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The people here have heard of the Doctor. They’ve worked him and his blue box into their mythology, echoes of the legend he’d become scattered around. The stranger who had come to town. And the woman - friend? lover? co-pilot? - who’d stood beside him.
“Look,” Clara says, holding up a box of what might be sweets, emblazoned with a rainbow man with a halo of bright yellow hair. “You’re the new Smarties mascot.”
He smiles tightly and puts his sunglasses on, bony forefinger pressing them into place on the bridge of his nose. “Suppose I missed a few loose ends.”
“Loose ends?” She palms a mouthful of what, she knows now, are not sweets. Edible, at least, she assumes/hopes.
He’s walking off, hands jammed in his pockets. “From when I tried to erase myself from the universe.”
Whatever that means. All the awful things she’s afraid it might mean. She watches him go, a narrow slash of dark blue against the dust-pale road, the washed-out signs and stalls of the market. Remembering, suddenly, how out of place they are here. She stashes the not-Smarties in her purse and follows him, skipping a little to keep up.
She knows, she’s known since he fell apart and rebuilt himself in front of her, that he’s uncomfortable with what he’s let himself become, the weight of the role he’d insisted on performing so often it began insisting on him. The nameless, functionally-faceless Man Who Fights the Monsters. It’s something Clara only abstractly understands: surely it’d be a thrill to be written about, sung about. Like he is a thrill to her, the fairy-tale he still is, despite his continued efforts to dispel the magic.
Those moments when he shrugs his legacy back on. The Doctor, in all his righteous fury and barely-constrained power. It does something to her, watching him embrace that side of himself. She doesn’t know whether it makes her want him, or want to be him, or both.
(And what does that say about her, when he’s crawling back to that familiar position of spiky self-loathing, the carefully-maintained distance, over something she can’t get enough of? Which of them is wrong, here? Neither, maybe. Or both.)
He might be uncomfortable with the mantle but she’s not. Why should she be? Why should she care, if it feels like this? The adrenaline rush, giddily running back into the TARDIS after some barely pulled-off scheme, the escalating lies and leaps of faith. This time involving coups and dress-up and royal intrigue, although this is a narrative they’ve played out before. Over and over again. And he insists he doesn’t enjoy it.
“You have to admit I did an excellent job back there. Doctor Oswald and her manservant, come on, that was…” What? Dangerous? Amazing? Oddly arousing? “Wild,” she settles.
“You make a better me than I do,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“Wasn’t a compliment.” He pulls his cravat off, tosses it in the corner. Undoes the top button of his shirt, a rare and oddly vulnerable look.
“Too late, it’s already made me feel excellent about myself. Not that I needed the encouragement, but it’s still nice.”
“Don’t be me,” he says. Again. He’s always saying that. “Much better to be Clara Oswald.”
Looking her up and down, her upswept hair and corseted waist and trailing skirts. Whatever information he got out of that. Not the normal things a normal man would, for sure.
Still. He’s too close, and she’s not moving away. She wonders if he’s about to kiss her; she’s certainly fighting the impulse to kiss him. Hitching what little breath the corset allows. He looks, he looks like -
But he’s not. He doesn’t. None of the things that might happen, happen, aside from him walking away.
Thirty minutes later, she’s unearthed herself from the dress, stockings rolled off and the corset unlaced. She entertains a brief fantasy about him being the one doing this, his hands sliding over her legs, deftly peeling off the layers of fabric. His hands on her waist, her breath held.
And then she puts on pajama pants and an oversized t-shirt, pulls all the bobby pins out of her hair. Thick socks and slippers. She goes looking for him. Or she goes for a walk, at least, fingers crossed that the TARDIS catches her drift.
An unlocked door - she doesn’t knock - to a small, dimly-lit room. The temperature noticeably higher than the rest of the ship, the gravity lower. A feeling, almost, like time is moving slower. No furnishings other than an ugly armchair, the Doctor slouched deeply into the cushion.
