Crazy About Clara Chronicles

by KendrixTermina

"In his very repressed, restrained way, he's clearly as besotted with Clara as he ever was! That line in 'Dark Water' [...] that's about as close to 'I love you' as the Doctor can get." - Steven Moffat, DWM 484. Assorted writings detailing the Doctor's Clara-related monomania and their ongoing struggle to divine each other's meaning. Obviously, Whouffle in all its shapes and forms.

9. Pomegranate Seeds

[Pomegranate Seeds]

Even still I was built
to tolerate your temper-ature
It fluctuates so I must break
Through the bleak of winter
Through your latest barrier

Your latest barrier

-Tori Amos, 'The Beauty of Speed'.

---

One day, she happened upon him as he was sleeping.

It wasn't the first time, exactly, but it wasn't a common sight, not exceedingly rare, although not frequent, either; To begin with, she did not stay over on the TARDIS all that often so she supposed that her chances of catching a glimpse were somewhat below those of the average passenger, but even when she was gone away with him for maybe days at a time, she would usually go to bed before him and wake to find him already up and about, whirling around the console and gushing about some list of potential next destinations with that usual, undimmed enthusiasm of his, or possibly tinkering away underneath it, but fresh as a rose either way.

Her best chances of witnessing him sleeping were probably when they were staying somewhere else, in hotel rooms or makeshift camps somewhere over the course of an adventure, when mere practicality would suggest that he do it within her sight; She'd wordlessly held him quite a few times after he got himself knocked out or severely exhausted braving various dangers, although the usual rule of finding him long since up and about and desperate to occupy himself the next morning applied even then, so it would have been fair to say that she treasured those rare moments when they came up, just for the chance to observe his peaceful breathing and get a good look at his relaxed features on one of the few occasions on which he would actually hold still and let himself be admired – There were even a few times, back in those golden days when it seemed almost like they were permanently attached to each other, when he had allowed her to let him let his head in her lap, perhaps out of no thoughts at all, just casually rolling himself over there, cracking an offhanded, somewhat awkward joke about 'getting her to a nunnery', and just for a moment, she ignored, in her mind, the grizzly fates that befell Hamlet and Ophelia after the scene that spawned that quote and the grievous abuse involved even there, so that she might, in some as-of-yet innocuous shape of vanity, admire herself, and both of them, in that archetypical pose, herself as his comfort, always there to soothe his brooding thoughts, reaching down to caress his face and play with his dark hair, and him, her mad, impossible lover, showering kisses upon her hand while he calculated and calibrated the specifics of some mystery that wasn't nearly as faraway as she thought, mumbling the occasional incoherence for her to decipher, for she, too, like many generations of literary analysts, could never quite tell: Mad, or faking it? Deliberate exaggeration, misdirection or lie, actual obliviousness on his part, or just the extent of the actual ridiculousness of this world?

One thing was for certain: He liked to keep her guessing, and it was a folly they probably shared.

But when he finally nodded off, his features relaxing, releasing themselves from the strain of deep frowns or wide, manic grins, she would be oddly struck by how he almost looked like any other boy, like he might actually succeed at blending into a crowd, given a jeans and a t-shirt, and - she thought she recalled him saying that he sometimes even dreamed, that he – or that was the implication, at least – regularly retreated to his chambers for that explicit purpose, or so one might think, there was no getting a straight answer out of him.

His personal room, like his birth name or the circumstances of his departure, was one of these things he liked to be mysterious about, and the longer he'd avoided the question, the more colorful his excuses grew. Given that she had already been made privy to many of these things he just refused to spill, Clara had not even given up all hope that she might just get to see it one day, but for now, it had remained unknown to her, which meant that if she were to catch him sleeping on the TARDIS proper, which would be... typically once in a few months, sometimes more frequently, like twice or thrice the same month, it would be after he dozed off somewhere within her reach, in the library at times, or underneath the console, over books, tools and disorderly sketches and scribblings, his mouth slightly open, dark hair hanging into his face where his pale skin wasn't obscured by soot, ink stains and red impressions left by the implements he'd spent a good while laying on, and at the time, she'd thought nothing of it, even found it cute.

So no, it wasn't the first time.

It was, however, the first time she found him doing this looking like that.

Part of her had cautiously awaited this, or at least, filed it as a potential opportunity to harness; In secret, she wondered if any of the many associations contained in this confusing amalgamation of a man would finally have taken over when she found him like this, finally in his own element, after the both of them had had the time to adapt to the situation, and what the sight would do to her. Would he have lost all allure, as if she'd merely found some weird uncle of hers snoring in his chair, some unwelcome perception of his form coming to the forefront when he wasn't awake to move it around in some astonishingly unusual way? Would his sharp features maintain that air of menace even with no will there to tense them, warning her to stay away?

When she finally beheld him, she honestly couldn't say.

She found him slumped on that newly acquired desk he had placed under the console, a dusty, smelly thing right at home among the mess of wires and cables that hung down, the messy innards of the moody machine he kept pouring hours of his days into, perhaps the closest anything could come to a visual equivalent to the contents of his scrambled mind.

The whole room no longer bothered to conceal that he basically lived in here, or maybe he had just reached an acceptance of it, and, for good measure, made sure to spare himself the walks to the library, or any reasonable place to keep the writing utensils; Between the ornate bookcases, the indefinable contraptions and more than one desk cramped with yellowed paper and a touch of gothic accessories, just a pricket here or there, to supplement the dim, feverishy-red glow from the inner column, the whole place had come to resemble a gloomy cave or cellar, perhaps the study of a wizard or alchemist, straight out of a book, with the distinctions that books didn't confer any smell, not of engines, not of sulfur or busted experiments, not of aged paper or somewhat more rarely, even oil paint, or the omnipresent chalk dust clinging to everything, the streams of associations and subconscious incoherence that had previously remained confined to the inside of his head and his diary pages, now scrawled across this room for everyone to see. She wouldn't have pegged him for a diary person, originally, though he claimed to be so rigorous that he once kept doing it even when he had been forced to wipe his own memory for a while... even though he also proclaimed that he never found the time to be as thorough as he wished to be.

Looking at this room now, trying to extrapolate what sort of a first impression it may have left if viewed without further knowledge of anything previous, casting it's owner as the diary-keeping sort did not seem like much of a stretch at all. Granted, it was probably cheating to draw this conclusion while she could see some of his old notes scattered about around his current workplace, some of them on the floor around the desk that seemed to have become his designated gadget-crafting workbench as of late, and indeed, the flock of random objects strewn across his surroundings did include two or three of his typical makeshift kitcheny contraptions intended for some presumably rather specific, but as of yet undisclosed later use. To craft them, he must have been looking up some of his old notes from way, way back; While Clara was by no means an expert on dating old pieces of paper – and, ultimately, grew more and more sure that he must have been using some sort of technology to keep the pages from crumbling to dust the more she considered it , there was a fairly obvious cue that made their relative age apparent: Those new faces, as it would seem, also tended to come with brand new handwriting, and the cryptic, cursive scrawl covering those pages (which Clara had since identified as belonging to the 'sand shoes' incarnation) had little in common with the writings that covered the surrounding blackboards, its letters clearly distinct from each other, the lowercase ones barely distinguishable from the capitals, and all of them made up hard, straight strokes that prematurely faded out toward the end probably due to insufficient application of pressure, as if he were losing interest in each letter halfway along the road and couldn't wait to move on to the next one, possibly a common denominator that could explain both variants of dreadful script, especially if one took into account how fast he commonly talked – or typed – and supposed that he had similar ambitions with his written word – so while the concrete aspect of his writing varied, it always succeeded in making Clara's hair stand on end.

In her capacity as a teacher (and a nigh-compulsive perfectionist), she could not help but cringe and suppose that it certainly fit that stereotype of how academics tended toward terrible handwriting, a phenomenon which, as the ample collection of assorted hilarious trivia that her incidentally well-read brain helpfully supplied, was actually known as "Doktorschrift" in the German language.

Knowing him and his track records, there was some chance that he was personally responsible for that, or would be, at some point in his personal future, and surely hadn't batted an eyelash at leaving the Federal Republic's entire stock of physicians to receive the blame.

The scattered notes themselves consisted of realistic sketches of strange creatures intersecting with what almost seemed like scattered, repetitive bits of stream-of-consciousness poetry, when it didn't slide into technical treatises or sprawling messes of symbols, seeing as he was liable to lapse into mathematical equations or random languages, in mid-sentence, wherever modern English failed to contain his erratic chains of associations, and here and there, she could make out the complex, interconnected circular structures that, judging by their resemblance to the symbols on the TARDIS controls, were most likely writing in his native language, presumably, some dialect of modern Gallifreyan, if local languages were even still a thing on a world that had been home for a space-faring civilization for so long that even the myth-shrouded days of their society's founding featured the thinkers and rulers of old abusing the Kardashev Scale for fun and profit; It boggled the mind to consider how long it might even take for anything to become myth among people with those kinds of lifespans.

