[Transmissions (III)]

"… he was reminded on Trenzalore that he wasn't Human; that he wasn't one of them, and that they live for a very short time. And that's what made him draw back a bit, and think 'I'm getting too bound up in them.' Of course, he doesn't succeed in that at all! In his very repressed, restrained way, he's clearly as besotted with Clara as he ever was! That line in 'Dark Water', Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference', that's about as close to 'I love you' as the Doctor can get."

-Steven Moffat in DWM #484, stating the obvious.

Not everything has changed, though.

The first time she hears him call her 'boss' with that gruffer, deeper voice of his, it comes so naturally that the nostalgic little moment where she smiled to herself at the thought didn't come until well after she'd walked out of the TARDIS doors for that particular day, and was long since back at her desk, reading through some eighth grader's essay.

There had been no hesitation, no pause, no sense of a boundary that required active, intentional crossing, as if he were, however tactlessly, taking someone else's property – Instead, it had felt quite right, and not in a way that needed clarification or attention drawn to it.

These days, she was more likely to get some mocking little 'Ma'am' or 'teach' out of him than those possessive pronouns or more illustrious epithets, but those hadn't vanished, either – in a way, these little taunts suited him, as he presented himself now, or he suited them, like he was made to fill his current spot, and possibly, to exasperate her – Given their recent exploits as sharply-dressed merry thieves, she felt reminded of a fantasy she had once entertained after one too many action movies, a pajama-clad teenager observing herself in the mirror, holding speeches before it or just walking around the room with an attitude, and pretending to herself that she was some sort of influential mafia boss – Not that she would have been that keen on the necessary steps 'having people assassinated' or 'extorting their livelihoods from them' , but as long as it took place safely within the realm of fantasy, what struck her fancy was the thought of seeing people flinch an shrink back when she entered the room, of smiling a thin, poison-like smile as everyone stumbled over their own feet to endear themselves to her, the privilege to point at people, swiftly provide them with orders and punctuate her statements with thinly-veiled promises to 'collect their fucking heads' – in a way, it was like being a princess, only with less frills and more action scenes.

And while the previous version of him might just have been able to pass for what would probably have been the most bumbling Prince Charming ever with sufficient application of effort, his current self seemed more at home in the former scenario, with his crooked smirks and acerbic wit, she could easily imagine him in the role of her mafia princess self's most trusted hitman, aloof and professional, yet distinctly dedicated to his unlikely codex of honor, his cause, and her – except, knowing him, his more distinguished exterior would only amount to her being snapped out of her dreams at the most unexpected moment, by whatever logic might dictate when he would chose to release one of his more ridiculous statements from his mouth.

Which, she supposed, would have made the scenario fit right in with some their previous under-cover antics that had ever so often ended looking like something out of any selection of ridiculous movies (and, depending on the genre, his newfound asshole credentials even added a little atmospheric touch here and there), he and her, running around the universe in fancy dress.

In the end, he was always the one with the nicknames, the one with the pseudonyms; Not to be outdone, she was making a steady effort to retaliate where she could, which occasionally resulted in 'John Smith' crashing the occasional party (and 'party' meant strictly 'megalomaniac scheme' here) alongside a certain 'Oswin Montague' or 'Clara Smith', or in her teasingly concocting infrequently used counterparts of her own to the various appellations he'd bestowed upon her.

(My Doctor, you clever boy, you ridiculous stick-insect, you're absolutely impossible!)

One thing she hadn't expected to see again was his way of turning a full 270 degrees when a mere 90 would have sufficed, but there it was – it took her a while t notice even with his last incarnation because of how damn natural he made it look every time, it was quite apparent that this was just how he did it and no the result of any deliberate effort, he didn't have to think twice about it, not even in the heat of battle did it cease to mesh seamlessly with the overall flow of his moments, so she might not have thought much about it, either, had she not been trying to work out what had lead him to her doorstep at the time. It wasn't confined to moments when you'd expect him to be doing something you might want to pay attention to, in fact, she knew from personal experience that he'd be hard-pressed to do 'normal' if he even wanted to, not that he was ever all too concerned with this whole not-looking-like-a-complete-lunatic part – and if anything, all that had gotten worse these days, so it was, perhaps, no surprise that his policy in regards to turning around hadn't significantly decreased in... uniqueness. At most she might expect him to do his spinning in a somewhat different, but equally weird fashion, but there were only so many variations on turning around.

At that point, she was beginning to consider that perhaps, the things he kept wanting to say and express to her hadn't changed all that much, and it was only how he said them that had changed, and in some cases, not even that.

