Happy (late) Easter! I hope you enjoy, this chapter is a bit slow, bear with it!
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Inside the Tardis, it's easier. The bio-dampeners aren't quite as effective and the happiness that rolls over her mind draws a soft breathless laugh. She wants to stay there and bask in the familiarity, the homecoming, but she knows there isn't time, that in a moment Clara and the Doctor will realize and follow her. She closes her eyes again, focusing and projecting pictures and feelings, not bothering with words because she knows they're not needed. It's still like yelling under water, the Doctor can't know, his face and her face and a chasm without a bridge, the Doctor can't know.
She feels the Tardis' displeasure, but just as the door behind her is flung open, there is a grudging, muted agreement there too, and a gentle edge of understanding. She breathes out a sigh of relief and fixes the look of shock back on her face as she breathes in, turning slowly to face Clara and the Doctor clustered in the open doorway.
"What is this?" she breathes out, widening her eyes and backing into the railing beside the door as she stares up at the height of the ceiling above her. There's Gallifreyan written everywhere, across the walls and above the console, and the light is dim, blue and silver rather than bright and golden. It reminds her too much of Trenzalore, his body stretched out on the ground and desperate Clara bending over him.
"It's a time machine, how many times have we gone over this?" snaps the Doctor, brushing past her to round the console, fiddling with switches and screens.
"But on the outside it's, it's," she waves her arms around for a minute, ends with her hands clasped over her head, "small. It's like…this should be a closet!"
"I know it's a lot to take in," Clara says gently, reaching out to rub River's upper arms comfortingly, "just take a few deep breaths, okay? Let's count them," she has her nanny voice on, and River hides a smile, turning in a slow circle, as if to take in the room, "One," says Clara, loudly sucking in and releasing a breath, "Two-"
The door slams shut behind them, both her and Clara start and look around at it, but then there is a sudden lurch, throwing River against the railing. She reaches out to grab Clara's arm, bracing them both as the Tardis shakes and an unhappy grinding noise filters up from the console.
She gives a nice shriek for affect, and if it's a little late everyone seems too busy to notice anyway.
"Doctor!" yells Clara, pushing herself up from where she'd been thrown against the railing, "What's going on?"
He's already hauled himself back to the console, bracing himself with one hand around a lever he should really be more careful of, and shaking the scanner with his other hand. River represses the urge to roll her eyes.
"I don't know! She just decided to take off!"
"What!? We're in flight?!" Clara pulls herself towards the console, holding onto the railings as the jostling continues.
"Yes! Obviously!"
"Well where are we going?" Clara stands next to him, gripping the rim of the console against the shaking and staring blankly at the scanner that's flashing nonsense Galiffreyan too quickly for even River to read.
"I don't know!"
"How can you not know?" River says, gripping either side of the railing in each hand, "Aren't you flying this thing?"
"Well, actually no, not at the moment," he swings around to the other side of the console, wrestling with a knob that refuses to budge.
"Then who is flying?"
"Um, she appears to be….flying herself."
"What?!" she infuses as much panic into her voice as she can, although really it's a comforting thought. She's a better pilot on her own anyway.
"Yes, well, it happens, every now and then."
"You've drugged me too, haven't you? This is one of those trippy, druggy dreams, isn't it?" she makes a show of stumbling back around and pulling on the door handle.
"Stop that," the Doctor snaps, "if you manage to get that door open you'll die in the time vortex!"
"Good! That's how these dreams work, right? You have to die to wake up!"
"Mo, he isn't drugging us and this is not a dream!" Clara yells from the console.
And then the shaking stops, the lights dimming and the tone of the engine shifting to something soft and humming. The Doctor swings back around the console to the monitor, and she can see by the crease of his eyebrows that he's confused.
"Doctor, where are we?" asks Clara, and he doesn't answer for a moment, just sort of hums, spinning and tapping at the screen.
"We're… in the outskirts of the Traxis system, about two thousand lightyears from Trivellia 5 in the year 586. Basically-" he pushes his hair back from his forehead with one sloppy hand, "we're in the middle of nowhere."
