Health and Safety: Chapter 11 – It's All in Your Head
Lara Winwald had never seen such an absurdly dressed man in her life. His suit, if you could call it that, was a medley of colours; it made her eyes hurt... She shook her head and readjusted her bag as she turned the street corner; she would be late for her meeting at the school if she dawdled gawking at strangers, what he chose to wear was up to him. After taking only a few more steps however, she was roughly grabbed from behind and pushed up against a wall, which caused her bag to fly open and her carefully graded papers to spill all over the street. An angry, nasally voice demanded to know if she had seen a rainbow man with curly blond hair. Despite being very afraid, she lied, saying she hadn't seen anyone like that, quickly adding that she surely wouldn't have forgotten such a man. It was only half a lie she supposed, she had seen him of course, but she certainly wouldn't be forgetting him anytime soon...
When my eyes open, it feels like my face has been slapped, but there is no snapping noise, and I can't feel the Doctor's hands anywhere near me. Lifting my head and blinking a few times to try and clear my eyes, I see that I'm surrounded by a shifting blue fog; the ground beneath me is a sort of watery looking mirror, rippling under me as I move. Off in the distance, the air keeps lighting up with what looks like lightning strikes, and above me is a curtain of what I think are stars.
Hauling myself to my feet, my hand goes to my cheek which is still stinging painfully. Despite the protests by my aching back, I try to turn around, hoping to find my bearings and sort out what on earth, or otherwise, has happened here. I only turn a few degrees though before stopping cold, coming face to face with an agitated looking woman who is seated gracefully in an ornate chair. It's more of a throne really; most of it is made of what looks like gold, engraved with swirling circles that I recognize as Gallifreyan. The seat and arms have velvet pads of a dusky orange material, rich but slightly faded with age.
The woman herself is nowhere near as elegant as the throne though; her black hair is arranged wildly, and her tattered blue dress looks like it belongs in some kind of period piece, but I can't place which one. If her appearance and the chair weren't daunting enough, the look of reproach on her face would make most brave people cower.
"Hello?" I ask cautiously.
"What? No smart comments? Not going to call me a large grazing domestic land mammal? No insinuations about me being a location where people do the kissing and the biting?" She spits at me.
I don't remember hitting my head on the way down, but who knows maybe I did? Her voice sounds familiar, like I have heard it before, but where?
"Sorry, what?"
She smirks.
"So his Impossible Girl isn't that clever after all."
That name makes me step away from her. No one except the Doctor, and the Cyberplanner I guess, who kind of was the Doctor… Anyways, I haven't heard anyone else call me that before, especially not with the possessive bit… His Impossible Girl…
The woman stands, opens her mouth, and the TARDIS noise echoes through the mysterious fog.
"How did you..?"
"Now you are just denying the obvious, though you seem to be doing that a lot."
"No... That's not possible..."
It can't be right? This can't actually be the TARDIS? If she could get up and walk around the Doctor wouldn't have much use for us humans now would he..?
"You don't know how many times my thief said that about you. A man with an infinitely large ship that travels through all of time and space and he gets flustered to the point of further madness by one little human girl. I tried to get him to drop it from the start." She has walked right up to me now, pointing an accusing finger in my face.
Oh this is so not happening, it can't be happening. Now I know where I heard that voice, it was when he called for the vocal override; it was this voice that answered!
"You are the TARDIS."
"Who else would I be?" She asks haughtily.
"But… but… but…"
"You aren't making me think that you are any more clever right now."
"How is this happening?"
"Because you are outrageously impossible!" She yells accusingly at me, huffing before she strides a few feet away, hands on her hips, keeping her back to me.
"You know I'm getting that a lot lately. Care to elaborate on why in this particular case I am impossible?"
She whips around again, hands still on her hips, stomping a foot impatiently.
"You don't listen do you? You brought something back, again, this time from my Doctor's time stream. You heard him; time travel leaves a trace, clinging to your fragile casings. You humans never pick up much; it takes ages to build up any substantial amount of Artron energy, you don't last long enough for that. But you went and managed to do this!" She flails her hands around her, like it is maddeningly obvious.
"I don't understand, what did I do? What did I bring back?"
"You brought back over a thousand years worth of time energy, my thief's time energy, built up over centuries of time travel, of breaking wholes in reality; he has time traveled more than anyone else. You crashed through his life, it all happened so quickly the Artron energy didn't even sink into you, it's not background radiation at all, you are positively brimming with it right now even if you can't see it! It's flowing off of you, dusting your every step, flying off you every time you push my thief from your mind! You are a walking power plant right now; a movable conduit of time energy, there is so much coming off of you I can actually speak to you. It's utterly impossible."
"Impossible and I seem to be following each other around right now." I utter coolly.
"I know it does, I knew it would, I knew it from the moment you traipsed through my doors, which is why I tried to convince him to turn away, but of course he didn't listen to me."
"You wanted the Doctor to turn me away from the moment you met me because you knew I would save him? Right, that makes a lot of sense."
"It makes perfect sense. When the other you followed him through my doors, shouting about not being sweet on the inside, I knew you at once. I had felt you before, a little niggling sensation I had never understood but had always wondered about. At our end, it was my thief and I of course, I never had any intention of giving him back, there was nowhere for us to be except together. But there was an odd tickle woven into him, something not right. I never understood, and ignored it, because alive is beautiful, but so sad when it is over, I didn't want to think about him being over. When you stepped in though, I knew it was you I had felt, at our ends, somehow resting in eternity with us, a snaking strand of scarlet. Oh, that is what you humans call alliteration isn't it?"
Despite the levity at the end of her rant, this woman, the TARDIS, looks absolutely livid, and I can honestly say that I am rather frightened right now.
