DAY 143

Nowadays

Clara

Sometimes, Clara Oswald overthought. It was a terrible habit. She would be trying to sleep, and she wouldn't be able to switch off her mind, and with partial loss of consciousness came a loss of control over her higher brain functions. And these thoughts came out of nowhere, they really did, a whole string of fears and realisations that felt like she had just had half of her teeth knocked out by a brick to her face.

As she lay there in the middle of the night, unable to quite get to sleep and fearing that even if she did she would be subjected to some rather horrendous nightmares, she felt smothered; the darkness around her became a physical entity, a malevolent force her own anxieties had conjured from the depths of her psyche, brought out to attack her, to weaken her, it became tendrils around her lungs and a deafening white noise rang in her ears, an impenetrable silence that was as cacophonous as an air raid siren hung in the air, all of her senses overloaded by a crushing sensation she had imagined unto herself and Clara felt like she couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything, like she was going to succumb to a billion tiny little worries that had popped out of nowhere like drops of water from a tap slowly dripping and dripping and dripping and building and building and building until she was drowning and she thought she might-

The Doctor coughed.

The sensations subsided.

It was some time a while after midnight in the in the early hours of the 'next day' - if 'next days' ever really existed in the stasis of the TARDIS. She had her fists clenched around her bedsheets, lying on her back, and had forgotten her was there next to her. But he was, she could see him when she glanced over, his dark silhouette, she could hear him breathing when she strained to listen. Letting go of the sheets she balled up her hands and pushed them into her own eyes. It was funny how her worries revolved around him, yet she had forgotten she had him there all along, to confide in, to talk to - but would he want to be talked to about this? Would confiding really help her at all?

There she lay, a married woman, and it was suddenly hitting her, four months later, that she had been wrenched right out of her life quite violently and flung into this new one with this man she had hardly known, a man she still hardly knew, and it was all becoming very overwhelming. There she was on a spaceship with an alien, travelling through time and space at a gazillion miles per hour and she could feel her old life, her old self, her family, her everything, slipping away, sending her tumbling down into a choking abyss. The Doctor had swept in and pulled the rug from under her and now she was in free fall. And the only question she had on her mind was the one of if he was willing to catch her. Catch her and keep her.

The darkness painted grim shapes and illusions on the walls and the ceiling around her, things indefinable yet threatening, those moving pictures children saw when they thought the monster under the bed had crawled out to play. But there he was, next to her. She knew where he was by the warmth constantly emanating from his body, those extra thirteen degrees of luxurious heat Time Lords possessed that was so welcome in winter nights and during storms – not that they experienced a lot of that in their cushy prison of a spaceship. In his cushy prison of a spaceship.

She decided then, though, that if she couldn't talk to her husband – who was not merely her husband but who was also a very old alien who always seemed to know the right, most eloquent thing to say in times of crisis – then who could she talk to? So she kicked him (gently) in his leg, more of a nudge, trying to get his attention. He made a noise of awareness, a sort of grunt, attempting to deduce whether or not she was awake and she had disturbed him on purpose, without waking her up if she had not.

"Are you awake?" Clara whispered, knowing full-well that he was. Glancing to her left, she saw him roll all the way over, onto his back, in the dark. He'd been facing away from her, at the wall; before she withdrew into her fitful half-sleep to be kept agitated by her own invasive concerns, she had muttered something to him about being too hot. Presumably, this was why he had moved away.

"Yes," he answered, and was about to say something else when he interrupted himself by yawning. Clara felt like she was stuck to the bed in some invisible way, trapped there. "Are you alright? Something the matter?" She didn't answer. "Clara?"

"Would you switch your light on, please?" she asked, her tone more desperate than she desired, but she had an unpleasant lack of control over herself. She heard him move under the sheets as he leant over to the other side and illuminated the room with dim, warm light, chasing away all the ghosts she had been obsessing over. It was exactly like when she had nightmares, her bad nightmares, those ones about her mother, and she would have to switch the lights on and sit there. Light equalled safety.

"What's wrong, Coo?" he asked softly. Of course he knew something was wrong. He was the Doctor. He always knew. He had probably known before she had nudged him or spoken at all. That was a good thing, though. Clara sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees, thinking. She really ought to stop thinking…

"I like it when you call me that," she told him, "It's my favourite thing you call me."

"It's fitting. It's your initials."

