[Transmissions (V)]

Maybe he and I

are like a pair of suns that are captured

eternally linked into chasing each other's spin

- Tori Amos, 'Cactus Practice'.

But let the past be past.

What she came back to every day (or a close enough approximation thereof), what she chose each time she followed him through these blue doors, was him-of-the-present –

Him as she could see, hear, touch and experience him right now.

His face, his voice, his gestures, habits and movements, his big rectangular ears and his long, bizarrely cute eyelashes –

His clothes, shoes, his bookshelves, blackboards and improvised gadgets, his odd taste in socks, the occasional forgotten knickknack lying around in her apartment almost like a territorial marking.

His he borders of his region, both abstract and concrete, as it could be recognized by others, and his unknowable innermost.

Him:

His will, his power, the light in his eyes, the patterns of his veins on the back of his hands, and the insidious way he could package words and libraries of meaning in the tiniest of gestures.

The blunt, nonchalantly-sloppy, yet boldly-deliberate manner to conduct his acts and speeches that was only his own, like a rose might have its own indivisible shade of red, like what those TV ads for fancy hair dye vainly loved to promise.

Him:

Audacious, driven, acerbic, absurdly-slash-adorably absent-minded, with a brooding introspective streak and precious little sense for when to shut his mouth.

The type of person who'd try to extinguish fire with gasoline instead of water.

Him:

Irritable.

Irritating.

Irresistible.

Downright infuriating.

Far from always there, but always liable to drop out of the sky and lead her on a merry dance, drag her along to whatever madness had possessed him this time, and along the way, they'd continue their continuous little game of tug-of-war, all too often in the form of scenarios where she tried to exert some form of dominance merely to get him to act sensible, while he would simultaneously attempt to drag her along for whatever enterprising undertaking had struck his fancy this time.

She was not particularly unsuccessful at dominating him, if you were to measure it with some tally mark list comparing wins versus losses, but he knew how to be a delicious arduous tease without ever trying, and in this game, she was never allowed to hold onto too much satisfaction for too long, just in bits and bursts to keep her stuffing coins into the metaphorical slot machine: Each time she thought she had him under her thumb, he'd turn around, subject her to a sobering reminder of his nature – ancient, petulant, unreadable, nonconformist, uncontrollable – and presumably, leave her hanging on for dear life somewhere, sometime, holding onto some railing or tube.

Sometimes he didn't mean to, he just didn't think he could bear something on his own, or didn't realize he was being sharp or or rude, and yet, on other occasions, he'd very much try to catch her off her guard, to knock her off balance to try and see what might be uncovered behind that supposedly overly-serious exterior he frequently made fun of with little semblance of restraint, or just very, very transparently trying to draw her attention.

He made her blood boil, he didn't even need to make an effort to make it pound in her head, rush out of clenched fists, or stew in her loins, and there, he would stand, oblivious, or indifferent, or at very least none too concerned about the aggravation he'd cause to her and others.

He, as he was now, honestly didn't seem to give a damn what sort of things he was sprouting at the world, like there were faraway parts of him that no one could reach, or touch, or grasp to get a hang on them, and it wasn't even suited to poetical descriptions like 'shapeless like a drifting cloud', there wasn't this leak of the mythical that you'd expect in a disguised fairytale creature that would give itself away with some telltale remainder of its true form –

She could see his form just fine, but that didn't mean that she could make sense of it, and he didn't particularly care whether he made any sense, usually, he'd be busy with something else and concentrating on that and wouldn't spare much patience for anyone who didn't have anything to contribute, and when he was done, he'd just pack up and never look back once that particular 'portal to the faerie world' was closed and ceased to intersects with the realm of his solitary wanderings, devil-may-care.

She could never be like this, and it's not like she wanted to – there was good reason to mind the concerns of common sense and sanity (within reason... or lack thereof), and since he wouldn't, that task would fall to her, when he didn't succeed at dragging her into the madness instead, dragging her by that same concern, some obligation to mitigate the madness and keep him in one piece, or perhaps sometimes even some treacherous side of her that secretly admired the fearlessness she wouldn't allow herself, or anyone else.