The crown jewel in the collection of the various oddities arranged on and around that desk, however, was the cause of them all, his long arms sprawled over the desk, his head and chest rested somewhere between them, among what was probably dangerous volatile technical equipment, dark clothing dusted with chalk dust, colorless curls in disarray, his features all askew unaware that his trusty screwdriver had rolled off his workbench and found its own resting place on the floor.

And although she had seen him dozed off before and thought nothing of it, she couldn't help but notice, half guiltily and half with apprehension, that the odd blobs and bubbles of emotion within her seemed to be mounting the first wary, uncertain stirrings of a reaction.

She was hesitant to even approach him to begin with, his scattered belongings seeming to repel her like a circle drawn in chalk, the sort that the occasional fantasy novel protagonist used as a makeshift protective charm to ward off evil spirits, and in the gloom of their dim surroundings, their ability to make her uncharacteristically afraid that she might step on something seemed almost supernatural, or merely a pretext for a more diffuse feeling that accompanied the sight of that hooked nose and the frown lines in their vicinity, but stranger yet was the paradoxical sensation that still drew her inwards, if not necessarily in a way she was completely comfortable with. Daunting as he was, there was still something that pulled on her caring instincts, but now how she'd liked, with some unjustified urgency that she had no direction to point into while she stood frozen at the border of his region, a second thing of which she could not determine whether there was any more left to it than stale old obligation leftover from better days, and traces of searching, disorientated longing that she really ought to have squished out of herself by now.

She felt the need to react, somehow, like the sight was something she needed to do something about, but she didn't know what, or if anything she might do would even be appreciated; He might snap awake from the slightest sound, and-

She didn't even know what might happen then.

She didn't know what made this so different – She worried about him, she supposed. It wasn't an unusual thing to worry about your friend that you had braved many trials with, but none of those memories seemed to contain this sharp, hostile face, that, so far, meant mostly uncertainty to her feelings and experiences, and somehow managed to nurture that impression rather than mitigate it with every passing day, and that alone made those former times feel strangely far away, like there had been more days in that span of months than in the previous ones. She had come to regard him as under her protection, or part of her duty, someone she was supposed to support and would never just leave, but back then, the good times were abundant between the hardship, and nowadays, she couldn't slap a label on half the things that went on with them both in the room, or what came out of his mouth - And yet, if nothing else, the mere intellectual knowledge that something from those days, at very least another set of memories, was situated there before her pulled her forward with an unrealized impulse:

A long time ago, she had tried to reach for his hand, but she had been too late to grasp it before it disintegrated into radiance;

She wanted to take him into her arms and let him find a home in the gaps and inversions of her form, but there was a fair chance that he might rebuff her, and even when she made him take his old place, he did not fit into it quite like he used to (not even when she stood on the tips of her toes) left her more convinced each time that she entire procedure had taken place entirely for her own benefit;

She wanted to keep him safe and warm and comfortable, but despite all the times she'd held him, she couldn't say if he wasn't already just exactly as cold as he was supposed to be, in the frantic moments of comparing fading memories that bled the pain of lost chances all over her, and trying to concentrate either way, she just couldn't be certain.

She even wanted to seize him and plant a kiss on his cheek like she'd always done, a light brush of her skin against his that could almost have passed for a friendly peck if it hadn't come to hold its own, very special meaning between them, but she was beginning to dread that even that would not be enough to reach him, and worse, to doubt whether she had ever reached him at all, but in spite of all this, he still looked to her for guidance, and she'd found herself backed against a wall, faced with the very real possibility that she could not give it to him, that she might not be able to think of how, and that, frankly, came close to challenging her ideas of how she defined herself; She was supposed to know what to do and how to be strong for him, but within the first days of appearing before her, this strange, unbidden man before her had managed to drive her to the ends of her strength, pushed her beyond what she would handle even just by herself, and worn her out with worry until her capacity for putting up a compassionate front had fractured into frustration, much of which was squarely directed at him, and without much hesitation to return in kind, and seemingly no regard for what she thought or felt, or any of her circumstances, he was quickly starting to deserve it;

Before long, life as she knew it had completely transformed with some semblance of irreversible permanence, and she started to find herself sitting in her room, telling her three reflections that the four of them would find a way to do this, and that they should probably all calm down.

It wasn't even the first time she had seen him with a different face; Besides the occasional vague flashes left over from her intimate encounter with his time stream, there was the incident in the national gallery and the memory of affectionate gestures to her cheeks and knuckles, and what she'd chosen to view as the first stirrings of a growing admiration, no doubt a stepping stone toward his third visit to the place, this time, with her at his side to begin with; It was one thing to deal with his past which, whatever it may contain, would almost necessarily lead to the day he wound up on her doorstep, just as she had come to know him, but another to face an uncertain future with hardly anything familiar to hold on to.

She understood the rough gist of the process, that it meant that he would get to postpone his "permanent" stay of Trenzalore after all, and make it off the planet on a pair of strong legs, as impossible as that seemed a moment ago, when she found him in the bell tower, but maybe it was the very thought that she would be completely okay with this that let fear and doubt creep in before she could notice it, only blindside her by flaring up just as they were both hit by the realization the transformation was just about to finish – That some bizarre turn of circumstance had allowed her, however briefly, to see him looking more or less how she remembered him before certainly didn't help with processing the reality of the last hour... last few hours, or last few centuries, and then, before she knew it, some impulse had taken her over and compelled her to beg him to stay, a flurry of doubts blossoming inside her thoughts like a flock of butterflies, countless multicolored variations of "What if..." and "What if he doesn't" fluttering through her being and before she could even thing of getting them under wraps, there was a flash of amber, and the metamorphosis was complete – Like breath on a mirror indeed.

What followed was a sequence of minutes that, in all likelihood, would never be known to either of them as more than a wild, convoluted blur. Later she would entertain the guess that he probably wanted to be in familiar surroundings when the full extent of the change hit, or perhaps there was some further, technical reason beyond the sentimental for him to prefer to be on the TARDIS, but one might think that given his general predisposition toward side effects, he'd eventually realize that would just end with him producing a crash landing it in a manic daze, and she'd bet anything that this can't have been the first, or the last time this occurred.

'As with all biological processes, there are large individual differences', he'd once told her, when the subject had come up after their trip to the national gallery, as he proceeded to lament about a particularly gifted acquaintance who might now have a real chance to turn up alive (much to his delight at the time; They had gone out to celebrate and finally had these cocktails after all, and every few minutes, he seemed to think of someone else who might now have a chance of survival: Relatives, classmates, allies and friends he'd made for himself on his various exploits, and she thought she'd never seen his grassblade-green eyes so radiant, his smile so bright, his arms flapping about with such lightness and expectant elation, like he might just stumble across the blasted orange globe this week or the next; The irony is only bitter in retrospect.) once he got that planet un-frozen from wherever it had gotten to – The woman in question had apparently had complete control of her appearance, to the point that she could make use of the residual malleable state of the first few hours to actually 'try on' different forms, and then waltz out of the TARDIS to explore like nothing happened, although that was far from the average case; Clara supposed that it was comparable to how some humans would just have really bad teeth or increased susceptibility to colds, or how two people might go through things like puberty or periods with very different amounts of pimples or cramps, respectively. Maybe he'd just happened to be born like that, there might be some circumstantial reasons that he'd gotten unlucky more often than not, or perhaps it ran in his family, in the end, it didn't matter why, all thoughts of explanations, implications or further reasoning had been swept away beyond both their reaches, and for that horrible moment, all her unspoken fears came to life at once, ripped her gridworks of self-reassurances off her walls and left her tumbling in free fall, struggling to hang on or process shards of perceptions, her own hands, white knuckles pressed against the railings in the console room, noises crashing into her awareness, exploding machinery and dinosaur roars, the peak of adrenaline making everything inside her contract while his blue box was still hurdling past tall ferns -

In short: Chaos.

Perhaps the one thing she feared most in the universe. Or one of them, anyways.

She was supposed to have been with a person she would trust with her life at the moment, something that should have been reassuring even if it was just in a purely symbolic or motivational manner, but she didn't feel like she was – the grey, spidery creature by the console did little to help; The most he could do was to direct his incoherent ramblings at her, and although those intermittent flashes of lucidity or recognition ought to have been a mitigating factor, what he asked of her did instead inject her with a dose of fresh dread:

That day, he had looked to her for help, and she couldn't give it to him.

Behold: The most dreadful few minutes of her life so far, at least, until that point; They pretty much set the tone for how the next days, weeks, months had gone, and didn't take long to be trumped in terms of awful experiences, but it wasn't as simple as saying that everything had gone downhill from there, either. Rather, she felt as if she were carefully treading along an imaginary path of thin ice across a large, open lake, right where she presumed the thickest layer to exist, but had no way to confirm that guess.

