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Clara Oswald has seen quite a lot in her short life. Strange things. Things that she's more often than not been able to roll with and get along with, once she's had a chance to wrap her head around them. She believes herself to be prepared for the absurd, or at least prepared to fake it 'til she makes it.
She's not quite prepared to see, out of the corner of her eye, the mug of cocoa being set down on the counter beside her.
It's not the cocoa itself, the mug—one of her favorites, a bright thing with red and yellow flowers that never fail to cheer her up—or the counter. Clara's baking. Just for fun, just to relax, she's at her flat and baking, the Doctor mostly banished to her sitting room to read because the last time he was in her kitchen he'd tried to upgrade her washing machine with disastrous results. The cocoa in the mug on the counter itself wasn't by any means strange.
What was strange is that she's sure she saw it delivered via tentacle.
“Sorry,” she says. She stops stirring her brownie batter, licks a bit of it off her finger and turns to face the Doctor. “Sorry, did you just-”
He raises one dark, thick eyebrow at her, sipping at his own cocoa. He's in the middle of walking out of the kitchen, looking like himself, skinny beyond words and with hair that looks like pyroclastic flow but otherwise human enough. No tentacles, at any rate. “Did I just what? Give you cocoa? I think the phrase you're looking for is, 'Thank you.'”
Clara glances at the cocoa, then looks back at the Doctor. “Yeah, thanks,” she murmurs. Try to play it off, she thinks to herself. “Didn't expect you to be so nice, that's all.”
“Well just don't expect anything more,” he says gruffly. “In some cultures, that mug of cocoa is a marriage proposal, you know.”
She holds her flour-dusted hands up to stop him speaking. “It's just cocoa, I get it. Thank you.”
“You're welcome. Can I lick the spoon?”
“Go away.”
*
Clara forgets about tentacle cocoa for a while. They've done too many things since that day with the brownies, gone to too many places and gotten themselves into too much trouble for her to remember it.
Until one day, they're running from some beastie—“These things always pretend to be Satan, why always Satan,” the Doctor asks—and she thinks she sees. Something. She's not sure. They're on a ship in space, she's in the engine room trying to keep the machinery from exploding and taking out half the solar system with it, the Doctor's around the corner apparently trying to negotiate with Satan, and once she's got the engines stabilized she runs to join him.
She's pretty sure she's not meant to see what she thinks she sees. She's pretty sure she's not even sure she saw it in the first place. Standing where she thinks the Doctor would be, Clara sees—nothing. And everything. Her brain can't quite process it. Tells her words, phrases, to attempt to figure out what it is she sees, places images that couldn't be possible in her memory. Horns, and long spindly limbs, more than she can count. More eyes than she thinks are natural and eyes that don't even look like eyes, eyes that she's not sure why she understands them as eyes.
Then she blinks, and it's gone. The Doctor is there. Silver hair shining in the light of the creature's fires, his body long and lean, sure and strong in a way beyond the physical. Probably just the heat, she thinks. Probably just the exhaustion.
She still thinks to mention it, just in case. Better safe than sorry.
*
“And then,” she finishes up, “it was gone. Just like that. You were you again.”
They're on the TARDIS, cleaned up and lounging in a room full of big fluffy sofas and love seats, like a furniture shop except with furniture from all over the universe. There's one sofa in particular that Clara likes, shifts to fit her and keeps her just as cool or warm as she wants to be. The Doctor's across from her in a wingback chair that looks marginally uncomfortable, listening intently to her story of how he looked like some kind of monster.
“Oh,” he says. His face is all frowny and wide-eyed, and a little bit disappointed. “Yes. Of course. You were overly tired, that's all. Nothing interesting about that story, why'd you say it was interesting?”
The thing is, Clara's gotten fairly good at reading him. He's not nearly as cold and collected as he likes other people to think, and she knows that his disappointment has nothing to do with her not presenting him with a proper mystery to solve. “It's pretty interesting,” she says. “As is your reaction to it.”
