[She still makes the guise of going to bed, sometimes. When her body feels wrong and her spirits are low, she'll put on pajamas and crawl into scratchy sheets and just pretend that rest of her apartment in Hackney is right out that door, that there's a nonsense text from the Doctor on her phone, that in seven hours she'll crawl into a skirt and a blouse and ride her bike to Coal Hill.
It never works. She always lies with eyes wide open for hours, listening to every second of silence from her heart, before giving up the game and making herself a cup of tea.
When she wishes the Doctor good night, it isn't because she's tired. It's because it's two in the morning, well after her old bedtime, and she doesn't want to give him another glaring fallacy to hone in on, to grieve for. So when the clock strikes two, she feigns a yawn, gives him a sideways hug, and stalks off up the stairs.
She's standing in front of the bathroom mirror in sweatpants and foamy toothpaste when she realizes that she can't do this. She can't do this, not after all they've been through, after all the lies they've spun and shouted and fought over. She's something terrible now, something that breaks his hearts, but it's not going to change just because she pretends. Lying awake every night, counting off the minutes, won't do anything to ease his grief. Dragging along a lie won't heal what she's already broken.
So, in socked feet and a somber face, she creeps back out of the upstairs bathroom, and follows the glow of the living room lamp back to where he is.]
Not so tired after all, [she explains as a re-greeting, her tone not inviting further inquiries.]
[ Thinking back to it his period of regeneration discombobulation really set the tone for sleeping: this face has never seen a bed it liked.
Semantics say aHA, this is a couch! but lo, he refuses to lower his guard for this - this wooden horse of Troy. And Agamemnon was a controlling ponce. Without the ability to skip to morning or pass Clara's sleeping hours with a quick jaunt to Celebron IV at his disposal all that's keeping the Doctor from going up stairs and poking her awake is the concession that he'd already taken up far too much of her energy reliving a trauma that he's yet to be privy to. So. He's not the most aware person in existence but he knows when he's not needed.
Meditation then? He's gotten himself down and cross-legged on the living room floor, steadfastly ignoring the bits of the wall where the plaster's failing since he doesn't know when it's appropriate to reapply plaster but he's relatively sure it isn't when humans sleep? They get very... punchy when disturbed. Life here is going to be hellish.
...
...
He can't think of anything else. Meditating on The Thing might bring clarity, more calm about it but prodding at its edges makes the pain flare anew, red and bright and hard to ignore. Try anyway? To what end? Has to be a reason to endure pain and not for its own sake.
Movement from the stairs makes the decision for him, shelving the subject as the Doctor starts and glances over his shoulder not entirely unlike a guilty puppy. ]
No..? That's - [ Unlike you, he wants to say, instead veering off to the truth. ] - good, I was going to be bored.
...It's not my fault, is it? [ He didn't do anything!! ]
[She hovers in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself, watching him tangled up on the floor like a great big praying mantis. He's here. He's in her house. How could she have hoped to run and hide?
He's going to find it all out sooner or later, a voice in her head chides. Even now, it still sounds a bit like Danny. Better if it's all from you. No more lies.
Eyes trained on the dim lamp, she purses her lips. Without the red scarf, the bandage around her neck is a glaring signal of wrong, wrong, wrong.]
I don't... sleep much, [she tries, the words pushed hard from her lungs.]
[ Question mark? Why does he still hang on tenterhooks about her? Besides the obvious, besides the ordeal they just got through having. That thing that he would not have blamed her for needing a good sleep after.
He can be dull, too. This isn't one of those moments but he's also sort of bulldozed past a lot of invisible lines in the sand in a very short time, his mind a glutton for the knowledge that his hearts have to then carry the weight of it, sometimes before he knows what he can bear. What could be heavier than the weight of the universe, one might ask.
Five one and crying. He never stood a chance.
The Doctor regards her quietly, then unfolds and stands slowly. ]
Neither do I. It's a nice change of pace to have some company in that regard.
[ Not all knowledge has to be bled from the stone at once. And from how he comes to sit on the couch's arm to face her, fingers steepled down and pointed toward the floor, he has patience to spare for his favorite human, plus a shoulder that might not quite be dry yet but is still available.
He can also play ignorant. The Doctor can't recall Clara looking this tired. ]
[She stays haunting the doorway, like a statue grasped in her own arms. The thinnest slant of a smile acknowledges his words.]
I used to wish I didn't need to. That I could just stay up all night, watching you pitter around the TARDIS.
[Right up until Trap Street, she wished that. She would have given anything to be like him, to be his equal in every way. And in the end, she did.