So bottom line, to all that:

He pissed her off.

She wanted to make him move because he was standing still.

She wanted to pull him down from his icy clouds, his ivory towers, his high horses, and right upon their (her) first meeting, she'd gotten him to show up exactly the next day, at the same time, she'd made him, Lord of Time, Mocker of Clocks, Finger-Pointer of Archeologists, be punctual for once in his life, and that's how it had continued, now more than ever – the missing weeks in which he escaped her grasp only made sure that she'd never stop to delight in her actual succeeded, for they would never, ever become something she could take for granted.

He'd leave and be gone for how knows how long, and there was probably no one, not even her, who could make him live by clocks and calendars ever again, but even so, that intangible man with the fierce eyes of a winged predator, would eventually gravitate back to her place, like that red string of fate had proved to be a leash of rubber bands in their particular case.

Clara would be busy doing Clara stuff, and he'd just stir up her papers with the winds that followed the materialization sound of his ship, and insolently gesture for her to climb aboard – She'd eventually learned that he did have consideration somewhere inside of him, at least for her when she was all too visibly distraught, but he practically made a point to use it very, very sparingly, but there he'd be, either back too late or back too early, come all this way to pester her into interrupting whatever she was doing; On a good day, he might try to entice her with some sparse but exciting-sounding details on their destination.

He was a bit like a cat, lacking the sociable, enthusiastically affectionate nature and easily won subordination of a dog, a bit more curious, a bit more aloof, a bit further from the sort of mammals that lived in packs, just commonly loitering about her house in irregular intervals more than he belonged to it, and liable to present her with the oddest little gifts.

What never occurred to her before he pretty much explicitly flaunted that fact in front of Danny, was that she had, indeed, never actually refused as much as a single trip, no matter the inconvenient circumstances. It had never occurred to her to 'keep score' of it that way, she'd often be annoyed enough even when she did come along, at least at first, until she ended up either swept up in the adventure or just busy trying to stay alive.

She'd looked at these events as individual incidents, not as a pattern, and so she'd have thought that, if anything, an uninitiated outside observer might have come away with the incorrect impression that he was just pestering her, or that she was the one treating him as a nuisance (So far, they had been in their own private bubble, but Danny's involvement had sensibility her for the fact that their conversations would probably look rather odd to an outside observer, especially now that they'd had years to find their own hermetic little language and done away with much of the outward politeness) but at the end of the day he'd always 'won' without fail –

And just like that, he'd turned the tables on her all over again.

However, if she never had any real intention of actually shooing him away – and here's something that could certainly bear some further thinking about – the sole remaining purpose of her resistance was, essentially, to make him say 'pretty please', and he was, in his own words, always 'happy to play your game', but there was no rule dictating that he wouldn't try to 'win' where applicable, so their private little constellation was, as it turns out, a pretty complex web to tread in, a field-grid of gravity liable to fling out any and all celestial bodies that carelessly blundered into their gravity wells without sticking to their stable orbits.

She was, ultimately, still subject to a certain observer effect, as were any citizens of this universe.

It was presumably the same reason why it had taken him over a thousand years to notice all those identical short, brown-haired girls all around him, or why the key puzzle piece to make sense of the phenomenon never occurred to him before he saw it originate before his eyes – She had never not been there, and how was he to notice that she only ever showed up in places he had visited if his presence was, by definition, something he could hardly leave behind to go investigate without it, and besides, didn't follow many other patterns except perhaps a certain clustering in the surroundings of planet Earth and the many places its illustrious children had gotten to; It didn't even take much of a living creature's natural limitation to their own position to assume that something he'd encounter everywhere he went was simply something that was encountered everywhere.

Similarly, she was understandably ill-equipped to measure anything related to the influence of her own presence – She, too, had to take it everywhere she went, nay, had spread it even further, and if the mind's eye had the power to make creatures of trees and seed the night with waiting eyes, the scope of what she could do here was limited.

So what if his presence brought a light to her eyes, what if he imbued the skin of her face with a private glow and woke the sway of her hips like the first catchy tunes of summertime – He could not reasonably be expected to notice – nor to let himself be noticed, nor let himself be anythinged, really.

