Spoilers for "Dark Water". Haven't seen "Death in Heaven" yet, waiting for it to hit the internets since I'm outside the anglosphere; This was originally partially intended as a venting piece for "Dark Water", but then I got held up, and in the end, I ended up completing this to scribble off my pre-finale anxiety. This series did a magnificent job of making me quite attached to both Clara, Twelve and the dynamics between the two, so I... I guess I really hope they'll be alright...

Carmen (Exactly what you deserve Remix)

Of all evil I deem you capable. Therefore I want the good from you. Verily I have often laughed at weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"All I need is one moment where I can exceed her speed."

Its a line he once reads in a comic, slouching on a couch in a somewhat unorthodox position, mostly trying to pass the time while Martha was sleeping. It's one of these Japanese swordy-fighty stories, and he doesn't know how it begins, or even how it ends, because that is how he stumbles through stories, both in fiction and reality; The beginning is often boring, the author perhaps needing a while to get a definite grip on their style, and endings are just depressing – So he will barge in halfway through, perhaps to look up some reference he's seen somewhere else, and perhaps he will even stay a while and follow the threads on the story, only to put the books aside and perhaps come back decades later, to a wildly different part of it, or get lost in the pages after a trip to revisit his favorite moments of the story – what he likes about this particular one is that its protagonists, engineered to be human weapons through gruesome weapons, were still able to hold on to their personhood through their bonds with their comrades, and eventually rebelled against the organization that would prefer them as unfeeling, perfect soldiers when they had the potential to be so much more – The leader of the rebellion is one of his favorites, an usually level-headed, big sister-like figure who specializes on speed. In the current chapters, she was faced with the resurrected corpse of one of the most terrible, most impossibly fast warriors of the past, and basically uses the help of her comrades to defeat her either way, a message that he basically agrees with, but has seen executed too many times for it to really catch his eye – what gives him pause is something about the villainess herself, and the way she was outwitted.

She fell victim to her pride, as villains are wont to do, but there is more than that.

He can't even say what exactly it is that gives him pause, he might get to the bottom of it if he took the time to process it, but does have a fair guess that the answer might be something he will not like. It just gets stuck in there somehow, the mental image of the resurrected villainess realizing that she cannot catch up, not even knowing that it was a clever trick and not hard-earned skill that allowed leader-girl to briefly beat her at her signature move, the way she charges her foe with single-minded focus at the expense of everything else, ending up destroyed in the crossfire of a nearby battle between a pair of unrelated monsters.

When he finds his way to the Dalek Asylum so many, many years later, the line is incandescent in is mind, resurfacing in the most unbidden manner when the understanding finally clicks into place.

And just like the villainess and those long forgotten pages of paper, he was lost the moment he was captivated, and captivated the moment he was exceeded.

Sure, there was also the irony, that a quick, metaphorical summary of all he found beautiful in this world would appear in the shape of all that he hated, that the Dalek's grotesque experiments to assimilate the 'human factor' would create something they couldn't control, that they, themselves products of mad science gone horribly right, would have their creations turn against their Masters because the Spark of person-hood refused to let itself be extinguished;

But he knew nothing of that when he sped down the corridors full of his wasted, ancient foes, deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, beckoned, lured, enticed by a faraway voices that promised intrigue, power, and logistically impossible soufflés.

He doesn't know how she imagined herself, within the confines of her mind, and at the time, he doesn't even have a face to assign to her, but with those notes seeping into his consciousness, his mental image of her starts to resemble the character from the opera, an ophelian madlady in a dress of dazzling scarlet, flowers in her hair as she calls him forward – the music, the piece of art, a manifestation of self-expression that tells a story of love is perhaps the most suitable symbol for the ultimate defiance she has been unceasingly upholding for over a year, against all odds of a grim reality that even she does not know in full; After all, love, beauty or self-expression is something that these marching metal monstrosities could never understand and perhaps terrified them all the more for it – Announcing her continued refusal to surrender her identity with a fanfare of classical music was not just an impressive manifestation of willpower, it had style.

But perhaps it is also the same form that her splinters of awareness had taken, the ones she couldn't suppress; For along with the melody, the lyrics carried a warning, telling of a fickle, unpredictable woman as unattainable and unreachable as a puff of smoke, or a flower in the mirror, or the reflection of the full moon in the middle of a lake, or the sound itself as it rings out into orbit, transmitting from the depths of the Dalek Asylum.