Slowly and silently, she leaves her perch on the threshold and makes her way to the sofa arm. It's lumpy and lopsided, another thrift store find, and she's not entirely sure that the stain on one cushion's underside isn't blood. But if it took sitting on a sofa while she drank her tea to feel like she had a semblance of humanity left to her routine, she was willing to sacrifice a bit of fastidiousness.
(It didn't work. When she sits on the edge of the cushions in her dusty house, sipping bad tea from a chipped mug, she never feels more like a ghost.)]
It's boring, really. I usually just go ride my bike, see how far away I can get.
[ If he senses something behind this news he doesn't reveal it. Funny thing, time travel. Get all wound up and turned around, remembering in the wrong direction and getting nostalgic for things that haven't yet come. Something Amy said echoes in his old dusty skull, taking on the same shade of bittersweet as Clara. It is just him and the TARDIS after they're all long gone. He loves his fairytale girls, not their decidedly unfairytale-like ends. ]
Sounds like a boring night. [ He teases of course; dreams are as noneuclidian and vast as the TARDIS's interiors but they are rarely bearing a guide as well. He smirks, watching her come closer with a stillness that isn't all ease. ] But an old man doddering about must be somewhat entertaining whilst punch-drunk and in desperate need of unconsciousness.
[ Those were the times he liked her best though - exhausted from running and bright eyed with the excitement of it all, fiery on superiority for having to get him free. The Doctor would get himself captured thousands of times over to see that, then do it again when he's feeling cheeky.
It's just that he knows all too well the tedium that she's gesturing toward. Humans weren't built for it, and he's only learned to cope with it with the benefit of centuries and a long, mutable memory. ]
Recursive space?
[ Clever, keeping them all bound up in one place. Good example of dream logic where the book test fails. He doesn't have anything better to offer her than an interrogation into the place, their circumstance, her. Another shortcoming of his. There's contrition in the lines of his face but he stays put, letting Clara be if she wants that. ]
I think I'm running on three weeks. Lots of business that Time Lords can get up to in all those hours they don't have to invest in sleep. I'm going to have a hell of a library list.
The woods make you turn back. They get in your head. [Easiest questions first. Questions that won't break anyone's hearts.] Me and River got about fifteen miles before we coudn't figure out which way was up.
[There's a gravity to her voice, a touch of warning: You probably think you can solve it, but don't go out there. Not without me.
You do not leave me.]
And I can't, [she finally adds, breaking an uncomfortable silence. She pauses on tenterhooks in front of him, as if waiting for some kind of evaluation, some kind of acceptance.] Not at all.
[ Who, him? Run off to solve a mystery without backup while he keeps his loved ones where they're safe? Nah, doesn't sound like him at all. ]
River? Can't stay out of it, you two.
[ Ooh, the missus and the wife coexisting. Be still his hearts. The Doctor's face does a complicated series of microexpressions that finally land on low-key resignation. Someone had to be the Doctor and both of them have spent long enough around him to try and fit the bill.
Notably, he makes no promises, but there is a knowing that he can't hide in his eyes so he keeps them downcast.
It's just that he doesn't relish Clara moving further back into the "mystery to solve" column. This woman that he'd already bound to him, made her think that she was worth sacrificing for him and now Clara thinks that whatever she's become is her being a burden on him.
He's quiet, reviewing what he's observed and what he might infer before remembering, ah yes, Clara might want to be privy to the process. ]
But your sense of touch is largely intact. [ His hand flutters, voice picking up purpose like when he thinks he might be onto something. ] There may not be heat - there wouldn't be with a lack of circulation - but sensation is still there, you can talk and think and communicate. That means electrical impulses are firing regardless.
[She nods absently along with his deductions, a laundry list of things she already knows about herself. Senses, yes. Thoughts, yes. There are graphs on legal pads somewhere around here, scribbled within an inch of life, hastier and more desperate with each page.]
It was done by someone very clever.
[There's no big show of secrecy, not even the slightest hint in her voice that she's dissuading him from a conclusion. He knows, somewhere in that head, whether or not it's conscious. All he needs to do is put together the facts.]
[ Ah Clara. The cleverest one in the room when he's not in it, and he loves you, he really does, but it's a good thing that they are not the same person. They see each other from outside themselves.
He's very still, voice a soft burr as he heeds the warning laid before him. He promised already, didn't he? ]
A very clever someone.
[ Technology or technique of familiar origin, to be sure, but that isn't the direction the Doctor is pushing. Slowly that daft smile spreads across his face, highlighting where the dim lamplight throws the laugh lines into relief. ]
I might have odd ideas about compliments. But - but trust me, it is one! Not about to crack you open, just see if I can help!
