A/N: I apologize in advance for my description of the ultimate villain.
Across the Universe
There was a chair splattered with dried blood in the room, with broken pieces of rope strewn all over from where they had been cut. A fresh coil waited on the ground - presumably, Clara guessed, for her.
Various needles and blades and bottles of ink sat on a side table, right beside massive, old tomes that were filled with handwritten text which she couldn't hope to, or want to understand.
Yet despite the fact that she now knew this was where so many victims had faced their final moments, despite the understanding that there was a good chance this room was the last thing she might ever see, Clara found herself terrified most of all by a large pane of glass propped in a corner.
More specifically, she was afraid of what she could plainly see lurking impossibly within.
It was like a window, staring into the worst of her nightmares, reflecting stars and flame…and something ancient and furious lunging silently at her, its bellows unheard.
The creature's face, though animated, was not alive. Rotten sinews clung to bare bone, while a stripped jaw widening into a bottomless maw snarled at her in boundless rage. In the depths of its empty sockets, she could see nothing, nothing at all except an endless blackness, and perhaps that was the most horrifying part of the tableau.
Her weapon fell from her limp fingers just as the door shattered behind her.
"Ben said you were special," Gary said from behind her. "Ben said you'd be worthy of our Master."
He strode across the room, reaching out with one hand for her throat. Clara spun, attempting to move out of his path, but she simply wasn't fast enough.
Thick fingers wrapped around her windpipe as she felt herself being lifted into the air, her feet losing purchase of the ground.
"You're just another dumb bitch." he spat, not hearing the creak of the front door.
Cold wrath filled his veins as he stumbled onto the scene. Clara's feet kicked under her as her small hands scrabbled vainly to loosen the merciless chokehold on her slender neck. Her complexion was already turning purple and her eyes were beginning to roll.
Driven purely by instinct, with every last iota of grace and strength gifted onto his kind, the Doctor sped forwards, reaching for the human male's shoulders. Gripping tightly with murderous force, he yanked the man back, sending Clara tumbling. Brutally, the Time Lord flung the man across the room.
"You dare?" the astrophysicist howled, his face made inhuman with anger.
A shot rang out, causing him to spasm and screech. Red blossomed where his left kneecap used to be. The Doctor looked up to see Martha pointing a gun down at the murderous and unhinged man.
"Stay down." she ordered. "Or next time, I shoot to kill."
"Fuck you," he swore, attempting to stand despite her warning.
Martha lifted her weapon and fired again.
He cradled Clara against his chest as Martha performed a cursory examination.
"She seems fine for now…her breathing seems to be normalizing." she frowned, keeping her weapon out of sight, for which the Doctor was grateful. "I will need to get a better look though."
He looked over at the fallen body crumpled not too far away. "Somehow, I doubt he was the only culprit."
Unfolding herself, Martha held her gun in both hands. "I'm going to make sure the place is clear and call for a clean-up team."
"Do you need help?" he asked, although he wasn't prepared to leave Clara. Especially not alone with that thing residing in the corner, which neither himself nor Martha were addressing.
The medical doctor seemed incapable of looking at it directly or acknowledging its existence.
"I'll be fine." she promised, and slipped out of the room as Clara's eyelids began to flutter.
"Hey," he greeted softly.
"Doctor?" she sounded confused. "Am I dreaming?"
"No," he shook his head, allowing himself against his better judgement to cup her cheek. "But you should rest."
She whispered, leaning into his touch, "I thought I'd never see you again."
As she fell asleep, he tried not to think about how that was almost true, and would have been true if he had arrived only a minute later than he did.
With great care, the Doctor picked Clara up and set her down on the ground outside the charnel room as gently as he could, before slowly walking back in. The creature eyed him warily, almost unmoving as it studied the Time Lord.
"I know who you are." the Doctor said as he casually stooped to pick up the hunting knife Clara had dropped, which was still smeared with blood. "Or at least, I know the names others have bestowed upon you. They're mostly overwrought, ridiculous and obnoxious titles. I mean, Teufel. Really? Sounds like a range of non-stick pans."