"Prends garde à toi!" - "You best beware!"

"Si je t'aime, prends garde a toi."

If I love you, you best beware.

You best beware.

You best beware.

For someone who valued his freedom so much, he sure didn't take all too well to isolation.

Every day he lived his dream of going somewhere new very far away, where no one would knew who he was, when he should long since have realized that every new fresh start would lead him back to the same old results as far as long as he took himself with him;

And where ever he went, there was chaos, perhaps, ultimately, because he did seek it out, and had this lovely blue box who was both very skilled at seeking it out, and just as curious as him to see what would result if she just fired him at the place.

It took him a long while, but after making a deliberate effort to scatter himself and she strips and snapshots of his story all over creation, it was, perhaps only a matter of time until he had found his way in all these near-catastrophes and nigh-apocalypses; He stole a time machine, he didn't just set out to see different places, not even places that were only available for a limited amount of years, but events as well. And people, whether he knows of whatever extraordinary future might await them, or not; It's like this that he comes across a plethora of artists, musicians and writers, researchers, politicians and activists, freelance paranormal hunters or even legends, future presidents left and right, whether their started out as haughty know-it-alls given to him as unwanted aides or sassy schoolgirls he immediately clicked with; He gets to meet the last centurion, the warrior queen of Krontep, the Bad Wolf, the one and only Captain Jack Harkness, even the Most Important Woman in the universe, and they were all so utterly worth it, but an unintended consequence of his widespread involvement was, of course, that it was no longer that easy to withdraw him from the equation; And sooner or later, it was, perhaps, unavoidable that someone might try.

Oh, he had tried to cover his tracks, to mend his wicked ways, to erase himself from history, but the thing was, while her certainly didn't like to be feared, there were times where it was practical, where lives would be at stake and wouldn't allow him to even consider whether he could afford not to make use of his reputation, or to take steps to avoid leaving an impression.

Time could be an unexpectedly flexible thing sometimes, perhaps it was perfectly possible for many of these events to have flowed along their predetermined paths without his involvement, here and there, but oh, the cumulative effect, now that the connections had been made. Little things he changed, that went on to influence and change other things, carrying his influence further through the fabric of reality like a bloodline; the effect of his deeds needn't even have been positive, at the bottom line, it was enough if they were massive. Pull him out at inopportune moments, and there'd be no telling whether entire chains of events wouldn't just fall to bits like a house of cards. At the very least, the people close to him would be affected, people he had changed such as Vashtra or Strax; There was way more at stake here than just his own, measly life – and all this had eventually necessitated his entanglement in yet another major event, several events, that were really just a series of time travel accidents and what had been done to fix it but still touched him in a fairly personal way, as one assumed it would, to know that she always has been, and until the end of his days will be all around him, but what makes her 'impossible' is not merely her means of showing up, but what she is when she does and that was all her – He got himself tangled in a girl, and her in him, like the Fates of greek mythology had grabbed the threads of their lives, pulled them in opposite directions like rubber bands, and then let go to watched them intertwine, until they were thoroughly splattered in each others existences, head to toe, birth to death even, in his own case at least.

Even before getting involved in it, if any variation of the word "before" is even meaningful in this concept, she looked at his scar left upon the world, and found it beautiful; There wasn't even a purely sensoric impression born from the mind of an impressionable, innocently unknowing girl; If she didn't understand its meaning then, she must have reached some inklings of comprehension at some point, perhaps after her own intimate contact with the very structure of his deeds, and she still went and described him as someone who "stops bad things happening at every minute of every day", an astonishingly short time after she very nearly smashed his face (after he basically just got it, too!) to express the extent of her disapproval; He was quite used to both kinds of reactions, and while he couldn't deny that the former made him feel somewhat flattered, it was the latter that he most appreciated, and this was, perhaps, why he found a certain unique comfort in people who were always eager to complain, or at least, not easily impressed (Examples, on a sliding scale from the former to the latter, would include Donna Noble, Peri Brown, Liz Shaw, Ian Chesterton or Sarah Jane Smith – not that this would have been the most defining trait or valuable feature of any of them), even when his own approach to the world was more one of trying to cultivate wonder.

