Please correct me if I'm wrong - but there are 93 companions who have travelled with the Doctor including Clara, right? (Apologies if it isn't.)
Update: The number of companions are fixed! The number I'll be going with is 47 :) Thank you to ThePurpleFrockCoat for the information!
I know audio adventures are technically canon (thanks to Night of the Doctor), I feel like I should only count TV companions. (Sorry Big Finish fans).
Thank you for all the reviews/follows/favourites - you guys are the best :D
Kate woke up, flinching in pain. She was in a completely different place. High tech monitors reading every signal in her body. She groaned as pain shot up her body.
"Hey." The Doctor said, as he squeezed her hand, the ring pulsed, and Kate knew it was the Doctor.
"What happened to the quarantine room?"
"I have higher authority than you. Apparently I still hold rights as the president of Earth." He added later. "And no one in the base wanted you to suffer alone."
"I should fire everyone for breaking the rules." She weakly chuckled.
"Yeah, everyone including me." He sarcastically added, chuckling with her.
"I've already had liver failure?" She said as she reached for her files and started reading it.
"…and kidney. So far, your symptoms are exactly like the ones Clara had."
"Doctor, I have to tell you something… "
"That you lost Clara's body?" He smiled. "I know, it's okay. That means my plan is working."
"… what?" Kate raised an eyebrow, confused. That was not the reaction she was expecting from the Doctor.
"That capsule is built with a GPS alert. It will give me a signal on where they are if the capsule is opened or disturbed. We will be able to find where Clara is." He said.
His expression suddenly changed. "Then, I can find whoever did this to her, and you. They will learn that if they hurt my friends I will hurt them back." Kate knew his fierce face. The face often referred to as the Oncoming Storm.
His expression then returned to a happy one.
"…anyway, you shouldn't worry about her, or me. You should worry about yourself. If you feel any different, you have to tell me. Okay?" He gave a small squeeze. The ring pulsed even stronger than before. "Brave heart Kate." He winked. Kate smiled as she closed her eyes.
The Doctor stayed there until she fell asleep. She was so much like the Brig. Such a fighter, yet with so much compassion. He sighed and left the room.
"Doctor, will she be okay?" It was McGillop.
He turned around, seeing her asleep. "No. She will be brilliant." He lied. But he knew that McGillop already knew the truth.
The Doctor skipped to the next day and landed near Clara's cemetery. He took a bouquet of flowers and walked up to her grave. He wanted to see how the flowerbed was progressing.
From afar, he could see a few police officers standing around, with the area taped. He ran up to see what was going on. He saw Dave and Clara's gran sat on the bench, devastated by the sight.
"What happened?!" He asked in shock.
"Grave robbery. Some bloody insensitive, selfish idiots robbed Clara's grave." Dave yelled in anger. "If I find whoever did this…"
"Dave, calm down. I'm pretty sure Clara wouldn't have wanted this. She never agreed to violence, remember?" Clara's gran said, tearfully.
"No, Clara would have wanted revenge."
"No, Dave, your mother is right. Clara would never want you to kill someone in her name. Just let me handle it." The Doctor said. "I have friends in the military. They handle cases like… grave robberies. I'll get them onto this as soon as I can."
"Fine." Dave angrily muttered. He aggressively breathed in and out trying to calm himself. That was his daughter for god's sake! Why did the grave robbers have to choose hers out of so many in the cemetery?! He was still furious, but after what the Doctor said, he managed to calm down a little.
The Doctor stood in fury as well. Something in his brain finally clicked together. 'Whoever they were, they must have tried to find Clara's body in the grave, then failed to do so. They probably scanned the DNA from the dummy body and found the real Clara in the UNIT base and taken her somewhere. But what for? Why would they need a dead body?' He questioned himself. Whoever they were, they had no right to treat his best friend's body and her family like this. The Doctor's clenched fist trembled in anger. Whoever did this will pay, no matter what. There were no second chances for them now, they'd already killed his best friend and then humiliate him more by taking away the last remains. That was already a strike two.
"Doctor." The Doctor turned around to see Clara's gran's sad eyes. "Promise me you'll find whoever did this." She sniffled. "She never deserved this. She was a good person."
The Doctor nodded sadly. "I promise. I would never let someone get away after hurting my friend."
"Thank you." She whispered.