Some things, she might have stopped noticing, others she might have overlooked because she got distracted by something else, while others had become so much clearer when given a different backdrop to contrast against, or circumstances that forced her to strip them them back or distill them down to the heart(s) of the matter, and somewhere along the way, some of the tried and true familiarity of the last three years turned out to have remained just where she'd left it, if she'd only muster the trust to rely on it to be there, in ways that allowed her to look at their entanglement as a whole, as individual chapters in a larger story – Three long weeks passed after that first, tentative approach on the streets of Glasgow, and she'd spent them with preciously little clues as to what she was supposed to feel or how things could be expected to continue from now, and in the end, he only sensible option she had left to her was to carry on with her life, at least the other parts of it, the ones that didn't necessarily involve him, the ones that, at that time, seemed like they might come to be all of its parts, given how fragile and uneasy the ground they were treading on had seemed to them, so even when he arrived, he didn't bring much relief, only more turmoil, and that was without even featuring in the terrible place he'd brought her to, physically and mentally. She did wind up feeling proper moral repulsion at some point – but in the world full of stubborn ignoramuses insisting on their point without ever considering that they might be wrong, he stopped, he listened, he considered, even appreciated her input, in quite astounding contrast tactlessly haughty act before, and still, with no real turn or disparity in his overall demeanor, one might even get the impression that he was trying to get her approval at some points, and when everything was over, she found him closer to hanging over the console than he was to sitting by it, his hair still disheveled and sticky with biological goop, his face pulled in folds where he'd deposited it on his knuckles, the mental, emotional and physical exhaustion from the incident (and whatever he might have gotten up to before that on his long quest for coffee) evident on his features, something about the familiarity of the situation had struck her, and it was then, suddenly, as she was about to leave through the TARDIS doors, that she knew how to answer him –

It was always something he used to do, stand by the console, his smile a mix of fondness, a varying undercurrent of melancholy and sometimes well-deserved elation if it had been that kind of day, and watch her as she walks away to the doors, back to her own world, her own daily affairs and preoccupations. His world was large and wide, so she'd spent some of their earlier days wondering what he could even want with her, but she'd come to see that it was also a lonely and empty world sometimes, so he was both glad and reluctant to welcome her inside, and similarly bittersweet in the hour of letting her go – He'd loved her because of her freedom, because she had her own world in which he could admire her, from which she could always bring new mysteries to mesmerize him, so as much as he liked their times together, he would never dream of daring to restrict her, and sometimes, not always, he'd counter her casual complaints or recollections of the various going-ons that filled the rest of her days with none-too-humble tales of his own numerous undertakings, and sometimes he might have been optimistic enough to believe that, little by little, he might just learn to look after himself at at long last, at his ripe old age in the quadruple digits, as long as he had a few places he could always return to or people to count on, another example being his friends at Paternoster row, or what Amelia and her family used to be, and nowadays, of course, Clara.

And while they both knew that this, too, could never last forever, it certainly wasn't over yet, and whether he found her waiting to greet him, or raising her brow at his belated and unannounced appearances in the various storage rooms of Coal Hill School, it seemed like their encounters could still wind up ending like they had so many times before – With him standing by the console, watching her walk away and possibly pause to exchange a few words by the TARDIS doors, and that was probably when she really, fully felt like she had him 'back', and allowed herself to feel the relief over how much she'd missed him those last three weeks, the few days she'd spent on her own at Madame Vashtra's mansion while he was... presumably shopping for bookshelves or something, and this whole bizarre situation that had hit her on one of the more miserable Christmases she'd been subjected to, after they'd met up for what started out like any of their ordinary adventures.

It wouldn't be the last time he continued that particular tradition, either, the more she thought about it, the surer she felt that there hadn't even been the slightest decrease in the way he would watch her walk away, and the more she found herself questioning how much of the longing she sometimes thought to see in his eyes was the product of her own hopeful interpretations – She knew that it must have been there at some point –

And there was no better indication than the way he had always treated her hands with what was best described as worship, held them affectionately, handled them carefully with the wiry porcelain artist's fingers he's had back in the day, even kissed them affectionately with those fuller, youthful lips, in context ranging from joyous exuberance, grateful, humbled reverence to simple adoration and overall moved-ness, she could think of so many individual moments that she couldn't arrange them in an orderly line, or even name when exactly each of them had taken place over those log three years, not even when considering only the most significant, pivotal of moments (there was some vague notion about ice, snow and keys, or big friendly buttons) – There had been enough instances – too many, too regular in frequency for Clara to recall every single one – where he'd peppered them with little kisses as if he wanted to commit every nook and cranny of their sensory shape to memory, the shape, the texture, the scent of work, teacups and chalk-dust, the round smallness that diminished even further toward the tips, the tiniest, faintest scars leftover from long bygone accidents with swing sets or horse-riding classes, like he was indebted so far to not just her actions but what she was and stood for, the principles and histories that had driven her to act, and it didn't take much to convince herself that he probably felt he owed it to her to know, to learn every nook and cranny of her by heart(s), like she was a poem, like that was the least he could do –