Admiration based on an illusion was worthless at best and at worst, a dissapointment waiting to happen, so any delight he might take from praise or gratitude would always be tinged with a bitter aftertaste; Certainly, there were those in this world who thought of him as a champion of this world, someone who might one day grab them by their hands, reignite intrigue them with his mystery and save their world, or perhaps just give them the slight nudge they needed to realize that they could save it themselves, and ended up going very far in their belief that he was worth it and deserved to be paid back, but is is those very efforts , those assurances that they wanted him safe that put everything they said in doubt; Spectacular cases like Rose Tyler or River Song are only the most prominent ones, in part because he managed to... sort of fix things or do his best to make up for it, respectively, but most of the time, he can't do a thing.

After so many centuries, Davros' eerie rasp was still as fresh in his memory as ever, blending into a chorus -

"...the Destroyer of Worlds!"

"...would anyone have died?"

"Is it that what you did to her, turned her into a soldier?"

"Do you realize how dangerous you make people to themselves?"

"...you can always tell with the aristocrats."

He can't say he's ever been very skilled, or serious at convincing others that he was fickle, unattainable thing, that they should best beware, because honestly, who cold ever honestly go on living that way?

He's tried to stop once, to turn away anyone who would come with him, more than once; The second time, taking the additional precaution of staying in one place and time to avoid a repeat of the things that followed the first, but in the end, it was prophesized to fail by the most obvious of clues – His title had ultimately become was it was by means of being used, only coming to take on its full significance along the way, and mostly after his departure and subsequent visit to Skaro, but there was a reason he'd chosen it back then, when he was still relatively young, but tired of leaving the task of defining himself up to his surroundings and the nicknames his classmates had thought up in his stead. ("Theta Sigma" being by far the most prominent one, a terribly punny joke on the tendecy of his grades to be either barely tolerable or unexpectedly eceptional depending on his mood and level of investment)

He'd briefly considered "The Scientist", but that might've been a little too much to live up to hile still not denoting quite enough, and besides, too unpersonal for a title, so he went with his academic degree, at the time more indicative of his qualifications as a physicist, not a physician, but of course, having since spent so much time gavillating around with the explicit purpose to gather more knowledge, his present claims of omnidisciplinary expertise were quite justified, although physics – and engineering, for which knowledge of physics was always a huge advantage – had always remained his forte.

The title was certainly an admission that he understod himself as a scholar first, but certainly not the ivory tower version of common perception, but the reality of someone who is passionate and curious about the world and what makes it tick; He must protest the notions of "Measuring the marygolds" and similar concepts; There is nothing that knowing how exactly something works takes away from its value or the experience of experiencing it, but the wonder your average 5-year old seems to be born with needs to be both preserved undiminishedly, and tempered with stringent methodology so one can be sure of the results; Or that, at least, was his idea, the plan he started with, before everything got complicated, but at the bottom of it all, there was his point where he recognized curiosity as one of his fundamentally defining traits, later adding the corollary that a passionate appreciator of the wonder in this world should not like to see it wasted, a conclusion that the Master or the Rani had certainly never reached, but – there it was, that important detail of truth about him; In the end, he was, and always would be, a slave to his curiosity, for better or for worse; So all it took to rouse him from his pits of despair, all that was needed to shatter his conviction to resist his usual impulses time and time again was an unsolved mystery – a little scottish girl in a house that was far too big, an intriguing woman who should have been twice dead... how could he ever, possibly resist? How could he not poke it with a stick, take them with him so he might observe them both in and out of their native environment

And perhaps, in some ways, the mystery would just be an excuse to allow himself to accept the kindred spirits involved in both these incidents into his world, to make the unreasonable, but understandable choice to mitigate the loneliness of right now at the price of the pain that would undeniably follow, and he'd be unable to deny that he'd brought it upon himself, that the pain he was running towards was exactly what he deserved;

But whatever that was, 'what he deserved', be it pain, or respite, or the challenge he longed for, he would come to find that there was one woman out there who thought that, perhaps, it was a little bit of both, and seemed determined to make sure that he would receive every last bit of it;