“My reaction to it is boredom,” he says. He stands suddenly, bolting and dashing off to the door to the library. “Give me something fun to work with next time, and I'll react differently.”
“I think I saw it when you gave me that cocoa,” she blurts out. She had no reason to recall it until just then, but it's true. “You didn't hand it to me. You. Um. Tentacled it to me.”
“You've been watching the weird kind of cartoons again,” he says. “You should stay away from those, they're clearly not good for your highly impressionable mind.”
She throws a pillow at his retreating back—well, they're called throw pillows, aren't they, that's what they're there for—misses him by about ten feet, and then huffs, hugs another pillow to her chest and settles into the sofa.
*
It's only a few days later that the Doctor finds her poring over the TARDIS console, reading as much as she can about what she thinks she knows. The TARDIS, for once, is being completely helpful, pulling up article after article to explain what Clara saw.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor asks. He sounds resigned. Like he knows he's going to have to explain something, now that the TARDIS has picked a side.
Clara stares at him, wide-eyed and stiff-spined. “I haven't been watching weird cartoons, I know what I saw,” she says. She swings the screen around for him to see. “What is this?”
He licks his lips, trying not to look crestfallen and failing. On the screen is a creature, one that Clara can't possibly comprehend; she looks at it and it falls out of view almost immediately, and she can't keep the memory of it for longer than a moment. Only parts of it remain in her mind, disconnected and jumbled.
The Doctor looks at it and sees the familiar. “Me,” he finally says. “Or someone rather like me. That's a Gallifreyan.”
Clara nods. That's what the TARDIS had told her, even if she couldn't quite hold the concept in her head. Not that she hadn't tried. She's still trying. “Okay,” she says. “So what's with—why-” She waves a hand at him, in his skinny trousers and big black boots, his jumper with holes in it that seem almost like someone thought it'd be high fashion to look moth-eaten. A face that's too much, too much nose and too much eyes, too much panic in the way he scans her for any kind of reaction, hands that rub themselves before falling back to his sides. “What's this, if that's what you really look like?”
“A shell, so you can understand my existence. I don't have control over the details, it's a lottery, but it's a lottery that will always be understandable to species that don't have the same capabilities as Gallifreyans. You don't really remember the details of what you saw, do you? Just a memory of a memory.”
“No,” she admits. She bites a nail, scrutinizing him for anything out of the ordinary. “Why?”
“My people—I. I exist outside of the realities and dimensions humans understand. It's like the difference between two dimensions and three, or four.” He shrugs, smiling lopsidedly. “Put another way, I'm bigger on the inside.”
*
It's easy for her to forget sometimes that he's not human. It's probably a little bit her own fault; he looks it, not just to her but to other non-humans as well, the body he wears as much for her comfort as it is a signal to others just whose side he's on. He's socially awkward and sometimes rude, yes, but so are a lot of humans, so is she at times, and there's nothing out of the ordinary about that.
And there are moments where he reminds her of Danny, the way he looks at her or the way he does certain things—the way he smirks whenever she gives in and asks him to grab something off a high shelf is so much like how Danny used to that sometimes it makes her heart feel like they're both there somehow. There are a lot of the same worries as what Danny had, about her and, he thinks more secretly, about his own inherent decency. She could never have told either of them this, they would both have denied it, but they were so much alike—stubborn, caring, utterly worried that they simply weren't good enough or even just good. And hers, both of them, in their own ways.
So it's easy for her to link her arm with his as they stroll through far-flung markets, or to grab his hand and run with him, to think of him the same way she thinks of and thought of her very human boyfriend, and to forget that there are parts of him not like her or like anyone else in the universe.
She thinks that maybe that assumption of humanity is part of why this is difficult for him, decides to try and do something about it. “Do you ever get tired?” she asks.