The Doctor walked into the TARDIS and calmly closed the door. He walked up to the console and hit it over and over until his knuckles started bleeding. He collapsed on the side of the console, breaking down. Why did everyone close to him got hurt?
Suddenly, there was a ping. He slowly stood up to see the location. The GPS tracker on Clara's capsule had finally turned itself on. He remembered what he said to Clara when she was breaking down.
He sniffled. "This is it. The darkest day. The blackest hour. Chin up, shoulders back. Let's see what we're made of, you and I." It sounded so empty without her. She always filled the TARDIS up with all her bright, bubbly personality and sassiness. Clara was dead, but he hoped he could fix that.
He pulled the lever and the TARDIS landed with a thud. The Oncoming storm was brewing.
When he opened the TARDIS, he was greeted with a damp underpass. It was a dark, unused tunnel that was once used for pedestrians. But judging by the state of it, it had passed its usefulness. He scanned the area with the screwdriver, and carefully walked into the scary tunnel.
There was a metal door that was shut close by extra-terrestrial lock.
He fiddled with the frequency, and heard the lock open with a click. "Gotcha."
The sound of his boots on the steel stairs leading downstairs bounced all through the large basement. Of course, the tunnel had been built there to lead them to the underground train station. However, complications probably arose stopping the government from opening it to the public. Now, it was an underground base station, or a hiding ground for deadly alien murderers.
The Doctor heard a hiss and then a squelch. His Time Lord ears picked up on a small electricity current zapping something. When he turned away from the stairs, he saw Clara's body in the middle, connected with blood bags from god knows where.
"Hey, leave my friend alone!" The Doctor growled. He could clearly see that they did not grasp the concept of human biology. There were tubes with wrong types of blood connected in wrong places, some missing the vein, some too close to her vital organs… They were damaging Clara's body – they had no idea what they were doing. He approached her body and pulled a long tube from her mouth. That was a breathing tube… god knows where they got it from, but they had stuffed it through to her stomach. It wasn't even remotely close. He grabbed onto the needles in the wrong place and pulled them out, which sprayed the blood all over the floor. He was pulling needles out of his best friend's dead body. Seeing her body in a state like this even worsened the Time Lord's mood.
Inside his mind, his hopes shattered into million pieces. He thought, them having access to the Polovox poison, they might have been advanced enough to bring her back. She had been only technically been dead for 10 minutes or less, and he wholeheartedly believed that there were some truth to the three hour myth. But seeing their lack of knowledge, he knew that wasn't possible. He grabbed onto her wrist, trying to pull the rest of the tubes out. Even if they were placed correctly, she was already dead, there was nothing they could do to stop her from being dead.
Suddenly, the Doctor froze. It was weak, but he felt a small pulse in Clara's wrist. He touched Clara's face. She was warm!
He brought his ears closer to her mouth to see if she was breathing. He flinched back as she coughed.
She was alive.
The aliens, who had receded to the corner of the room garbled excitedly in what seemed like gibberish. Either it was a language he has never heard of before, or they were too far from the future for him to understand their concept of language.
"You were… trying to save her?" He asked.
With a little pause, he heard a deep metallic voice like one in a bad quality recording. "Yes. She is now useful."
"Useful for what?" He asked, frowning.
"Incubating an antitoxin for Polovox poison."
The Doctor saw a little military symbol inscribed on their body. They were droids!
"State your intention on earth." He demanded. He realised they weren't sentient forms, just military droids of the 87th century programmed to do its job.
"We are the Navdroids from the 87th century. Polinian race of Hunod – 7 has created a biological weapon containing a toxin called Polovox. 4 Navdroids have been sent to various timelines of various life forms to find an organic lifeform that can survive the poison. We have finally found a human compatible for this purpose."
"No, Clara wasn't compatible for your purpose. You killed her in the process." He said, emptily. "Even if you can create an antitoxin from her empty body, you wouldn't know if the antitoxin is toxic to other bodies as well… because you're trying to experiment on a dead body." Their quest killed his best friend for nothing… and another was dying as they were speaking right now. "Okay, I can understand why you're doing this. It's what you're programmed to do. I know that. But what I don't understand is why you attacked Kate. She did nothing wrong, she was only trying to protect Clara's body, for me." He said in anger.