And so it came to past that, after all his exploring and adventuring, he finally happens upon the impossible: a girl who could outdo him with computers, who left him marvelling at the beauty of her genius, who presented a mystery for him to figure out, and ended up the one who'd grab his hand as a comfort, or simply to drag him along into adventure; A girl who could talk even faster than him, who would wind up saving his native planet, or at least pointing him towards the way to do it, who wasn't even shy of his usual routine of tricking people into saving themselves so he could go and pull something potentially suicidal, someone who'd earn his admiration, who'd make him want to pay it all back to her... the intangible woman in red who is all his curses and blessings at once;

She is wearing a red dress when he first sees her, and she is wearing another red dress when he takes her into his arms near the abyss that was meant to separate them from the heart of the TARDIS and back then, he was so relieved and overjoyed to find – or so he thought – that she wasn't a trick or a trap, that he might actually get to keep her just as he was.

It isn't the unknown he should have been wary of, but the familiar, the simplest, most mudane of feelings, situations and ocurrences, the every day occurences during wich he has slowly allowed her to observe and assess him, and if secrets were mant to bring safety and protect from betrayal, all this might just have been the proof he needed to assure himself that he should never have let those walls melt down, that he was justified all along to keep her in the dark, but when that dark moment comes, there is – yes, rage, dissapointment and hurt, perhaps even regret, motly about other things, but to take it all back, to wish all this has never been, , he finds that he found way too much joy in their ways of being together, more than an one single moment could ever negate, even as he sees her without any mysticism or embelishment involved, filthy with the various fluids streaming down her face and the shame of her deeds.

The memories of his first impression, revealed at last once that pretzel of a time stream finally untangled itself far enough for him to retain them, turned out to contain mostly admiration. Certainly, his drained state after centuries of endless warfare would have left him quite susceptible to hopeful mirages, but he thought there must have been an undeniable grain of truth in the person he saw, the person who sat across him in that gallery, offering cups of tea and words of comfort, that firm upholder of what was right, pointing him towards a way out when even he had given up all hope, as these brave, humans always did.

Maybe if he'd paid more attention, if he hadn't been so busy with other things, if he hadn't been so weary, he might already have spotted the eerie halo of faint recognition that followed every turn of her face, every sounding of her voice – In that moment alone, at last, she is salvation, and in some ways, she always remained that.

When he finally becomes aware of her existence in a way he gets to retain during their encounter at the Dalek Asylum, he is immediately as wary of her as he is fascinated, but when he first meets her, meets her properly a fashion recognizeable as a proper, old-school beginning, his zeal, his protectiveness, the sheer unadulterated joy he displays are all purest gratitude.

But by then, he's seen his boyhood hero turn out to be a madman that ruled a warped universe inside a black hole, seen both one of the few teachers who ever seemed to see any potential in him and the very founder of the society he was born into turn out to be more megalomaniac than in the worst of the stories, and even that is practically a handful of funny anecdotes compared to the horrors he's seen in the time war; If all of this didn't beat any capacity to believe in any sort of saints or impossible heroes straight out of him, the many years he spent trapped on Trenzalore sure did, all that time fighting, struggling, watching generations turn to dust before him, longing for the darkness that he was sure would release him from his strife, and those days and nights spent in silence, pondering the failings and mistakes of the life that led him here (Amelia! Just what had he done to her when he left her to wait? Was it like this?) and bitterly understanding quite sufficiently that he never was, and never could be, anyone's dashing gentleman friend; And even though it was only the thought of her that sustained him in all these years, his only beacon of light and the only reason he'd ever gotten off that planet in the first place (for now, that is), the wall left by the experience seems unsurmountable even when he gets back to her, and he's too old, too hard, too experienced, to miss these subtle details, how unsettingly efficient she is (and has been, in the past) in taken his role, how low blows are definitely on the menu ("Get back in your lonely little TARDIS!"), how she's definitely not telling neither him nor soldier boy the whole story, and how something seems off the very moment she steps into the console room that accursed day;

The hindsight poisons even the memories of the past, and he can now see the same power and efficiency in her dealings with the cybermen, or how even her counterpart in Victorian London (even before his involvement, as he almost thankfully notes) led two parallel lives, because she always, in any context, wants to experience it all, the respectable, perfectionist natural leader and the excitement of the nighttime, and, of course, an avid, pretentious buff of literature would label herself 'Miss Montague', a reference obvious enough to mock anyone who doesn't get it, an obvious alias, of course, rather like "John Smith".

