The creature named Louis is not waiting for them immediately outside the Tardis.
Which is nice. Maybe he's got his years mixed up. Maybe his temporal transport, whatever it is, is unreliable. Maybe it broke down and he's lost tumbling through the vortex, will be for all eternity, and they'll never have to worry about him again. That would be terribly nice. But just to be certain, they ought to wait around a while. Give him a chance. Should he show up, they'll deal with it.
Should he fail to show up, the Doctor will take Clara home, and with the Tardis cloaked out of sight, he will stay within whistling distance until quite sure that her ordeal is over.
If Louis shows up then, he'll know better than to show his face. There's only so many times you can get a thing wrong before it just becomes undignified. And there's only so many times you can come after one of the Doctor's friends before he becomes very angry indeed.
Still, for now it seems that Virginia is safe. It is not, however, without questions.
"I don't understand," the Doctor says. "I left them right here."
Clara is quiet just long enough to have thought about this. Then, "Left them? Doctor, did you abandon people in a strange place outside their own time?"
"I had just received an unequivocal message that you were in grave danger. I didn't know what I was walking into."
"And now you can't find them?"
"They were right here."
"And one of them is Jessica?"
"…I know I'm not helping my case, but you should know the other one is just as bad."
He looks for them, up and down and across the street. He did have one idea where they might be, but the hotdog stand has closed up shop and been wheeled home for the night. Then, up from the gutter, a breeze catches a piece of old newspaper and wraps it around his ankle. It looks grubby, soft. A couple of days being blown about and trampled on.
The front page headline is about a hurricane in 2013. It's the paper that came up out of the pit with the hollowed man. Which was pristinely preserved, and is now a couple of days old.
Louis might not be the one with faulty, unreliable travel technology.
River once told him about a thing called a 'news sandwich'. It's a psychological trick for delivering bad news. By sandwiching it between two bits of good news, it comes to feel less important. It has never, ever worked for him. So maybe, just maybe, it will work the other way round. The Doctor organizes his thoughts and turns to Clara. "The bad news is, we're going to have to find them. The good news is, I've figured out we're just a day or two late. The bad news is, that Louis fellow might be thinking we tried to trick him."
…No. No, it's not working. From the anxious, knotty feeling in his stomach, it's not working on him. From the look on Clara's face it's not working on her either. Somehow it's worse than making up a good thing to go on the other side. No, this is awful. He looks at Clara and regrets the whole endeavour. She's worried now. He had calmed her and she's worried again.
Worried, but she has the wherewithal to say, "You tried to do the news thing again, didn't you?"
"Oh, we've been through that before."
"You explained it to me once, so that I would understand how sorry you were that you couldn't think of a second piece of good news. It went something like, 'Good news, Strax is here,' and then, 'Bad news, he's lost his sense of self and all memory of the pact so he's acting a bit more Sontaran than usual' and then you couldn't think of anything."
He nods. Not because he remembers, but because ti makes sense for him to have forgotten. As one might surmise from Clara's synopsis, he had other things on his mind. That was an interesting Easter. He should tell it to you sometime. Exploding eggs.
"Come on," he tells her, trying to change the subject. "They couldn't be too difficult to find."
Clara nods, agreeing. "And more considerate than you, too."
The Doctor neither agrees, nor is happy, not understands what the two facts have to do with each other. She nods over his shoulder. There, stuck to a lamppost, nailed down with a little end of blue stake, is a note handwritten on another piece of the newspaper. The intricate cursive has to be Lizzie's, though she's more used to a quill; a black felt-tip trembled in her hand.
"Doctor," he reads aloud. For Clara's benefit, not just because he likes the sound of his own name, scout's honour. "On Jessica's advice we have decided to accompany the unfortunate victim from the collapsed tunnel to the place of…" And here he trails off. Lizzie's language is refreshingly elegant. But Jessica, having been able to make head nor tail of it, has left her own words chalked on the pavement. He walks backward over those and reads them. "Goes to hospital Doctor. Oh, yes, that's much better. And look, she's put a little smiley face on the end. See, Elizabeth is relaying a message, information. Jessica is a communicator. Four words, everything I need to know, and the smiley face so I know they're not angry at me."
"Jessica isn't angry." Clara had taken the note from him when he forgot it. Frowning at it, "Elizabeth might be a little bit annoyed."
"Oh, there's a P.S., isn't there?"
"Shall I read it to y-?" She stops. Doesn't trail off like he did, but just stops. The Doctor stops smiling back at the face on the pavement and looks up. There, not inches from Clara's face, is a hovering robot. Light flashes over her face as it scans for her identity. "Doctor?"
"Police drone. Don't worry, he's friendly. Provided you have no outstanding arrest warrants, parking tickets, anything like that. Although, those I.D. scans are supposed to take less than a second. Clara, you haven't done anything illegal since we landed, have you?"
"No!" she balks.
"Just checking."
"How could I possibly have done anything illegal, I am a half-step outside the Tardis I've done nothing but talk to you, which might make me mad but certainly not a criminal and-"
"I was just checking, twisty-knickers." But really, she must have done something, because now the little lights are turning red. Certainly, that's not a good thing. Red lights are seldom a good thing. Green lights which become red are almost never a good thing. "Oh! Oh, you don't exist."
"Beg pardon?!"
"You're 70-odd years out of date and you're not from round here." The Doctor leaps across to her, slings an arm around her shoulders and pushes his face up next to hers, making sure he draws the attention of the scanners by sticking his tongue out, wiggling his nose. "Bleh, look at me, I'm weirder than she is, look how weird I am, look, bleugh."
From the corner of her mouth, "What are you doing?"
"Hoping the truce between UNIT and the Roswell lot has held out until now. If it knows who I am – and look, she's with me! – it might not make an official report. Lot of paperwork, very dull, no time for that." Even as he describes it, the lights switch back from red to green. Which is almost always a good thing, and even more so in this case. The drone calms down, lifts up in the air, and goes back about its hovering business.
As they step back into the Tardis for the short hop to hospital, Clara pauses, grumbling, "Does this mean I can't go anywhere without you, while we're here?"
"Yes."
He allows his answer to remain just that simple. She doesn't need to know the details. It's nothing to do with the drone. Now that she's been logged, now that the system knows he brought her here, she's in no danger. Unless she does something illegal, but they covered that. She can't go anywhere without him because there is a dangerous force wandering around somewhere that wants her.
Louis, whatever he is, could have come after the Doctor from any angle. There have been so many dozens of people in his lifetimes, hundreds of them, thousands, that had some sort of access. A great number of them would have had no problem at all giving him up into enemy hands.
There is only one conclusion to draw – gaining the Doctor was less important to the creature than was gaining him from Clara.
So no, she can't go anywhere without him, because he's not letting her out of his sight.
[Sorry – this is short and nothing happens. But I wanted to post something before Xmas so that I could wish you all a merry one, and thank you very much for being here for me the last few weeks. I really needed to come back to FFnet and all you and your kind words. Much love – Sal.
P.S. If it helps, after Christmas there'll be action and confrontation, a minor demon named Toffee being nasty to the Doctor and an unusual use for a Chameleon Arch, and it's going to be wicked class. Provided, of course, y'all still want me.]