“Is this your sulking room?” She hovers for a few seconds, then sits down on the floor, cross-legged. Looking up at him.
“Works as well as any designation, yeah.”
“Get another chair in here, I could sulk with you, if you’d just tell me why we’re unhappy.”
He laughs, ish, a breath huffed out through his nose. “Doctor Oswald.”
“Mmm-hmm. The hero of parallel-universe Steampunk London.”
“You should pick another name.”
“Afraid I’ll overshadow you?” She leans back, legs stretched out, slippers kicked off, wiggling her toes under the brightly-patterned socks.
“Oh, I hope that you will. Assume that you will. Clara Oswald, you are capable of greatness. And even if not, just being you, you are…”
She should be used to that by now, the things he can never bring himself to say outright to her, but she’s a little disappointed when he trails off. Whatever she is, he won’t be the one to tell her.
“But you shouldn’t want to be the Doctor,” he continues. “I don’t even want to be the Doctor, I’m just stuck with it.”
“So stop. Call yourself John Smith, do what you like. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”
“It’s just…” Trailing off, again. Slouching down more. She can see his legs and the top of his hair and not much else.
“Your duty,” she supplies, as he finishes the sentence: “I’ve got nothing else.”
She frowns, scrambles up off the floor. Looks down at him, half-falling off the chair, the heels of his palms pressed against his eyes.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” he says hoarsely. “He’s just a self-pitying piece of - pardon my almost-French.”
He flinches, but notably does not run away, when she squeezes herself next to him, legs hooked over his lap. “Would it make you feel better if I told you all the things I don’t like about myself?”
“Not really, no.”
“Would it help if-” She pauses, considers. Lays her hand flat on his chest, fancying she can feel his heartbeat. Heartsbeats? Whatever. She feels like kissing him, so she does.
The noise he makes as her lips press against his, she’ll tuck the memory of it away for safe-keeping. The tensing and gradual relaxing of the muscles in his thighs, the shakily exhaled breath. His hands tentatively brushing against her lower back, then growing bolder, sliding under her shirt, clinging to her. His eyes opening, wide and watery, then closing again as she shifts to straddle him. The way his fingers dig into her skin as she grinds down on him, pulling her closer. The way he says her name, a private, whispered prayer.
He doesn’t stay the night, is gone when she wakes up. Acts like it’d never happened. And later, after the day - or days, it’s hard to keep track - he doesn’t so much come to her as lets her come to him, lets her find the crack in his defenses and widen it. Metaphorically, literally, pulling him apart and discovering everything hidden underneath.
This is their secret, and theirs alone. He’s been other men, and he has had other lovers, sure. But this him, this right-now him, only she knows what’s under all that fussy clothing. And she watches him, coat pulled tight over his narrow shoulders (over the hoodie, over the other hoodie, over the assortment of t-shirts), voice taking on that practiced tone, lecturing the robots du jour about how he’s going to foil their plans. She probably shouldn’t enjoy it as much as she does. Shouldn’t egg him on, take over when he falters. But she does. So what. He might be tired of it, but she’s not jaded yet, fails to grasp how she ever could be. They make their mark. She leaves her name, her likeness behind. This planet will sing songs of her.
“Cool it on the flirting,” he says, even as he spins her towards him, hands cupping her arse.
“You flirt with me in public all the time.” Keeping the upper hand, of course, backing him up until he hits the wall of the TARDIS, urging him down to his knees as the ship whines apprehensively.
“That’s - oh. That’s different.” Looking up at her, those wide bright eyes, before letting her grab a fistful of his hair and guide his head between her legs.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. She doesn’t need to argue the point right now. Doesn’t need to talk at all.
(She knows he’s not ashamed of her, or at least she hopes he’s not; it’s just he’s uncomfortable with It. With himself, in that position. The necessary vulnerability. The man behind the curtain, so terribly eager to submit to someone else pulling the strings. To her, pulling the ropes tighter. He might hate the legend but he is, and she’ll admit he was right, he is fuck-all without it. Time Lord, sure, but ultimately just a scrawny, gangly pile of flesh and bone, her name caught in his throat and her cunt on his mouth. His shoulders shaking under her clenched hands. A far cry from the act he puts on outside closed doors.)