He'd thought that, despite everythng, she had the wisdow to draw a line on how far she was willing to follow him and realized the follies and undesirabilities of his being, when she had the wisdom to remain behind on the earth during the incident with the forest, instead of begging him to save her loved ones at any price, or escaping by herself; He thought she'd quite understood that he couldn't fight physics, or the laws of the world, but aparently, he'd have no chance of ever predicting her, not in all ways, at least.

"It was all a dream" is perhaps not the most poetic, or impactful ending for a story, but there's a reason he's given up on the heroes in such stories, because they only ever end up one way, and given the life he lives and the threats he often deals with, he cannot afford to be that wretched old magician who gets himself trapped in a cave by his own magic, betrayed by his distractingly pretty student after she had learned all his secrets, after he couldn't help himsel from showing off and taught her too little of his "magic" to do her any good, and too much to save himself; They'd make a pathetic sight, and every mirror he's come across since leaving Trenzalore seems rather intent on making sure that he will not forget his folly.

But as he looks upon her, his Nimue, his Vivien, or Ninyave, depending which version of the myth one followed, his eyes turned cold and he could not help but observe in morbid curiosity, and while a great part of his emotional processes is occupied with being ripped wide open and reminding themselves that she's not even physically capable of knowing him as long as he's known her, and the he really ought to be more realistic with his expectations, but there was a certain callous little part of him that was almost impressed, or at least sufficiently dumbstruck to see that same... will turned against him instead of the Daleks;

And yet, it is NOT the same, his Clara, the Clara he thought he knew, would never have made such a stupid mistake, especially not after she'd gotten the recent incident with the 'invisibility watches' to pick up on, certainly not after she'd recognized his making use of the propensity others might have toward that particular mistake as a staple of his modus operandi;

Had she been thinking clearly, had she not been completely inundated with chemicals and stress responses that made rational thought nigh impossible and otherwise just generally not herself, she would have realized that he usually made a point to make sure that none of the equipment he used could be turned against him, and thought of some other way to subdue him, likely quite sucessfully.

"If it is no true, do not say it

If it is not right, do not do it."

That quote, framed into your usual motivational poster layout together with a photograph showing a statue of her favorite Roman Emperor and the word "Integrity" printed in large, white letters, had served as her desktop background for many years; When she got rid of it, it was more for a simple change, and because motivational posters had become overused enough for her students to start snickering if they ever learned of this, but even if were still there, she would probably be unable to stand it by now; As a girl, she'd immediatel loved the straightforwardness of the quote, how it seemed to express the simple truth most poignantly, and in a way, she still thought so, still aknowledged that there was always the simple possibility to just not do the wrong thing, but what had since changed was that this left her in a rather precarious position: Has she been naïve in thinking that others were lazy to do wrong, or would she just be lowly self-serving with any assertions that it was easy to be a saint in paradise?

Paradise was certainly not where she was going.

There were many words for a woman who's say "I love you" to one man while looking and thinking of another, and "liar" was one of the kinder ones.

Back when that picture still grazed her desktop, she'd shaken her head at the Doctor's suggestions that secrets could somehow make you safe, possibly, her influence was one of the things that made him throw that idea right out of the window, or at least backedal on it, she was quite positive that nowadays, his reactions to that situation might have been the exact opposite.

Back then, she did not see or perceive her own actions as "secretive", perhaps because she wanted to believe that what she showed to the world was not a perfectionist front, but simply her self that was just as she'd want it to be, and not quite as suceptible to fear; Turns out it took just a few shifts in situation to bring out the discrepancy, to make her quite aware that she might fall short, and be very terrified of that fact.

If it came to scary situations, the person that put her into them in the first place would hardly blame her for reactions that were only human, if doubting her decisions made her feel like an idiot, she could pin the blame right at whoever asked her to make it, but there was no simple way to excuse why she'd tell blatant, transparent lies to two of the most significant people in her life.

It was not that she somehow didn't care about them, or that's what she tried to tell herself; It certainly wasn't that any of them was somehow a... bad person, or wouldn't understand.

