She found herself walking among broken headstones, some with her own name chiselled into them; others bore names that were strangely familiar, although she was sure she had never met anybody named Amy Pond or Rory Williams in her life. Not that she recalled anyway.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a comforting blue shape standing on the other side of the open graveyard gates, waiting.
"What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" Danny asked, standing a few paces in front of her, resplendent in his silver armour.
"Why are we here?" she asked, though she was sure she wasn't going to like the answer. Tilting her head up, she stared at dark clouds that were beginning to gather, spoiling what had otherwise been a perfectly blue sky.
"Well, you're currently dreaming on your couch. You just passed out after drinking a bottle of wine while going through old murder cases." he sounded reproachful as he absentmindedly wiped away a sluggish trail of blood trickling down his face from places where thin metal claws dug into his grey skin. "Babe, I think you've been drinking too much lately."
She stopped in front of him. "You don't get to lecture me like I'm one of the kids."
"That's true, I suppose. I've never been able to stop you from making bad choices," he agreed, bowing his head briefly. "You shouldn't be here. There are things that should stay buried lingering in these parts. Old, ancient and hungry things."
"Those girls weren't buried." she reached a hand up to caress his face. "They were tossed aside like used up dolls. Someone needs to speak for them."
Danny stared up at the rapidly fading sunlight with milky-white eyes.
"There's a storm coming." he said. "For your sake, I hope it gets here soon. Even if I still don't much like that arrogant prat."
"Don't go," Clara pleaded as the shadows deepened, reaching out to hold him.
"I can't stay love," he whispered gently as he stepped back into the gloom, out of her reach. "I'm dead, remember?"
Somewhere in the distance, something roared in unbridled fury, sending a shiver up her spine.
Clara's eyes snapped open in her dimly lit living room.
"Clara asked us never to contact her again," Martha said as she drew her laptop out from a locked briefcase in her backseat and rested it on the roof of her car. "But she doesn't know UNIT has been keeping an eye on her movements anyway. She's far too valuable for us to lose track of her."
Her car was parked in a lonely alley, shielded by tall, windowless walls. Long and unlit passageways led out towards the main streets. Any other woman would have been afraid to walk down such a road in the middle of the night or wee hours of the morning, but the Doctor pitied the man who thought Martha might have been an easy target for a mugging.
Observing intently the data which the UNIT doctor was pulling up, he skimmed through Clara's files and records. Without quite meaning to, he caught sight of a bullet point on one of the documents which caused his breath to hitch.
"Doctor are you listening?" Martha asked, drawing him out of his reverie.
"I…" he stared uncomprehendingly at the woman who huffed a little impatiently.
"She's been researching a serial murder case that we've been following in South Yorkshire. Her web history is littered with searches on historical precedence, and it seems she's been connecting the dots on our behalf." Martha smiled. "She's a smart girl that one."
"Why is she getting involved in a murder case?" he furrowed his brows. "For that matter, I didn't realize UNIT is interested in crime solving these days."
"We're not." Martha agreed. "But this one's different. All victims found were covered in multiple tattooed characters. At last count, the characters contain at least ten alien languages. Some letters were written in ancient Sumerian, others in versions of Latin that haven't been spoken for centuries."
Photographs of victims popped up on her screen, one after another like a macabre parade of death.
"Clara seems to have linked these murders to similar cases that have occurred throughout recorded history," Martha continued grimly. "And they're not confined to one civilization either. There are oral and written texts documenting these ritualized killings in various places all across the globe."
"Result of a shared consciousness perhaps," the Doctor murmured, though there was something about the tattooed corpses that nagged at him.
"Whatever it is." Martha shrugged. "It's dangerous. I think Clara is closing in on something big, and without back-up of some sort…Doctor, I don't want to see her get hurt and something tells me you don't either."
"What are we waiting for then?" the Doctor said. "Let's get aboard the TARDIS and get ourselves there."
"You…want me to come with you?" Martha asked slowly.
"Of course." he frowned. "Why wouldn't I? Just because you appear to be willingly employed at a spy agency intent on monitoring unsuspecting citizens, doesn't mean I don't want your help."
Shutting her laptop and locking it back up, Martha said flatly, ""I think I preferred you when you were a lovesick dandy on the rebound."
"Why, did I say something that wasn't true?" he asked almost challengingly.
"You don't reach out for years. You don't even try." she slammed the car door shut and locked the vehicle before striding in the direction of his TARDIS. "So you don't get to judge."
"Where is Mickey by the way?" he asked mildly as he followed her. "I can't imagine him being the military type."
"Does it matter?" she asked as they exited the alley. Dawn was breaking over the city slowly. "Do you care?"
"Yes." he said quietly. "Both of you matter to me, even if I can be a crusty old man who is phenomenally bad at managing his interpersonal relationships. Just because I'm a shit friend doesn't mean I don't want to try being a better one."
Martha sighed as they walked down the still empty street. "Let's go get your girl. If we have time when all this is over…maybe you can say hi to Mickey."
"Morning. Or should I say 'afternoon'?" Jemma called out from behind her desk as Clara entered the office, clutching a cup of coffee as if it were the only thing standing between herself and utter destruction. Behind her eyelids, a tiny little man was hammering against her skull viciously and repeatedly.
Grunting a non-committal greeting in response, she turned to her own desk and settled in. However, no sooner had she plugged in her laptop when a knock on the office door interrupted the quiet of the office. Given the state of her hangover, she decided to ignore the visitor and let Jemma handle whatever asinine inquiry that was bound to be forthcoming.
"Clara?"
Looking up in surprise, the former schoolteacher blinked. "Ben. Hi!"