[ That's his girl - he may know for a fact that she didn't hang the moon and stars but from how he looks up at her she may as well be, thumbs rubbing across the backs of her small cold hands, undaunted. ]
[The fact that she knows he doesn't text is part of the reason she chooses that instead of calling right now. Pros: can't hear him complain, message will be there as proof if he tries to say he didn't get it. Cons: ... none detected.]
Won't be home until late, or possibly tomorrow. Don't wait up.
[ And what praytell makes her think she'd actually get away with it, Scot free? Nine, nada, and zip, here is a frowny Time Lord thumbing the call button on the display. ]
Clara, there are things on my screen, you know I don't take to that.
[She answers before she's turned her bike off, and lets several seconds of motor noise pop and groan directly into her speaker before finally turning the key.]
You can read a whole book in five minutes, but you can't just glance at a text?
so unspeakably rude that he doesn't have time enough left before Earth's sun burns out to adequately express, so he has to move along, but know that he is Unhappy and you're just digging a deeper hole, young miss. ]
Those are in Garamond or Arial - I'm not going to willingly stab myself in the eye in Courier.
More importantly why aren't you going to be home? The gumdrops I get, but why does a gingerbread man need licorice for his mouth? It's like opening wide for a can or tar to be poured in.
[ As if that explains everything, and as far as knowing the answers to the universe it may as well be. ]
That's what's done at Christmas, isn't it? I'd [ stolen ] acquired some at the market and gotten, ah. Preoccupied in the kitchen. Agatha is awaiting mishaps with baited breath.
Why are your plans contingent on them going well? I usually dont, makes the fact of your presence much stickier.
[Oh lord. She pictures the state of her kitchen, and further cements her plan not to go home for several hours, at the very least.]
My plans don't have anything to do with gingerbread. [Sorry her words are a bit snapped, Doctor. It's cold out here.] I'm just going to a bar with a friend.
[Beat.]
And please don't let Aggie eat any of it. She's big enough as it is.
[ You're assuming so much correctly about the state of the kitchen. Tetchy. You should have a gingerbread cookie. ]
Yes, but they have to do with my plans, which are your plans when you invite them to be, thus by extension -
[ Et cetera et cetera. His eyes dart to Aggie, currently snuffling at the flour on his boot's toe. Out, damn'd spot.
All of this is bloviating of course because as soon as he commits to saying that kind of navel-gazey drivel the game is sort of up, therefore. ]
Well. Enjoy yourself. Should you feel the need to drive whilst inebriated do remember the Tuvalian ritual for safe passage and don't be too wild with the gestures.
[ Well, Teach cracks her whip if he strays too far from the subject at had and he's become slowly accustomed to the sound over the course of their relationship. Snapping at the hand is rote, habit. ]
Ohhh. [ More an exhalation, this side of intrigued. ] Do let me know? Scientifically I'm interested in the effects on a - on you, though emotionally I admit there is a blockage of sorts I'm unsure of how to clear.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
action, first night.
It never works. She always lies with eyes wide open for hours, listening to every second of silence from her heart, before giving up the game and making herself a cup of tea.
When she wishes the Doctor good night, it isn't because she's tired. It's because it's two in the morning, well after her old bedtime, and she doesn't want to give him another glaring fallacy to hone in on, to grieve for. So when the clock strikes two, she feigns a yawn, gives him a sideways hug, and stalks off up the stairs.
She's standing in front of the bathroom mirror in sweatpants and foamy toothpaste when she realizes that she can't do this. She can't do this, not after all they've been through, after all the lies they've spun and shouted and fought over. She's something terrible now, something that breaks his hearts, but it's not going to change just because she pretends. Lying awake every night, counting off the minutes, won't do anything to ease his grief. Dragging along a lie won't heal what she's already broken.
So, in socked feet and a somber face, she creeps back out of the upstairs bathroom, and follows the glow of the living room lamp back to where he is.]
Not so tired after all, [she explains as a re-greeting, her tone not inviting further inquiries.]
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Semantics say aHA, this is a couch! but lo, he refuses to lower his guard for this - this wooden horse of Troy. And Agamemnon was a controlling ponce. Without the ability to skip to morning or pass Clara's sleeping hours with a quick jaunt to Celebron IV at his disposal all that's keeping the Doctor from going up stairs and poking her awake is the concession that he'd already taken up far too much of her energy reliving a trauma that he's yet to be privy to. So. He's not the most aware person in existence but he knows when he's not needed.
