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The console room is dark and quiet when Clara steps inside the TARDIS, the only light coming from the reading lamp next to the Doctor’s armchair. Clara can barely make out the Doctor’s silhouette in the shadows.
She takes a step closer. “Doctor…?”
This isn’t right.
Clara has noticed that he likes to sit and read quietly, in the dark, sometimes, but there’s something in the air this time that makes her shudder. Not so much scary, but … Melancholy.
She notices the glass of amber liquid on the small table next to the Doctor. Closer now, she can make out his face, his eyes red-rimmed and his shoulders sagging.
He’s watching her now, still not saying anything.
“Are you drunk?” she asks, nodding towards the glass. She’s never known him to get drunk before, even though she knows he isn’t a stranger to alcohol, but he’s looking at her in such an odd way that she cannot but wonder.
“No.” His voice is raspy and low, barely above a whisper. “No,” he says again, a little louder this time. “I— I wanted to be. Isn’t working. Time Lord metabolism. Takes more than something humans have come up with to defeat that.”
Humans. He spits the word out, distaste clear on his tongue.
Clara sighs. He’d seemed almost fine the day before, in the aftermath of dealing with the Skovox Blaster, and she’d thought … She doesn’t know what she’d thought. Hoped that everything would be back to normal now, probably, or what passed for normal these days.
“If this is about Danny—”
“He is an alien.” The Doctor’s head is raised now. She’s ready to protest, ready to argue, ready to ask him to explain himself, but the raw hurt in his voice shocks her into realising it’s her own words he’s throwing back at her, not an insinuation about Danny being anything but human.
“He’s an alien.” He closes his eyes, rests his head on his hands. “Is this how you see me?”
Clara shrugs, uncomfortably aware that he cannot see the gesture. “You are.” She tries to put levity into her voice but regrets it in an instant. There is something going on in the Doctor’s mind and she has, for a change, trouble keeping up with it.
He shudders, and she doesn’t know what to do. With anyone else – with the Doctor the way he was before – she would step closer, put a hand on his shoulder, ask him to tell her what’s wrong, assure him that everything would be okay. With him, she doubts herself.
He doesn’t like being touched. And she’s tested his boundaries enough these last few days.
“Doctor,” she ventures after a few moments’ silence.
He mumbles something. She strains to hear the words but cannot make them out, until he enunciates them more clearly. “Go away. Leave. Go.”
This is … well, not good, but better. A stubborn, angry Doctor is a more familiar ground for her. “Not when you’re being like this. What’s wrong?”
He sighs and sits up straight again, runs his fingers through his hair. “Nothing. I just… I need some time for myself.”
“Yet you’re here.”
He raises an eyebrow at her. “Where else should I be? This is my home.”
“Here,” Clara clarifies. “In my bedroom. If you don’t want my company, why park the TARDIS here?”
He blinks, his blue eyes confused. “In your bedroom?”
A leap and a few strides of his long legs later, he’s peeking out of the TARDIS doors. “Oh.”
Clara rolls her eyes. “Yes. Oh.”
He’s still not turned on the lights, not even at the console, so Clara doesn’t quite see his expression, but his posture suggests resignation. “I just let her take me … somewhere. The TARDIS,” he adds, unnecessarily. “I didn’t— I didn’t know.”
Clara is used to him not making sense at times, but this … This feels different. She doesn’t like not getting it, especially when it seems to have something to do with her.
The leap to the door has exhausted his energy, and he slumps, supporting himself on the console. “Just go, Clara. Leave. Please. I’ll get the… I’ll take the TARDIS somewhere else. I suppose Dave might not like seeing it parked in your bedroom, anyway.”
The sting in his voice finally gives Clara a clue. “Danny. His name is Danny.”
The Doctor waves his hand, clearly considering the correction unimportant. Clara’s eyes are transfixed on that hand, with its long, smooth, slender, strong fingers.
“I’m not leaving.” She itches to touch him, to take that hand in hers, to force him to look at her properly, but she doesn’t. “We need to talk, and I’m not leaving until we have.”
He does look at her now. “You’re very stubborn.”
“I know.”
He gives her a slight half-smile. It doesn’t reach his eyes, but Clara smiles back at him. Progress, of sorts.
