Inspired by/ spoilers for the Children-in-Need trailer for the upcomming Christmas special. Oh Jenna, you Jenius.
She doesn't even get a chance to think; The sound is just there and an instant later, so is the familiar creaking of the door, and she turns in a timeless daze, through the numbing viscousness of the nighttime air.
The blue box is framed in half-light and so she wonders if she dreams, if her brains aren't just erroneously computing those garish bits of illumination into familiar patterns and shapes; She is already so surrounded by surreality that she doesn't even pay mind to the slowing down of time, or the interplay of the interstitial darkness with the dim orange glowering from within.
She just knows that there is the long likeness of a man framed between the lights both warm and cold, a mosaic of shadow and pallor demanding to be processed.
In the twillight of their meeting place, he barely even resembles a human, not even by the distorted sharp outline of his angular form; His colorless eyes reflect the light in an eerie gleam and the shadows find plenty of burrows and crannies in the lines and contortions of his wild face; His unusually ordinary clothing takes away much of the refinement from his appearance and accentuates the scruffy bits, and cast in the sharp contrasts by the light from their silvery sky-egg, he looks so very pale and gaunt, more so than she remembers, and the lines on his face have less in common with the wrinkles of your friendly neighborhood pensioner than the crumpled bark on a venerable oak tree or the ancient crevices of a mountainrange;
And yet, all she perceives are merely the letters, that once put together, come to spell out what is simply the shape of a dear person dolefully missed, a kindred mind and a soul she thought she might never touch again.
She doesn't recall how her hand got on his arm, but she urgently needs to make it do the talking because her face is utterly frozen in place and the comfirmation of his cool, reacting flesh and blood beneath her palm seems more likely to exascerbate it than to offer mitigation; But she had to know, is still desperate for knowledge of whether he isn't just another part of this crazy flurry of color, snowflakes and bad jokes, so she won't go squandering any of those emotions on an inevitable disapointment.
Then of course, he tells her exactly what she needs to hear, because of course he does, seriously and gruffly and in the middle of the business he's conducting, but she thinks he's taking care to phrase his words not like an order, but a request between friends, because wasn't this the conclusion last time, that friends are better than armies? And all the memories rush back with the realization that they're staring at each other like that time when he first took this form; Back then, they had recoiled in confusion, yet remained bound by the crass gawking of confused fascination, but this time, their motions seem to draw them toward each other, with him leaning in more than his demonstrative explaining would necessitate, or that succint slipping of her hand further down his arm as she follows, like the many things she now wants to say or do, like she was afraid he might just dissapear back into the night if she ever let go.
But even she doesn't think that an illusion could renew the memory of his voice, his most particular way of saying her name, the rough clarity of the vowels and the twirl in the 'r' and the frankness of understated devotion when he would say it over and over again, repeated like one of those incoherent scribbles on his blackboards: Clara, my Clara, claraclaraclara.
Like ever before, his voice was enough, the promise that made her press on despite her emotions, simple instructions and an urgent tone that told her all she needed to know, and in that instant, a part of her that had been dreaming for a long time rises to the surface like a mermaid jumping out into the air with a boastful splash, and in an instant, she understands, she nods, connects, trusts and saves the feelings for later, and without a moment's hesitation, they are an unit again, united again amongst their midwinter snow.
From the moment she starts moving until the TARDIS doors snap shut behind her, his eyes, face and body remain turned towards her alone.
Working to pump warmth into the peripheral edges of his form, his twin hearts beat strong, in this second chance at life that is a gift from her.
As someone on tumblr said, this trailer thing was far more intense than it had any right of being; Maybe it's just me being preemptively charged with feels, but in any case, I was compelled to scribble down my impressions. Oh Twelvie. Oh Clara... How do you make everything so awesome? Oh, and excuse the lame pun above.