He had decreed that she shouldn't see them – the additional bounce in his steps when he knew he was on his way to her, or when she'd left, and left him with the highlight of of his whatever-thoroughly-whimsical-span-of-time-he-was-gonna-stay-out-there, his day most definitely made like some kid whose crush had just invited them to go have some ice cream together.

Seriously, though, what was that flaunting thing about again?

Why did he have to put her in this sort of situation, why couldn't he have the slightest iota of consideration, if not for Danny, than at least for her? Honestly, what did he think this was going to sound like?

He'd very, very deliberately made sure to make Danny understand that their activities together ha been taking place all around him, even alluding to specific oddities like the time she got herself a tan or that time he'd forgotten that she was still going out for (or preemptive loaded her with?) dinner, things he was probably expecting Danny to retroactively connect with vague observations (although he'd probably underestimate his ability to have actually caught onto the pattern before their confrontation – She had, too.)

At the time, she was mostly frustrated about having to deal with the two men snapping at each other with downright infantile petulance – especially the Doctor, who managed to be amazingly hostile and snide in a way that her students usually reserved for paying back the bullies that used to steal their lunch money. Did any of them really have to ask why she'd made an effort to make sure their paths didn't cross?

Granted, that level of instant animosity was even beyond her worst case scenarios. If there was such a thing as love at first sight, loathing at first sight must be a thing, too. But was there, though? She liked to hope that they'd merely pressed the wrong buttons with each other given the sensitive bits of their back stories, that who they were really directing those bitter words at some other people long buried in their memories, maybe some particular haughty former superior of Danny's, who perhaps just happened to wave around his arms in similar ways, or some military types from faraway worlds whose however well-meaning interventions led something the Doctor had hoped to solve with diplomacy to go up in flames, and that if they only could see past that to the reality of each other, things might be different.

But in reality, her efforts to get that stubborn man to see Danny for his present occupation rather than his past ended up revealing her own failings; For his supposed girlfriend and source of comfort in that new life he was supposed to have started, her understanding of the role his time in the army played in his life and identity was laughably shallow ("I'm a soldier, guilty as charged!") and as for the man whose best friend and confidant she was supposed to have been, it was not her, but his rival who first worked out that for all the verbal sewage he'd used to express his disapproval ultimately had all the intention to respect her life choice once he'd ascertained that her new suitor's intentions were proven sufficiently honest, as much as he still didn't like or even understand it one bit – and lest she delude herself that at least the alternate direction had worked at all, her forays to leverage this to get Danny to see him as she wanted him to see him.

Others she may have been able to convince that he 'wasn't really like that underneath' by the time the day was done, no matter how tense things might get in the middle of the story, but here, the reaction she got was tantamount to "Promise you'll tell me if that monster ever does anything to you so I can protect you." as one might cautiously convince a battered girl to disclose the truth about her abusive husband without scaring her into defensiveness, and she couldn't reply with any sort of satisfying clarification or explanation because back then, she wasn't particularly certain about anything concerning him either.

She wanted to believe that they were just both unreasonably, but understandably protective about a person they liked and didn't want to see being ruined by whatever random weirdo just came along, because then she would be justified in the steps she had taken to ensure that neither of them worried, but a day would come when she would lie in a lonely, tousled bed, long since robbed of them both, and consider whether what looked like fairness and patience on one side wasn't just miserable resignation toward something he knew she couldn't be talked out of, or if the hostility on the other side wasn't just a haphazard cover for the fear that she would tire of their already strained relationship, believe this other person who had all the youth, good looks and social skills, turn her back on everything they shared – from philosophies, to little oddities, to the parts and traits of herself that looked better in the mechanical lights of spaceship corridors – and be lost to him forever.

Maybe, by announcing that she had always come with him so far, he was trying to convince himself that he still filled an important role in her life, more than anything else, as a proof that the two of them as an unit still had some exclusive particularities to them, that he was still special to her, even when reconnecting after that long parting that simply hadn't happened for her, but somehow still made its presence felt... or was it merely the insurmountable veil of the death he should have found on Trenzalore? Despite her once valiant attempts to convince him of the opposite, he knew very well that he didn't deserve to get away with nothing.