It’s been like this ever since he regenerated, became this man she’s looking at now. Sometimes he’s funny and light-hearted and full of a sense of adventure, dragging her off to places so amazing she could never even have dreamed of anything of the kind; other times he’s distant and prickly and there’s a hard shell around him, hiding him from her.
She doesn’t know him. Not really. Not the man he is now.
Sometimes, she thinks she’d like to, but he doesn’t respond well to pushing.
It’s been a hard game of give and take, and there are times, like now, when Clara isn’t sure about anything any more.
So she smiles, and tilts her head, and makes sure to keep her voice steady. “Talk. Now.”
He lets out a deep sigh. “Clara…”
The way he says her name, low and raspy and with that new-found accent of his … It does things to Clara, deep in the pit of her stomach. He says her name a lot, and she’s wondered more than once if he knows.
He’s a very clever man, in some ways. In others, he’s the slowest, most infuriatingly dim person she knows. She’d like to blame it on his alienness, but that other him, the young and handsome one, was never quite like that.
She still hasn’t come to grips with this whole concept of regeneration, she admits to herself. How much of this man is the same man she used to know? He’s changed, and not just outwardly, and she just doesn’t know how to handle it. She’s only human, as he likes to remind her, usually accompanied by some insult or another, even if he never means it to hurt. He’s still the Doctor; that much is undeniable, and some of the things have stayed the same. Yet others…
“Are you going to stay with him?” he asks at last, when Clara has already given up hope of getting him to talk after all. His gaze is firmly fixed on the telepathic circuits of the TARDIS console, his back ramrod straight.
Clara takes a deep breath. “I don’t know. Eventually, maybe. If things work out. I— I’m not leaving you now, if that is what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” he snarls, but there’s a hitch in his breathing and his posture relaxes, so minutely she nearly misses it. “I just wanted to know if I should find myself a new travel companion.”
She shouldn’t ask this, shouldn’t blow up at him, but the words stumble out before she can catch herself. “Is that all I am to you? A travel companion?”
“Is an alien all that I am to you?” The hurt is his voice is almost palpable this time, and Clara winces. “Just that? An alien? I should think that a travel companion is at least a class above that.”
Clara closes her eyes for a moment. So this is what all this is about.
“It seemed the easiest way to put it to Danny,” she offers at last. “I didn’t … He wouldn’t have understood.”
“Never mind him. What about me?” He turns his head at her and she has to force herself not to take a step back at the blazing intensity in those sharp blue eyes, directed at her. “I don’t understand, Clara. I thought—”
Clara waits for him to continue, but he just purses his lips and rubs his eyes. “Doesn’t matter.”
She raises her hand to his face now, his aversion to being touched be damned, and smooths down a tuft of his grey, angry hair, which always sticks up when he’s been running his fingers through it. “I don’t know if I can put it into words,” she says. “I’m sorry. You’re not just an alien to me.” Alien, yes, a stranger she doesn’t quite understand, but never just that.
He squints, tries to look at her fingers which are still touching his face. “Clara, I… I haven’t handled things well, have I.”
She smiles and shakes her head. “No, you haven’t. Neither of us have.”
“Can we start again?”
She’d like to, but it’s too late for that. “I wish we could, but it’s complicated now.”
“Dave.”
“Danny.”
He waves her correction away. “Soldier boy.”
“Maths teacher.”
He sighs and puts his hand on hers, sliding her fingertips down his cheek before he gently removes her presence from his face. “I’ve been a fool, Clara. I should— I was confused. When I regenerated. I said some things I— I shouldn’t have. And now it’s too late to fix that.”
He hasn’t let go of her hand, and it’s at this moment, when Clara looks into those eyes – the eyes of a man both much, much older than her, and yet so young and new and vulnerable – that she realises what he’s been trying to say and cannot. And just like that, the puzzle pieces fall into place. His need to impress her. His snarling, his rivalry with all the young men they’ve met at their travels. His almost desperate need for her at times.
She’d put it down to impatience, combined with loneliness and a general sense of arrogance, but it’s never been just that, has it?
She likes him. She doesn’t feel that she knows him well, and sometimes he scares her, even if that isn’t something she’d want to admit, but she likes him, in spite of everything. More than likes, if she’s honest with herself – yes, even this new Doctor, the one with the grey, unruly hair and the angry eyebrows and long fingers and a lean, wiry strength to him – but it’s not something she ever wished to examine too closely.
He’s not her boyfriend, after all. He never was. He never would be.