It's not like there hadn't been any good times in between, moments where she felt as if she were at very least approaching an understanding, but then, something else would happen to throw all their progress into doubt and make her question why she even put up with all this anymore, why she'd ever agreed to come with him at all. Her life, or at least this arrangement that had been a very important part of it for the last three years, had become a stormy sea of questions, unpredictability and ambiguities, and everything, including the fact that many of these things weren't that new when you thought about it, refused to make sense.

He refused to make sense, and it put her on edge, more than it should, or perhaps less, she had principles that should have informed her actions, but how to apply them, what the various weighing scales would suggest was the outcome of the balance sheet, that seemed fuzzier by the day, and even her ideals themselves seemed harder and harder to make out to define; They had been tall towers of a shining white forest, but now they seemed hidden in the mists, and told her absolutely nothing except reasons why she was probably doing something wrong one way or another, and in the midst of it all, there was him, every bit as likely to react to a given situation with disgusting callousness as he was to turn to her and make her understand in no uncertain terms that she's caused him heartbreak, and she couldn't seem get a hold of the steering wheel, and felt own feelings and ideas being thrown into chaos, too, just by extension, like some kind of poison spreading through interconnected bodies of water.

Worry and frustration were at war inside her, feeding off each other, and reason found itself torn between demanding his condemnation, that she should just disconnect herself from this disarray or try to get the things she no longer found here somewhere else, and telling her that none of this was his fault, and yet, maybe it was, maybe some part of her still hung on to the vain fantasy that all this could have been avoided if he'd desisted from sending her away when they found the time crack on Trenzalore.

He'd left her behind, furious and sick with worry, and this was pretty much her default state these days; She never knew what he might be doing, she was afraid to even let him out of her sight, as much as he told her that he'd managed to live through the last 2000 years, or her own warnings not to wear herself out attempting the impossible – Even as she saw him now, not even remotely engaged in anything dangerous, completely still except for his soft breathing, he made her mind race. What was he even doing, nodding off in a place like this? Was he even getting enough sleep?

It was a long time ago that she'd voiced her suspicion that he needed somewhat less than a human, and he'd confirmed it, but never placed an exact number or clarification on it that didn't seem like an obvious exaggeration, and at the time, she'd accepted it, he was supposed to be from another planet after all; But ever since, she'd met tons of people who were from other planets, witnessed it being varying degrees of a big deal, and come to realize that she had no way to tell how much of his various oddities were due to his being a Time Lord, and how much were just him, just how he had been born and the choices and promises he'd made ever since; He was a Time Lord alright, but as far as she could tell with hr limited exposure to all things Gallifreyan, he was a very unusual Time Lord. and she knew for a fact that beds seem to have been a thing on his own, so the locals spent enough time asleep to merit specific furniture, despite his various wild claims; To an extent, he probably enjoyed to keep her guessing, to make himself look impressive to her by any means at his disposal, and the species difference merely provided him with an opportunity for that.

But it was also beginning to dawn on her that there was another important reason why he had avoided to disclose any sort of sensible, concrete numbers among the lines of 'five hours' or 'once every three days', one that was not all that outlandish and significantly closer to home than she was comfortable with: He didn't want her to keep tabs on him.

He'd had this more or less under control in a far from ideal but still mostly functional manner and didn't want to explain why he was or wasn't neglecting his personal dosage of shut-eye at a given moment, maybe even out of some pseudo-considerate reasoning to no make her worry, but on some level, he simply knew very, very well that she would not like the truth.

And she knew that very well, because when she decided to go home and attend to that long overdue dinner date with Mr. Pink at some yet unscheduled point in the future, he'd think that it had been half a day since she'd last seen him, not very nearly a week, it would be for those very same reasons, and she didn't even want to consider what that made of her, and her case wasn't helped in the slightest by how completely those thoughts evaporated from her mind when she'd turned her attention back to the large, slumbering Time Lord;

He'd stirred, just the slightest bit, somewhat adjusted the position of his right arm, and returned to his former stillness, but not before mumbling a brief string on incoherence which she thought might even have been English, but she could hardly make out the words.

She wondered if he was dreaming right now, perhaps of running through corridors, of tinkering with his screwdriver, or a bathtub filled with jelly babies; Or perhaps, he saw himself returned to the fields of Gallifrey, smiling with absent friends or in the arms of some long lost love... Clara rolled her eyes. The fact that he wasn't bothered by the futuristic spanner digging into the right side of his face would suggest the 'deep and dreamless' variety of sleep.

She was almost tempted to pull that thing out from under him so he might at least get his rest on the desk proper, if nothing else, its surface was more or less even.

Then again, it might not be worth it. His face -faces, all thirteen of them – seemed to have more or less withstood this sort of abuse for years untold and come out fine enough, and she didn't really want to disturb what little sleep he granted himself, or, given the circumstances, had simply been overtaken by.

It occurred to her that even if she could somehow get her hands on some solid numbers, some representative statistics documenting how much time the average Time Lord (or Lady) devoted to excursions into the realm of dreams, there were quite a number of factors known – and possibly more that were unknown – to her that might predispose him toward needing somewhat less sleep or just having a harder time getting it, or at least would, if he were human. He was of above-average intelligence, to say that least, as far as she'd read that could correlate with a lesser amount of duvet-time, and on top of that, he'd often keep himself busy with some rush of very relevant work of great variety, he was always active, always learning a new language or testing out some new idea; Thinking of explorers, her thoughts would lead her to her lifelong faible for travel books and how that had inevitably lead her to familiarize herself with various books about the multidisciplinary genius Alexander Humboldt and his expeditions to South America, and how he'd made do with six hours tops at the height of those trips, categorizing and sampling the local life, measuring land that had never been drawn onto maps before, and speaking out against slavery and colonial policies along the way – and given that he'd accomplished all this with the limitations of a human, one might imagine what was possible if you ventured slightly beyond them – Or didn't have to imagine, if you happened to be Clara Oswald and were personally acquainted with another quite distinguished explorer, a man who had probably seen more of this world and its highlights and turning point than any other individual, at very least when you only considered the two-legs-two-arms variety of life, and much of what he'd witnessed had been none too pretty, either, which perhaps – or, most certainly – accounted for another common source of insomnia.

In addition to all this, he was, in some shape or form, certainly in some ways if not necessarily in the ones that counted, a... somewhat older person. She was more hesitant with applying that classification, not in the least because she could very much imagine his indignant reaction – but, just as a general statement. Old People. Those tended to sleep less, or have a harder time sleeping, than younger individuals, or that's what it was like in humans.

When they first met, he'd told her pretty much right off the bat that he was a time traveler from an advanced alien civilization, that he had two hearts and a personal age in the quadruple digits, but given the sheer amount of new and incredible things he'd brought with her when he crashed into her her life and slammed headfirst into her understanding of the world, he might as well have told her that he's some sort of manic, magical pixie. Her means of understanding what any of this meant were restricted to observation, imagination and purely intellectual understanding.

Given his old-fashioned clothes and never-ending well of unbelievable anecdotes, it was not too hard to believe that he was older than he looked; Despite his at times exceptionally poor grip on his inner five-year old, he did, all things considered, carry himself much like a sort of mad professor. As early as during their trip to Ankhaten, she could tell that he had fierce conviction grounded in experience, and deep thoughts about this world and the place of its inhabitants in it; He had his fair share of silly moments, which connected them at times, simply because they had the same quirky sense of humor, but his more childish impulses grated on her nerves often enough; But at other times, everything that came from his mouth had at least seven meanings, all his gestures and reactions had their place in his larger relation to the universe. At first she was daunted, and perhaps insulted that she'd be made to feel this way, because she refused to be any sort of ghost or replacement or stand in, and having seen his world, she wondered what other place this even left for her in this world, whether he'd see her as someone to have an equal discourse with, but then, he'd told her: "You are the only mystery worth solving" and she knew he was talking of all humanity , and simultaneously, of what kept him engaged with the world; And he was also talking of her, in particular, as he saw her every day and longed to know her, he was really as mesmerized as he seemed, as she'd hoped he was. In hindsight, she realized that the mystery or her Echoes must also have been on his mind at that time, but it was one of many things, and there was no seeing one instead of another for him, no reduction to any kind of surface, because that was the amazing thing about him:

He was a person who could value the wideness of the world, the excitement of the rare and unknown and the turning of the wheels of fate, but that didn't take away from his appreciation for the value or, say, a single little girl, or a smart, dependable woman, there was no contradiction between his valuing of the macro- or microcosm, and for her, Clara Oswin Oswald, the impossible girl, who, as an entity, extended into both those realms, he had nothing but fascination, and recognition of her as an entity like himself, even if that came with suspicion and wariness fostered by his long, embittering life that just didn't allow him to believe that one good thing could fall into his lap like this, too hardened to believe in impossible heroes when one stared him in the face every time he walked past a mirror, and too disillusioned of himself to imagine that someone might decide to risk life and limb to repay him for all the good he did to this world.

