AN: I'm gonna get so sick of Clara; this storyline is all Whouffluff, and the next one is all Clarenny. You're all just gonna have to deal with it. Anyway, it's worth all this Clara for Jenny, because everyone likes Jenny.
Darling
Clara
If there was one man she hated more than anyone else in the world, it was the Eleventh Doctor. Because he – horrid man – was jumping up and down on the bed next to her and yelling that it was her birthday. She knew it was her birthday, he had told her so last night, told her she was now twenty-five years of age. A whole quarter of a century. She did not need to fall out of bed to be reminded of this. Yet fall out of bed, she did. After that he stopped.
"Wakey, wakey, wifey," he half-sang at her. She told him to eff off. He laughed. She despised him.
"Never a fouler man have I woken up with in all my life," Clara grumbled. She curled up in a ball on the floor. He jumped lightly down next to her – spry moves for such an old man.
"I've got surprises for you."
"The only surprises I want from you are divorce papers." He thought that was funny, too, like he didn't think she was being one-hundred percent serious. That man was insufferable sometimes. He sat cross-legged on the carpet next to her and she scowled up at him where she lay, her pillow across her from where she had dragged it off the bed, too.
"They wouldn't be surprises if you got what you asked for," he remarked. He was fully dressed, which confused her, because as far as she could remember they had left the TARDIS in just their pyjamas, and she had quite possibly ruined her favourite dressing gown. Served her right for trying to wear it to the beach. She yawned. "Sorry for knocking you out of bed, I didn't quite intend for that to happen."
"You shouldn't've been jumping on the bed anyway, you'll break the springs and then they'll charge us for a new mattress. And mattresses aren't cheap," she pointed out. He never thought of these things. It was her money they were using, for once, and she needed to be careful with those funds, being as she was completely unemployed and didn't have any ethical way to get more – even if her bank account was very generously inflated by tokens of Adam Mitchell's generosity, the leftovers from that time they had purchased a haunted house in Nottingham. Months ago now. "And you don't want to make a racket to cause people to complain about us, we get enough of that from Rory on the TARDIS."
"We shall have to take advantage of being here away from prying ears."
"Not if the walls are paper-thin, we shan't," she said, putting him down from the offset that day. Denying him certain… pleasures. He was put out. She finally brought herself to sit up, holding the stray pillow tightly in her arms. She could finally take a look around at the room in the daylight. It was modern and simple, everything either royal blue or white. Warm sunlight poured in through the window, the curtains open, flooding the room with summer light from the clear sky above. They had certainly picked a good weekend to visit Blackpool; the weather was almost always foul up north, more so on the coast.
"There's only an hour left to get breakfast," he said.
"What? What time is it?"
"Nearly eleven," he answered, "They stop serving breakfast downstairs at noon, the flyer over there says." He indicated a glossy piece of paper sitting next to the television. She didn't care enough to go look. "It's included in the price of the room; we've already paid for it."
"I've already paid for it," she corrected him.
"We're married!" he protested, "We share everything now."
"We definitely do not," she told him. That was the last thing she needed, him thinking a silver ring gave him access to her savings account. The money would all almost definitely be spent on a hoard of Jammie Dodgers as soon as he found out what her pin number was. "God, look at that," she said, staring out of the window.
"What?" he asked.
"The sky, the sun – real daylight. It's like a dream."
"It's a shame you slept through the sunrise, though it was at five in the morning. Presents?" he suggested.
"Presents plural?"
"Of course presents plural!"
"You didn't have to get me a lot," she said, watching him get to his feet to walk around to the foot of the bed. "Since you refuse to tell me when your birthday is so I can't pay you back." Not that she would know what to get him, anyway. He had everything. Would she have to just get him bananas, or something? A stockpile of them? He brought a cluster of gifts in shiny, red wrapping paper and dumped them all on the bed. She stood up from the floor and sat back down.
"It's fine, it's not like I paid for any of it," he said.
"You don't have to keep reminding me what a thief you are, you know," she laughed, "It's no wonder your daughter is the way she is."
It was three things, which was two more things than she deemed acceptable. She didn't think it would be very good if he started spoiling her with stolen goods. Still, though, she opened them, struggling a lot because it turned out that Eleven was unsurprisingly terrible at wrapping presents. It was just a big mess of red paper and an almighty amount of sellotape until she finally saw what it was.
"Is this a camera?" she asked.
"Yes! Very interesting type of camera, from the future, very state-of-the-art."
"Stolen?"
"Of course. Prints the pictures out. Instant camera. Fancy polaroid. Would have gotten you a proper, vintage polaroid, of course, but they're not half bulky. And the picture quality is abhorrent," he said. She'd always liked grainy polaroids. The next present she opened happened to be a very nice, leather-bound photo album for these photos to in. It was true, she was often complaining that they didn't have any photos together, and she wanted keepsakes to remember all the places they had seen, even if the Doctor wasn't really all that fussed.
