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Clara awoke with a groan, her body aching all over. Her pounding headache faded as quickly as it had come, and she stabilized herself on the desk in front of her with her hands. Wait a minute - there was a desk in front of her? And she was sitting in a chair in a dimly-lit yet smart room? How could this be? As her mind raced for answers, Clara recalled her last moments - a Cybermen had his laser primed, ready to fire. She'd failed to convince Dr Skarosa-turned-Cyberman that she was The Doctor. And of course, how could she convince them? Their Cyber Network meant that they'd known the Doctor was outside with The Master, so that logically meant she couldn't have been The Doctor. Just who was The Master anyway? Was the Master someone she'd seen when she went into the Doctor's timestream...? It couldn't be. Harold Saxon? A psychopath, and most certainly nothing like The Great Intelligence or whoever else could've been behind this sort of plan.
As Clara mulled in the depths of her thoughts, a door in the corner of the room opened to reveal a smartly-dressed man in a dark blue suit and trouser ensemble. He closed the door behind himself as he stepped in, a file in his other hand and a smile on his face. His hair was neatly trimmed and slightly oiled, giving him a more comical than businesslike appearance.
"My name's Seb. Short for Sebastian, that is." The man grinned, placing his file on the desk opposite Clara. Stretching out a hand for her to shake, she hesitated before taking it. Their pleasantries done after a brief handshake, Seb quickly got down to business and opened the file, sitting back in his chair. "Your name... Clara Oswald, am I right?"
"Y-yes..." Clara nodded and spoke affirmation under her breath. Seb took this as his cue to continue, taking out a form from the back of the file, and a pen from the pocket of his neatly-arranged jacket. He put them both next to Clara, and pointed at the form.
"Please put your full name on this form, including your middle name and of course, your other details." He smiled. "In the meantime, would you like a coffee? Tea, perhaps?"
"I... Where am I?" Clara asked, ignoring the form and Sebastian's questions.
"Oh, let's start with the easy stuff first!" Sebastian chuckled gently, wiping his nose. He replaced the tissue in his pocket, and stood up, walking over to the side of the room Clara'd not paid attention to yet. An ominous-looking curtain was draped over what could only be a large window behind it. Clara's eyes followed Sebastian, and she was compelled to also stand up and walk over to the opposite side of the window that he stood on. With a flourish, Seb drew open the curtains to reveal an emerald-light-encrusted metropolis, suspended all around in three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. Clara gasped, nearly stumbling backward onto the table, but Seb gently reached for and held her arm. Regaining her composure, Clara took deep breaths, a hand to her chest feeling it rise and fall, with the other held by Sebastian.
"W-what is this?" She asked Sebastian, dumbstruck. She'd never seen anything like it, not even in the Doctor's timestream. Sebastian carefully took his hand away as she approached the window with renewed vigor.
"This, Clara..." Seb began to explain, pausing for dramatic effect. "Is Heaven. It's where you go when you die." He stood beside the window, awaiting the inevitable barrage of questions. But Clara had other ideas.
"Is... Danny... here?" She turned her gaze to meet his. Raising his eyebrow to the unexpected question - he'd rather moreso have expected a 'what now' sort of question - Seb went on to answer it.
"Yes. And no." He chuckled, shifting his weight awkwardly as he began to answer. Clara looked at him funnily, expecting further elaboration. He cleared his throat, then continued. "Yes, he is here. I can take you to see him if you like. But he is not... here, here." Seb tried to elaborate with hand gestures, cupping the air on either side of his body to create a diagram. "This is you in the 'material world'. The place you were before you died. This however, is Heaven. The place you go when you die. Your consciousness has been taken from your body, and... 'uploaded'... for lack of better word." He chuckled with the awkwardness. Explaining Heaven to the thousands if not millions of attendees was never going to get any less awkward. "Your body is not here in the material sense, but your minds are, and you have been rendered here as a manifestation of your physical self from the best moments from before you died."
"So basically, he is here, and I can see him?" Clara asked, growing increasingly urgent with her expectation of an answer. She stepped toward Seb as he smiled awkwardly, raising her face to meet his slightly higher eye level. "Take me to him."
The Doctor barged past the Cybermen outside of St Paul's, dashing into the building-turned-mausoleum. As he scurried along the polished marble hallways and past the empty Cyberman-containing cells, he looked around in horror. The mausoleum was larger than he could ever have imagined, with newly-created Cybermen pouring out of unseen hallways and holding cells. The Cybermen that the Doctor passed ignored him as if he were merely a panicked tourist running for the bus in the middle of Oxford, and continued marching. The only logical way this mausoleum could be explained was through Gallifreyan technology, much like the Nethersphere hanging in the centre was. Essentially, it was a dimension within an object - a fixed-location dimension. Larger on the inside than the outside, a portal to 'somewhere else', encased within a physical, existing object. And then it struck him. Pausing for the briefest of seconds, the Doctor stopped running through the crowds of Cybermen, and approached the banister that separated him from a massive fall. He looked down to see expanding nothingness, a reflection of the corridors he'd been running through. Then he looked back up at the Nethersphere.
"A Gallifreyan hard drive. Of course!" The Doctor's mouth went dry as he considered the implications of the situation. "The Promised Land... A location, within a location! How could I have been so stupid?!" He then doubled over as he recalled the words of the half-face man. His mission had been to reach The Promised Land. With his mind uploaded to the database upon his death, he'd undoubtedly reached it. Once a person's mind had been uploaded to the hard drive upon their death, it was Missy's call to action that had revived the Cybermen with the use of the minds from the Hard Drive. But only when they - or she - was ready. So Dr Chang hadn't been lying... the afterlife really did exist. And Clara had spoken to Danny. It'd been successful because they had communicated with the hard drive. A mind within a hard drive... A new location.
Then the Doctor's eyes flashed with realization. Clara. Breaking off his train of thought and feeling increasingly nauseous, he ran back to where he'd left Clara - in Doctor Chang's office. Pushing past the ever-growing crowds of Cybermen, he pushed out mental images of the metal monsters zapping innocent citizens but once he reached the door to the office, his pace slowed. Something was terribly wrong. Wisps of smoke were wafting through the cracks in the door, and a Cyberman stood inside. Habitually, the Doctor pulled out his Sonic Screwdriver, and replaced it in frustration as he recalled its ineffectiveness, thanks to Missy.
"This calls for some old-time action..." The Doctor muttered, then approaching the double doors and kicking it open squarely in the centre, almost causing it to fly off its hinges as the lock broke. The doors swung open wildly, smacking against the walls on the other side, and closing again slowly as the Doctor stepped through. But what the Doctor saw was what he'd hoped he'd never see. The reason he'd never brought companions along with him.
What was left of Clara was in the middle of the room, nothing more than a pile of ash.
The Cyberman stood guard, emotionless and saluting, unaware of the rage that crossed the Doctor's features.