"My Clara." Tears spilled down his cheeks and onto Clara's face as he cradled her in his lap.
A shadow fell on him. He looked up furiously. "What have you done?"
"Nothing. What happens here is not your fault. But missed chances, feelings locked away because you are stubborn, or frightened or clueless, that is your fault."
"Who the hell are you? What gives you the right—"
"You can call me the Director." For a moment the image flickered, then the room was empty.
Clara was by his side, on her knees, her hand on his back. "Doctor. What's wrong?"
He put his hand to her face, in the moonlight she was more beautiful than he'd ever seen her, vibrant, alive, his impossible girl, perfect for him in every way. He'd never needed to hold her as much as he did right then. He pulled her close. "My Clara," he said.
"What did you see?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Yes, it does. Tell me."
"I saw you. Hurt. Dead. It was a trick."
"Was it? You said there's archon energy here. What if the things we're seeing are not tricks, but the future?"
The possibility had occurred to him. "Then the future's not set. We're time travellers, Clara. We make the future. I won't let anything happen to you. Not ever. That's the truth."
"Okay. Shall we try and get out of here?"
They got to their feet. Where the stairs had been, was a door, with a silver number 12 on the blue paint. They turned around. The window at the other end of the hall was also now a door. The same door, same blue, same silver 12. They turned around again. More doors, everywhere the same. There was little else for it but to open one.
Clara's mouth dropped open. "This is my room!" She rushed in. "My bed, my dressing table and mirror." She went to the window. "But outside it's still. . ."
The Doctor stood behind her and pointed out of the window. "Look at the window ledge, then glance out of the window with the corner of your eye."
"I don't get it."
He gently put his arms on her shoulders and maneuverer her so she looked at the window ledge. "You see the trees and fields, yeah?" She nodded. "Okay, now glance for a fraction of a second. What do you see?"
Clara gasped. "This house! I see the front of this house. How is that possible?"
He spoke quietly into her ear. "We thought we were in All-Hallows House. We're not. We're in something else disguised as All-Hallows House, plonked right in front of the real thing. It's very clever actually."
She turned around in his arms, she was so close to him now he could hardly breath.
"Clara. . ." her name died on his lips.
Her face coloured with the slightest of blushes. "What is this truth?" she whispered, eyes locked with his.
He had an uncomfortable idea about that. Clara stood in his arms with face turned up to him, and he had no idea what to say or do. How does a mountain admit he's in love with a mayfly? How does a gentleman, and he considered himself a gentleman, confess that he brought her here because he likes the way she looks when she screams?
"Doctor?" She looked up at him, expecting him to say something.
"Ah, you see, this, this is interesting." He sidestepped out of the embrace. "Very interesting. A physical representation of subjective elements of our future, or past, projected via a high-resolution alpha-wave progressive matrix—" He sat on the bed. Then he noticed he was sitting on her bed, and jumped up again.
"The tempro-linear equations needed to create this kind of hyper-spectral environ—"
"Doctor. You're rambling." She took a step forward. His hearts began to race and his cheeks flushed. What was she doing? Standing too close and sending his head into a spin, that's what she was doing. And she was smiling that sly smile, the one that gave him the uneasy feeling she knew exactly what was going on between them and he didn't. This was ridiculous. He was more than two thousand years old. He'd been round the block a few times, so how could one small human send him into a tailspin like this?
He said to the room at large. "You can stop playing games. You'll get no confessions from us here today."
The room shook, and with a terrible groan the walls began to move towards them.
Clara rattled the door handle. It didn't budge. "Doctor, can you open this?"
He walked to the door with sinking hearts. If what he suspected was right, then he wouldn't be able to open those doors. He tried the sonic glasses, the transphasic amplifier, and even the bottle opener he forgot to return to Arthur C Clarke after the incident with the lava lamp. Nothing worked.
The walls juddered and shook, and he took Clara's hand and backed towards the bed.
"What's going on?" she asked him.
"Someone is manipulating us."
"I worked that much out myself!" she said. She tried to brace the walls by pressing her back to the edge of the bed and the soles of her feet to the wall. "I didn't expect to end today in a trash-compactor!"
He braced the wall with his shoulder, but it moved relentlessly forward. Soon there was no floor left and they were both forced onto the bed. They sat, side by side, squared in by four walls, in silence for a few moments.