It was the third and final gift which he seemed most excited about giving to her, which he told her to be careful while unwrapping, which she was. She found it to be a book, but not just any book-
"It's a first edition," he said, "Rare." It was Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. "I had the idea from Ravenwood, you know, when she was drunk a few nights ago and kept raving about how she thought she might have written Orlando. Of course she hasn't." There were two inscriptions in the front of it, one of them in handwriting she recognised as Eleven's, and the other an autographed note she didn't know.
I've never met you, Clara, but I wish you all the luck in the world trying to make an honest man out of the Doctor, it read.
"Wait – did – did Woolf write that!?" Clara exclaimed. When she squinted hard at the signature she was sure it read Virginia Woolf underneath. "You got me a signed first edition of Mrs Dalloway, with a personalised note?"
"And you haven't even read the one from me," he said, "In lieu of an actual birthday card." It didn't say much more than happy birthday, and that he loved her, and some other rather lyrical phrases she wondered if he hadn't had help coming up with. She found the Woolf significantly more interesting. After all, her husband was right there – if she wanted him to say nice things about her, she need only ask. She didn't have to wait until November to do so. "It was either that or Pride and Prejudice, and aren't I glad I didn't go for that now, after hearing of all this unorthodox business between you and Jane Austen." She decided to ignore that comment.
"Thank you – thank you so much, sweetheart, I love you," she said, hugging him on the bed.
"Yes, yes, of course you do, why wouldn't you? Anyway," he cleared his throat and let her go, "I wasn't lying about breakfast. I'm famished. Get dressed."
"Into what?"
"Oh! I forgot to mention – I had to go back to the TARDIS, didn't I? To bring all of these things. I brought clothes. There's a suitcase. Hurry along now, I want eggs before they run out, if they haven't already, thanks to you being so lazy and sleeping in."
They had not run out of eggs, thankfully, because Clara wanted some as well. She hadn't eaten since around six o'clock the night before. The restaurant in the downstairs of the hotel – The Dolphin Hotel – was just full enough for them to have to lower their voices when they spoke of what they had witnessed the night before. It was a while later. She was mopping up the dregs of her egg yolk with half of a sausage, having finished all her toast, and he was pouring over that morning's edition of the Blackpool Gazette, the local paper. The 'flying saucer' on the promenade was front-page news, but the photograph wasn't much more than a blurry, silver thing. Looked more like a comet.
"It's nice having breakfast like this," she said.
"We have breakfast every morning," he told her, looking at the paper still with a frown on his face.
"Not on the TARDIS, I mean. Not having to hide in our room because everyone else hates us – god, isn't it peaceful?" she said. He smiled.
"Peaceful is a funny word for it – we are in the shadow of this alien that ran off yesterday, and I still don't know what it is," he said, "I brought my tracking device with us, but it won't work well enough without a DNA sample."
"Then it's a terrible tracker," she said, "You have to find it to be able to find it?"
"Be quiet," he said, "Ah, nine down, clue is doctor. Physician, obviously."
"I thought you were reading? Are you doing the crossword?" she questioned.
"Yes," he replied, "The article is dreadful, doesn't tell us anything new, just a bunch of theories from conspiracy nuts. Lord knows what they've done with the wreckage, and the skin you found in it, for that matter."
"Maybe they'll make a handbag out of it."
"That only works if you take the skin off the snake when it's still alive, Coo," he told her. Then he frowned at the page.
"What?"
"Ten across, clue is circuitous," he said.
"Roundabout," she answered. He looked up at her in surprise. She shrugged and smiled, "I'm good at crosswords."
"Six down, material for violin strings," he said. He was challenging her now. It took her a moment.
"Ah – catgut!" she exclaimed, a little too loud. An old woman nearby looked at her. "Sorry," she mumbled, "Just getting excited about the crossword." The old woman eyed the pair of them for a few seconds – she also had the morning's paper in front of her with her cup of tea sitting on it, leaving a beige ring on the pages – before talking.
"Did you get ten across?" she asked. Clara began to speak, but the Doctor cut her off.
"Yes, it's roundabout," he answered, "Figured it out all by myself."
"You did not!" she protested, and he laughed. The woman seemed grateful, though. For revenge, she asked her husband, "Who wrote that crossword?" He glanced down into the bottom corner of the page and told her the name of the man. "I slept with him."
"Clara!" She burst out laughing. "Is that true!?"
"Yeah. Found him in a bar, I was bored and he made out like he was some big-shot reporter. I still might have gone with him if he told me the truth; that he just does the puzzles in the Gazette." Annoyed, the Doctor flipped to some other random page in the newspaper.