"Ok…" says Clara, straining to look at the scanner, covered in swirling Gallifreyan and rotating galactic star charts, "Why? Did something happen here?"
He shakes his head, giving up on the scanner and moving to the darkened navigation controls. He tugs on the zigzag plotter, nothing happens and he throws his hands up in frustration, "No! Never! There's literally nothing here! Ever! It's just a great big nowhere nothingness of nothing!"
"Good," says River, faintly, putting a frightened shiver in her voice, "that means we can just go straight home, right?" She leans back against the railing, holding it behind her in both hands, her thumb stroking the warm metal happily. They aren't going back, not for awhile. The Tardis feels smug against her mind, and she can feel her intentions uncurling against River's mind.
Safe. Staying. A cradle made from silver wood and hung with stars.
"Yeah, yeah of course," says the Doctor, distractedly, not looking up.
Clara walks back to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders comfortingly. "Don't worry, Mo, the Doctor's going to get us home," her confidence both warms River's heart and breaks it a little.
"Save her, yes, but be sensible!"
"Clara, are we..." she rubs a hand over her face, "it's impossible, right? I mean, we're not actually, you know, in space?"
"It's perfectly safe, Mo, really, trust me," Clara smiles at her, and River can see suddenly the age in her eyes, the slight dip to her shoulders.
"How long have you been doing this?" she asks quietly. The arm around her shoulders loosens and Clara's gaze flickers past her face.
"It's hard to say," Clara answers, distantly, "a long time."
"Clara-"
"Do you want to see?" Clara asks brightly, cutting her off, and before she can respond she raises her voice to the Doctor, currently with his head buried under the console, "It's alright to open the door now, yes?"
He waves his free hand at them but doesn't answer and Clara rolls her eyes, looping her arm through River's and pulling her the short distance to the door, "It's brilliant Mo, you'll love it," she says, eyes sparkling, "I've wanted to tell you for ages, you know." She pushes the door open with a flourish, a little too enthusiastically, and River winces internally as the door hits the outside wall with a dull clunk.
The Tardis hates it when people do that.
"Amazing isn't it?"
It isn't terribly impressive, really, as far as space views go. They truly are out in the middle of deep space, hanging on the edge of a spiral galaxy, looking out into the blackness of the gaps that span the distances between stars. In the distance there are a few softly glowing spots of distant galaxies, and off to the left the edge of one of them is marked by a scattering of stars.
But mostly it's just black.
"Wow," she says.
"Yep, sure is." Clara leans against the doorway, folding her arms across her chest, and River moves to join her, clutching the door-jam with both hands and craning her neck to look down like she's terrified.
"How are we breathing right now?"
"Oh, there's an air bubble. Perfectly safe, see?" Clara leans out the doorway as far as she can and waves her arms around in space
River snorts at her, "You look daft."
They stay for a while in the open doorway. River asks all the expected questions about space and time travel and the Doctor himself, and tries to listen to Clara's explanations. It's difficult though, with the Doctor fiddling around just at the edge of her vision. She is entirely too aware of his every noise and movement.
Clara is in the middle of attempting to explain the bigger-on-the-inside-ness of the Tardis (always difficult to do without transdimensional adjectives), when the Doctor pulls on the wrong wire. The Tardis shouts in her head and the Doctor squaks from under the console as he's showered with sparks. She hears the dull clunk of his head making contact with the underside of the console. She groans and rubs her own head before she can remember not to, and Clara drops her explanation quickly, "I know it's hard to understand," she says comfortingly.
"Yeah," lies River, "It's giving me a bit of a headache actually. I don't suppose you've got any tea on this thing? Not alien tea, mind you, the real stuff."
She follows Clara back to the kitchen, trying not to roll her eyes when the Tardis shifts it around a couple of times, just to make sure River remembers that she is not happy about the situation.
"I swear," says Clara, finally opening the right door and holding it open for River to pass through into the familiar room, "the Tardis just does not like me."