Danny Pink was as far from being an obediently marching little Dalek or a shoot-first-talk-later sort of dumb-muscle bully as the Doctor was from being a haughty aristocrat guy – he was positively anti-authoritarian, he was a bookworm, he... always blamed himself for everything... and as for Danny, she figured he was nice enough, she liked the wisdom he would somehow exibit, and his devotion to protect children – She had chosen her profession in part so she could give to others what had been taken from her when her mother died, and while she didn't know the whole story, she supposed that it must be something similar with him. She had no reason to turn him away, being single and all that, but of course, neither of them knew that about each other, and they certainly didn't owe it to her or the world to get along with everyone in it; They'd just pressed the wrong buttons with each other, and she certainly wasn't demand that they get along, she had no right ask that of them, and no intetion; That's why she'd tried to keep things separate at first, so that none of them started to worry, or caused a situation over this, so there wouldn't be any drama and nothing would have to change, and she would still be able to have her normal, successful life which included a job, a nice flat and a boyfriend, and spend her voyages as a capable, save space adventurer.

Regardless of wether she could, or should give any of these things up, a pair of questions that she had been trying hard to avoid, she had never quite seen why she would have to, why she couldn't have both and continue doing worthwhile things in either capacity; why would they have to conflict, if neither man had any interest in the sphere the other existed in?

Except, of course, that life did not fit into neat little cathegories, life was a messy, blurry, unpredictable afair that refused to be fully controlled, and at the end of the day, things might just... collide, migle, and leave her with the demand for a well-deserved explanation.

And oh, she tried to mend her wicked ways, to get it all sorted and in order and how it belonged, how it should be, how a mature person ought to handle and arrange things so they could neatly coexist without overlapped, but in hindsight, it seemed so obvious how it was all inevitably doomed, her rehearsed, painfully artificial speech teeming with suspiciously specific denial, her post-its to keep in mind each of her planned, eloquent paragraphs, ever the English teacher, ever the big words, ever fake, like a child's incincere promises delivered to placate nagging adults, "Now I'll do it, Now I'll behave, I promise, right tmorrow, I'm gonna start doing my homework and stop saying things that I shouldn't" - She had still thought that she'd get everything fixed if only she could apologize, and suddenly, she couldn't, and she was right back lost on their bank hollyday, or helplessly whimpering as her mother's body lost all of its warmth, after she'd used it to shield her young daughter from these rampaging shopdummy monsters.

As much as her guilty conscience insisted she ought to act like one, to the point that she might have done something very stupid if not for the insistent words of a dear person urging her to get her rationality working and be certain before she acted on anything, in the end, she was – and would very much have declared this with pride under any other circumstances – not the type of hopeless romantic little girl that would throw away a deep, lasting connection beyond even a regular friendship for a simple love interest, which didn't make any of this any better, because that meant that it was all about her, and her refusal to accept that there were things in this life that were cruel and random, things that were out of her hands and couldn't be controlled, like the simple truth that she had fallen short of her standards, made a mistake with a person who deserved better, and now, she could never ever fix this again, and it was all her fault...

And in that instant, all thoughts of what was 'right' or what she 'should' do were washed away – She just wanted this universe to do what she wanted it to, and she was willing to use all means at her disposal to make it obey.

Part of her even coldly reasoned that, if there was the slightest chance that her sheme could have worked, it was totally worth it, and she might do it again.

Part of her snapped back in anger even when using the words that should have been her acceptance of her quite deserved punishment for basically going and ruining yet another of the good things in her life...

But just as she was almost halfway out the door of the TARDIS, just as she was resigned enough to begin thinking that she was almost thankful for his pityless honesty, he turned his head to her, and started to say something so beautiful she thought she might die, from the weakness in her knees, the shame burning in her chest, and the way the instant shattered and broke around them, as if from that very familiar hopeless, merciless frankness.

There she was, all this time, wondering why she put up with him, why she bothered making excuses for that person, if she even knew him, and all the time, she should have asking the same things of herself;

Oh, sure he was pissed. He was dissapointed. He was wounded, and didn't hesitate to make her understand that, but in the next breath, she sees him trying to build her back up, to give her streght, "Come on, get your brains back online, time to prove what we're made of!", willing to do what he could to give her things he could never have, with someone he didn't even approve of, didn't even like.

It was the most startingly pure-hearted thing she had ever witnessed.

In this brief moment of respite they might or might not have had, as apocalypse brews all around them, they find themselves on the strairs of the cathedral, waiting for something unspecified, perhaps the right wind, perhaps an opportunity.

