Indecent

Clara & Eleven

The tracker was a complete nightmare. It was still blinking its little yellow light at him when he staggered across the room in the middle of the night to get at the door, because somebody was knocking. Initially, he thought the tracker had beeped, signifying it done with its DNA analysis. Of course, that would be too easy, though. Not that there was much to be done about it. Twelve hours or so, he reckoned it might take. That meant it would clock off at three in the morning. At present, he was too tired to determine exactly what time it was. Behind him, his wife lay unclothed and sound asleep on her front, just the sheets trailing across her middle to maintain her modesty; they covered from the bottom of her waist to the tops of her thighs, and he was hardly better himself, stumbling through the bleak room with just his pants on. Her entire back and her legs were on show.

He was yawning when he pulled the door open with one hand, scratching the back of his head and feeling what a terrible mess his hair had become. Clara took great pleasure in messing up his hair. They had fallen asleep relatively early, but they had been exhausted, and he was still exhausted now. He didn't have time to think in his head about who could possibly be knocking at their door at this hour, wondering if it was a noise complaint – though they had been very careful to keep the noise down, and why would a complaint be coming to them hours after they had stopped doing anything? No, it was a far worse caller than that.

Wade Sawyer was standing there. And Eleven was not Wade Sawyer's biggest fan. He did not like the way Wade had been putting doubts into Clara's head about their marriage, didn't like him trying to fabricate issues out of thin air between them, and had sneaking suspicions that Wade still had designs on the Doctor's wife.

"This is an odd hour for the police to be conducting interviews, is it not?" Eleven asked, leaning on the door frame with his elbow. Wade didn't look at him. Tall Wade was looking over the Doctor's shoulder. Very tall Wade was looking at very nude Clara – it certainly was a good thing she was asleep on her front rather than her back, otherwise Sawyer would be getting a far too intimate view of a woman who had left him a decade ago. "Is it really polite to be ogling people when they are asleep and can't object to it?" he questioned, "Consent is important, Wade."

"Then what have you been doing in there with her?" Wade asked him sharply, but he did look away, somewhat guiltily, and Eleven stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him so as to keep Clara hidden from that fiend's wandering eyes. She wouldn't be happy to hear about all this, he had no doubts about that.

"You mean when you woke me up just now with your knocking? Sleeping, funnily enough. She's my wife. We sleep in the same bed."

"I want to talk to her," Wade Sawyer declared. He really was tall, taller even, Eleven thought, than Fyn Kyris, Oswin's gangly, intellectual brother. And Fyn was infamously tall.

"She's asleep as well," the Doctor said, "What are you doing here?"

"I'll start shouting if you don't let me in to speak with her."

"Let you in to go and gawk at her, you mean."

"I bet you stripped her while she was unconscious," Wade accused, "I'll tell people all about what kind of a sick bastard you are if you don't let me speak to Clara." Eleven frowned. And then he thought, fine. If Wade Sawyer wanted to talk to Clara so badly, Wade Sawyer could talk to Clara. She could give him a piece of her mind, her sleep-deprived, angry mind.

"Alright. I shall go and wake her, lest you wake everybody else," the Doctor grumbled, "But you're not coming in."

"Don't you dare hurt her," Wade warned as Eleven tried to go back into the bedroom in a way that didn't gave Wade a view of his wife.

Dryly, the Doctor remarked, "I wasn't planning on it," and closed the door on him. He probably didn't have very long until Wade tried to break the door down, and he wondered what was the matter with him. Perhaps Dave Oswald had been telling stories to Geoff. He wouldn't put it past him. Nevertheless, he went to crouch down next to Clara. Twice in a row he was going to have woken her up; she would be annoyed. He blew on her face, and she frowned. It took him crooning her name very close to her ear to get her to finally stir.

"Wha' you want?" she mumbled.

"You have to put some clothes on," he said. She made an unhappy noise. "Your ex-boyfriend is outside. He seems to think I'm going to hurt you. Threatened me if I didn't come and wake you up. And he was trying to stare at you through the door." And then she became alarmed and alert and pushed herself up, squinting in the darkness at the small slivers of light around the now-closed door. "Clothes, Coo." He had brought that oversized woollen sweater of hers she often slept in with them in his transdimensional briefcase, and it was this she bade him fetch while she got her bearings.