She even briefly picked up on his obvious distraught feelings, but he just rebuffed her, and she wasn't about to cater to his whims when she was trying to do her job, have a normal relationship, avoid causalities all the while he was making everything pointlessly harder, so his tiny, halfhearted cries for help went unheard.

(Despite everything, she did not expect the moment he turned around and extricated himself)

(Despite everything, he didn't even begin to realize how pissed-off she truly was until she stormed right out of the TARDIS doors)

And somehow, they found themselves here, wrapped in a soft, lulling shroud of party background noise and a good, but imperfect replication of a train's ambient machine noises, speeding past the Magellan black hole, their faint reflections remaining exactly where they had been as the lights beyond them danced on, leaden certainties that they would rather ignore steadily swelling in the air between them like the heat that would rise over the course of a party as the room filled with dancing, sweating bodies.

Hard-pressed to even swallow down the air in the way of their words, their latest experience in talking past each other is quite something to behold, and Clara is quite sure that he doesn't know how her gaze doesn't even bother to penetrate the glass, and instead lingers, as discreetly as possible, on the reflection of his features, scanning for any sign or signal to make sense of.

She wouldn't be here if there had ever been a time in her life when she didn't want to hear about black holes, she wasn't some stupid girl that didn't want to see obvious disinterest when it was in front of her nose, instead, it was quite the opposite, she could very much discern what sort of game he was playing, trying his hardest to ignore that this would be their last day together so he wouldn't have to confront this thing called an 'ending' yet, so he could lean back and do their usual routine just one last time, but his melancholy bled through so visibly in the tone of his descriptions, when he spoke of the wealth of worlds that had existed there long ago before it had slowly but surely found its way into one of these cosmic drains, and he looked so visibly miserable, so recognizably ancient with his swept-back white hair and something almost resembling pained tenderness in those large, beautiful eyes that no one so callous had any business possessing, and she found herself wondering when the fact that he'd actually care if she would leave had become something that would surprise her.

She hated this part, she didn't want to have to be in this situation, but the better part of her kept reminding her to be strong and sensible and get this over with – His recent actions hadn't exactly put her in his debt, and today, she had come here for closure, she needed to make him listen to the speech she had prepared before this day was done, for she had already decided that it would be her last chance.

So she carried on with the script she'd planned out and rewritten a thousand times in her mind, complete with a pretty quote and a fancy anecdote to match, never accounting for his inability to tell, or unwillingness to care, when she was done talking. Perhaps his random comments interrupting her merely showcased how wooden her performance of this role had gotten, or maybe it was him who couldn't stand the silence, or didn't know what to do with the situation, maybe his clueless ramblings were merely evidence of how nervous he really was underneath his waistcoat, fancy necktie and uncharacteristic hint of cologne.

One upon a time, he might have been able to be swept up in some dramatic grieving, and once all of that had been carefully squeezed out of him, he'd been left with little less than frustrated, childish petulance, or biting, hard-boiled cold, and that's how he'd landed on her doorstep, but these days, he had finally been mastering how to be a gentleman with disgrace, and he wore that sweetest sadness so stylishly, even forgetting to be obnoxious for a little while, but only until new opportunities and occasions presented themselves.

He wasn't going to stand still in any sort of pretty manageable frame and let himself be pinned down. And maybe she should have imagined that someone with a track record like this would take her jumble of words to mean that he wasn't even worth the energy required for despising him, when what she'd wanted to say was pretty much the opposite; He might be liable to go and revisit those otters; Part of her remained seriously peeved about the unfairness of it all.

If he had to be an arrogant ass, why couldn't he stay one all the time? That way, it would actually feel good to tell him to leave her be.

But alas, she did, instead, wind up clarifying, wrapping her arms around one of his and nestling into his shoulder, something like unscheduled bittersweet elation taking her over.