All that time, he kept asking who she was, when he should really has been asking that of himself, should have wondered who he was, or what he might come to be: Her chosen, the closest person to her in the world.

Or was he? He had been, at the time, but the moment she had pulled hat stunt was just one instant, one thing, that was still out there, but in her personal past now, and much, much further in his; There was nothing, nothing all assuring that they couldn't adrift apart regardless, because there was never any certainty of that, and while there might be some things that don't always end, there were none that didn't at least have the capacity to.

She'd liked herself in that role, the one judging him worthy of her, the one who would polish herself to shine to meet him, the one conspiring to leave some of her fruit-orange lipstick on his pale cheeks, paying no mind to the little boys looking for a playmate and politely refusing the suitors piling at her feet because she'd found the one who understood, who would misjudge as her as sweet or simple just because she was caring, or as blind to the little wonders contained in the laugh of a child just because some part of her always lusted for the starts, who could look past the veil of her youth and see choice and deliberateness where others expected little girls that needed to be lectured about what she'd chosen as the most basic parts of her world, and what a sweet though it had been, oh, how often she' stared at herself in her mirrors, the sin of self-love possessing all her eyes, telling herself that she was the 'boss', the mistress of her own little imaginary castle, hanging the destroyer of worlds among her cloudy trophies.

She didn't even get more than she bargained for, but having expected what might hit her, the days on which she might have to pay for all her indulgences and perceptions, and taste the truth of the unfathomable depths, the abyss of years she had judged herself fit to not just handle, but take for her own decoration, just as he had taken her for his, although he did, at least, have the guts to admit his mistake, losing whatever points that earned him through the unfairness that was always implicit in the "It's not you, it's me" game, the cowardice to only admit his feelings after he'd assured that nothing would become of them, leaving her stunned, alone with processing the knowledge of what her hasty, defensive words had just thrown away.

He'd said he was 2000 years old, that he'd made many mistakes, that he should not have misjudged his place, that the blame was not on her – but all he'd done was to make her wonder whether she hadn't misjudged hers from the very beginning.

When he showed up at her doorstep, he wasn't quite that far ahead yet, although he'd already had his fair share of tearing a blazing trail of not mostly glory through the fabric of the universe.

When he first showed up at her doorstep, underneath all hi big coats and bow ties and the occasional wigs, he'd looked thirty.

She'd known he wasn't, she wouldn't want him to be, if anything, his looks had presented a nifty loophole to get her hands on someone who wasn't thirty, who secretly 'counted' as those experienced patrician types she'd always had a bit of a thing for (but never chose to actually pursue, given that it barely looked like the reasonable thing to do) without anyone noticing and sticking up their nose unless she chose to tell them.

But now her 'loophole' was gone and she was forced to face what she had done, what she had always known to be unreasonable , what she'd always tried to avoid because she knew it would never work out, because it was the one thing that might have been a little too impossible even for the two of them - "Trick is, don't fall in love."

There it was, the confirmation of a chance, of a reciprocation, only after both these things seemed gone forever.

Maybe, at some point, because she was only human, because she didn't get everything right all the time, because no one could be as right as she tried and wished to be, she'd made the unproven, unspoken assumption that he was, at least, some equivalent of thirty, however rough it may be. The truth, it turned out, was significantly more complex, and it turned out, aging was the one thing that worked very, very differently for Time Lords and humans. He wasn't just long-lived, he was subject to a different life cycle, one that involved not just changing forms bits of looking outwardly old or young all crisscrossed, and as if to make it even more confusing, she'd found out firsthand that a "fresh" face didn't even necessarily have to look particularly fresh.

Should he manage to locate and un-freeze his planet within her lifetime, and find his family sufficiently alive to introduce them to her, she'd probably have no means to tell whether a given individual was his mother or his granddaughter, at least not by appearance alone. His appearance, right now, roughly evoked a human in his fifties, but any more than a passing glance would have revealed details that were distinctly off, some diffusely obvious in is shiftings and motions, others, somewhat harder to pinpoint completely, and more obvious in quiet hindsight than they had ever been in direct confrontation, not least the oddity of staring at a man who had all the wrinkles to show for a purely hypothetical lifetime, but none of the small marks, scars and calluses that would be expected to go with them; His hand were very, very far from smooth as a baby's, and yet, in some ways closer than it should have been possible.

This detail, at least, had since been remedied – even though they were all new, his active, dangerous lifestyle had not taken very long to get his hands and face covered in subtle marks and scratches, nothing anywhere close permanent scars yet but a sizable transient population that came and went like the tides, among them the last faded remainder of the circular mark left by their recent trip to the end of the universe; They healed faster than they would in a typical human, but given the amount of explosion they'd ended up running away from, there was never a shortage of new little bruises and scorch marks, superficial and slight as they may be; For many, she could make a very good guess where he might have gotten them from, others might not have even happened on her watch, as a cold a comfort as that might be. Since he was rarely ever standing still, she did not get to inspect him up close all that often, but when she did, the signs of what, to him, merely constituted the average daily wear and tear were sufficiently apparent on his pale skin, not that they hadn't been on his previous exterior, (he'd had something of a snow-white look going on back in the day), but even at his most irritating she could not seem to detach that air of fragility from him and she wasn't even sure if it was really him, the remainders of his mortality etched onto his face, or merely the filter of her own perception;

Maybe it was only natural that she would be worried, that the events that had transpired would lead her might predispose her to see him in a different way, although she was herself not quite sure whether it should; One thing was the belated realization of the truth and another was the pining for faded, impossible dreams, hanging on to something long gone out of obligation to a past of which the grinding of time had left nothing but the creeping suspicious that what she'd once yearned for had been left scattered in broken bit and pieces somewhere on Trenzalore, but then there was the present, the presence of this man who certainly wouldn't have wanted to lose respect in her eyes, and would it have been any different if he'd crashed at her place in some humiliating state after something significantly more mundane, such as one too many gulp of vodka?

She had compassion and obligation, yes, but she'd been made to feel the limits of what she had perhaps arrogantly picked for her own definition, and all she could think of was the desolation at the end of the world, the sheer stench of the butchery perpetuated by Daleks and malfunctioning killer droids, and how she didn't want to see him like this, despite all her earlier proclamations of wanting to know all of him down to the ugliest secrets, had no desire to witness things that would complicate it like that... She didn't want to have to see her best friend, her greatest inspiration, someone she had even once...desired... speaking incoherence in some filthy coat he might have procured heaven knows where, or throwing himself out of airlocks, or throwing other things into her face, like brazen arrogance that made her want to break that blasted face off after he'd just gotten it, or that overwhelmed sense of being lost in the dark, or anything about that unrecognizable, half dissolved being she'd gotten stuck with, and of course that wasn't all the truth, not nearly, not all there had been since then, but it was easy rationale to slip into, the practical, beckoning excuse of the difference between his world and hers, like it hadn't become one and the same long ago, like there was a way to go back to him and her before there was a 'them', like 'them' wasn't happening all around them at every moment of every day, making sure that he didn't meet his final end ahead of schedule – through the wonders of time travel, it had even been in their power to become retroactively intertwined, although one might wonder if time travel was really needed to accomplish that, or if a mind longing to make sense of the universe was enough, if it's need for order outweighed the distortions needed to rationalize and reinterpret everything as leading up to moments that were now done and over with as far as her personal time line was concerned, and there was nothing in the laws of physics promising that they couldn't part tomorrow and never meet again.

It didn't bother her that much that he might outlast her, as much as it might have bothered others before her because first and foremost, she wanted him to continue before she herself even featured in; But then again, he'd come preciously close to crumbling to dust in her arms not too long ago, which was what left them in this bizarre situation to begin with, through the whimsical nature of time travel and misguided heroism addressed to each of them, he'd made it off that planet, sure as he was that he never would, but he'd left some of himself behind on Trenzalore, a first taste for the planet's soil to chew on before its worms got their bristles on the rest of him, and he'd remained marred by their time apart while she stayed the same, and kept having to remind herself that his current form was technically younger and newer than it had been in a long time, bar the brief instant just before the change. In a way, she'd helped him to a complete fresh start – whether the Time Lords behind the crack had acted out of actual gratitude or pure self-preservation, granting him that new regeneration cycle might be seen as tantamount to granting him another lifetime, a second chance at spending his time in ways he wouldn't regret, or perhaps doing what he truly wanted, a deck of cards, of days to live out newly shuffled – and yet, it wasn't as if the burdens and choices from his previous try at existence didn't carry over – if anything he seemed even more acutely aware of them now that he was back to his favored activity at long last and had to somehow justify to himself and the world why he'd outstayed his welcome, find a way to put the days that were ever ticking away to some good use. Or perhaps he'd always been this doubtful about himself and his place in the universe, and had merely grown too tired, too disillusioned to hide it anymore. Maybe it had been a life decision, like a new year's resolution, perhaps, if either of them would be willing to indulge that optimism; Indeed, there was much cause to see him less as someone starting over with a clean slate, with most of his connections resting in the far past, and more as a derelict remnant of bygone ages, an individual who had exhausted his natural lifespan and been artificially kept in the closest mockery of alive technology could produce, something he would likely never have considered as a favorable or commendable option if he didn't have this quest, or mission to carry out, but once again, for the umpteenth time, the long shadow of the Time War would not allow him to end, as much as his disintegrating mind proved harder to renew than his failing flesh.