After all, the hand was, in the words of Immanuel Kant, the visible part of the brain: The part of her body most commonly used to make her will manifest, what she used to fiddle with wires, draw on whiteboards, flip through pages, press keys or drive motorbikes. The hand would prove whether there was truth and value to a persons' words. The hand revealed where their true allegiance lay. The hand dripped with the nectar of her actions for which it was ever so often the conduit, and, for which he would search like a hummingbird, as if he longed to find some metaphysical impression or memory of a more abstract form of her presence, at the interface through which her mind interacted with the world –

She'd certainly have a hard time forgetting that scraping last gesture of gratitude on Trenzalore, before he went to face what he then expected would become his last battle.

And yet, she had to admit that she'd wondered if he even remembered, now, after all that time, after all that changed, what the discolored remains of those memories even looked like to him, even as they'd established a... working relationship, a new manner of coexisting, there was something pretty awkward about the thought of him, the new him, knowing about all that, but the more she considered it, what really bothered her was less the thought of him looking back at, or reliving those memories than it was the idea that he might not necessarily want these memories, or how the fact that he had them meshed with the presence of someone else in her life these days, in the function he used to fill, although neither of them would have provoked that reality into forcing them to confront it by speaking the truth out loud and calling things by their names.

The fiction was flimsy back then, for starters, they had been a very physical couple

- Sure, his last incarnation was (like his second one) rather exuberant, cuddly and quick to follow an impulse, and even liable to spontaneously plant a kiss onto the next available non-hostile adult, or object even, without meaning all that much by it (not unlike his eighth), but overall, she would have been deluding herself if were to pretend – as she ever so often did – that the context and constellation and words, gestures and clear communications through body language and gesturing left any room for misunderstandings, and there was no mistaking his hands all over the sensitive parts of her face and neck –

although she didn't fully realize how thoroughly she'd failed at keeping this at a manageable level that couldn't knock her off guard until that one time she didn't reach his hand in time. They might not have done everything by the book, but they had their own private equivalents, and it takes two to play that game in a way that functions enough to last. Then, she thought, it had come crashing down as it was destined to do, as she should have seen it coming all along when she let herself get attached beyond what she could reliable shut off – but she had lost that game a long time ago, and there was, of course, the possibility that his thoughts had been exactly the same, and that she'd merely been handed a new set of equivalents, because, back then?

He had his reasons for being distant, with her more than with anyone before, but he probably wasn't used to it, to being the one doing the pining, or dealing with someone who would pick up on his inconsistencies and white lies, someone who'd force him to be the one pushing the boundaries; It wasn't easy to predict the outcome when there was two of them trying to monopolize the information and to decide who got to be privy to it, someone with a need to know about all the chess-pieces on the board – Especially now that she actually had her own set of things to hide, or at least more than just the full extent of her regular old emotions.

But maybe it was this quality that had allowed her to read him and reply on a channel he'd actually be receptive to, that had a real chance of circumventing his barriers and defenses just as he's circumvented hers; Directly following the regeneration, she'd seen her inability to tell him her feelings earlier, her insistence on pursuing both narratives depending on which happened to be convenient right now, as a mistake waiting to come crashing down on her, but when she thought back to the past three years, she hadn't necessarily thought that way.

She didn't want to cause any complications that might destroy what they had, not when they could be enjoying themselves instead, or be preoccupied with the quest that the other represented. If they had those conversations, they might have to face their rational minds and the 1001 reasons for why this might not be the smartest step – But oh, they'd gotten smart, they'd indulged in their little, indirect games, they'd chosen to decidedly overhear things like third-party assumptions neither of them had bothered to correct, or unscheduled confessions brought about by Truth Fields or partial robotization, but that didn't mean they hadn't picked up on it, that didn't mean they weren't very consciously slipping into a state that might just allow them to have their cake and eat it, too.

And this was perhaps what had led to a few disastrous misunderstandings along the way, but without it, this connection wouldn't have been possible either, so who's to say that the drawbacks weren't worth the benefits, the cost worth the merchandise, or that they weren't something that they, as an unit that had accomplished the most titanic of deeds, could learn to work around?

In dark retrospect, there was no doubt that they had both been willing participants.