"I knew that there was only one way to literally tie another life into his like that, you were going to find your way into his tomb, and you were going to throw yourself into his time stream. I didn't know he would be a fool and jump in after you, but I knew you would be one more stray gone wrong, this time in the worst possible way."
"I did not just throw myself in; I went in to protect him! To save him! There was no other way!"
"You could have just walked away. Gotten back into me, and been taken away from there."
"No I couldn't have! That isn't what we do and you should know that better than anyone. I would never have just left him!"
"Which is why I tried to stop you from being there to do it in the first place! But he would never leave you anymore than you would leave him."
The whole space shifts a bit, causing massive ripples in the water like floor and almost knocking me off of my feet, but leaving her in perfect balance.
"What have you done to us?"
"Just put you all down for a little nap, you all need it, especially you. You won't let him help you deal with the consequences of what you've done, foolish girl. He could just overpower you if he wanted to you know? But as soon as you start pushing him away he lets go, he is afraid of holding his ground, doesn't know what it will do to that fragile mind of yours in its current state. Well, I'm not so delicate about you, I'm keeping your mind right here with me for now, and you don't get any choice about it. You're not getting lost and you're not getting away."
"I'm not letting him in because I'm trying to keep us both safe." I grumble at her.
She laughs harshly, getting right into my face again.
"From what? What are you trying to keep you both safe from? Just say it out loud, I'm in your head, have been since you came in here, there isn't any hiding and there aren't any tricks now Impossible Girl."
I swallow thickly, and she looms over me, daring me to say it out loud, taunting me with that name. I want to deny it, but she has already pointed out how futile that would be.
"From the fact that… from the fact that… I love him." The last words come out as a harsh whisper and my eyes drop to my shoes, heart pounding in my chest.
"I jumped into his time stream because I love him, the madman with the box. The most clever and most ridiculous man anyone could ever meet, with the dress sense to match. The alien with two hearts that hold more caring than he will ever admit, so much that it doesn't matter if the universe doesn't care, because he always will. And because he always will, he will always be hurt. We both know that the Doctor's greatest enemy will never be the Daleks, or the Cybermen or the Great Intelligence, or any other creature he is pitted against. It has always been, and will always be himself."
I'm crying now, damn it and she is still staring at me, seemingly without an inch of compassion.
"I didn't expect him to come in after me, honestly I didn't. That breaks all of the rules doesn't it? Because even he has rules, lines he can't cross, but he crossed that one. He won't always be able to do that, eventually my time with him will run out, one way or another, and if I'm not dead it will... I know it probably seems like nothing compared to what he has gone through, but I have lost the person I cared about most in my life before too remember? I don't know how I did it once; a second time… if it was him… it just… But even if that doesn't happen, even if I am the one who promises forever and manages to do it, stay with him, not get separated by war, politics or accidents in time, we both know my forever and his forever are very different things, the slow decay of time on me is something he can't save me from, something he can't come in after me and snatch me away from."
Wiping the tears from my eyes, I meet her glare eye for eye.
"So I am protecting us both from the fact that I am a trap!" I seethe at her, any composure lost.
"You humans are all traps in your own way. But in this case, in fairness to you, you trapped each other. My thief, one run in with the other you and he mans up, all charm, devotion, prancing about trying to make a good impression. I tried to stop it; I hoped two weeks cooped up together under the sea would cool you both off. It's too late to try and pull away girl, neither of you could do it. You are tied together, there is no hiding, and there is no pushing away. You both have to deal with the mess you have made. You're going to hurt my thief eventually, and I hate you for that. But first you will make each other happy."
"How do I do that though? How do I do that when I know he'll be sad later?"
"There needs to be happiness now, because there will be sorrow later."
The ground shakes again, dumping me onto the ground. She looks down at me, her expression softening slightly.
"Remember when the moment comes that if you lose yourself to any of your echoes, it will be that Victorian one. You feel comfortable with that echo don't you? Safe even? You are wrong to, that is the echo you ought to fear the most. She was the most like you of all of them. With any recipe you can change the ingredients slightly and get a similar result, most of your echoes are like that, soufflés made with slightly different ingredients but following the same recipe, similar but not indistinguishable. But that you is almost an identical copy of the original, right down to the name, so if you do lose yourself, it will be because you won't feel the difference. You need him to help you remember, you need to let him in. He is the only one who will know she isn't really you."
She steps towards me, offering a hand and helping me back onto my feet, steadying me as the ground shakes harder.
"He's waking up. You fell on top of him, as always, one of you goes down and the other follows. I won't be able to do this again, I don't know if you could handle it, best not to addle you anymore than you already must be. Let yourselves be happy, if you're going to call me a snogbox at least make the name credible. Remember this as well Clara, I don't always take him where he wants to go, but I always take him where he needs to be. Among other places, that includes a certain house every Wednesday."
She smiles sadly as the fog fades away slowly, becoming nothing but blackness, I'm laying on something pleasantly warm instead of standing up, there's something soft between the fingers of my right hand, and a slightly scratchy material under my cheek.
"Clara?" The Doctor asks gently.
"Hmm?" I mutter, running my fingers through whatever I am holding.
"I'm not really sure how we ended up down here, but you may need to let go of my hair if we want to get up and find out…"
A/N: Slight confession, this was probably the most difficult thing I have done in my brief career as a fanfiction write, holy cow… So many rewrites, it looks nothing like the original very draft I had about three weeks ago anymore, but I hope that means I managed to fix it so that it worked! Thank you so much for the reviews, I am really enjoying writing this story (despite yelling at my laptop more than once) so it is amazing to know people are having fun reading it too! More to come soon.