Then again, one might consider that of the many forms he'd taken, he'd only worn three of them to the limit, many of his allotted years having cut short by careless foes, burnt too fast by his hazardous lifestyle, or freely given for the safety of others. In the light of this, it was perfectly feasible that he might not actually be all that ancient by Time Lord standards, and even of the times he'd managed to 'keep' a particular incarnation up to its natural expiration date, two of those, including the latest, had followed centuries of warfare, probably his least favorite activity in the world – to use an almost insulting understatement - and much of the first had been spent trapped on Gallifrey. They'd even 'executed' him once, hadn't they? If they hadn't, they could have spared themselves giving him a whole new cycle, and ensuring that there would be plenty more of him to go around and get on their nerves, so in a sense, it could be viewed as a form of justice being served, as his merely getting back what unfair circumstances had taken from him. But life wasn't measured in years alone, it consisted of experiences, stories, and their concentration in the passage of time. Even before he departed, he had by all intents of purposes had something of a full life behind him, he'd gone to school, made friends, presumably worked, as a researcher or engineer perhaps, even trying his hand at interstellar activism once, the non-interference policy be damned - he'd probably gotten married and certainly had kids and grandkids, what almost seemed like the beginning of a full-blown dynasty, and there'd been bitter losses involved at some point, given that the lady in question was no longer around, and all that ought to have accounted for a certain net value of experience, or weight, no matter how much additional time there might be left; So maybe he had never felt anything as constricting as her undeniable approach of the big thirty, no need to chose if he had all the time in the world to do things subsequently, but she, too, had spent some time preparing, or exclusively following other obligations before the day she took his hand and ran away, by no means leaving everything else behind, but she was still splitting her time, still deducting from her total number of days by spending un-counted gaps in his realms, but as much as she dreaded to imagine the end result, a somewhat lower number on her headstone might just be a fine payment because the number would still be incorrect and she'd have spent those days, or rather, the days that containing both counted and uncounted hours living to the fullest, doing all the things she wanted to do. She had priorities, but ultimately accepted no compromises which, of course, made implications of incompatibilities and consequences her worst enemies, but the day where she would be forced to look where her eyes didn't dare to tread was yet so come.

As for him, he'd probably been used to some regularity back on Gallifrey, an idea of everyday life that would have little overlap with the phenomenon as it was known to her to begin with, but that was so long ago that he'd lost all ability to even tolerate a slow day, so that even his stay on Trenzalore had been something he'd processed more as a long-term assignment to monster-hunting on one place than a definite return t long-term accommodations, a last stand – because that place and its inhabitants deserved better than to be known to him only as the place of certain doom or a place of warfare, and getting to know it before his final and permanent stay on the remote colony world was perhaps the one certain good thing that had come out of this whole confusion which, just to illustrate its bizarre nature, and that of his existence in general, had involved raiding his own tomb. He'd crossed his own path so often – usually more living than dead – that he had running gags – which Clara had been all too eager to get in on – actual inside jokes going on with himself.

The emphasis of the patent ludicrousness of these events might do the awe-inducing, humbling potential of those events a disservice, but it might keep someone from driving themselves mad with the mind-boggling, terrifying implications of those moments and their fragility in the web of events. Even before Trenzalore (either visit), she'd seen him reduced to tears describing the horrors he'd witnessed, the wonders he'd seen, the effort to stuff new worthwhile skills and experiences inside his skull that he embarked on every day with varying degrees of success, the people he'd met, the lessons he'd learned and the price he'd paid for all those privileges. He had personally acquainted himself with the abysses of this world, and the abysses had stared back into him; He'd come within hair's breath of his physical annihilation countless times and being lucky enough to technically survive did little to mitigate the strains he'd endured, the pain in all flavors of physical, emotional, mental and metaphysical, and worn himself out as much as that might suggest; It was not stretch to say that he'd lived significantly more in his two millenia than your average model citizen Time Lord who'd obediently eat their vegetables and live out their ten thousand years in the crowns of some secluded spires up high in the enclosure of their domed cities, never leaving the planet, never getting all to attached to anything that lay beyond, perhaps forgetting to be alive as they eyed the cosmos as a detached, dispassionate observer.

So yes, he was ancient, he was ancient before, he was even more ancient now, to a degree that almost seemed proportional to the – to her – sudden shift in his looks, and she couldn't quite say which of the new things and discrepancies were products of the regeneration itself and which were merely consequences of their long separation which had taken a while to become apparent. Then again, 'fifty-something' was more or less what he'd consistently acted like even before, albeit a very eccentric one with a very poor grip on his inner five year old – and his inner showy adolescent, to be precise, neither of which had particularly improved on Trenzalore, much to her continued annoyance, and the unexpected result of her getting personally acquainted with that five year old, almost as if someone out there in eternity – or most likely, no one but herself – had dared her to try herself at the futile task of reaching directly into that thick, crowded skull of his and see if she could convince any of its individual components to make sense, or just manage to get him – either him – to calm down in whatever roundabout-retroactive manner that might have been possible; Nothing was ever particularly straightforward with him, no part, no aspect of life, and that didn't mean that it didn't count, as their own analogue they'd found for themselves in this diverse and crazy world, if they had truly found anything for certain ever at all, as certain as anything ever got around a man of whom she could never be certain if he was even being serious, or rambling madness.

Speaking of which, his general immaturity was another of these things she could not help but see in a slightly different light now; Not that it hadn't annoyed her before, not that she hadn't simply been younger when they first met, less experienced, her ambitions softer, more diffuse, although she didn't want to use the word "dreamer", she resented some of its implications, and to others, she was closer now that she would have been then, her ideas now firmer and sharper, and in most cases in the process of being realized, in full progress every day, it wasn't even a real option anymore to leave them as just vague floating ideas, and she was beginning to know the taste of dreams realized, something that, she supposed, must exist in his world, too, together with a byproduct she was only just beginning to get stuck with, an experience that neither of them had ever wanted to become something they shared, and yet, something that was undoubtedly bound to accumulate as she tread along her increasingly uncertain path: The waste dreams realized leave behind.

But this, too, made it more obvious. Those things he did, those things he'd always done, the ridiculousness, they just didn't come across the same way if he did it like this, not just older looking, but that general scruffy, wild, incoherent quality that followed him these days like a dusting of an aura, half of the time, despite a fairly formal getup, although the times he went for that ...interesting choice of jumper certainly didn't help; He might as well be wearing some white undershirt underneath, given how pale he was, but frequently enough, he didn't, but the whole thing still managed to look like some pattern of a starry sky, and he obviously shot down the notion of catching any sort of cold in that thing as patently ridiculous, and evaded her attempts to prove her point by poking him through one of these holes with the sort of vehement protest reminiscent of someone's annoying younger sibling reacting to the threat of a pillow fight or tickle battle, although distinctly on the more distinctly, unapologetically peeved end of that spectrum, and he did it looking like that, large, narrow frame evading her teasing little fingers, gray curls approaching their inevitable return to a state of disarray no matter which of his varied endeavors at styling it he'd pursued today. At first, she was relatively glad to see it, just because it was something she recognized, something that, perhaps, at first had been easy to overlook given his somewhat less open demeanor, but in the context, it was exposed to her, or just appeared to her, as somewhat less innocuous, not quite a thirty-year-old dwelling in their parent's basement, he was doing way too much productive contributions to society for that, might even have paid some taxes for his work with UNIT, sure why not, but the way he refused to deal with any iteration of society for extended periods of time, and yet, took none too well to extended periods of isolation might be described with that parallel. His immaturity struck her as that of a cut flower, or dried, perhaps, since those didn't spoil quite as quickly, but definitely something plucked, rootless, something you'd keep in a vase, something like a still-life in rosy pastel colours alluring you from beyond a pale of glass, from where it could tempt, and yet, remain forever out of reach, caught in a moment, frozen in time – Sure, maybe that was too strict a judgment or too far an exaggeration, cut flowers might be observed as they open if you watch for a long, long time or take the risk to skip bits and pieces of time before you come back later.

But like those flowers, he was more likely to crumble to dust before he'd ever reach full bloom, let alone bear fruit; He was a frozen flower bud crawling with insects, a mummified apple forgotten in the branches, an old man too set in his ways for anyone, including himself, to have a chance at setting him straight or finding the sense in bothering. Come the Time War, come Trenzalore, whatever it was and however long it might hold him up, what little it might leave of whoever he was when he first got involved, let alone of that ignorant boy who'd once played in the red fields, it should be of little surprise that what little the never-ending fight with the Daleks had spat back out went back to his journey, for it was the only life he knew how to live anymore, and all roads back home were cut off – All she could really offer in the face of that insurmountable pyramid of years was the barest mitigation, perhaps little more than a temporary distraction from the inevitable.