"Hey," he stepped further into the office, waving awkwardly at Jemma as he passed her. Her coworker looked over with raised eyebrows. "I checked out your profile in the university directory and found out you worked here. I hope its ok, me showing up like this. That is, I hope I'm not being a creepy stalker. Of course, now that I've said it, you probably think I'm a creepy stalker. I should maybe stop talking."
"It's ok," Clara found herself smiling. "I don't mind."
"Good. Awesome." Ben smiled in relief as he approached her desk, hands stuck firmly in his jean pockets. "I…uh…I checked out the stuff you passed me yesterday. It was rather fascinating…I was wondering if you wanted to maybe grab a coffee or something so we can talk about my findings? Though, I see you already have a coffee…"
"Right now?" Clara asked through clenched teeth, cursing the bottle of pinot noir she had finished the night before. "We could have lunch."
"Sure, yeah, totally." he grinned.
"You just got in!" Jemma piped up from across the room.
"I won't take long," Clara shook her head. "Jemma, this is Dr. Ben Peters, he's helping me on a really important project."
"Fine," the other woman looked annoyed, ignoring the introduction. "But I'm not covering for you if anybody asks,"
"Great. Just…great." Clara refused to let her smile falter. Turning to the astrophysicist, she asked, "Shall we?"
Stepping carefully across the TARDIS threshold, Martha looked around her with a small grin on her face, a smile that seemed to shed years off her tired face.
"You've redecorated." she observed.
"Let me guess, you don't like it," the Doctor asked from the console, hurriedly pushing buttons and pulling levers.
"Actually I think it's quite nice. Love what you did with the lighting and the bookshelves," she closed the door behind her.
"Oh," he paused for a second. "That was unexpected. Thank you."
Shrugging, she strolled around to stand beside him as the ship rocked.
"I missed that sound," she said over the noise of the TARDIS taking off. The Doctor looked at her with the tiniest of smiles.
The journey was over quickly, and when next they opened the door, they were in a slowly filling courtyard as students milled past dispiritedly on their way to class. A few teenagers stopped and stared at the blue box, blinking in confusion.
"Physics experiment," Martha said loudly with a wide grin. "We can offer a free lesson to anyone interested. The equations are really quite easy to understand."
All lingering bystanders immediately dispersed.
"Good job," the Doctor smirked. "Now where do we start?"
The library was bright, large and airy, which wasn't necessarily something he liked. If he was going to spend time anywhere feeling sorry for himself, he preferred dark and cloistered spots, just to really add to the flavour of misery.
Until of course, he met Jemma, Clara's coworker. That was when he understood why this had been the perfect place for her to torture herself.
"…never comes in on time, and good god, could her hemline get any shorter?" the woman had started complaining the moment they walked in and introduced themselves as local police. "It's not as if she's got the legs for those outfits - she's much too short."
"Er…" Martha glanced at the Doctor who appeared on the verge of saying something unpleasant at the very least. "Ma'am, if you don't mind, we're here on official business and I have some questions for you. Would you be so kind as to step somewhere private with me?"
"We can talk here can't we?" Jemma looked around. "There's no one else here. She hasn't been back since her lunch date yesterday and I have no idea if she's even going to come in today. Frankly officers, I'm not surprised you're here investigating her - I have no idea what she gets up to outside the workplace."
"Ma'am." Martha's voice was firm and brooked no argument. "Please step outside with me while my colleague investigates her workspace. Thank you."
The Doctor gave her a grateful look as she led the chafing librarian out of the small office. When the two of them had disappeared, he strode over to the neat and uncluttered desk that was so painfully and obviously Clara's, his hearts thumped painfully at the sight. The fact that she hadn't been seen by her coworker for over a day did not escape his notice.
There was nothing on her desk aside from a pen holder and a table lamp, and the single drawer was locked. Looking around to make sure no one could witness what he was about to do, he drew his sonic screwdriver out of his coat and activated it. The latch snapped open with ease.
Keeping away his sonic, he slid open the drawer carefully. There wasn't much within aside from a few hastily scribbled notes, including a set of numbers on a yellow post-it note - star coordinates, he identified - that seemed painfully familiar. At the very bottom of the drawer, he found a printout listing out the academics within the Astrophysics department.
Lifting the document, he studied the contents before him, especially where she had underlined the names of two faculty members. Apparently, she had paid special attention to a Dr. Benjamin Peters and Dr. Gary Saunders, both of whom were focusing in a ground breaking research of Black Holes.
He looked hard at the brief descriptions paragraphed under each name, and stared again at the coordinates she had jotted down in her messy handwriting.
The photographs of the corpses Martha had shown him flashed through his mind.
"Clara, my Clara…" he whispered as his eyes widened. "What have you gotten yourself into?"
"Doctor?" Martha asked from the doorway. Jemma walked into the office, muttering something about arrogant civil servants and taxpayer money. "Is everything ok?"
"What did you find out?" he asked abruptly, ignoring the other librarian.
"That she went for lunch with one Dr. Ben Peters yesterday. And her high heels make too much noise," the UNIT Doctor said drily.
Dropping the papers on the desk, he hurried out of the office, Martha in tow.
"Doctor, what's going on?" she asked anxiously.
"We need to find her now. Especially if she's with Ben Peters." the Doctor looked down at her with dread in his eyes. "I know what we're up against."
Her head was killing her as she came to. These hangovers were getting truly awful…she really needed to stop drinking the way she did.
Opening her eyes, she looked around and breathed in sharply.
Not only was she not home, she was beginning to recollect some of the more recent events that had transpired.
"Shit," she muttered, gazing in panic at the familiar symbols covering the floorboards, walls and ceiling.
The place stank of sulphur.
I'm in so, so much trouble.