"Well this is fun," she said after a while, clearly meaning it was anything but.
He looked up. "At least the—"
The rectangle above their heads creaked, a layer of dust floated downwards. The ceiling began to move.
"Bloody hell, you had to go and say that, didn't you? Look, think, what does this Director want?"
"The truth," he said simply.
The ceiling slowed its descent.
"I know, but the truth about what? We don't lie about stuff." As soon as she said it the ceiling began to move again. "Okay, so maybe, sometimes we are guilty of acts of omission!"
The square above them continued its descent, until they were forced to lay side by side, face to face.
"If you've got something to say I suggest you say it!" Clara gabbled.
"Sometimes I bring you places like this for less than honest reasons."
"You do?"
"Sometimes."
"If you've got a confession to make, spit it out before we get crushed to death!"
The celling was two feet above them now.
"Alright, I brought you here because I like the way you look when you scream, and you run, and you hold my hand. I like it, okay. Is that enough?"
The ceiling stopped. Clara stared at him, eyes wide, her face so close to his it was almost painful. He blushed, screwed up his own eyes, because he didn't want to see shock, or disgust, or disappointment in hers.
He felt the palm of her hand on his face. "Hey, it's okay." The room was silent for a moment, and the only sound was her breathing. It seemed to fill his senses. She rolled over and pressed her hand to the flock wall paper. "He's told me, he's confessed. So you can stop your sad little game now."
The grinding began again.
"Clara-"
"You must be joking!" she said, banging her fist on the wall. "Let us go!"
"Clara, I think maybe—"
"I'm not hiding anything!" she exclaimed.
A laugh echoed through the small space.
"I don't think the Director believes you."
The ceiling moved inexorably down.
He pulled her towards him. "Clara, calm down. Just tell me whatever it is, and maybe we can go home."
"I don't think—" the ceiling was inches away from their heads now.
"This is hardly the time for reticence!"
"Alright," she said angrily. "I sometimes wonder what it would be like to kiss you."
The small room shook, Clara yelped. "Okay, I think about it a lot. And I flirt with you. I know I shouldn't but I can't help it and you're just as bad and—"
She closed her eyes as the confession tumbled out, every moment expecting to feel the crushing weight of the ceiling on her. Then, instead of searing pain, she felt his breath on her face, and his lips against hers. Everything stopped. Time, space, nothing mattered but the sensation of his body pressed to hers.
"Oh," she said quietly, after the kiss broke. The room had returned to exactly the way it was when they walked in. "What just happened?"
"I think we just had a moment of candour."
She remained still, aware of how fast she was breathing, and of how close he was, that his usually pale cheeks were tinged with a flush of red. She was aware too of his grey-blue eyes and his silver curls, and above all, she was aware of just how much she longed to kiss him again.
"What do we do now?" she asked. Did he kiss her because he meant it, or just to stop them from being crushed to death? She gazed deeply into his eyes, and for a moment it seemed he was going to kiss her again.
Then the walls, the floor, the whole room shimmered and lost coherence. For an instant she saw white walls, and heard distorted voices.
"I told you this would drain the systems."
"I can stablise it—"
The room became a bedroom once more. The bed tremored and the Doctor leapt up and offered her his hand. "I think we should—"
"—run!" she finished the sentence for him as she grasped his hand.
The house shook itself to its very foundations, light fittings rattled as they ran under them, the bannister rail juddered and then snapped in two with an ear-splitting crack. The stairs behind them fell away into a black abyss.
At the bottom of the stairs, the front door was wide open, and there was a hole where floorboards should have been. Fires raged below, spitting flames upwards in the doorway.
"Are they real?"
"I don't know."
There was no way back. They paused at the bottom of the stairs, she one step higher than he, hand in hand, eye to eye.
"What do we do?" Clara asked.
"Do you trust me?"
"Always."
"Then we do what we've always done. Take a leap of faith. I'll go first."
She held tight to his hand. "No," she whispered and pressed her lips lightly to his. "Together, or not at all."
He smiled then, as if he had met his match, met the one who would always jump through the flames with him. He murmured, "I love you, Clara Oswald."