Her thoughts went back to Ophelia, and the fascination readers seemed to have with her, all the way from the Elizabethan Era to right now – Clara as someone with a clue of the contemporary literature would be aware of the many ripoffs she had spawned, how 'mad scenes' had become a bit of a staple after that, because there was just something about a disoriented, disheveled madperson going about in a filthy nightgown, speaking madness, picking up flowers to sniff, handing out sharp, stinging, painfully accurate criticism of the world around her as if they were bouquets, with such uncomprehending bluntness as a person more in charge of their wits would never be able to muster. The beauty of broken things, perhaps, the tragedy of wasted potential, the challenge in deciphering the madness. But why, she had often wondered, did any metaphor about any sort of beauty, broken or otherwise, have to come packaged in the shape of a pretty girl, why did she, like many such tragic objects of fascination, the Lolitas and Sabeths of this world, only seem to exist to display the weight of Hamlet's failures without much voice of her own? Wouldn't the 'beauty of broken things' be better served by the form and example of a middle-aged man who'd been thrown out by his family after drinking himself to ruin, or perhaps an old lady barely able to hold on to the crumbling ruins and faded, once joyous memories of her long and bountiful life? Maybe she'd overestimated herself there, or underestimated the task, or the metaphor; There would be precedents for that, last but not least another, significantly more recent book where one of the main character's friends is unceremoniously dumped by the girlfriend he previously though to have a profound and unbreakable connection with, just as he was about to undergo a surgery that would leave him blind, quite transparently because it would look slightly worse if she did so afterward. Of course, Clara had been enraged and expected a thorough denouncement of the girl who had received little characterization other than her capacity for such shallowness, but the protagonist, despite her own sub-optimal health situation, or maybe exactly because of it, unexpectedly presented what the author probably considered a more empathetic point of view, that may be he'd expected too much from a teenaged girl, maybe she didn't have the strength, or other plans in her life, that maybe – 'It wasn't very nice what you did, going blind. It wasn't your fault, but it wasn't very nice',

Clara had, of course, disagreed with the notion at the time, and found the book to be rather pretentious besides, too much meta for the sake of meta and the presentation of the individual she'd be most inclined to agree with as all too obviously wrong for all the premise of making up your own opinion got touted; At the time, she would have indignantly assured anyone willing to doubt her that her 'never' would always mean 'never' and her 'always' would never mean anything other than 'always'.

But that wouldn't be the only conviction of hers that had been made to shake lately; Maybe those 'broken things' required the distance and idealization for anyone to scour them for beauty, when the smell of them couldn't leap off the pages and overwhelm them.

It wasn't very nice what he did, changing his face and leaving her behind to worry what he might get up to in such a state. It wasn't his fault, but it wasn't very nice, and that they both would have expected better of her did little to keep him away from the receiving end of the poorly concealed anger and frustration she might have spared him from if she'd just accepted and confronted its existence instead of trying her hardest deny that she was susceptible to such irrational imperfections.

It would have seemed like such a convenient narrative now, even one that could be made to sound reasonable, the idea that whatever misguided attachments she may have had toward him had just decayed right in front of her like some old scraps of carrion, that she'd come to see him in the cold, wan light of complete disenchantment, or found him too different to connect to, be it too different from her, or too different from before, but that wouldn't have been the true story, and it certainly wasn't hers, she didn't even want it to be hers, and she'd long since decided on another, as bizarre as it might seem to refer to the large, weathered-looking man before her as 'her clever boy'. Not it that it would have been any more correct to say that he'd put all boyish things away; There was nothing about this that would have been easy to overlook or make sense of.

But whatever she'd attempt to classify him as – a silly boy, a bratty adolescent, a middle-ages eccentric, a worn geezer, a sheer abyss, a thirty year old basement dweller who couldn't bring a date home unless his mommy approves,none of these or all at once – He merely looked the part now, and that would be his good right even if he did have halfway decent control over how he'd wind up looking. However he acted, he'd acted that way for a long, long time beyond what would be proportional to anything in humans, which might just be how that worked, or a particularity of his personality. Maybe he'd come off as stuffy and overly serious when he was younger, when he'd acted just the same, but in a context where his occasional preoccupation with mischief would have been seen as expected if not permissive. Maybe he used to be rather like her, projecting a semblance of presentability, until whatever obligations had kept him from departing until his first serving of hair had gone pure white, when he, too, had discovered a part of himself that, once unleashed, refused to be stuffed back into a drawer. Or maybe she simply didn't understand. She couldn't say; She did think that she had been able to tell which of the versions she'd encountered at the National Gallery was the oldest, which the youngest, even when their outward appearance would have suggested pretty much the opposite. The him from before Gallifrey's disappearance was one thing; But she even picked up the subtle differences between the version she'd accompanied and the one in the suit, she could tell 'her' version had since come to be a bit embarrassed of his life back then, unaware that he'd soon – or not soon at all, but eventually – consign the bow tie to the heap of "embarrassing fashion mistakes" (And thinking of it as something that had happened before might just make the memory of the moment she saw him discard the bow tie and the disturbing ease with which he'd given away what used to be his favorite pocket watch somewhat more bearable. It might. ) and there were details about how he spoke, how he carried himself, or the expression in his eyes that might betray the truth to the attentive observer, but the reason she'd been able to tell was probably that she'd had quite some time to study him and his little mannerisms; She wasn't confident that she could have pulled it off with any given Time Lord the way she might easily be able to compile photographs from throughout the life of any given human into a neat chronological order.

In any case, there was no simple equation in the style of "dog years" that she could have used to speculate what a comparable human equivalent to his age or life stage would be, but she had an inkling that it was most certainly not "thirty".

Purely chronologically, he'd existed longer than the language she'd grown up speaking, in this particular form, a few months, at most, although she could never be exactly sure how much time would have elapsed between their last meeting – sometimes he seemed so impatient she'd assume he'd just pop straight ahead to the next week, but one thing the regeneration didn't seem to have fixed was his tendency to get quite easily distracted, and then sometimes he'd arrive in a state, refusing to be calmed down in ways that didn't involve mortal danger (But what else could she do? How were you support to comfort someone who didn't think much of usually approved methods such as "great warm hug"?) and bringing her ever new reasons to worry herself sick. After their separation on Trenzalore, the mere thought of longer strips of his time being lost to her was enough to drive a dreadful feeling into the pit of her stomach, and the less sense he made on a given day, the more she had taken to scanning him for any signs of a longer absence, like whether he'd changed clothes since his last visit and the general state his outfit was in, the length and style of his hair, how long it'd been since he last shaved, or if he'd lost any weight. The presence of additional wrinkles would indicate a rather more drastic disparity in the times since they last saw each other, so she usually assumed that any of those must have been a product of her own, overly frantic imagination, or maybe a simple consequence of the fact that she'd never memorized and cataloged every crease on his face, or even all detail on the previous one, not that it stopped her from feeling dread at the thought that those precious memories of a time neither of them could ever return to were already beginning to fade, when they were probably just as accurate as they had ever been. She wondered if those memories were precious to him, or if they were now just something embarrassing he, or the person using the title "The Doctor" at the time however that related to his current self, just ought to have desisted from, at best – or worst? – something for which he should apologize to her.

As it stood, they both seemed to have gotten themselves cut on the shards of false hopes, but that was besides the point; The point was that she wasn't sure where he stood, what he wanted or expected of her; As distant as he might feel to her nowadays, he hadn't exactly thrown her out; Quite the opposite, he'd practically begged her to stay, told her he needed her.

Okay, alright, she was here, she was willing, but what did he need her for, what did he need her to do, what did he need her to be? What did he need, period, however it may compare to any other individual, human or otherwise.

Quite apparently, he needed her to be there to make sure he doesn't get himself killed, alright, she'd been there for that, but beyond this, what could she do, what could she be for him? Not his girlfriend apparently, fine, but this wasn't about her, or her place, but about him, and how she could do something that felt like she was doing more than the bare minimum of scratching the surface, because she felt she should be doing something, because she couldn't just un-love him at the drop of a hat.

In the end, she couldn't just leave him, her sense of duty refused to let her run out on him, her intellect refused to give up on the hard task she had deemed herself worthy of, her pride wouldn't be satisfied with any simpler enterprise, her courage would not allow her to back down on what she considered under her protection, and her heart would always lie with him – in the end, the reason their lives were too interwoven to ever be disentangled was that she didn't want to. She had made it that way, she had made them to be to be connected, and he would always have that place in her lap to return to even if he ceased his adoration and told her to get herself to a nunnery. But if there was no kind of loving that could mend what he'd experienced, if it was too far beyond the realm of her own experiences for her to comprehend, if her fingertips would never succeed in reaching him, she'd try to reach him with her words, and discussions of the abstract.