He noted that, at least, even if he didn't know how to make sense of that 'malfunction', he tried, he saw more than she wished he would, always with the gamebreaking details and never taking so much note of what she wanted to direct his sight toward;

Nevertheless, she though that she should be able to phrase this a way he should be able to appreciate; a truth that united both poets and make-up artists was that sometimes the greatest piece of craftsmanship was that which did not look all that crafted at all, something straightforward enough for it to be right up his alleyway:

"Look, what I'm trying to say is... I don't hate you. I could never hate you."

Oh, how those eyes of his could glitter with sheer emotion – She didn't turn her head to look at him, but she could make it out in their reflection, his half-open mouth next to her artistic hairpin and coral-red lipstick.

She'd stormed out because she felt like he was going all superior on her and looking down; She didn't see herself as the junior partner in this team at all, and she wasn't going to have him talking of bike stabilizers to her face. But whether he'd taken his criticism to heart, meant to prove his claims of having acted out of respect, or just wound up on the more pliant sides of his moods, that day on the beach he spoke to her in a distinctly eye-to-eye sort of fashion, from one space adventurer (or hopeless case) to another, 'this and that has been my experience; Tell me yours if you like, it might come in handy'

A significant quantum of understanding finally passed between them, and then, of all sudden, still between the rails and the doorway, it occurred to her what she must do:

She had to tell him properly.

No truth field this time, no implication, no uncorrected assumptions.

She knew she might never hear it back, she knew it wouldn't be fair to expect him to, but she didn't care. She needed it to be said, and he deserved to know.

For all one might think of how he'd only admitted to what had once existed there a long time ago exactly one sentence after pulling the tired old its-not-me-its-you tactic, at least he'd had the guts to admit it at all, and why shouldn't he? Even if he hadn't said it, he'd still have felt it, and maybe one of these days, she, too, would get it into her head that horrible things would keep existed whether she'd denied them or remained ignorant, or none of these.

He might not even care anymore, nor think it anything more than an annoyance, but maybe it interested it for the record, for posterity, for whatever faded afterimage of his previous self might be lingering around in there, whatever possibility –

In hindsight, he'd certainly been reluctant and she suspected that he always was to an extent, but he'd been the less reluctant person compared to her, the one showing things more openly, the one leaving the door open, and she the one enforcing the lines, and he probably hadn't been used to that.

Then he'd drawn back, and probably thought that was just what she wanted as well, and then, just as she was about to walk out the door and leave here thinking that their differences had been too much to surmount in the end, and that they might never truly return to the unspoken harmonies they had before, she becomes bluntly aware that it's possible, one of these things you read about in books and dismiss as silly, soppy garnishments until suddenly, you experience it yourself – Associating your partner with a certain specific scent unrelated to their shampoo or perfume was such a thing she'd dismissed, until she'd met Nina and her slight note of brazil nut, bubblegum and factory-new rubber.

It would be a while longer until she experienced 'spotting a special person's face in a large crowd', 'eyes that whimsically seemed to change color based on mood and time of the day', or that one, particularly silly thing that was supposed to happen when you got reunited after not having seen each other for a while, or lived through experiences that made you see the person in question in a different light, but on that day that should have been the last, Clara did instead come to conclude that is was indeed possible, and had been going on for a long time, like a star that had gone supernova and flung its outer shells of matter into the far reaches of the cosmos, but didn't become properly visible as such until the light telling its tale reached the eyes of the beholder:

Whoever would have thought that it was actually possible to fall in love with the same person all over again, all anew yet stronger than before?

Where had it come from, that entirely different kind of feeling, that low and deep burning, that high and fragile wall coming undone, something long ripened and refined and at the same time abrupt and immediate, like coming awake, like words coming alive inside her thoughts and becoming their own independent entities, thrashing against the walls to make themselves heard:

"I love you."

No use being obvious with him, it would just go right over his head.

Let her be sneaky, and know him well enough to know that he'd pick up on the discrepancies.

The deliberate raising of her voice, her eyes directed at him as he stood by the console, the finesses of her posture and expression, the slight inward curling of her fingers on the railing, as if she was about to do something bold and potentially wrong –

She deliberately left him the option to pretend she'd been talking to someone else, and almost relied on her certainty that he would most certainly take it.