Meditation then? He's gotten himself down and cross-legged on the living room floor, steadfastly ignoring the bits of the wall where the plaster's failing since he doesn't know when it's appropriate to reapply plaster but he's relatively sure it isn't when humans sleep? They get very... punchy when disturbed. Life here is going to be hellish.
...
...
He can't think of anything else. Meditating on The Thing might bring clarity, more calm about it but prodding at its edges makes the pain flare anew, red and bright and hard to ignore. Try anyway? To what end? Has to be a reason to endure pain and not for its own sake.
Movement from the stairs makes the decision for him, shelving the subject as the Doctor starts and glances over his shoulder not entirely unlike a guilty puppy. ]
No..? That's - [ Unlike you, he wants to say, instead veering off to the truth. ] - good, I was going to be bored.
...It's not my fault, is it? [ He didn't do anything!! ]
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[She hovers in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself, watching him tangled up on the floor like a great big praying mantis. He's here. He's in her house. How could she have hoped to run and hide?
He's going to find it all out sooner or later, a voice in her head chides. Even now, it still sounds a bit like Danny. Better if it's all from you. No more lies.
Eyes trained on the dim lamp, she purses her lips. Without the red scarf, the bandage around her neck is a glaring signal of wrong, wrong, wrong.]
I don't... sleep much, [she tries, the words pushed hard from her lungs.]
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[ Question mark? Why does he still hang on tenterhooks about her? Besides the obvious, besides the ordeal they just got through having. That thing that he would not have blamed her for needing a good sleep after.
He can be dull, too. This isn't one of those moments but he's also sort of bulldozed past a lot of invisible lines in the sand in a very short time, his mind a glutton for the knowledge that his hearts have to then carry the weight of it, sometimes before he knows what he can bear. What could be heavier than the weight of the universe, one might ask.
Five one and crying. He never stood a chance.
The Doctor regards her quietly, then unfolds and stands slowly. ]
Neither do I. It's a nice change of pace to have some company in that regard.
[ Not all knowledge has to be bled from the stone at once. And from how he comes to sit on the couch's arm to face her, fingers steepled down and pointed toward the floor, he has patience to spare for his favorite human, plus a shoulder that might not quite be dry yet but is still available.
He can also play ignorant. The Doctor can't recall Clara looking this tired. ]
Quite odd anyway, to need sleep in a dream world.
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I used to wish I didn't need to. That I could just stay up all night, watching you pitter around the TARDIS.
[Right up until Trap Street, she wished that. She would have given anything to be like him, to be his equal in every way. And in the end, she did.
Slowly and silently, she leaves her perch on the threshold and makes her way to the sofa arm. It's lumpy and lopsided, another thrift store find, and she's not entirely sure that the stain on one cushion's underside isn't blood. But if it took sitting on a sofa while she drank her tea to feel like she had a semblance of humanity left to her routine, she was willing to sacrifice a bit of fastidiousness.
(It didn't work. When she sits on the edge of the cushions in her dusty house, sipping bad tea from a chipped mug, she never feels more like a ghost.)]
It's boring, really. I usually just go ride my bike, see how far away I can get.
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Sounds like a boring night. [ He teases of course; dreams are as noneuclidian and vast as the TARDIS's interiors but they are rarely bearing a guide as well. He smirks, watching her come closer with a stillness that isn't all ease. ] But an old man doddering about must be somewhat entertaining whilst punch-drunk and in desperate need of unconsciousness.
[ Those were the times he liked her best though - exhausted from running and bright eyed with the excitement of it all, fiery on superiority for having to get him free. The Doctor would get himself captured thousands of times over to see that, then do it again when he's feeling cheeky.
It's just that he knows all too well the tedium that she's gesturing toward. Humans weren't built for it, and he's only learned to cope with it with the benefit of centuries and a long, mutable memory. ]
Recursive space?
[ Clever, keeping them all bound up in one place. Good example of dream logic where the book test fails. He doesn't have anything better to offer her than an interrogation into the place, their circumstance, her. Another shortcoming of his. There's contrition in the lines of his face but he stays put, letting Clara be if she wants that. ]
I think I'm running on three weeks. Lots of business that Time Lords can get up to in all those hours they don't have to invest in sleep. I'm going to have a hell of a library list.
You can't sleep at all? Or just very rarely?
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[There's a gravity to her voice, a touch of warning: You probably think you can solve it, but don't go out there. Not without me.
You do not leave me.]
And I can't, [she finally adds, breaking an uncomfortable silence. She pauses on tenterhooks in front of him, as if waiting for some kind of evaluation, some kind of acceptance.] Not at all.