The kitchen doesn't change the way the console room does, and it's wonderfully familiar. She sits down in Amy's favorite chair, and watches Clara go up on her toes to pull a kettle out of one the upper cupboards.
"Really Sweetie, a tea kettle? Isn't that a little old fashioned"
The steam curls around his long fingers as he pours, and he doesn't look at her when he says, "a friend brought it with her."
"Which friend?" She raises the mug to her lips, watches his face through the lazy swirl of steam as he pours his own mug.
"Donna," he answers, and then he smiles, almost involuntarily, "she brought everything, I think I'll be finding her things laying about for at least a few hundred more years." Under the table she catches one of his ankles between her own, and he smiles at her over the rim of his mug.
Without the Doctor and his distracting disinterest, and away from the cold blue console room rimmed in ghostly names, she finds that it's easier to lean into Clara, drawing out their friendship across the table like it's Amy sitting there in her nightgown.
Giggling together late at night.
The stories start out light and exciting, with ghosts that aren't ghosts (and yet, in a way everyone already is, and there's the depth of those other lives again, before she blinks and slips past it, and it was kind of like Romeo and Juliet, only aliens), and fighting robot men in a castle. And then, almost unthinkingly she slips into a story about Christmas, and snowmen that came alive.
"….and then he handed me a key-" she stops, her eyes dropping to the mug clutched between her suddenly white-knuckled hands. The memories play across her face, and suddenly she covers her mouth with the back of her hand, eyes squeezing shut as two tears break through and slip down her cheeks.
"Clara!" River says, reaching for her free hand, "what happened?"
"I fell, I fell and then I, I died."
"What? No you didn't."
"I did though, another me, one of the, the echoes."
"You remember it?" She asks, softly.
Clara nods, resting her elbow on the table and her face in her hand.
"That's terrible," she cradles Clara's hand, squeezing her fingers comfortingly. Clara looks up at her, wiping her face on her sleeve and attempting a watery smile,
"Sorry, sorry, I just…I'm not used to it yet, you know? Sometimes I can't keep it all straight in my head."
Behind her the door opens and the Doctor bursts in, "Ah! There you are, drinking tea! Lovely idea."
Clara pulls away from her quickly, wiping the remnants of tears from her cheeks discreetly. It's pointless, River can tell by the tenseness of his shoulders and the way his eyes slip away from Clara that he'd been listening.
He dances across the room, "Clara Clara Clara, what's with this old thing, eh?" he says, dumping the water out of the kettle, "I've told you, this is much better," he holds up a sleek, sophisticated appliance, "instant heating, very convenient, don't have to wait." He pushes Donna's kettle into the sink with a clatter.
"So why don't you know me? Where am I in the future?"
"Clara can use the damn kettle if she wants to," River snaps at him. He starts a little, spinning around, taken aback by her vehemence. She stands up, her chair scraping loudly against the floor, "have you got us home yet?"
"Er, well, no. Looks like that might take a little while,"
"Fine, whatever. Come on, Clara, you said there was a library."
"Um," says Clara, not moving from her seat, "Yeah there is, you want to go see it…. now?"
"Yes please," River stands expectantly, hands braced on the back of her chair.
"Clara hasn't finished her tea yet, and look at that, it's cold." The Doctor sits down next to Clara and plops a new, steaming mug down in front of her, "There you are," he says brightly, "now then, were you having 'girl talk'?" he makes finger quotes in the air, "because that's rubbish. Just general chat, now, that's much better."
"Don't drink that Clara," River snaps, "they probably use some kind of crazy radiation to heat it up that fast, it's going to give you cancer."
The Doctor splutters and launches into a defensive explanation of how, in fact, the appliance really works as she grabs Clara's arm and pulls her out the door. Just before the door closes she catches a glimpse of him gazing after them, sitting alone at the table amidst their three mugs.
You shouldn't be alone Doctor.
She regrets it for just a moment, but pushes it aside easily enough.
Because there was Amy, facing them both with her last words just for him; Raggedy Man, goodbye.
She's only borrowing Clara, after all. At least he'll get her back.