If there was the slightest ghost of a smile in reply, it didn't last much and was so faint it was only really noticed when the corners of his mouth lowered themselves right afterward, when he expected to be left to his brooding of how he might have made her life harder and kept it from being what both of them had somewhat unfairly decided it 'should' be.

Now, she'd technically witnessed him in all his forms and physically encountered a good five. She'd had the unique privilege of somewhere somehow, learning to cherish every bit of him, and the full of his impact on the world, but even so, with all her latter understanding, his previous incarnation, the one he'd labeled 'the Eleventh' more out of a chosen concept of styling himself than biological fact, would always be special to her, since that was what he'd looked liked when he first noticed her presence in his life, and how he stood beside her in the early days that had made her want to devote herself to him in the first place – but in a similar, yet distinct way, his present self also held a special place in her heart, for reasons that applied to all of him, and others that were particular to him-as-he-was-now – for instance, he'd been the first to take form with full awareness of her, and in her presence, besides, the adult woman who'd grown alongside him in her fearsome power in the full of his view, and thus she wondered sometimes if he, just like his precious self, when he'd chased an illusory phantom of this 'Amelia', a woman long dead – and longer dead for him – in the last extremity, would call for her when he'd lay shattered in the foreign sands of a distant world, where no one, not anymore, not at all, knew something as silly as her mere, mortal little name, not even the furthest reach of connection laid by someone inspired by her inspiration of her students.

She knew, at least theoretically, that big 'ol face of his might easily become the last thing she'd ever see at any given moment, anywhere between right now, unannounced, and some faraway end of her days (and might, in fact, already have become just that in another lifetime, before she even knew she'd personally witness this set of features coming into existence before her eyes) – Her insistence on her illusion of manageable, obtainable safety would not let her go further than to ponder this possibility in a distant, remote scenario she'd merely be humoring for the sake of entertainment, or argument, or exploration. And as a safe sandbox scenario, stripped of uncertainties or further implications, fully in the hands of what she chose to imagine, there could be worse last-ever-sights. ) – but that in itself confirmed how much his current form and being had become intensely special to her.

Maybe it was a bit like the hour-blossoms in Michael Ende's Momo, each of them, each that was her present, seeming like it was the most beautiful one, but him-of-the-present, he-of-right-now was certainly precious to her, in unique ways that she'd miss if he were gone, and that she hoped? Suspected? he might miss too – perhaps, he'd find it refreshing, enlightening in hindsight, if a bit hard to keep up indefinitely –

If people knew how they'd come to view each of their actions in the future, they might come to know significantly less regret, and the world would work by some very different rules, but such was not the type of world they lived in, so they had no choice but to work from wherever it was they had gotten themselves to, and try to get it all a little righter every day, and if one thing that could be said in either of their defenses, it was probably that they were trying to do just that for most of their days –

But apart from that, there was little about their coexistence that fit sure, easy explanations or safe labels, and this was perhaps the most apparent when she struggled to find a fitting appellation, some brief, practical term to explain themselves amid the odd enough circumstance of both their presence in the midst of danger, but how could some simple term encapsulate the in some ways dynamic and ever-shifting, and in others, ever-constant stream of exchanges between them? How she comprehensibly explain away those ever more frequent raised eyebrows when she herself wasn't sure what the should think, let alone what she actually did think of him, and the things that happened over the course of their exploits made her think of him in a different way every day, some days, she'll have this notion that it used to be easier, on others, she felt he'd mystified her since he first showed up on her doorstep and on yet another set of occasions, there might have been a sense of lightness or heavy significance, assuring her that she was glimpsing more and more, more than nothing, or more than before, either way she couldn't quite put her finger on it, so what she gave were perhaps situational, or incomplete answers that may have contained grains of truths, even insights, but could never encompass the subject matter in full, not him, not even her, not anything in their constellation, but she could make do with these statements, the many possible flat maps of a three-dimensional structure, the places the shadows would fall if you illuminated it from different angles – "I'm his carer", "You're one of my hobbies", "He's my hero", "he's been with me for a long time", "He's an alien", definitely not the space dad (If glares could kill, this would inevitably put someone in mortal peril), "He was supposed to have been my friend", "He's not anything of mine at all."