"Whaddid 'e say?" Clara asked in that northern, slurring way of hers she always adopted when tired, rubbing her bleary eyes. She didn't like being woken up, but there was something about the Doctor that meant he could never help himself but to do so. That was how it seemed to her, anyway. Always she was getting disturbed. If she didn't love him so much she might punch him in the face – and if she wasn't a (usually) nonviolent person. He passed her the jumper and she dragged it over hear head.

"Well, he swore at me," the Doctor explained, "I think he thinks I'm mistreating you."

"Urgh. This is ridiculous," she complained. He sat down on the bed next to her. As she slid off it to get to her feet and answer Wade's incessant knocking (which he had resumed) she kissed him briefly, touching his face for the smallest second. He reached up his hand to hold hers there, but found it gone, slipped through his fingers.

"What?" Clara asked coldly when she opened the door. The Doctor was behind her, sitting on the bed.

"Are you okay!?" Wade asked her urgently.

"…I'm fine. I'm just tired. Somebody has woken me up in the middle of the bloody night."

"I was worried about you. Come on, you have to leave," he ordered, then – the nerve of him – tried to grab her hand. He took her so by surprise she was pulled all the way out of the room, the door shutting behind her, before she hit at his arm to make him let go.

"What are you doing?" she hissed in the hallway of the hotel. The Doctor didn't follow them out. No doubt he knew she could handle this – whatever this was – herself. Or his tracking device had done something interesting.

"I'm rescuing you," Wade said.

"Rescuing me from what?"

"From him! He's abusing you, and you can't see it," Wade told her firmly.

"The Doctor is not abusing me at all," she said.

"He is. The things he said about you!"

"And I say things just as 'bad' to him. It's just how we are with each other," she said. If she was unknowingly in an abusive relationship, Oswin would have figured it out long ago and done everything in her power to break the spell over Clara. But there was no spell over Clara, and there was no issue with her marriage, she had finally decided. And this behaviour from Wade Sawyer just put the last nail in the coffin, the coffin which was any respect she had for him and his opinions. "He would never hurt me."

"How do you know? Earlier, the way he talked – like he wasn't even a human. Like he was just as bad as that thing we're hunting."

"He's not a human," she said, "He's an alien. And to him, I'm an alien. But he'd never tear people limb from limb – even if he wanted to, I'm not sure he has the strength." Eleven was a little scrawny, she sometimes thought. Not that she minded, of course she didn't.

"Then what happened to your arm, hmm? You were really 'struck by lightning'?"

"You know what, Wade? No. No, I was not struck by lightning. A girl I know called Esther who was brought back to life via alien technology, and subsequently gained the power to shoot lightning out of her hands, ended up electrocuting me, because I was threatening to telekinetically murder someone who'd killed some of my Echoes. And Echoes, if you're wondering, are clones of me I created in order to save the Doctor, that man in there you hate so much."

"He's changed you."

"He's changed me!? I'm sorry, did you honestly just say that to me?" she was getting loud now, and she didn't care, "How would you know?"

"He isn't good for you!"

"And you are!?"

"Yes!" Clara scoffed at him. "I'm in love with you." Her eyes widened. People were coming out of their rooms nearby now, and she could hear a shrill, muffled bleeping from somewhere, but she tried to ignore that.

"You're what?" she exclaimed, horrified. Tired onlookers were suddenly quite engrossed in this scene, rather than being annoyed by the ruckus. She supposed that, to them, it must look like a soap opera.

"I've been in love with you since you first kissed me," he told her.

"Bloody hell…" And then he got down on one knee (yeah, seriously.) She imagined that the Doctor, most likely listening in through the door, was highly amused hearing all this. "Wade…" she sighed. The incessant, high-pitched beeping continued in the background.

"I'm serious. I can't take my eyes off you, Clara," he said. Their observers were now swooning, assuming that this was a genuine proposal. Clara just stood. "Leave him, leave him right now, he's not treating you right. I'll treat you right. Your dad would give his blessing! I love you!"

"Aww," a sleepy woman said, getting emotional looking at the pair of them.

"What? No!" Clara said to her, "This isn't – you do not love me, Wade, we haven't spoken to each other for ten years! I have a husband!" she brandished her left hand and her wedding ring in his face, "You've followed us here in the middle of the night!"