It's three days later. He'd acted like the conversation was over after his admission, discomfort coming off him in waves and she hadn't wanted to push. But he's been pensive ever since, and she has been too, and she's not sure if his pensiveness is because of hers or vice versa, so she waits until they're back in the TARDIS, exhausted and mulling cups of tea in the kitchen, to ask her question.
“Yes,” he sighs. He holds his cup to warm his hands, staring blankly over the rising steam. “But not because of how I look, if that's what you're asking. It's not extra work.”
“Then why?” She frowns, because that's not really the question she wanted to ask. “No, I mean. Why was I able to see you a little bit?”
He leans back in his chair, takes a sip of his tea, closes his eyes. “Because I'm tired,” he says, “and because you're safe.”
Clara's not entirely sure what that means, so she sips her own tea and looks away. “Told you it wasn't just me watching weird cartoons.”
He cracks an eye open and peers at her. “But you do admit you watch them.”
“Shut up.”
*
She sees him again, though she's about to pass out as it happens.
Oxygen levels getting low. Something about the plants all dying off on this planet, combined with the makeup of the atmosphere and a chemical the Sontarans have sprayed into the air. He appears, between her and the Sontaran fleet, a great and mad creature that she witnesses and cannot bear to witness all at once, expanding beyond the space between them before contracting back into himself. The sky is burning red and orange; he turns to her with fire in his eyes, the electric crackle of a weapon he's fashioned blooming into a purge of the soldiers coming towards them.
There's darkness around the corners of her vision, and darkness above them as he comes for her. They've hurt him somehow and he can't keep up the shell; his arms are strong as they wrap around her, but she sees horns sprouting from his hair. She reaches out to touch them, feeling velvet and hardness before dropping her hand to stroke a face that looks like the face she knows but at the same time doesn't, not really.
She's being carried away when she closes her eyes and slips from consciousness. When she wakes up again, it's in the bright medical bay of the TARDIS, she's on one of the soft beds with a monitor beside her, and he's on the other side of her. Seated, his hand laying close enough to hers to brush his fingers against the side of her wrist. “You might have a headache,” he says.
“You're beautiful,” she says. “I wish I could remember.”
“Your brain might melt if you did. It's a protective measure.” His voice is clinical in the most forced way she's ever heard. “That you see as much as you do is...tremendous.”
She reaches up and strokes his hair, ghosting her hand over the spot where she'd felt his real self earlier. “Have others seen you? They must have, some of them, even if they forget like me.”
“The ones who've known me long enough, yes,” he says. His hands are picking at the sheets, still missing her body entirely. “For instance, the Brigadier was once in need of a tennis partner to frighten and subjugate a particularly officious bureaucrat.” He glances at her nervously. “I'm not kidding,” he adds, his voice hollow.
“I didn't think you were,” she says. “I'm glad.”
He frowns at her, confused. “For what?”
“You said I could see you because I'm safe.” She sits up a little, testing out just how well she really feels, and takes his hand in hers. “So that means they were safe too. I'm glad you have that.”
Keeping hold of her hand, he crosses his forearms on her bed, pillows his head on them, and murmurs, “Me too.”
*
“The thing is,” he starts to say.
It's later that night. She's still a bit out of sorts from their last dance with the Sontarans. Reading on a chaise longue in the library is about as much as she can handle; he puts a mug of cocoa down on the table next to her. She raises an eyebrow at him. “This a marriage proposal?”
“No,” he says. “The thing is. I don't think you're supposed to see me by accident.”
“What, so only when we're playing tennis?” she asks. It's a silly question, one meant to hide the slightly growing worry in her chest. She puts the book down and picks up her cocoa. “What's wrong, Doctor?”
“It's just that most people who've seen me,” he says, “were from before. Before Gallifrey was lost, before I was cut off from my people.” He's sitting cross-legged on the floor beside her, looking down at his hands as they pick at bits of carpet. “I used to be seen by them. I could talk to my friends, no matter where in time or space I was.”
“Because of the extra dimensions thing,” she says on a hunch.