From the beginning, neither of them had been so easy to grasp or define that they could be pinned down to a single, simple principle or archetype, they were each worlds of endless possibility of things to achieve, learn and become, they had each worn many masks even before they became aware of that nearby, kindred existence all around, and they'd worn many more since, and continued to perfect their art, too, but none of all these roles and performances they'd taken on, nor the very worlds of their birth had been able to hold them in full; Some part of them always sought for more, some parts always remained hidden as they effortlessly slipped in and out of their constructed selves, like they were paper masks, or costumes, or online pseudonyms, functional fake identities of varying identities for each of the many situations and compartments of their lives, discarding and drawing them, even switching them around between them at a moment's notice, repeatedly, again and again –

So these are their stories

The unmatched genius, and the impossible one in whom they finally met their match,

The sinner and their salvation,

the madperson and their madness,

the seeker and the mystery,

the saviors of worlds,

Lovers chasing ghosts,

the keeper of secrets, and the chaos that ensues when there's more than one of those

partners in crime, facing the doomsday machines together,

the commander and her most trusted lieutenant,

all the endless variations strewn across a thousand times, a thousand places, always telling that same, oldest story,

a brave citizen of a doomed world, and the visitor from far away who led him to realize that he held the strength to save it with his own hands all along

boyfriend and girlfriend,

the stranger in the mirror and the one who knew him better than he knew himself

the wise teacher and her student,

the hero and their muse,

or just two frightened children trying to find their way back to the path, holding hands as they braved the uncertain shadows, the dark and fearsome forest, the labyrinth, the shadows of the tomb and the turbid stream of the future?

bank-robbers on date night,

the prideful one who wanted to solve everything by themselves, and the headstrong maverick that made them reexamine their preconceptions of themselves and others,

a pair of thrill-seekers on a wild ride to oblivion,

the one devil it takes to know another,

or the wise one remaining behind to tend to the last of her duties, and the one last victory she sought to secure with gentle deception?

If nothing else could be certain, a friend whose support they could always count on, no matter how dark their days.

(and, if she was honest, the only one among all these rings and crowns she had been offered that she could truly be satisfied with)

It was there on the shore that she'd recognized him anew as this being, this man of infinite possibility, who found himself torn between trying his hardest to be a good person, and going out there to experience everything life could offer someone as exquisite as him.

And, in that way, she understood him, now more than ever; and why she would always reserve a special, soft spot for him, why even after all of their disagreements and tribulations, she would proudly proclaim: "I will always forgive, always trust.", why the affinity she felt toward him would endlessly keep sprouting from within the garden of her heart like some exceptionally persistent weed.

(Surely, he'd be one of these fluffy, silvery clock-orbs of dandelion seeds, waiting to take to the sky and ride on the wind to wherever they might be swept, to break through worlds of asphalt and leave misshapen yellow flowerettes poking out in unexpected places)

She'd recognized him as the same sort of being, in a way more fundamental than the layout of their insides, some sort of deeper, subtler truth that instruments cannot detect as of yet.

Maybe this world had no place, and no word yet for whatever he and her were supposed to be, and they would have to create their own idea of happiness with their own hands and their own words.

Or maybe the truth was exceedingly simple, a core of truth they'd held back for so long because speaking its name would have made it all too real and impossible to take back without shattering into pieces.

She thought that she sometimes found what she was looking for, in lines of lyric and twirls of memory, or poems that she would read through and set aside because they struck a cord with her endless going ons, described the events of the day in poignant, epic or surprisingly simple ways, potential snarky comebacks, or phrases that just immediately resonated with her in all possible ways at once;

And she thought that maybe he felt the same on those rare occasions on which he would paint her, rendering her in surprising detail for how meager his capacity to process her as a whole could sometimes be. Perhaps he drew her one detail at a time, aligning the trees to produce the dark of the forest and hoping that the bits exceeding the sum of the parts would be assumed to be there, or maybe she just thought to saw them because she expected them beside his abstractions.