"You gave me your address!"

"…No I didn't! I just told your dad where our hotel was, that isn't an invitation to come and ask me to fucking marry you! Jesus! This is why I left you for Melanie in the first place." She was made even more agitated by that damned electronic beeping in the back of her head this whole time – could other people hear it, too?

"You left him for a woman?" somebody interrupted. There was a crowd gathering, but guests and nightshift staff, the receptionist coming up from below to see what all the racket was about. "This is better than Hollyoaks."

"I'm glad to see you're all so entertained by a stranger being stalked in the middle of the night," Clara said coldly.

"I'm not stalking you!" Wade argued, still on one knee in front of her.

"You are!"

"Marry me!"

"No!"

"You're the centre of my entire universe," he said, which more people seemed to find cute. And then, obviously, the Doctor couldn't resist. He more or less kicked the door open (but not quite, he just made rather a big show of his entrance) to join the chaos.

"I said that to you earlier today – he overheard, and now he's stealing my lines!" Eleven complained.

The woman who kept commenting gasped and muttered to the cleaner who was closest to her, "The husband!" The Doctor was pulling his tweed jacket on, all of a sudden dressed, and carrying a large amount of items in his arms. Fabrics, and the tracker. The tracker which Clara now realised was the source of that beeping.

"This is between Clara and I," Wade declared.

"There's nothing between Clara and you!" Clara shouted at him, "Clara never wants to see you or hear from you or speak to you again, you absolute creep!"

"Tracker, Coo, it's got a signal, we have to go," Eleven said.

The woman made another noise, "Aw! He calls her 'coo'!" She and the other guests were very involved in all this. Clara made to leave immediately, seizing the opportunity, but Wade grabbed her hand when she tried to follow the Doctor. She made a noise of disgust and wrenched her fingers free, and then, with the same hand, slapped him.

"Don't even touch me, you weirdo!" she shouted. The Doctor handed her the fabrics in his arms, which she promptly realised were her own clothes, and she quickly followed him down the stairs, jumping the last three at a time.

"It's got a name I can't pronounce, but I recognise it," Eleven began hastily explaining. The annoying thing was that they weren't allowed to go alone – of course Wade was following right in their footsteps. She really wished she had more clothes on that just that sweater – when they burst out onto the twilight street, it was… drafty. To say the least. Why did he have time to get dressed but she didn't? "And we have to hurry up."

"Well – where is it?"

"Pleasure Beach," he answered.

"Why would it go there?" she questioned. That was the last place she expected a flesh-eating alien lizard to go, a theme park. Then again, she couldn't really think where she would expect a flesh-eating alien to go.

"I don't know, but this species – it's very dangerous. The interesting thing is they have a very bad reaction with nitrogen, so it won't be able to survive long in Earth's atmosphere. It's number one priority is probably finding a way off this planet."

"Isn't Earth's atmosphere all oxygen?" she asked.

"No! Unbelievable! Do you really not know the oxygen percentage of your own planet's atmosphere?" he asked, going up to the DeLorean. She just shrugged innocently, and he seemed disappointed in her. Then she realised that he was standing at the right-side door.

"Hold on – this is the passenger side," Clara pointed out, her at the left. Wade was still tailing them. She spied his car nearby.

"Yes, I'm driving."

"No."

"Yes! You have to get dressed! You dress, I'll drive! We don't have time to wait around for you to put your knickers back on. You're so much better at taking them off I assume you hardly even remember how to put them on again," he said, and she glared. But he was right, they didn't have time for her to get dressed in the middle of the street. So, against all of her better judgement, she told him fine. He could drive. But if anything happened to that car, he had to be the one to tell Adam Mitchell.

"You do know the way, don't you?" she asked, closing the door as they got into the car. Wade Sawyer, she saw in the wing-mirror, also got into his car. You didn't need to be a genius to figure out he was still going to come after them.

"Not exactly. But it's a theme park on the coast, if I just drive straight north from here in one direction, I should find it easily enough."

"South, sweetheart. It's south. Behind us."

"That's what I meant, south. Practically the same thing. Put your clothes back on."

"If I had a penny for every time you've told me to put my clothes back on…"

"You would be very poor indeed," and he turned the key in the ignition.