"She was protecting our asset from us. We recognised her as the enemy soldier. Time is running out for all Navbots. We have been in this quest for seven thousand years."
"Seven thousand?! Blimey, how are you still functional? Even 87th century drones can't last more than one thousand years without being tended."
"We absorb unimportant organic lifeforms such rodents and pests. We are programmed to cause the least damage to the ecosystems of the planet."
"And yet, you killed one human and another who will die in a few days." The Doctor's eyes returned to Clara's breathing body. He scanned her to see that everything was functional, except her brain. She was basically an empty shell, forced to live through the 87th century life support.
"Why was she compatible?" He asked in sadness. "Tell me why. Out of the 7 billion people on earth, why was she the only one compatible?"
"Clara Oswald is the forty seventh subject. The subjects are chosen by their levels of background radiation. Experiments were once conducted in humane conditions that did not alter their ability to function, nor noticed by the subjects. After forty six failed experiments, the safety protocol was overridden. Clara Oswald is the first subject of the overridden protocol." The Doctor closed his eyes. forty seven… He froze. The amount of companions he has had in the TARDIS. Forty seven people who have travelled in the TARDIS and gathered harmless background radiation.
Another drone stepped up. "The newly planned extracting of the subject was initially planned to be conducted without the subject's knowledge, minimising the suffering. However, due to malfunctions, the subject located the operation drone before the mission. With limiting human knowledge, the drone tried to shut the subject down with the method of punching, however failed to do so. Information was gathered from a dummy body in the grave, and the subject's real body from Unified Intelligent Taskforce was brought back to the main hub."
"Fellow robots, I'm sorry to inform you that she won't be of much use to you. She is dead." He felt pain saying that. He had so much hope, and it was shattered. Now all he had was an empty breathing shell. "The only reason she is alive is because of your machinery. Once humans are dead, their brain, which is something like your hard drive, permanently switches off. She will be useless to you now. Please, she was my friend, my best friend. Please let her go. I would like her to rest in peace." The Doctor pleaded.
"Request: Denied. The subject will now be tested with the sample of the Polovox toxin."
A drone walked up to Clara's body.
"No, don't you dare!" He screamed. Before he could stop the drone, another drone locked his arms together. He cried out in pain. He felt both of his shoulder dislocating from the strength the drone held him.
"You don't handle humanoid lifeforms like that!" He yelled in pain and annoyance. The strength of the drone decreased, but it still held tight onto the Doctor's wrists.
He saw a sticky green liquid being injected into one of the tubes. His eyes followed the tube until it disappeared under Clara's skin.
Clara's breathing became short and shallow, her heart rate increased and her body twisted, trying to break free from the chemical.
"I'm sorry Clara, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He repeated the words. He was somehow glad that she was already brain dead, as he would have hated to see her in so much pain. He had heard that this substance was used to interrogate prisoners with valuable information in the Dalek concentration camps, which didn't really end well for the prisoners as they always ended up dead.
Even with the life support, the poison killed her in less than two minutes. Seeing her dead body being used like that broke his hearts. He groaned at the pain from his dislocated shoulders; if it wasn't for the pain, he would have tried making a run for it, to take the drones down.
A drone approached Clara's lifeless body again. A spark jumped from the drone to Clara, and her empty life was restarted again.
"No!" He was so shocked that it came out as a breathless whisper.
He saw his best friend be killed from the toxin and brought back to life five… six… twenty… he had lost count. He didn't know how long had passed, but it felt almost like his twelve lifetimes, seeing dead Clara brought back to life over and over again to be killed again and again with robotic precision. By the end of it, he was looking away in despair. The mere sight ripped him into shreds. If he had a soul in the first place, it was now definitely gone.
"Subject forty seven, declared failed." The voice said.
"Please… let us go." He pleaded for the last time. His voice was hoarse from screaming and pleading with the drones.
"Granted." The drones ungrasped his wrist. The Doctor grimaced and popped his shoulders back into place. He laid on the black, grimy floor in temporary relief.
"Polinian law states that you have seen too much confidential matters. Solution: execution."
He backed away. "No, no. I've done nothing wrong, please go away. Just let us go."
The robot shot a green crystal on his face, which exploded into vapour in contact.
"Execution completed." The drones disappeared through a teleporter beam.
The Doctor could feel the toxin slowly corrupting his blood. He gazed at the watch.
"I have three days left."