She'd give him her silent presence if he would have nothing else, she'd give him her best guesses if she couldn't crack the mystery, and provide him with what little comfort she could muster.

Right now, that meant tearing her gaze from his sleeping form and turning her attention toward the hatches around the central column, situated right beneath the console.

Her hand went straight for one of the handles as soon as she was remotely within range, but what she found once she knelt down and pulled it open somewhat dimmed her confidence when she was met with the sight of various machinery. She was sure that she ought to have had at least a rough guess of what each of them was for, but this was the first time she'd had a reason to personally open any of them since his 'redecoration' of the console room.

She surmised that she might simply have gotten them mixed up, happens to everyone, especially when they're distracted with all sorts of thoughts, but Clara was obviously not satisfied with that for an explanation. Scanning the inside of the hatch again, she suggests to herself that this was where they put that blasted Turkey that sneaky bastard had used to distract her – but she's still mindful enough to resist the urge to slam the hatch back in place – While that alone might have been a legit way to vent her frustrations a she doubted that the potential side-effect rousing said bastard from his sleep would bring her satisfaction. So, she remains careful as she closes that hatch and heads straight for the next where – much to her relief – she finds exactly what she expects, more or less. One of the things he keeps here is usually a change of clothes in case of unexpected goop or unscheduled showers, and here they are, although he'd since adapted the contents to fit his 'new look', in fact, she thinks she recognizes that particular burgundy dress shirt from their little excursion to Sherwood forest. This implied that he had, at some point, gone through his things and gotten rid of the sets of clothing he'd previously kept here, including a few dozen multicolored spare bow ties, and possibly dumped back into the main wardrobe with all the other seldom-used costume options, or simply disposed of them.

She couldn't imagine him keeping them as a memento somehow or displaying much else in the vein of sentimental gestures; He'd probably just casually reached into the compartment grabbed handfuls of clothes and carelessly thrown them out to make room for the new content. To the left of the spare outfits, she could see that he'd gotten himself a new diary, too, (another physical reminder of a shared past purged; another reminder that this idiot was liable to as much as wipe his entire memory if left to his own devices in crucial moments) next to a fairly new blank book with many pages left to fill, she found a worn notebook wit curled, yellowed pages, presumably records from his long stay on Trenzalore, evidence of days she hadn't been part of.

Sure, she could peek inside, he'd let her get her hands on it before; The issue was not even some uncertainty whether she'd still be allowed in there, the threat of finding out which side of the completely redrawn, confusingly bizarre lines between intimacy and distance this might have fallen on – Even if he were to wake and scowl at her in disapproval, she could probably talk herself out of it, distract him, convince him, turn his previous words against him. If he was going to get pissed off, let him get pissed off! That wasn't the sort of thing that would intimidate her. But she felt exposed, doing this in his presence, she somehow felt like it would be going behind his back, like she'd somehow be forcing access into his current mind by trying to follow the line of events that created it; She wasn't even sure, didn't even think that he was doing anything like deliberately closing himself off, at least not in all aspects. He might not see this as anything out of the ordinary, let alone a breach of trust. But she had to consciously make herself shake off this sense of going through a stranger's things. The potential mundane reality that he had simply grown apart from her, gotten over her completely at any point during hose years of constant strife, that she'd come to comprehend that after reading through enough of his exploits in Christmas town for them to blur together, might or might not be worse than attributing it all to some kind of experience she might never be able to relate to beyond a level of imagination or abstract thought. The notes held in that battered journal encompassed a long, long time, so who knew how many average days of 'relatively uneventful' monster-hunting she' have to read through to get to the significant, transforming bits. Maybe it was the mere accumulation of many such days that was the significance, he'd spent more such days in these frozen fields than she would ever see, too much for her to know where to even start.

So she left the diary where it was.

To the right, however, she found the picnic rugs more or less as she'd expected them, although she supposed that there wouldn't have been much of a reason to switch those; Although, given that he'd refurnished the entire room, there was no certainty of anything anymore.

But given that she'd found the picnic rugs – the closest to a blanket she could procure in the vicinity of the console room – she knew at least what to do, at least one way to partially vent her conflicting feelings, to do something, however small and temporary.

Mustering some firmness of decisiveness in the pattern of her steps, she marched back to the napping Time Lord and his desk once she'd closed the hatch back down, the green-and-red plaid pattern of the designated improvized blanket beneath the fingers of her right hand.

The handy excuse of not wanting to wake him was certainly helpful in the task of avoiding whether or not her reluctance to actually touch him – for example, in the process of removing those scattered tools from under him – involved her being uncharacteristically daunted among its reasons, but then again, he'd probably have protested if he were awake.

Besides, he could very well picture him – as he was now – as a relatively light sleeper. Or she could picture him otherwise, she wasn't sure either way, hadn't been given all that many opportunities to find out.

But the least she could do was to spread that picnic rug out and drape it over his sleeping form, cautiously tugging at it here, just pulling at the cloth with the tips of her fingers, mindful to minimize even indirect contact, ruling out any chance of heat transfer, and yet, with some ache driving her purposeful operation, something longing to manifest as much as it could within the boundaries they had set for themselves, some need to know he was warm and safe and comfortable, as much as he would ever be, as much as safe heavens were anything that could be found in his future no matter what.

It was the sort of existence he was, alien – not in the sense that he was from another world, but rather, it was a sort of air he'd had about him to begin with, something that would make even Gallifrey a place he'd stick out from, perhaps even more than he did right here, or on earth. A quality of being just a bit out of synch with the cosmos he was striding through, able to see through its folds from an outsider's perspective, shining light on overlooked things, exposing naked emperors and two-dimensional props of cardboard scenery thought to be absolutes, his labyrinthine marvel of a mind racing faster than even he could follow, and for each day on which she felt that this made him the only challenge worthy of her, there was another on which she felt unsure if she would be able to keep up with him; at least right now, he wouldn't be going anywhere, and that was one sort of comfort at least, cold as it may be.

But she already knew very well that even if she'd been able to hold him right now, to wrap herself around him like she'd done it wit that picnic rug, there would be no warmth to him. He wouldn't exactly be cold either, but, if she had to spend time in a room of just about that temperature, she'd probably make sure to be wearing long sleeves.

Before, when the sensation of his weight in her arms had still been a common occurrence, she used to think of it as a romantic, almost magical quality, like he was a prince from a frozen kingdom in some snowy, faraway land, where they dwelt in spires of ice with windows in snowflake-like patterns. But that was before he'd gone and had the juice soundly beaten out of him in the fields of Trenzalore, little by little, through ages of endless strife, and made her feel like she'd gotten stuck with a faded mirage, tired, restless, and so very lost on his way.

And perhaps unavoidably, she had found herself wondering what she might feel like to him, wretchedly warm perhaps, like burnt, stagnant air on a day of suffocating midsummer, where yellowed grass went to waste pining for relief from the discomfort of the heat that leaked from the sorely inefficient processes in every single of her cells, accumulating faults, with laughably little means to repair them at all, needing eight hours a day for what little meagre maintenance she was capable of, yet still burning up with feverish speed, going to waste in his very grasp, and when the longer she allowed herself to brood on such thoughts, the more she asks herself the absurd question why he ever tolerated her arms and fingers in the first place, if they must have been like a festering swamp or a corpse left outside in summertime, warmed by a flourishing bloom of fungus and flies, possibly the least cozy warmth there could be, and one of the few things that terrified her so much she didn't even dare imagine it; She didn't need the previews any more than he did.

At this point, it suddenly occurred to her that she'd technically visited the grave of her closest friend, and that neither of them had thought of leaving any flowers, and she's filled with significantly more of that uneasy cold feeling than she can confidently swallow down, and she thinks that given a high enough dose of that wobbly ectoplasm that seems to suffuse everything in his immediate surroundings, she might very well freeze over herself, and forever decorate his console room as a rigid statue, with no chance of her fingers ever reaching his snow-white form.

But if that was not among the things she could do for him, she would simply have to get creative, to use her clever tongue to do what her fingers and lips could not, and use her words and deeds to cross the distance.

She had learned all too bitterly that there wasn't anything she could guarantee, but she had, at least, promised, and that meant that nothing short of scouring every (im)possibility in search of a way she would remotely be able to accept, because she'd shared his journey for far too long to abandon him when things got tough, and this was who she'd chosen to be: She would always come and find him, under technicolor skies, in snow-covered alleyways and behind the veils of his latest barriers, whether he needed her to be the plucky girl willing to endure a long and strenuous journey to procure whatever elixir might be required to melt the sliver of ice in his heart, or the snow queen who would give him refuge in her majestic halls of frost, and silently stand by his side while he spent his days immersed in his puzzles, or turning in heavy dreams.