He nods. “It was like a release of pressure. You're part of a whole, connected. Even with the shell you wear, you have—well, you have people you don't need to wear the shell with, and you can wear it in one space and not be wearing it in another, and-”
“And now you've got nobody,” she says. Last of his kind, sort of, with the exception of that cruel creature she'd met on that awful day. Who she'd asked him to kill. Seeing him on the floor, looking for all the universe like a lost child, she's beginning to regret having asked him to do that even knowing that he hadn't. She swings her legs over the side of the chaise, pulls his hands into her lap, and asks, “Are you asking me to do something?”
He closes his eyes. “You won't be able to see me. Like I said, brain, melting, not good. But when you're sleeping. Dreams. They're a very similar concept to existing in multiple dimensions, so maybe I could just. Walk with you, in your dreams?”
She tries to remember the fearsome, awesome creature that she's seen in him and fails, but she knows that she'd been filled with a sense of peace that didn't make sense each time. “Will you look like you?” she asks. “Even if I don't remember, will you look like yourself?”
“Yes. And it'll be safe.”
“I know. I trust you.”
He opens his eyes, looks up at her and there's something there she recognizes. So much like Danny in all the best ways. She smiles and hopes he sees the same thing in her eyes.
*
Clara hasn't shared a bed with anyone in months and it surprises her how much she misses that. The simple touch of another body to hers, the weight of someone behind her and the feel of an arm around her; she sighs deeply as the Doctor settles in next to her. “So you'll look like this when I'm awake, but when I'm asleep-”
“Out here, I'll look more like me,” he says. His breath is warm against her shoulder, feathery and leaving a memory that will take a long time to fade. “Sort of in the middle. In your mind I'll be the real me.”
“Mm. Good night, then, Doctor.”
“Good night, Clara.”
*
She won't remember the dream.
She remembers the heft of it on her mind. The warmth of twin suns on her skin, the weight of her hand taking a hand that isn't quite a hand. The feel of a thousand not-eyes on her, brimming with something so peaceful and content that the madness and strangeness of it is diminished and softened by the sense of him inside of and around her.
When she wakes, for a moment she thinks she's been cocooned somehow; the moment passes, and what had felt like countless limbs surrounding her turns into a single pair of arms, legs that curl behind hers, feet that fit behind her arches. He's hard against her soft curves, and from the sound of it, fully awake. “Doctor,” she whispers.
“Thank you,” he whispers back, his voice cracking, and it's then that she feels wet against her neck and shoulder. His hold on her is so tight she can barely move. “Thank you.”
“Hey.” She manages to turn in his arms, takes his face in her hands. He's naked, and she has some vague understanding that this is a side effect of what he'd done, of how he'd opened up to her; she's at peace with it, with the feel of his skin against her clothes. “Look at me, are you all right?”
He smiles at her, even as a tear spills across his cheek and hits the pillow under his head. “We talked for hours. You called me beautiful again. You said—you said so many nice things.”
Kindness is all he'd wanted, she realizes with a start. Kindness and the space to exist, comfort from a friend. She rolls onto her back, pulling him along with her, kisses him deeply. It's the first time she has kissed him anywhere but the cheek, and he settles on top of her with a sigh against her lips. “I don't remember,” she says when they finally break, “but I'm sure I meant it.”
He's still hard and she wonders if they should do something about it—she wouldn't mind, somehow, as something about the way he kisses the top of her breast seems completely innocent and she's sure that if she guided him inside her it would feel just the same—but he seems content enough to rest against her. “Thank you,” he says again. He repeats it over and over, a mantra between kisses from her, until he's drifting off in her arms, warm and happy to simply be there with her.
“Any time,” she murmurs, ruffling his curls as she holds him close.
*
Later, a tentacle will leave a cup of cocoa on the table next to her, and she'll smile, catch a glance of the unseeable, and tease him about whether this one's not a marriage proposal, as well.