She's no longer sure if she believes in such a thing, if there is sense in hoping or wether it even matters; It's one thing when there's opponents to face and events to react to, something against which she can define herself through opposition and prop herself up through it; In the silence of this moment, there is only vagueness, only uncertain futures she can't guess at when she's not even certain of the present, of whom she just spoke to, and what it even means.

She sits there, a grown woman in black stockings and proper clothes, and all she can to is pull her legs to her body and hug her knees, when she has long since forgotten to make attempts at not weeping; She can only imagine how filthy she must look, in ways way beyond 'Wide face and a funny nose', all red and puffy and swollen, tears and snot sticking to her face, and of course, there's the moral repugnancy.

If there was ever any chance that her pretense at being mature and righteous was ever fooling anyone at all, the impressions should be so far damaged that it's no use to ever bother, and she honestly feels it might be easiest if she could just give up, but there's still this whole situation, there is this tall, pale-faced man whom she has already thoroughly dissapointed and should have seen her true self quite clearly, but since he's somehow still there, some insidious piece of pride still fuels the usual reflexes that would otherwise quickly make sure that she isn't seen when she's making such a hot, sticky, salty mess everywhere.

She wants to do something about it, stop herself from looking like a lost little girl in front of her, but her limbs won't obey and the state of her face just gets worse, and while she might treacherously lower her face hoping that her hair will cover the mess on the front, but all hypothetic progress is undone by how her sobs just get louder.

"I'm not even sure... if I'm really crying because of him, or just because of this mess I made..."

And of course, his unreadable gaze stays where it is, and no false reassurance comes forth.

"I know- I know it should be him. It should be him. And I've- Even you-"

He's sitting there upright, arms rested on his knees, his frame sharply defined by the outline of his dark, red-lined jacket, and she feels she doesn't even want to know what she might find in his eyes right now, although she's sure that their glance is pinned somewhere between the mess that is her hair and the cloth covering her back. She knows that apologies will be useless if she doesn't mean them, and she can't even tell if she means them, so she can't even risk it, not when she's not even sure if anything about her own idea of herself was correct at all, even in the slightest bits.

All she has to cling to is the hope that, perhaps, she needn't fear the words as much if they come from her own mouth, if she can... anticipate them, they won't just hit her unprepared.

"...When this is over, you're going to boot me out, aren't you? You won't... can't ever take me with you again..."

His answer is in no way definite and opens with a serious, heavy sigh. "You do understand... that I can't let anyone have access to the TARDIS or certain delicate knowledge if I cannot trust them."

"So I'm... unsuitable?" she tries to summon up some 'fight' at this, forces herself to look up at him even with her visage in its full slippery, contorted glory. "Not a fit? Not good enough?"

"...I didn't say that."

Her movements and expressions become wild and vivid at that, although she is as much raging for her own benefit as she simply wants something clarified. "Don't. Just don't! Don't give me that!"

That does seem to surprise him, but judging by his serious look, he's expecting something quite different than what is about to come, and this doesn't change as she braces herself with numerous sobs, wanting this bit to get out without a misunderstanding.

"...Listen, just so we understand ach other... It's one thing if you're... pissed at me because of what I just did, I'd have no objections to give you there, if you said I wasn't trustworthy, or just didn't want to see my face again, there's nothing I can do to argue with that. But don't you go and brandish the martyr complex, and tell me that you're gonna do this for my own good. Don't you act like you're my bloody father or something, or worse than that. If we part ways tomorrow, I don't want you to go and act like everything that goes bad ever if your fault, like you always do. You're really overstating your influence there, if you think all I do, even all I do wrong, everything any people around you ever do wrong, revolves around you. I'm not your... weapon, or your grunt, or someone you 'corrupted'. I screwed up. I really did, but that was me.

I did what I did, all the things I did, for many reasons of my own, and I can't speak for everyone who ever gor hurt in your vincinity, but I' sure they had their reasons for what they did, too, things they believed in, things they wanted to protect, not all of which have to agree with you. If you... if you honestly think that, y-you're doing them a greater disservice than yourself! My mistakes are mine, okay? I screwed up."