And while she might still not be ready to accept and acknowledge that, they still were.

After all, there was no particular reason why the deciphering of his person had to be up to her specifically, duty might have kept her there at the beginning, but moths had passed and she'd still end up leaping onto his moody little snog-box when he decided to materialize it in her vicinity at however inopportune moments, and it was making her think that maybe, their problem was not so much what they didn't understand about each other, but that they understood just about enough, that they were very much speaking the same language more often than not, a particular, obscure dialect that no one else seemed to understand.

It was tantalizing, in a way, that she never knew enough for her interest to wane, or to perceive him as being without secrets, but still enough to keep her at it, keep them circling each other for more. It could be so much easier if she simply had no clue, if they were so different that she could reasonably give up any quests for common ground, and let him go, or at least accept that a bridge could only be built to a certain extent, and then stuff him in a neat compartment of her life.

That would be easy, but he was most definitely settling for 'difficult' these days, so there was no such luck for her.

And now, the complication they'd tried to stave off had come about by their own hands, through their efforts to avoid it. Each in their own ways, they had tried to make a point to extricate themselves, but old habits die hard, and this thing he'd said wasn't her fault? It didn't take long until they were at it again.

They never really stopped, at least not for long – Let there be no confusion: As of now, she had yet to ascertain whether his scent had changed as much as his face, she had not had all that many opportunities to stay sufficiently close for longer than a few brief, awkward moment – at the very least, she suspected, there should be an additional dusting of chalk –

(She spent the first few weeks at her current workplace trying to figure out techniques to keep the insidious white dust from staining all her clothing. )

But did that mean that any and all overlapping of their physical borders had all but ceased, or had what they once shared merely been stripped back to a... more minimalistic aesthetic, as if this were the work of some ambitious artist trying to turn his story on its head to try and see what would remain of it? In the absence of his once steady, solid presence around her, she felt all the more aware of his attention to her hands, how he would hold them while leading her over thresholds, out of hatches, into ballrooms, or, when they didn't have quite as much time on those hands, he could grab then in a combination of a manner and a specific moment that eliminated the need for any and all further words.

Eventually, she even picked up on a peculiarity particular to this version of him:When the relative speed of the circumstances allowed it, he'd do this thing where he'd run his thumb over the back of her hand – a most minimal caress, and yet, enough to speak volumes of fondness and adoration, or even suggest that he might well be able to savor such things if presented to them in more manageable doses – and when she thought of it, it didn't make sense, anyway, that his careful treatment of her hands would end with his bow-tie incarnation, given that it predated him – She remembered a particular detail from the incident at the national gallery, an unbidden giggle she did not quite succeed at suppressing when his tall, suit-wearing younger self left her with a gentlemanly hand kiss before his departure, the funny thing being that this would have been one of their earliest 'proper' meetings, and that he still opted for that particular gesture – he wouldn't even remember that incident until much later, so he couldn't have deliberately reused it later. Instead, it seemed like the brief observations of his older self had been enough for him to tell that she was gonna be the 'boss' in the future – there was indeed something 'submissive' about the gesture, something that communicated deference and a promise of devotion, but also with a layer of 'my power is yours to command', it was something you'd expect from a knight pronouncing his loyalty to the lady of the castle – of course, back in these days, he was still trying far too hard to be the hero everyone expected him to be, and the proof that he wasn't burst forth in volcanic bursts.

He'd eventually given up, came to consider himself a monster, and spent much time trying to distract himself from that fact, trying to downplay it or forget altogether, if only for a while, and then he'd found himself at her doorstep, getting caught in a spontaneous spring shower without an umbrella because what he'd been preparing for was endless winter, and to date, he still didn't quite know what to do with that, or even what do to about his unexpected lack of deadness following the siege of Trenzalore – A hostile world could be kept away by means of a wall, the moment of resignation meant that you could, at least, stop fighting, but hope could be scary, the once clear waters could turn murky and muddied once stirred again.

In part, she was merely getting to see the brooding that would previously have taken place beyond her reach, once those doors closed, the chilling suspicions that had, more than once, come quite close to making her blood run cold.

The outlines of the inevitable were easier to make out when she could easily make out his thoughts and truths better than he knew himself, or at least thought she did, but it was easier to forget when she found him inaccessible and cold, and more like one of those big, immovable powers in the world that one ought to be incensed against, something from faraway cities, glass domes, crystal spires and towers of ivory -

He'd turn around in the most unexpected of moments, and do something he'd never have done before: Instead of keeping it all to himself, instead of putting up a makeshift facade of "okay", he'd turn to her and tell her, in no uncertain terms, that she'd upset her.