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River? Can't stay out of it, you two.
[ Ooh, the missus and the wife coexisting. Be still his hearts. The Doctor's face does a complicated series of microexpressions that finally land on low-key resignation. Someone had to be the Doctor and both of them have spent long enough around him to try and fit the bill.
Notably, he makes no promises, but there is a knowing that he can't hide in his eyes so he keeps them downcast.
It's just that he doesn't relish Clara moving further back into the "mystery to solve" column. This woman that he'd already bound to him, made her think that she was worth sacrificing for him and now Clara thinks that whatever she's become is her being a burden on him.
He's quiet, reviewing what he's observed and what he might infer before remembering, ah yes, Clara might want to be privy to the process. ]
But your sense of touch is largely intact. [ His hand flutters, voice picking up purpose like when he thinks he might be onto something. ] There may not be heat - there wouldn't be with a lack of circulation - but sensation is still there, you can talk and think and communicate. That means electrical impulses are firing regardless.
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It was done by someone very clever.
[There's no big show of secrecy, not even the slightest hint in her voice that she's dissuading him from a conclusion. He knows, somewhere in that head, whether or not it's conscious. All he needs to do is put together the facts.]
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He's very still, voice a soft burr as he heeds the warning laid before him. He promised already, didn't he? ]
A very clever someone.
[ Technology or technique of familiar origin, to be sure, but that isn't the direction the Doctor is pushing. Slowly that daft smile spreads across his face, highlighting where the dim lamplight throws the laugh lines into relief. ]
And d'you know what I've got, Clara?
[ Both hands lift, fingers wiggling goofily. ]
Dad skills.
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And what are you going to do with those? Open a jar of pickles?
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[ Flappy! Hands! Then fussily reaching for hers because this could be HUGE! He needs a win for them!! ]
If your head were a jar of pickles it would be the most lovely, beautiful jar of pickles I've ever seen, please!
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I'll take that as a compliment, 'long as you aren't about to try to open my head.
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[ That's his girl - he may know for a fact that she didn't hang the moon and stars but from how he looks up at her she may as well be, thumbs rubbing across the backs of her small cold hands, undaunted. ]
Eh? D'you think it's worth a try?
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Tell me what you're trying, first.
[Not to say that the whole thing with the neural block ruffled her trust in him at all, but... She just likes to know what she's getting into.]
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text, last saturday.
Won't be home until late, or possibly tomorrow. Don't wait up.
>:(
Clara, there are things on my screen, you know I don't take to that.
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You can read a whole book in five minutes, but you can't just glance at a text?
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so unspeakably rude that he doesn't have time enough left before Earth's sun burns out to adequately express, so he has to move along, but know that he is Unhappy and you're just digging a deeper hole, young miss. ]
Those are in Garamond or Arial - I'm not going to willingly stab myself in the eye in Courier.
More importantly why aren't you going to be home? The gumdrops I get, but why does a gingerbread man need licorice for his mouth? It's like opening wide for a can or tar to be poured in.
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Because I have plans, and if they go well- [Hold on.] Wait, what are you talking about?
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[ As if that explains everything, and as far as knowing the answers to the universe it may as well be. ]
That's what's done at Christmas, isn't it? I'd [ stolen ] acquired some at the market and gotten, ah. Preoccupied in the kitchen. Agatha is awaiting mishaps with baited breath.
Why are your plans contingent on them going well? I usually dont, makes the fact of your presence much stickier.
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My plans don't have anything to do with gingerbread. [Sorry her words are a bit snapped, Doctor. It's cold out here.] I'm just going to a bar with a friend.
[Beat.]
And please don't let Aggie eat any of it. She's big enough as it is.
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correctlyabout the state of the kitchen. Tetchy. You should have a gingerbread cookie. ]Yes, but they have to do with my plans, which are your plans when you invite them to be, thus by extension -
[ Et cetera et cetera. His eyes dart to Aggie, currently snuffling at the flour on his boot's toe. Out, damn'd spot.
All of this is bloviating of course because as soon as he commits to saying that kind of navel-gazey drivel the game is sort of up, therefore. ]
Well. Enjoy yourself. Should you feel the need to drive whilst inebriated do remember the Tuvalian ritual for safe passage and don't be too wild with the gestures.
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I’m not entirely sure I can get inebriated, but I suppose I’ll find out in a few minutes.
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Ohhh. [ More an exhalation, this side of intrigued. ] Do let me know? Scientifically I'm interested in the effects on a - on you, though emotionally I admit there is a blockage of sorts I'm unsure of how to clear.