Fragments

Three: Shattered Oblivion

When Clara stepped outside, she felt like something had punched her in the gut. She could recognize this feeling; it was the same sensation she had endured the last time she was on Trenzalore. It was emptiness, an emptiness that consumed her from the very center of her heart to the tips of the hairs on her arms. Her head began pounding. Perspiration trickled down her forehead. A stale wind flowed by as she turned to look at the eerily familiar desolation spread out around her. Tombstones- both innocuous little markers and monumental structures- littered the bleak landscape.

No. It wasn't bleak; that word was too kind for her surroundings. It was oblivion.

Her body began to wrack involuntarily with cold shivers. This was wrong. This was completely wrong. They'd saved Trenzalore, hadn't they? Christmas Town had been saved, the Daleks destroyed...

She gasped. Suddenly her stomach began to feel queasy. There was a pressure there- a squeezing; pulling, shifting pressure- that felt like every atom of her existence was about to fall apart. Her breath quickened in pace. She hugged herself, trying to make the searing pain go away.

The Doctor, meanwhile, was too busy scrutinizing the outer shell of the TARDIS to notice the graveyard. He gently ran his hand down the blue box's smooth wooden side, eyes wide with curiosity.

"Aren't you curious... Billions of disguises to choose from, and you choose this odd blue police box," he said quietly, more to the TARDIS than anyone else. "Would have thought you'd masquerade as a tomb."

Clara, still hugging her abdomen, strained to glance up. "It's looked like that for hundreds of years. Some sort of circuit's broken."

If he heard what she said, then he didn't reply. Instead, he ran towards some concrete stairs. The steps had long sense dilapidated, and by this day didn't lead anywhere. It offered a wide view of Trenzalore's war-stricken surface, however. He stood there tall, his muscles rigid, and observed the wreckage. In that moment, he didn't look like the compassionate Doctor she'd come to know. He looked like a Time Lord- proud and naïve- with a superiority complex.

"There must have been a war here," he stated indifferently, hands thrust in pockets. "A grrreat, gigantic war."

Clara didn't think she would ever get used to the way this Doctor rolled his r's. As her mind drifted, her abdomen throbbed once again, and she struggled not to cry out. Carefully, her arm latched around her midsection, and she hesitantly stepped up the stairs towards him.

"It was the Siege of Trenzalore," she explained, gasping for air in the planet's stale atmosphere. "You were protecting the town that was here for... for years and years, but your enemies finally broke through. Y-you died trying to save them."

Those last few words fell out in a flurried cluster, much faster than the Doctor could comprehend them. When the auditory portion of his brain seemed to finally match up with the computing sector, his mouth bobbed up and down. He was utterly speechless. With nothing else of importance to say, Clara was as well. So together, the two of them stood at the edges of their separate realities; one of them cursed with unwanted memories, and the other doomed to forget.

Clara Oswald watched her breath turn into condensation, and as that condensation blew into the distance to join the fog bank that was beginning to fall upon the mass graveyard. As she observed the ghastly reality around her, she had a most unpleasant thought. What if she had a tombstone, somewhere out there? She grimaced.

There was no way to know for sure, but it was likely that she did.

"I've been here once before," she whispered hoarsely then, "in the aftermath, but this is wrong. I changed time, and I saved you!"

At this, the Doctor- standing directly next to her- swiveled to attention.

"What do you mean, 'you saved me?'" he growled.

"What does it sound like?"

His lip curled up in disgust. "It sounds like you've been bending time to your own likings. I would highly advise against that, for She does not often enjoy being tampered with," he spat, and shot a sharpened dagger of a glance at her. The way he looked at her, she might as well have been one of the monstrous Zygon.

He turned on a dime, and began to amble down the broken-down steps, leaving Clara to stand there with a growing emptiness in her heart. There was no shattering this time; by now there were no more pieces of her heart large enough to break in half. It was already in fragments. What she had to do now was find a way to pick up the pieces.

"Do you know what the signal is coming from, or not?" she questioned him sullenly. She still stared at his turned back, consistently doing double takes because this man looked so much like her green-eyed Doctor from behind. Forgetting the grey hair; their body structure was very similar, and coupled with his predecessor's waistcoat, it made for a close resemblance.