The rotting thing twitched.
"People will forget you. People are already starting to forget you, like some bad fairytale - like the bogeyman under our beds." the Doctor paused, tucking his hands behind him. "Would you want to know what happens to you?"
Dark pits glared at him.
"You will become so desperate for anyone to listen to your voice, for a way to escape your little prison, that you will get careless. You will call out, and keen and wail, and eventually…eventually someone will heed your begging." he continued.
"To be precise, I will heed your call. But when I come to you, you won't know me. You will not recognize my face, nor my voice. But mark my words, when I get to you …you will become nothing more than a nasty vestige of human lore, doomed to be forgotten in the aeons of time. And there's nothing you can do to stop it…the deed is already done."
The red monstrosity lifted its head and howled in the vacuum of space.
"Be seeing you." the Doctor bared his teeth as he lifted the bloody blade, smashing the knife's hilt into the glass. In one move, the window gazing into the darkest corner of time and space became nothing more than useless shards.
Dropping the knife, he went back to Clara's side, kneeling down beside her.
Martha looked grim as she descended down to the first floor. "Peters is upstairs. He's in no condition to move on his own, but I've restrained him anyway. Your girl did some serious damage."
"You're going to want to burn everything." He stated. "Starting with those books they've got in that room."
She nodded with a slight shiver. "We should get Clara to the UNIT medical facility just in case. She's probably dehydrated at the very least,"
The Doctor didn't argue. Rather, he slipped one arm under Clara's shoulders and another under her knees. Effortlessly, he hoisted her up and walked out the front door, in the direction of his ship with the other woman beside him.
Clara was being tugged from under a heavy, black wave; sleep ebbed away slowly as she found herself becoming aware of her surroundings. Blinking, she glanced around and realized that she was in a hospital room of sorts. Turning her head, she gazed at the man sitting close by, who was staring out the window beside her head.
"Hello," she croaked. "It seems I didn't dream you up after all."
His head whipped around.
"Didn't know you made house calls from Gallifrey," she joked weakly.
"Clara Oswald," he started. "For all the times you called me an idiot, I hope you remember that you damned near got yourself murdered by a couple of incompetent satanic worshippers, because you thought you could handle them on your own."
"In my defence," she said. "I appear to be alive. Which means I clearly had everything under control."
The corners of his lips twitched.
"What happened?" she asked, hoisting her body up with effort.
"Well, you did something pudding-brained, so naturally, I had to step in to save the day," The Doctor scooted his chair closer to her. It didn't look like a comfortable seat in the least.
She studied his features carefully. "Why did you come back? I thought you'd be having fun doing Gallifreyan things right about now. Thought you'd watching a Gallifreyan football match, before enjoying a Gallifreyan beer with your Time Lord mates down at the local pub."
"Time Lords don't play football, although we do enjoy a good spot of badminton," the Doctor said drily. "I have to confess something, and it's embarrassing."
Clara looked inquiringly at him.
"It seems – and try to look surprised please – Missy might have… er…lied. About Gallifrey." The Doctor sounded sheepish.
"Must be a Time Lord thing," she said quietly, although her words held no rancour. "Because so did you."
"Human thing too, apparently." He nodded knowingly, his eyes never leaving hers.
"Ah." She leaned back into her pillows, understanding that no explanations were required of her for the moment. "Right."
They sat in silence, listening to the sound of the world passing outside the window. Wisps of canned laughter drifted through the thin walls; someone in the next room was watching a sitcom.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"Whatever you want boss." he straightened up.
"Do you still want me to come with you?" she allowed herself to hope.
"Clara," the Doctor's expression was serious. "I'm not abandoning you. Not again. If you decided to go back to work in that miserable library – although to be honest I think you might have gotten yourself fired during your absence…"
"Bloody Jemma," Clara interjected in irritation.
"…I will come to your office every single day and request for your help in searching for books nobody except the supremely dull ever looks for." He grinned smugly. "How does that sound to you?"