They both gripped the other's hand tightly, and ran, one pace, two, then jumped over the broken floorboards and the fiery pit, and through the flames licking up in the doorway. Clara braced herself for the heat, but there was none. They hit the ground, she stumbled.
He caught her before she could fall. "Got you."
Then they were up and running, and they flew through the darkness, not once looking back, until the TARDIS was in sight and they fell gratefully through the doors.
#
The All-Hallows house that had terrorised Clara and the Doctor, shimmered and disappeared, revealing, had there been an observer to notice, the real All-Hallows house directly behind it. A wheezing, groaning sound filled the night air briefly, and then all was still.
In the space-time vortex, two travellers glowered at one another across the console of a Type 40 TARDIS. "You took a big risk, Director." The first woman said, her haughty voice laced with sarcasm. "Hacking into Gallifrey's matrix to steal data and making holographic projections from it. Using the chameleon circuit to make a house. It was never intended to manipulate structural features like that. You could have overloaded—"
"Well, I didn't. No harm done," said the Director.
"No harm? You've interfered with your own past! What about all those things you said on the Trap street about noble sacrifice? 'Be a Doctor'." Ashildr's sarcasm dripped from her words. "You're as bad as he is!"
Clara Oswald just smiled. Some things were fixed, some things were inevitable and painful and just had to be. Perhaps she would always have to die on the Trap street and be sentenced to live in a frozen body. Maybe she'd get used to it one day, and come to believe that him forgetting her was for the best. But she knew, better than anyone save the Doctor himself, that time exists in a state of flux. If she couldn't change her present, then at least she'd live her past to the full. Re-write time? Dangerous? Perhaps. Ill advised, certainly. But she'd done it before, and she'd do it again.
"Ashildr, he told me memories become stories. Memories are all I have now, I'm going to make damn sure they're good ones," she said carefully. She knew Ashildr would feel she had to argue the point, but that she'd cave in the end. She always did; the bottom line was she still felt guilty for what she'd done and Clara knew her friend couldn't deny her this. It was too late anyway. It was done, and she could already feel a gentle fizz in her temples.
Sure enough, Ashildr gave in and shrugged. "Alright. Is it working?"
Clara smiled as new memories jostled her synapses and integrated themselves into her neural pathways. "Let's just say that honesty is the best policy, shall we?"
"You're impossible, Clara Oswald."
"Thank you. That's probably the nicest thing you've said to me all year."
#
The Doctor and Clara were out of breath, laughing, and stumbling out of the darkness and into the TARDIS. They too were in the space-time vortex, but a billion lifetimes away from Ashildr and the Director.
Clara said, "That made absolutely no sense. Who would care about whether we're honest with each other, except—" Her eyes widened in realisation, "—us," she finished quietly.
The Doctor rested a hand on her shoulder and put a long finger to her lips. "I think there are still some things better left unsaid."
She took hold of his finger. "Was that you? You from the future?"
"Clara, I think we should just stick to dealing with the present, because frankly that's complicated enough." He looked down her as if he hadn't the faintest idea what to say next.
She held onto his finger and let an impish smile run across her face. "So, you like the way I look when I scream?"
He blushed. "I think we've established that's true. I'm an idiot. A sorry idiot," he let his breath out from between his teeth. "But you're not much better, with flirting and . . . kissing."
"You kissed me."
"Because you wanted me to."
"What if," she said slowly, turning his hand over in hers, gripping his finger, "I wanted you to do it again?"
"Well, I suppose in the interest of truth, I might just have to do it again."
He put one hand on her hip, the other in the small of her back and pulled her closer.
She turned her face up to his.
He kissed her again and she wondered, dimly, why on earth it had taken them so long. Her heart pounded, her body awakened, and she wanted more. They'd waited long enough. A little surprised at her own boldness, but grinning all the same, she grabbed his lapels and whispered in his ear, "You know, there's more than one way to make a girl scream."
His eyes widened for a moment, then the corner of his mouth twitched up into a smile. He took a step backwards,towards the corridor that led into the heart of the TARDIS, tugging her with him as he went.
"We have space and time, in this magic blue box, for a lot of screaming," he said, unable to keep his eyes off the woman had loved so long.
When she smiled, he thought his hearts would burst.
"I hope so," she said. "Honestly, Doctor, I think you're going to love the way I look when I scream."
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