Perhaps this was something else he now trusted her to handle, perhaps that was the common base that could be found in even the most disparate things.

Perhaps he'd trusted her to know better, or perhaps it was merely too late for him to draw back but that's the obvious thing you can no longer avoid once you open up to each other, a natural consequence of the absence of the barriers and secrets they'd torn down one by one.

He could have appealed to the past, the things they shared or the things they hadn't, but instead, he let her see in full, his disappointment, his despair, his disillusioned attempts to remind himself that she was physically incapable of having known him as long as he had known her, and couldn't fathom the bitter taste of getting so cool a reception after finding her again after a long, long time that had left her untouched; He could have kept quiet and told himself that he had no right to be upset, not when it was usually him who walked through the chapters of people's lives without bearing the marks of a single day, but she'd wanted him to give his troubles unto her, and he'd respected that, for better or for worse.

He expected more, he'd actually allowed himself to expect, and could only chide himself so much for it.

"I am right here!"

"You haven't explained him to me!"

"I thought that's what you wanted."

And with what right, she wonders, does he say that? Did she not do exactly as she asked? - He replies something similar back to her when she requests to know why she was left alone with that terrible burden on the pock-marked satellite of her fragile little world.

Can they not reach a however fragile basis of basic understanding even if they think they're working toward each other's best, is there no way they cannot coexist without cutting each other to pieces?

In these days, she learns, unexpectedly, that she's capable of enjoying the act of spiting him, that, if he's going to pull an "It's not me it's you" thing on her, if he's going to be a coward and reveal his feelings only when he'd decided, without consulting her, to close that door forever, and have the nerve to tell her to move on, she just might, and that if he wanted no part in her life, he had no business being upset over her life choices.

("Because I love him!")

She learns that she's capable to tell a moment that should have belonged to someone else, words that should have been told properly, and just use it to spite someone else; She didn't go into this meaning to deceive, but in the end, she did.

She learns that the skillfully crafted words she uses to leverage and convince, always with good intentions, the vowels and consonants she made her life's trade, can also be used to cut like knives, slice like blades and stab like rapiers, she learns that when she's backed into a corner, her claws long to scratch and tear.

("Get back in your lonely bloody TARDIS and don't come back!")

She also learns, unexpectedly, that for someone who says such horrible things all the time, he has a fairly thin skin, and his own feelings bruise quite easily. It is perhaps the one realization that begins to dawn on her the earliest, and takes the longest to complete – He cries easily. Before, it took quite a bit of punishment for the dark pools of his inner waters to reach the surface, but now, much of the cruft has been worn down by time, or washed away by her, and it does not take very much to reduce him to tears. The sight of him outright bawling is not one anyone is ever very likely to see, but him just tearing up, eyes sparkling with wetness?

That wasn't that much of a rarity, and it rarely less rare than in the vicinity of her.

She may have been too disbelieving to see it, too angry to care, or too burdened for him not to conceal it, but when she put the clues together, she couldn't evade the feeling that this had always been happening all around her, and she'd merely failed to notice before – And maybe that humbled stupefaction was the closest she'd get to glimpsing how her existence must appear to him.

The thing that really throws her off balance, what exasperates her the most, is that she was absolutely not thinking of it in those moments, that it didn't occur to her that she, as the one he allowed to hold his secrets would also have the power to actually hurt him, that her words could cut that deep – in the instants before, she'd felt like she could barely even reach, even been beginning to doubt whether they existed on the same planes of being at all, him and her, but there he was, if not suddenly broken, then visibly cracked, and no matter how much he frustrated her, how much she might want to smash in his smug visage, she still couldn't stand to see him in pain, she could stand it no more than she could before any of this fiasco, even if the cause of that hardship was herself and her will to cause it, even if she'd deemed it well-deserved, and he looked ever so pained, so visibly miserable when he thought she might never want to see him again, and she wanted to curse him for making it so hard on her to take what ought have been the reasonable path.

But there was also always that treacherous part of her that delighted in the power, over the future, over the moon which seemed to make an ever so perfect metaphor for their fractured little bond – a her that secretly rejoiced in the knowledge, the potential, in what was revealed to be shining through from behind fault lines and cracks, the life beneath the shell of the egg: To know that she had such power over him, that he put such weight onto her words, that she could make him unravel before her with but a flick of a wrist.

But she had been scared of that power, that responsibility, the fear of getting it wrong, the truth of her own being, that she had drawn back, backpedaled, played it safe, from what was not breaking apart but transforming, awakening with an intensity that might just force her to realize that her heart was beyond her ability to control, that the burn of her own feelings could overwhelm her, and that she might not know where this path led.