"Awful, is what." She fought back tears, though for the first time in a long time, the urge to cry was for something other than grief.
"I've got all the time in the universe Clara," he said patiently. "So don't think for a second I'm lying. Not this time, anyway."
Dragging her tired feet down the deserted wing of the UNIT medical facility, Martha rubbed at her eyes, longing for sleep. The damned paperwork from the most recent fiasco had taken her hours to complete, and she was ready to call it a day.
Rounding a corner, she approached the door on the very end of the hall and twisted its cold handle.
"Hey babe," she called in greeting, before she realized she wasn't alone in the room. To be precise, both herself and Mickey were not alone in the room.
"They told me this is where I'd find Mickey Smith," The Doctor said, eyes trained on the man behind the ten inch bulletproof glass wall. The latter was on all fours, pacing the length of his enclosed space like a feral animal. His clothing hung in tatters as if they had been clawed to shreds.
"Whoever told you," Martha said. "Is about to get seriously demoted. I'm talking janitorial duty for the next ten years."
"Don't you dare," the Doctor sniffed. "I might have threatened her a little bit."
"Of course you did," she sighed resignedly.
"So." The Doctor stared at Mickey who was hissing at him, his body coiled as if ready to spring. "Want to tell me what happened?"
Martha closed the door behind her and leaned against it, staring at her husband forlornly.
"A few years ago, we were hunting something in an industrial complex outside the city. We never caught whatever the hell it was that was sending patient after patient to emergency," Martha explained. "But it appeared to have left something behind in Mickey. X-rays show that an unknown organism has been fused to his lower spine…one which cannot be removed without killing the host."
"UNIT called. Offered me all the resources and help at their disposal, in return for my resumed employment." Martha finished. "That pretty much leaves us here."
"You could have called for me." The Doctor murmured, squatting down to look at the man who had been Mickey; if the time traveller was disconcerted at the sight of cold yellow irises looking back at him, he barely showed it.
"I didn't know if you would have answered." She laughed bitterly. "Like I said, you stayed away from our lives for so long."
"Then you don't know me at all Martha Jones," He said shortly.
Martha had no response to that.
"You have my help." The Doctor stood up and turned to look at his friend with a firm tilt of his head. "For what it's worth."
Pushing herself away from her place at the door, Martha stepped close to the Time Lord, and tiptoed close enough to kiss him on the cheek.
"Thank you. Your help and your friendship - it's worth everything." She said sincerely.
"I don't do pecks on the cheek." The Doctor shook his head awkwardly.
"Yeah." Martha's smile widened. "We definitely wouldn't have worked out in the end."
On the other side of the glass, Mickey's jaws snapped angrily, even as Martha turned to look at him with all the tenderness in the world.
Something had changed inside the TARDIS, he thought the moment he entered his ship. The lights seemed to glow warmer, the air seemed less frigid. If he had to guess, it probably had to do with the girl wandering around the bookshelves, letting her fingers hover over spines and covers.
The TARDIS was as relieved to have her back as he was, it seemed.
Noisily, he shut the door behind him and cleared his throat.
"Are you sure about this?" she asked, turning and walking down to meet him by the console.
"For once in my long life," he said as he slowly ambled to stand before her. "Yes."
"There's one last lie." She said. "One last thing I didn't tell you at least. Haven't told you."
The Doctor was quite sure that he knew what her last secret was, given what he had glimpsed in the files Martha had shown him. But it wasn't his place to speak it aloud.
"I…Danny and I…" her words became stilted. "We were going to have a baby."
Carefully, breaking his own rules even as he did so, he reached an arm out and drew her tightly into the circle of his embrace.
"I lost our baby," her voice was muffled, but he could hear the tears in her voice nonetheless, feel the shudders of her body as she cried against his chest. "I couldn't…I couldn't hold on to either of them."
"It's not your fault," He murmured into her hair, one hand settling at the nape of her neck.
They stood like this for a very long time, not moving, or going anywhere; the Time Lord and his Impossible Girl, standing together on the shores of time and loneliness, stemming the tide for long as they were able.