Lover, her brain supplies. He could be that.
Yes, he could be that. And for a moment, she allows herself to imagine what it would feel like, to be the focus of all that intensity, of all that need, of all those centuries of accumulated knowledge behind those blazing blue eyes of his, and for that moment, she very nearly gives in to the temptation of finding out.
It would be a disastrously bad idea, she knows.
They’re standing very close, she realises. Too close. It’s a good thing he’s so tall, or their faces would almost be touching, and then where would they be?
Her heart is beating, fast. She thinks that if she presses her hand on his chest, she’d find out that his is, too. Are. His hearts. He has two of them, she dimly remembers.
And she broke both of them when she declared she loved Danny.
He’s very quiet. He often is, this new Doctor, not needing to fill the silence with words. Right now she wishes he wasn’t.
When the silence becomes too much, she inhales, for courage more than anything, and stands up on her tiptoes, placing their still-joined hands on his chest to keep her balance, and kisses him. Gently. Lightly.
She withdraws after a moment. He blinks owlishly at her, his face a mixture of confusion and a deep, raw, vulnerable need.
“I’m sorry,” she says after a moment. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
She curses herself for that moment of stupidity; yet she cannot deny it felt right. Would have felt right if he’d kissed her back, in any case.
“I— I’m sorry,” he manages at last. “I didn’t expect—”
“No.” She looks at his hand still holding hers. “It was my mistake.”
“Was it? A mistake?”
Clara looks at him, really looks at him. In spite of his age, both his real age and his visible age, he reminds her of nothing as much as a small boy right at this moment, full of hope and fear.
She knows she should lie, but she finds she cannot. Not now, not to him. “No, it wasn’t a mistake. But it cannot be, can it.”
“Can’t it?”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Da— Danny.”
“Yes. Not just him, though.”
“Explain it to me, then.” From the look in his eyes, from the way his hand clutches hers, she knows he’s serious, his confusion genuine. He’s an alien, and he doesn’t understand, not the way she’d expect him to.
“I love you.” There, she’s said it. “I love you, in ways I cannot even begin to understand myself, let alone explain to you or anyone. I love travelling with you. I love just spending time with you – sometimes. Not always. But I’ve never regretted a moment I’ve spent in your company.”
“And that is a problem…?”
Clara sighs. “It isn’t, and it is. I can’t keep doing this forever. You’re the one who always reminds me how short human life spans are. You might get killed tomorrow, and regenerate into someone new, someone strange again, or you might survive and live in this shape for centuries. This isn’t the life for me. I love this, I will always love this time I’ve spent with you, and I don’t want to stop it any time soon yet, but I … I also want to settle down and do normal things. Human things.”
“And I cannot offer them to you.” There is bitterness in his voice, but less than she’d feared. “I can offer you all the time and space in the universe, but this is the one thing I can’t give you.”
“No,” she agrees. “You can’t.”
He lets go of her hand at last and takes a step back. “Clara… If I hadn’t— If I hadn’t regenerated. If I hadn’t changed… If I was still the man I was before—”
“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “I fancied you, the way you were. I probably would have pursued you, and we might have had a go at things, for a short while. But it would never have lasted, would it? It couldn’t.”
His half-smile is back, sweet and bitter all at once. “I think I might have liked to have tried. Even if only for a short while.”
It’s too much for her, that look on his face. She knows they cannot – they shouldn’t – and for a moment she remembers Danny, but then she resolutely pushes that thought away, into the neat compartment in her brain that is labelled Danny, normal life, and she kisses him properly then, not letting go until he responds, his whole body trembling in her arms, and for a short while, nothing else exists in the universe but Clara and her Doctor, wrapped up in each other, until she finally draws back, with a regretful, but also a little bit smug, smile.
“Are you going to tell Danny?” he asks a little later, when they’ve made themselves comfortable in the low, warm glow in what she’s come to think of as the library floor of the console room.
“No.” She doesn’t hesitate in her answer. “But I am going back to him. You know that, right?”
His fingertips graze hers in response. “I know.”
“And you accept that?”
A half-shrug. “I won’t lie to you, Clara, not in this matter. I don’t like it. I don’t like him. But yes, I do accept it.”
She sighs, and when they settle into a companionable silence, each of them curled up in an armchair with a book in their laps, she wonders when, and why, did her life get this complicated.