The Doctor glanced back, breaking her hazy spell of remembrance. "Whatever pulled us off course, it has to be something massive," he mentioned offhand. "Something with revolutionary temporal capabilities," he continued, searching lazily across the sky until his eyes landed on something of interest, "something like that!"

She peered in the direction his finger was pointing, and found only two things: dread, and a gigantic, blue, size-leaked time capsule. A bolt of pain tore through her side once again, causing her to gasp.

"Is that our ship?" he asked, and she could see the uneasiness drawn on his face.

"Yeah."

"Did you see her when you were here before?"

"Yeah. Bad, then?"

"You could say that," he muttered. He scratched at his head. "I think we can now proclaim with certainty where our mysterious signal came from."

Clara frowned, and continued to stare at the dying TARDIS in the hills beyond. She didn't quite know how to explain it, but there was just something about it that felt... Off. She blinked. No matter what she did, that feeling was always there. It was like it was somehow calling her, beckoning her to come closer, for her to see the light.

"Well," she muttered, and began to step towards the distant hillside. "No time like the present. Let's go to-"

Her words became punctuated by a cry of pain. At at once, the world's colors flashed and throbbed and glowed. She drifted in and out of awareness for just a millisecond, and when she came to again, her surroundings were not the same. All off a sudden, the war-torn oblivion was gone, and replaced with the very town they had just left. Townspeople skittered about, picking up minor debris from that last Dalek attack.

"But that's-" she stuttered, flabbergasted.

Impossible, her subconscious completed. But of course, impossible doesn't exist when you're in the world of the Doctor.

"This is fascinating," the man himself gushed, having popped up by Clara's side. A wide grin (the sort that was gleeful for all the wrong reasons) crossed his face as he began to jump back and forth, one step towards Clara... one step away. One towards... one away. She could only imagine the jarring experience his senses were getting right now.

"This is definitely the same place on the globe, and the same time period. It's like there's two realities bleeding into each other," he said. "One where everything perished in bloodshed, and one where most survived." He pointed at the ground beneath his feet. "Right here- where I'm standing- is just one of the edges, one of the thresholds, where the dual realities are separated. By now, however, I sense that one reality could not fully exist without the other... They're wrapped around each other, they've got codependence."

"Okay, but why?" she pressed, still confused.

His mouth was a disapproving line. "You said you changed time, Clara. This here... The world in fragments... This would be the consequence."

The Doctor extended one foot in front of him. The moment it landed on the dull brickwork of Christmas Town's rickety streets, he doubled over with a wheeze of discomfort. Alarmed, she ran forwards to help, shaking off the weird disconnected sensation she felt as she crossed over a second threshold, and Trenzalore became an empty graveyard once more.

"What's wrong?" Clara cried, helping him to squat. She looked on in horror as his complexion became ashen and sickly. His eyes called out in fear as a dim glow began to radiate from underneath the skin of his neck.

"I-I'm not quite sure," he stuttered. "It feels like my regeneration might somehow be reversing-"

At that moment, his mouth involuntarily jerked wide, and a stream of the golden energy wafted into the air. Both of then watched it flutter into the sky. Their sight was fixed on the excess regenerative energy until it finally disappeared beyond their foreseeable horizons.

"Not reversing, then," he proclaimed, still staring dazedly into the distance. "Just excess from my last regeneration. I suppose that's to be expected."

"So you're fine, then, everything's okay?" Clara queried with a hopeful smile.

"No," the Doctor replied slowly. There was evidence of active contemplation on his brow. "I'm still dying. Or I'm already dead, it depends on one's perspective. You said you changed time to save my life, and that single decision split reality into halves; two sides are literally at war for domination. Currently, my body can't figure out which side is true and which is false, so I am both dead and alive simultaneously. You probably are, as well."

Suddenly, neurons in her mind connected, and she began to make sense of the situation. So this was why her body had felt terrible; when she could feel the emptiness, she was feeling death. It was the effects of the other timeline, which were seeping through to this reality. In the other turn of events, where the Doctor died and Trenzalore ended as a tombstone-encrusted battlefield, she was dead. Her broken, lifeless body lied somewhere in that ground...

Now suitably creeped out, Clara shivered. It appeared this situation was worlds more complicated than originally imagined.