"It isn't." Coo. To 'coo' being the verb to murmur fondly or amorously; to whisper kindly, sweet nothings, coo.

"It's what's engraved in my wedding ring. Think of it as a… symbol of commitment. Tell me what's wrong, won't you?" he entreated, sitting up himself next to her, leaning over. She still didn't speak. "What are you worrying about?"

"About whether you'll be upset," she said.

"Upset? Why would I be upset? You can tell me anything, no matter what," he assured her. She could hear the concern in his voice, so evident. So comforting, strangely.

"Just… promise you won't be upset, or angry."

"I promise, of course I promise. What's wrong?" he asked, apparently not knowing if it was, at that moment, alright for him to touch her. His hands sort of hovered uselessly next to her shoulder. She was worried that in a moment he might resort to patting her head.

"I'm feeling kind of uprooted right now, you know? Really on edge," she said, "Because I had a whole life. Not necessarily the life I wanted, but I had a job, had home with the Maitlands, and one day I just happen to be here, reading Pride and Prejudice in the kitchen, trying to bake another soufflé. And… in an instant… everything changed. Oh. I think the honeymoon period might have just ended, sweetheart… now I'm in the harsh light of day and can't help but be really bloody freaked out that if this ever ends I haven't got a single thing to…" She stopped and sighed, then looked at him. He looked sad. "Do you ever just want to go home?"

"Everyday. And I never can."

"Yeah. Right. Sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. I'll just go back to sleep. Don't worry about-" he reached over and took both of her hands, both of her clenched, shaking fists, in his. "I feel claustrophobic on this ship. Which is ironic."

"Do you want to go somewhere? For a walk? Change of scenery?" he asked her kindly.

"It's the middle of the night."

"The world is your oyster, Clara Oswald. Whatever you think might make you feel better you can have right now, I don't want you to be sad. I would give you the universe if you asked for it."

"Then… yeah. A walk would be nice," she nodded slightly, struggling to smile at him.

"It's weird, you know, wanting to go home, because it's not so much the place as more the feeling or familiarity and sanctuary," Clara began saying, a while later. She didn't know the date, but it was the middle of the night and chilly and they were sitting on a bench right on the edge of the promenade in Blackpool, overlooking the beach with the moon reflected in the ocean, pearlescent and fragmented in the rippling waves. She thought it was August. They weren't paid much notice by people walking past, which was good because they were both in pyjamas in dressing gowns.

"What is home to you?" he asked. They were both eating Cornettos he had procured from somewhere (she didn't much like to look into his methods of 'procuring' things) because, as he declared, they couldn't go to the seaside and not have ice cream. Even if it was the middle of the night. His was strawberry because, apparently, it reminded him of her. She had mint for little sentimental reason other than she enjoyed the flavour.

"I don't know," she slumped, "Not my old house, not my dad. Not the Maitlands. Not the TARDIS. I don't think it's much more than a feeling."

"Ah, but one has to listen to feelings. Life is so dull without them. Maybe you ought to travel and find yourself."

"All we do is travel. You've been travelling for centuries."

"Yes, but every few decades I turn into a new person. Keeps things fresh. Besides, I don't need to find myself, I found you," he said rather offhandedly, licking his ice-cream. "I know what you mean about feeling lost and homesick, though, Clara. It happens to the best of us. I just can't do anything about it in my case. And I know that you feel trapped by the TARDIS, but for whatever reason you just don't want to leave." He gave a slight shrug when he finished speaking, and she stared at him.

"What do you mean for 'whatever reason'? You're the reason." He almost seemed surprised. She was sitting on the bench with her feet up on it, facing him with her back against the metal arm, and he was sat turned ahead with both legs stretched out in front of him, one crossed languidly over the other.

"What about Oswin?"

"What about Oswin? Oswin… would be alright. This isn't about her. It's… about us. It's like… look, this is gonna sound really weird but I can't think of another metaphor right now other than, like – imagine the TARDIS is… a disease. And I don't mean that in a negative way, just bear with me, alright? So the TARDIS, and the Dimension Crash, and all your other companions, and everything, are just symptoms of this one big disease, right? Well, what am I? Am I just another… another symptom in your life, or am I… you know, am I like, my own disease? A separate disease?" Clara was tired and so all of her words were clunky, and she was finding it terribly difficult to construe any completely coherent meaning through them.