"Sounds almost like you're proud of them." he comments sadonically, and something about it really gets her seething, but, mostly for lack of any right to say anything, she finds that anger mostly evaporating as she struggles to continue her idea somehow, not even finding the words to really contradict him or find a real follow up to his words, not even the most minimal, 'Of course I don't'. "Just... don't blame herself, okay?" and the sincerity, the wish to leave at least something in order, surely tears at her. "And when you remember me, don't think of me as some... silly earthling that you didn't handle correctly, or some person that you screwed up. Think of me as... this friend you had, or someone with the same hobby as you, who appreciated that nice vehicle you used to have access to because of where you happened to get born. We found that we... had a lot of thinks in comon, and then, I screwed up. Alright?"

Obviously, he shakes his head, but she defensively interrupts him before he can get any further than "Clara, Clara...".

"Whatever happened to... 'Some decisions are too important not to make on your own'? Don't you dare decide this for me!"

"So you're sure then?" He asks, brusquely, straightforwardly. "You think this is definitely a good idea, to keep going? You can handle it? Nothing like this will ever happen again? You understand that?"

And as if on cue, she falls back into herself, onto her knees, sobbing.

Sure she understands, but she understood before she even did it, and did it regardless. If the Understanding were the problem, she would at least have some way to fix it, but like this, she couldn't guarantee anything. She had only just lost her boyfriend an co-worker, and to have yet another important person drop out of her life right now was the last thing she needed; She imagine that maybe, one trip would even cheer her up a bit, but when she thought of one trip becoming many, and the further direction that might lead her into, she was much less certain. She was supposed to do the wise thing, but was what that even, could leaving all this behind in this mess of a state be called wise, when she'd still be the same when she'd be alone here, without him, and come to regret it as a hasty choice that didn't adress the real problem?

By now, she knew that asking for trips without the ocassional dangerous event was neither a realistic, or even fair thing to ask of him.

She didn't want to be alone; She didn't want even more things to change either way, and she didn't have the slightest idea what to do.

"I- I was going to be mature and reasonable..." she subben, obviously having given up all hope of being, or even appearing as any of these things. "If... if Danny were here, he'd want me to do the mature thing-" and now, she could no longer contain herself. The floodgates opened, and she became a most undignified sight to behold, the level-headed, decisive teacher having completely given way to inelegant blubbering. "It was all because of me, if I hadn't lied... if I hadn't had to explain in the first place-"

And amids it all, in the most unexpected moment, there was a hand on her shoulder, attached to an arm that was awkwardly held in a position where there was as little contact as possible, but still placed there with deliberate precision.

"It's alright, I get it, believe me, I do. Loss does things to the mind."

And he really does get it. He's been there, he's lost people, dear people of various kinds; He has no right to claim any sort of high ground here, he hasn't had any for a long time, and he wished, he really hoped that perhaps, he could keep her from these feelings of loss, of guilt that he knows is probably the sort that will never go away, but what matters is that she's feeling all this now and that he understands it very well;

And that might just be the only silver lining to this horrible situation they've found themselves in, that the very thing that would usually be this largest, unsurmountable barrier between him and the humans around him could be the very thing that allows him to understand now, that allows him to be there for her now.

She had put up with him, all the times he was being irrational or simply confused, all the mistakes he had made, and she was still here.

She had always been there, all this time, when he didn't know what it was living for, whenever he hadn't been sure what to do, and who he even was... and he had not forgotten. He had not failed to value that.

What made her think he wouldn't pay her back, show her another way when she couldn't find one, lead her back onto the path, now that it was finally his turn?

Right now, in the state she's in, she might be forgiven for thinking that he's helping her out of nowhere, but he knew he was not, and she would too, soon enough; He is here right now because he has waded through that same darkness, because he's chosen his undoing as she's chosen hers.

"...doing all of this for me... after all I did... You must think that I'm a horrible person..."

"I think that it is very obvious that you don't want to be, and as someone once told me... that is probably the point."

And she thinks, just briefly, from the way she shifts his fingers on her shoulder, the slight melancholy tone in his otherwise matter-of-factly voice, and the way looks at her with those eyes of his, somewhat... softly, delayed in a way that makes him look very old, and very deep in thought, that he might very well actually grab her, press her against his chest and allow her to let her tears flow freely.

Obviously, he doesn't do that; He does something better.

Rising to his feet, he extends a single arm and offers his hand.

"Come. We have work to do."

"If I love you, you best beware.

For I might just be exactly what you deserve."