“They asked for help,” the Doctor says apologetically. “You know how I am.”
Clara does. And she gets it, or thinks she does. Bit of a cascading-mistake situation, this, or a well-meaning blunder into a promise that, considering the name they sort of share, they’ll fulfill.
Or she’ll fulfill, at least. Left alone after he’s run away again, trying to find a way around this. This, what, fertility ritual? Science experiment? She’s fuzzy on the details.
Down in the depths of a spaceship, or she assumes it’s a spaceship, despite the way the walls pulsate like a living thing. A feeling, almost, of momentum, the universe speeding past below her feet. The creature across the room, facing her, nothing about it familiar enough for her to ascribe emotions, motivations. She smiles anyway, braver than she feels. That’s what she does, right? The Doctor doesn’t run away.
Their name is a series of harsh, chittering consonants her mouth is incapable of repeating, and they apologize, but their translating device appears to be malfunctioning.
“Mine too, no worries,” she says. She holds her hand out.
They unfurl their secondary appendage and wrap it gently around her wrist. Like a cat’s tongue, a million tiny barbs rasping against her skin. It doesn’t feel as odd as it might. Underneath the physical embrace, a sort of quick history lesson: their species on the verge of extinction, a need for a - how would you call? - genetic kick-start. A psychic exchange. There are no words for this in her language.
“A spark,” she says, watching as they withdraw their sense-tendril from her arm and fold it back inside their carapace.
Yes. Yes, they believe that to be a sufficient word, in her language.
She waits for the Doctor to come back for her. Two hours, maybe more, sitting on the floor - no chairs a bipedal organism could make sense of, here - feeling the ship thrum beneath her. And, eventually, he shuffles in through the hole in the wall, the door irising shut behind him, an apology on his lips, a shrug.
“It’s all right,” she says.
He sighs heavily and slowly collapses down to the floor next to her. “For you, maybe.”
“Not what I’d have picked for a date, but. Yeah. And you?”
“Nope.” Popping the ‘p’, drawing his knees up to his chin. “Sorry. Didn’t think it through. This, us, it’s. You know.”
Private. Secret. A weakness, a softness, a frailty he’d only ever admitted to her. The skin and sinews of him, the banality of what he really was, behind all those layers and stories and ego-as-armor. And whatever it is that they share, which neither of them are willing to put a name to.
“It’s just sex,” she says. Maybe she believes it. She stands up, grabbing his hand to pull him up with her.
She can feel her newfound insect-looking friend and their partners watching, the faint nail-on-chalkboard sound of their bodies sliding together. A psychic presence, a strangeness in her head, and something enveloping them, the Doctor and her and the creatures outside the room and the living ship they are all held in, the arm of it carefully encircling them. Close enough to the TARDIS’s embrace that it shouldn’t feel weird. It doesn’t, she refuses to let it.
“They’ll see me,” he whispers. He’s standing close to her but not touching, his hands jammed in his pockets. She imagines she can hear his hearts hammering in his chest. They’ll see us, the shared psychic link provides.
Embarrassed or ashamed or both and a thousand other things besides. Whatever it was he's thinking, when he thinks about this sort of thing. The obscure look in his eyes, the unfathomable depths of what he really is, under the physical specifics he’d arbitrarily assigned himself this regeneration. Crows-feet crinkling, his stomach tensing as she hooks her fingers behind his waistband, other hand firm on the small of his back.
And they’re watching, and she likes it, and she doesn’t know what that says about her.
“It’s okay,” she says softly. “I’ve got you.”
You have no idea, the link offers; she assumes it’s from him. She smiles, and pushes herself up onto her toes, kissing him until his lips part, her tongue sliding into his mouth, swallowing the moan he makes. Her hands on his shoulders, pulling him down to the floor.