"I must say, I sound very ill in these fantasies of yours, darling," he remarked. She didn't laugh. He seemed nearly amused, though. Not angry, like she had thought. Thank god.

"Well, what am I? How important am I to you really? Because I'm not just a friend of yours, I'm your wife. You agreed to marry me; more than one you, the mysterious, elusive Doctor, have married me, and… I don't know whether or not you quite get what that means. Or I get what that means, in all honesty… not that I'm saying you're doing a terrible job of being a husband, as far as I can tell, you're wonderful, I just… what if you're just getting lucky in us having a healthy relationship and it's not because you really want this? What if we started arguing? Would you fight to keep us together or just sort of let us drift apart? I don't know."

"…Forgive me for me confused, but isn't this all rather irrelevant? We've both met Thirteen. She has to happen."

"But you can't just assume that and then not put any work in!" she protested, "We can't just get lazy because our future seems like a sure-thing – and even so, what if our marriage were to break down after whenever she comes from? Neither of us know how old she was." Eleven sighed.

"I thought this was about you feeling stuck on the TARDIS?"

"Say you lost the TARDIS. I don't know how, or why, but hypothetically, say you lost the TARDIS and there was absolutely no way to get it back. None at all. You were just stuck without it. But you had me. Am I a separate part of your life, or just another sub-part of your travels through time and space? A side-effect? Even if I am arguably one of those good side-effects people sometimes get. I don't like to think that my being on the TARDIS all the time is the only thing keeping us together. And from what it sounds like, when Thirteen comes from, we are still living on the TARDIS. If we lived somewhere else, would we still work or would you get sick of me and just leave?"

"You're making yourself sound like a consolation prize."

"Well, aren't I?" she asked. He stared at her in shock. A late-night tram slinked past them and some cars skidded along out of its way, lights from the takeaways that lined the seafront making odd patterns when clashed with the closed, dark souvenir shops.

"Of course you're not!"

"It just all comes down to… if I asked you to leave the TARDIS, for us, would you?"

"It depends on the context, to be completely honest, wifey."

"Not forever. For a bit. A while. But then, you're over a thousand years old. A while to you isn't the same as a while to me. But would you? Do you care about me and our relationship enough to step out of that spaceship and…? I don't know. Live the way I would want to? Are we on equal terms like that? Do you just hate the thought of every stepping off that ship, even with me and even temporarily? Because I'm living there with you the way you would like, and it just seems kind of unfair. Unfair on me that I have to completely eliminate any possibility for my having an even somewhat normal life just because e of some bloke who's come swanning along." He watched her for a long time as he finished eating his Cornetto, reaching the chocolate tip at the bottom.

"Why are you thinking about all this now, anyway? Out of nowhere?"

"I'm not, it's been a while. Weeks, maybe."

"And you didn't tell me?"

"This is me telling you. I thought it would go away."

"I don't understand, we've been happy for four months, what's generated these inhibitions of yours?" he asked. He was more worried than anything.

And when Clara Oswald finally opened her mouth to pour out the miserable contents of her sordid heart, a bleak torrent of things which she had never dreamed she would ever need to tell the Doctor, the only thing that came out was a very loud humming. But this humming was unnatural and didn't come from Clara; in fact, it took the pair of them quite by surprise and she promptly closed her mouth and sealed away her secrets again. It didn't take long for them to locate the source of the humming, the exponentially noisy humming, a buzzing and whirring sound of rockets accompanied by that sharp smell she associated with whatever universal fuel alien jets all syphoned into themselves. There were lights, too, dozens of them, sticking their green bulbs out of the silvery silhouette of a battered spaceship. It was too dark to see the proper shape, but it came shooting, comet-like, across the houses and the seafront and the tacky tourist attractions lining the promenade, bringing its extra-terrestrial stench and its mystery dive-bombing into the ocean. A wave rolled up the beach after it, and they stared at the black water. Nothing for a few moments. Then a great deal of bulbous bubbles, like pustules, conglomerated in a foamy cluster on the murky surface of the sea and the shimmering thing rose up, emerging from the greyish depths like a great, shiny whale. It drifted with the ebb of the tide onto the sand, beaching itself atop the shales scorched from the day's afternoon heat. Then it just sat there very oddly, and she was acutely aware of unfocused screaming just outside the range of her attention.

AN: A great deal of the conversation between Clara and the Doctor in this chapter and the next two is referenced by Future Clara and Thirteen in Chapter 467, "Future Hearts."