(By the next time she finds him like that, this time in his armchair, with a seemingly engineering-themed book still in his lap, many months have passed, and the earth has kept turning whether she's been on it or not.

As it frequently happens, some old worries have faded and been replaced by new ones, and more often than not, she found herself looking at the world through changed eyes by the time she returned.

When she looks at him now, she doesn't see age, or frost, or newness.

She merely sees him.

With his mouth slightly askew, the sight of him strikes her as oddly endearing and invites comparisons to various other times she'd caught him dozing off, including some occasions on which the hair hanging into his face had been dark and straight; She's not exactly sure just when the memories of his bow-tie-wearing days ceased to be something raw and painful that caused a surge of emotion each time she touched it with her thoughts, or when the default image her mind would summon up when the thought of 'The Doctor' without any further specifiers started featuring this unmistakeably brazen cocky-bastard-grin, accentuated by that particular upward motion of those much-maligned eyebrows. At some point, she'd acutely realized that she'd come to imagine him speaking in that deep, somewhat gruff voice when she tried to picture what he'd say or do in a given situation, simply because that was how she heard him nearly every other day, and when something prompted her to recall any memory in which he'd sounded and looked different, she was usually able to feel mostly nostalgic fondness without any more 'dramatic' emotions drowning it out, as one might when looking back at a precious component of one's youth – Which, she was sure, would undoubtedly prompt him to claim that she was beginning to sound like an old hag, should she ever be foolish enough to say it aloud in his presence.

By now, his particular brand of ridiculousness was more likely to bring a smile to her face than anything else, with an annoyed rolling of her eyes and an attempt at a witty quip designed to annoy him right back being the next likely options.

It was true that she was no longer the young dreamer who had first followed him onto this ship, nor even the firm idealist whose claims of absolutes had begun to crumble by the time this console room had undergone its most recent redecoration; She'd been out in the darkness and gazed down the ravines of this world, and when she returned, she brought with her shadows that licked at her heels and clung to her footfalls, and Night, Daughter of Chaos, had powdered her trusty set of skills with new and creative applications with the potential to make everything so much easier, and yet so, so much harder.

She'd stepped off the path and realized that there were more possible routes to her goals than she'd ever have considered acceptable, and that some of them got the job done quite well, sometimes so well that insisting on whatever useless pride wanted to be able to claim that she'd gotten her on the straight and narrow way seemed criminal. But once abandoned, the way back to the path might no longer be as intelligible, and what she saw from afar upon turning back might even convince her that said path had been an illusion to begin with, and that there was no clear, universally accepted path that would be ideal in every single way;

It was all up to her to find her way through these murky, turbid waters, and one misstep might just have been enough to leave her stranded in the darkness.

She wasn't yet quite sure what to do with it, there had never been any delusions about the possibility that it might not be a good thing in its entirety, but she could not make a confident case for either warming to it or recoiling in disgust, although there had been times where she had been tempted to do just that for each of these possibilities. She did not want to cut off any potential outcomes, nor close the open doors behind her, but none of that changed that she had adapted to this new habitat of hers; She had known very well what she'd been doing when she'd swallowed that pomegranate seed, and now there would always be something that called her back to this dark realm of chalk dust, candle wax and sickly red light, not from the outside, but inside her own heart, no matter how often she might return to walk on the green pastures of the Earth that gave birth to her – The fair, flowery maiden, more cunning and ambitious to begin with than her rosy cheeks and chestnut eyes would have you suspect, had taken root among white poplars, spider lillies and asphodels, and now her branches were heavy indeed, bent by burgundy fruit at their ripest peak, waiting to be picked and placed among the desks and bookshelves that already seemed like something out of a baroque still-life – There were parts of her that only existed here, where she could rule as the iron queen of the underworld without having to hide any of her true power and merit.

And as the more she had become a citizen of the darkness, the more she'd found herself sharing it with its other occupant – No, not its Lord, whatever his cocky ancestors may have chosen to call themselves, but ultimately just another passenger who was seeking the answers just as she was, afraid that none of them might ever find the way out if they let go of each other's hands.

As his fellow and comrade on this journey, she knew that she belonged here now, she knew that she belonged with him, maybe not all, but certainly some of the time, and as such, she carried herself with the poise and confidence of someone fully immersed in their element as she decided just what to do bout him, a thin smile of fondness on her lips as she calmly picked up the book he'd been reading, marked the page for him and placed it on the nearest shelf while inwardly surmising what a hopeless case he was.

There was no longer anything hesitating, or uncertain about the way she procured a light, red-patterned blanket and ensured that he's spend the rest of his nap neatly tucked away beneath it like it was the most natural thing in the world for her, even going so far as to stuff some of it between the backside of his narrow shoulders and the chair to make sure that it stayed in place, and she even thought she could make out her name among the vaguely mumblings this elicited.

She reassured him with an expertly-timed "Shush", and observed as he drifted back into deeper states of unconsciousness, the slight smirk never quite fading from her face.

It wouldn't have been too much of a leap to assume that he was currently imagining her counterpart in his dreams as being far too impressed at whatever ridiculously showy shenanigans he was currently concocting; She couldn't deny that she almost wished she could see it, for whatever it was must have been some sight to behold, given that not even physics or sanity could impose limits on whatever flights of fancy he got up to in his own subconscious, and neither could she pretend that she didn't get a little kick out of having him completely at her mercy like this.

He might have made his enemies believe that he was an invincible immortal, but in the end, he was just a single man – bit harder to kill than your average humanoid and with certain bits advanced technology at his disposal, but that's it – who'd inadvertently stirred up the legend by foiling them with guile, wit and determination, and there he was, filling the space right before her, granting her the rare privilege of witnessing the fragile, vulnerable, or just simply undignified, mundane sides of him that his foes probably didn't even expect to exist, and in that way, they were, unexpectedly, the same, in this experience of not quite filling their own, long shadows, and maybe that affinity was the reason that she always reserved a soft spot for him no matter how much he pissed her off, what made her willing to go such lengths for him and still, always return to that unending well of affection that seemed sometimes incredibly obvious, and sometimes inexplicable.

And even though she knew that this would be mostly for her own benefit, it was the need to vent those feelings and impulses in a tangible form that led her whether that meant to tackle him into submission with an unannounced surprise glomp, or the small, minimal gesture she was beginning to aim at his unsuspecting left cheek right now.

It was just a mere brush with three of her fingers, not enough to wake him but sufficient for him to with a small, soft sound, not exactly discomfort, but still disproportionately close to some derivative of desperation –

She was beginning to figure out how this works now, he might 'overload' fast, but that also meant that she could count on getting definite reactions from the slightest of gestures and touches, she could make him do that with just the backs of her digits, as if she were a shining queen or goddess resplendent in her coruscating finery.

Her kind of man.

It was moments like this when she found herself regretting that she had missed her chance to make him hers and was highly unlikely to ever get another, but it was a bittersweet, wistful little thought, an occasional longing, not something that would have painfully clogged up her thoughts each time she saw him or made being around him an overall painful experience; There was only so long she could dwell on the things she couldn't have, not when she had been given this rare and precious opportunity to live a full life that allowed her to feel like she was making a difference for the broader world every single day, whether she was inspiring the citizens of tomorrow to strive toward their promising futures, making new experiences, expanding her horizons, fighting the good fight out there in the stars, not when she got to have him for her closest friend and confidant, when she could set out to chase the night alongside him whenever she so desired. )

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A/N: Some of you might have recognized the book involving the blind guy as "The fault in our stars", which I was introduced to because my younger sister is a huge fan girl. The opinions on the literary works mentioned in this chapter are more intended to reflect what I think Clara might think of it, than what my own opinion of the books proper is. You'd just think that someone like her would draw parallels to various literature, or at least narrative conventions ("Good guys do not have zombie creatures!") not that my own knowledge is all that expansive there, but I try.

Beyond that, I can't state enough how much I love the fact that the Doctor has a designated gadget-crafting desk (as briefly seen in "Flatline"). Also, Clara comforting Eleven in her lap is totally something that must have happened at some point, and you're not gonna convince me otherwise.

I also want to use this opportunity to do my part to make sure that everyone's informed of some sneaky little references to some of Shakespeare's sonnets that some ppl have spotted throughout "Last Christmas". I have written a little essay of sorts on the subject right here: post/107094248640/last-christmas-and-shakespeares-sonnets although I can't claim that mine is a particularly informed opinion. Needless to say, this has given me ideas that you may or may not get to see shortly (bits of it made its way into this chapter already, although I've had the basic idea for it long before), especially since it confirmed my headcanon that Victorian!Clara's alias is a symptom of the original one being a bit of a shakespeare nut...

Oh, and did you guys notice the Whouffaldi-themed Valentine's day cards they put out on the BBC's official twitter? You know, right next to the Ten/Rose, Eleven/River and Amy/Rory ones. [canonicity intensifies]