid her fingers easily down the buttons and pushed it off of his shoulders. "It's one of my favorite Doctor outfits."

"I didn't know you had favorite Doctor outfits," he smiled slyly.

"Well, you should," Clara winked. His fingers began to peruse her legs, caressing them before moving up to her thighs and then slipping under her black skirt, peeling her stockings down and then off.

"You and your stockings," the Doctor accused, his voice a low, sexy drawl. "You've got a lot to answer for, Clara Oswald."

"Whenever I put them on, whenever I put anything on, I'm hoping you'll like it," she confessed, leaning down to kiss a trail down his chest and stomach, pausing at his waist to undo his pants and slide them down.

Clara lowered her mouth to pay the Doctor some attentions that soon had him raggedly sighing her name. He grabbed her by the waist and changed their position so that he was on top, and Clara gasped at the sudden and bold move.

"You really are feeling better," She noted as he pulled her skirt off.

"So," the Doctor said, kissing her mouth, his own lips hot and demanding. "Much." He hooked his finger into her panties and moved them down to her thighs. "Better." When the Doctor moved his exploratory touch to Clara's warm, aching center, she almost buckled under the sweet release of pressure, all of her so-long-repressed need for him escaping in a blissful moan.

When he entered her in one long, easy thrust, Clara's breath caught as the ecstatic feeling of fullness and completion took her over. Their eyes met and locked as their movements, first slow and overwhelmed, became more deliberate, deeper, faster, until Clara threw her head back in a soundless cry, grasping the sheets while her body trembled in euphoria.

"Doctor?" Clara asked a few minutes later, resting her head against his chest, listening intently to her favorite sound. "There were other ways you could have brought me back. I know how you were planning to do it, before…before the neural block. So why choose the soul restoration ceremony?"

"You want to talk about that now?" The Doctor asked, humorously aghast, running his fingers through her hair, his other hand resting contentedly on her bare back.

"Why not?" Clara asked, propping her head up on her hand and gazing into his eyes.

"With this method, your life will last longer. How much longer, it's hard to say. Decades, centuries? Your aging will be slowed."

"Centuries? But we can't know?"

"It will unfold naturally with time. I'm sorry I can't give you more certainty of anything beyond my greed to keep you with me as long as is physically possible."

"You've got nothing to apologize for," Clara assured him. "What changed your mind about the dangers of us being together? And possibly becoming the Hybrid?"

"That answer's simple," the Doctor explained, "Being without you, once my memories returned, showed me that it was far more dangerous for us to separate. I need you, Clara, as I've never needed anyone. The good we can do the universe far outweighs any consequence of our recklessness."

"Want to hear something reckless enough to make the Time Lord High Council shake in their boots?" Clara asked. He raised an eyebrow.

"Well, it doesn't take a lot to do that."

"How about these words," Clara proposed, "We've got a wedding to plan!"

"So we do," The Doctor agreed. "Shall it be here, or back on Earth? What kind of a wedding has Clara Oswald always dreamed of?"

"I've hardly anyone back home," Clara said dismissively, sensitively. Hiding mixed feelings about how her mother couldn't be there, her father had become distant, her students were moving on without her. Maybe they'd all forget her in time. Would that be easier, given what she had become? The Doctor's partner. A woman who traveled through time and space and couldn't be depended on for a normal life any longer. Who didn't want a normal existence, couldn't want it. "Let's have it here," she decided. "Show me a proper old-fashioned, traditional Gallifreyan wedding in all its glory. I bet there's a lot of crazy pomp and circumstance, right?"

"There is indeed," the Doctor laughed softly. "As long as that is truly what you want."

"It is," Clara confirmed, nodding too quickly. Another pause came and went with them silently sinking into their comfortable embrace, caressing one another in continued disbelief of their happiness.

"Oh," the Doctor said suddenly, "I almost forgot to ask you something that's been lingering in the back of my mind since this whole madcap adventure began back in that bloody pub in London. How did you know that I was in dire straits, that I'd failed so cataclysmically on Ruille, when you came to get me? An act of mercy for which I shall forever be grateful, by the way."

"That!" Clara grinned. "I've been spending a lot of time with Ashildr lately. And she has her sources of information, let me tell you. There's not a morsel of intergalactic gossip I haven't been privy to. So when she told me what had happened, the temptation to drop everything and run to you was just too much to resist. I'm a bad girl that way, Doctor."

"I've always liked that about you," the Doctor assured her, his voice taking on that sensual lilt again, the one that made her twitchingly, tremblingly eager to resume exploring their passion together.

"Hmm," Clara pouted, a realization striking her.

"Don't you stick your bottom lip out like that," he warned. "there are consequences for that sort of thing around here."

"Good," Clara giggled. "But Doctor, I'm not mysterious anymore, am I? I liked being mysterious."

"Oh, Clara," the Doctor corrected her, "You are my Impossible Girl. No one could ever be more mysterious. Every day with you will be a delicious and exciting mystery I can't wait to spend a very long time solving."

"So," Clara replied, blushing at his epic words, "When do you want to marry me, Doctor?"

"Uh…." the Doctor feigned indecision. "Yesterday."

Clara batted at him playfully; he caught her fingers and kissed them. "Yesterday is a little impractical even by your standards," she laughed.

"Tomorrow," he corrected himself. Clara's eyes widened. It was truly real, all of this.

"Absolutely perfect," she agreed, kissing his mouth and sliding fully on top of his body to begin yet another elated seduction. "Tomorrow."