"Here's an article written by an Oliver Jackson. You haven't slept with him as well, have you?" he asked. She glared at him. "Ooh, it's about a roller coaster."
"Well, there is an abundance of them here," she said.
"'Yet again, the much-awaited Stratosphere roller coaster's opening date has been pushed back, this time as far as 2018, following a near-fatal accident where an engineer fell from one of the tracks,'" Eleven read aloud, "Nasty business, it sounds." Clara had zoned out halfway through his sentence, however, when she heard her phone buzzing in the pocket of her leather jacket hanging around the back of the chair. Well, it was actually Thirteen's leather jacket she had left behind as a keepsake after emptying the pockets, but Eleven wasn't to know that; just like the transdimensional bag Clara knew she had given to Jenny. She dug her phone out and saw it was an incoming call from her father.
"Crap, it's my dad," she told her husband, putting it to her ear before he could say anything. "Hi," Clara said, trying to sound more chipper than she felt.
"Where are you?" her dad asked.
Clara stayed quiet for a long while, until asking finally, "Has Geoff been speaking to you?"
"Yes!" her dad said, sounding irritated, "I have to hear from a drinking mate that my own daughter is back in Blackpool this weekend!? Why didn't you mention, Clara?"
"It was kind of an impromptu thing – we only got here at one in the morning," she explained.
"Geoff said you were there when that thing crashed. Is it something to do with you?"
"No, it's a coincidence, came out of nowhere. We're looking into it, sort of," she said.
"Are you still here?"
"Yeah." The Doctor was very blatantly trying to overhear Dave's side of the conversation, but averted his gaze when she looked at him warningly. "Would've come to stay with you, if you didn't hate the Doctor so much."
"Geoff thinks he's weird."
"I'll divorce him then, shall I? Because Geoff thinks he's weird?" she challenged.
"Do you know what today is?"
"Saturday?" she suggested, after a pause.
"Clara…" he said.
"What? I don't, I don't have a clue. It's just some Saturday in August, I don't even know the year," she said. Then she froze. A Saturday. In August. In Blackpool. Oh no. She was going to kill her husband if she found out he had brought them there on purpose – but even he wouldn't be able to keep from nervously twitching if he had done, and he seemed quite involved with this article about the roller coaster. Wasn't bouncing his foot up and down or anything, which he usually did when she caught him lying to her. He sipped his coffee and then saw her watching him.
"What?" he asked. She didn't say anything, just looked out of the window, where she could see the sea and the beachfront.
"I'm not going."
"It's your aunt's fiftieth birthday party, Clara! You have to go. You have to show your face to the rest of your family – people keep asking me if you're dead," he said*.
"Tell them I'm not dead, then," she said, and Eleven pulled a face. She rolled her eyes at him in response to what her father was saying.
"How many times do we have to go through this? You're coming."
"I'm not! She keeps getting in fights with me on Facebook! She's twice my age and she's getting into Facebook fights**. It's ridiculous," Clara said.
"I'll be fine, you don't have to stay for long. There'll be free food."
"I don't care. I hate that woman."
"She still thinks you've married a heart surgeon after your grandmother told her so much. I won't correct anybody."
"…Gran'll be there?" Clara asked hesitantly. She liked her grandmother, and she liked her father. She liked her uncle on her dad's side, too. That was where all the family was, everybody on her mother's side was gone.
"Yes. She'd love to see you."
"Dammit… fine, alright? Fine. I'll come. And I'm bringing the Doctor. And if she kicks off – like she will, because she always does – or if she says anything about mum, it's all your fault. I won't be held responsible for my actions," she said. She could hear him smiling. She was just annoyed. The Doctor wanted to know what he was being made to go to. Clara hung up the phone and groaned.
"What was that about?" he asked.
"It was about that stupid bloody party of my Aunt Fiona's he's been banging on about for months," she said, "It's today. Did you know that?"
"Is it? No, I hadn't a clue. I thought it was in April?" he said. She believed him. More coincidences.
"No, August. We'll have to go. Get a taxi, or something… urgh… and you're still going to have to pretend to be a heart surgeon."
"Taxi? No need," he said, "I picked up a little something else for us while I was back on the ship. Or rather, borrowed, from our brother-in-law."
"Have you?" He nodded, beaming, and she grumbled, "Oh, god… I can't wait to see what it is…"
*chapter 877
**chapter 1016
AN: Won't be updates for a few days at least (hopefully before the New Year though) over Christmas, but oh well I'm sure you're all busy as well anyway. If, remarkably enough, you're NOT busy, go read Spook Watch since none of you guys seem to and you don't leave reviews - which baffles me because if I uploaded it as part of the main continuity you'd all love it. It's great. Please read it and review it because I put a lot of work into it.