What would she give for an insight in his process of perceiving her, her image in his mind's eye; His sketches and paintings were the closest hints she had but also rather inconclusive ones, but she'd like to hope that he sometimes wished he could reach into the frame and try to grasp her in a however abstract way, much like he tried

It wasn't easy to picture just what he might be thinking when he sat there in front of his easels, appearing to work with as much methodical concentration as he might if he were working on one of his usual deluges of mathematics formulas.

("Rubbish!", he'd once told her. "Even here on the planet of the pudding brains, any university professor worth their salt will tell you that math and logic are as much about creativity as it is about stringent methodology – maybe not the sort that your soldier boy habitually ruins for those unfortunate ten-year-olds, but, the proper stuff. You would understand, wouldn't you?"

"Understand what?" she'd retorted somewhat candidly, mentally debating whether informing him that Mr. Pin was in fact very beloved by the ten-year-olds in question was likely to bear fruit and considering smacking him with the massive door-stopper she was currently reading as a fairly alluring alternative.

Naturally, he hadn't even turned to look at her as he kept scrawling away on his blackboards, starting to resemble a ghostly apparition under all the white dust.

"Ah come on. You know. How you can do just as much exploration and discovery with a blank piece of paper as you can with this TARDIS. Well most. Usually. Most of the time.")

Double stars, it turns out, are – like black holes – far from that weird, exotic oddity that people would associate with statistically rare events like human twin children.

In fact, half or more of those dots of light visible from the skies of the Earth – and one third of all stars at all – were really composed of two individual bodies that only betrayed themselves through careful observation of their oscillations.

Double stars, it seems, were really quite commonplace. So commonplace that out of two given intelligent, planet-dwelling lifeforms, at least one was likely to have hailed from some sort of binary system - "Take, for example, the two of us."

"So you're telling me when you were a boy and looked out of the window, there were two suns out there?"

"Yeah? Shouldn't that have stopped surprising you after a while?"

"Well, I was there, but it was only once, very briefly, an we were standing around in that barn instead of doing any sun-gazing-"

"Only very- ….what are you talking about of all sudden?"

"Gallifrey?"

"Gallifrey? Weren't we discussing your system just now? As I said, I'd think you'd be used to it after... what? Fifty years on it?"

"Twenty-eight." she insisted sharply.

Then, she would find out that she, too, had unknowingly spent those years – whatever amount it might have been – in a binary system of her own, even if double 'star' was not exactly applicable in that context – Apparently, her solar system's center of mass was situated just outside the sun's diameter as a consequence of Jupiter's mass, which apparently struck him as the greatest occasion to begin a longer ramble/rant/lecture on the subject of Jupiter and how it actually was one of the more bemusing and unusual planets of the Sol system – he talked about the oceans under the surface of it's moons, of early travelers and cartographers who found it a lot more noteworthy than the terrestrial planets further inside, given that such large gas giants were most commonly found on close orbits around their respective stars. Jupiter was, in fact, as huge as a planet could possibly be. Those closer-circling, hotter gas giants were often much more massive, but Jupiter was very narrowly situated on the border were, if you were to throw any more mass into it, its constituting matter would actually be compressed by it's own immense gravity and shrink before it got any larger – and by the time one of these denser objects overtook the size of Jupiter, it would no longer be classified as a planet, but a brown dwarf star.

Indeed, it might have been the colossal size and mass of Jupiter that made the inner planets of the Sol system the cradle of life they had gone on to become, as it's gravitatonal pull would have steadied the asteroid's orbits and diverted larger comets that could have wiped out the emergent lifeforms into itself, playing the protective big brother not just for Earth, and it's legacy of humans, Silurians and various tree-creatures, but their cosmic siblings on Mars and Venus –

So in the end, they were both the same.

They were both from binary systems and had been all along.

Clara Oswald tried to be realistic with her expectations – But in a world where mythological archers could jump out of the bushes at any moment, where living statues and flesh-eating shadows swarmed the night, but where fear could still trick you into expecting beasts where there were none, that was not an easy call to make.

("You know the problem with telling the difference between dreams and reality? They're both ridiculous.")