[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 eagerness is tempered, but the Doctor is so visibly cheered by finding a small avenue where he could make Clara's life a bit easier past her express former dislike of sleep. ]
Just a theory - with your say so, of course. If electrical signals still course through your body and brain, relaying complex information, feedback, et cetera, there's a decent shot that I can use touch telepathy to help you sleep.
[ He'd say Time Lord telepathy is limited, but that's disregarding the memories he's wiped clean from dear friends, people who didn't deserve it. He'd say they have more than a good chance of this working, but in case it doesn't he's holding onto some small reserve, excess energy making him draw her hands together into both of his and loosely cradle them. ]
[She pauses, lets out a puff of air. Her eyes - tired, tired eyes - flick down to their hands, and then back up to him.]
Yeah. [It comes out like a breath, barely another thought necessary.] Yeah, that would... that would be awesome.
[God, she has missed sleeping. Her body positively aches for the sensation of waking up, soft sheets up to her chin, sunlight streaming in the window.]
[ :D? :D! See! She missed him being clever for her, yeah? The Doctor grins as wide as she's seen and squeezes her hands gently, nose wrinkling with boyish glee. ]
I am at your beck and call, Miss Oswald. Just say the word and consider it done.
[ In fact he's already standing because he's so familiar with how fatigue wears on her shoulders - not tiredness, not sleepiness, fatigue. The kind that aches in the bones and grinds them to dust when you have no reprieve.
Honestly, he'll have to go back to missing Clara while she's out if this works. But how worthwhile it'd be. A very productive silence. ]
[ Here he is already following because really, the decision's made, isn't it? The rest is performance, including how the Doctor's eyes dart about to the dark windows and back to Clara, a playful brand of condescension that allows her in on the joke levied against the night. ]
Unless you want to wait 'til next two in the morning.
[She steps backwards up the first stair, hands still linked, her eager smile a manic contrast to the way she haunts this house. Her hands are cold, her skin too pale in the darkness, but her excitement cuts through it, familiar and warm.]
It's been two months of two-in-the-mornings.
[The wallpaper in the stairwell is yellow and peeling, and a small window sends a patch of white moon across their feet as Clara pulls the Doctor upstairs. If he expected anything different about the top floor of the little cottage, he'll find he was wrong - it's the same barren jumble as below, save for the back bedroom, where a double mattress lies on the floor under a picture window.]
I sold the frame. [And bought Murder Sofa and her motorcycle boots with the proceeds. Smart girl.] Didn't really plan to use it much.
[ It's good that the Doctor is the Doctor, otherwise he might he forced to acknowledge the odd feeling that he should be doing something as they cross the threshold into Clara's room hand in hand. There's a headtip, an I would've done the same and probably done away with the mattress to boot, no judgment for prepossessing trappings so much as the infernal existence of bedrooms at all. ]
A pragmatism we may be forced to revise if my working hypothesis does, in fact, work. Or I don't know. Find something more fittingly upscale.
[ The need to find his guitar wherever he left it when he woke up becomes ever increasingly pressing. He's used to Clara's bed being... however you describe it. More? More.
The Doctor detaches only to fetch a thin quilt that looks more slept laid upon than beneath, suddenly feeling the need to keep his head cast down and flap a hand at the bed between fussing with the quilt. ]
Right, two months of two a.m.s too long, you're up past your bedtime.
[Clara moves to wrap her arms around herself, and then drops them, hands fidgeting as she circles the bed. It occurs to her, minutes too late, that the ritual is familiar: hands clasped, grins giddy, tugging a man - or woman - down the hall and into her bedroom. This reads like a grim parody.
Do you love him?, the last man she invited to her bedroom had asked. She had only half-lied. Love, as a human understands it, is a narrow and desperate thing. This isn't that.
(She's not sure when she stopped considering herself a human.)]
I thought about getting a four-poster one, like I had on the TARDIS. Get a canopy, maybe.
[She sits down, legs crossed and smile easy. Then, a hint of teasing in her face, she reaches up and tugs at his hand again.]
Get down here, you giraffe. [Leaning back on her pillow, she makes plenty of room for him and all his elbows.] Now, how do we do this?
No. It isn't. Not that he's ignorant of the human way of expressing it, but that the Venn diagram of that and how he might convey it does share a wider cross section than it used to. Never wants to dip back into Hair And Pinstripes levels of push-pull, coming closer and distancing in perpetuity until it's just a day late and a quick reaction short.
[ Except by small, powerful girls that nearly send him ass over teakettle and this quilt was very interesting you see. Frowning deeply, the Doctor drags himself down and Clara can have all his sharp elbows and throw in the knobby knees for free because he's rather sure - yep his boot heels would be hanging off if he laid on his back.
How - I'm not going to prick your finger on a spindle if that's what you're asking.
[ Arms: crossed, and the Doctor: only performatively cross, a point proved by the immediate softening around his edges as he half shifts toward her and holds out his first two fingers. ]
Our mutual friend Rupert caught the express train, but if you don't fancy hitting your head on the [ A glance up - no headboard. ] wall, there's gentl- easier grades down the mountain.
[Rupert. Clara wonders for a moment, wildly, if the Doctor's been listening to her thoughts, if he knows that she was thinking of Danny, and of the last time she laid in bed with someone.
Just in case, she thinks about it harder.]
I don't care. [Can't do any real damage, surely.] Give me your worst.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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Just a theory - with your say so, of course. If electrical signals still course through your body and brain, relaying complex information, feedback, et cetera, there's a decent shot that I can use touch telepathy to help you sleep.
[ He'd say Time Lord telepathy is limited, but that's disregarding the memories he's wiped clean from dear friends, people who didn't deserve it. He'd say they have more than a good chance of this working, but in case it doesn't he's holding onto some small reserve, excess energy making him draw her hands together into both of his and loosely cradle them. ]
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[She pauses, lets out a puff of air. Her eyes - tired, tired eyes - flick down to their hands, and then back up to him.]
Yeah. [It comes out like a breath, barely another thought necessary.] Yeah, that would... that would be awesome.
[God, she has missed sleeping. Her body positively aches for the sensation of waking up, soft sheets up to her chin, sunlight streaming in the window.]
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I am at your beck and call, Miss Oswald. Just say the word and consider it done.
[ In fact he's already standing because he's so familiar with how fatigue wears on her shoulders - not tiredness, not sleepiness, fatigue. The kind that aches in the bones and grinds them to dust when you have no reprieve.
Honestly, he'll have to go back to missing Clara while she's out if this works. But how worthwhile it'd be. A very productive silence. ]
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Can we try it now?
[She's already tugging backwards, towards the doorway, a bit of old spark in her eyes for the first time since they met a few hours ago.]
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Unless you want to wait 'til next two in the morning.
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It's been two months of two-in-the-mornings.
[The wallpaper in the stairwell is yellow and peeling, and a small window sends a patch of white moon across their feet as Clara pulls the Doctor upstairs. If he expected anything different about the top floor of the little cottage, he'll find he was wrong - it's the same barren jumble as below, save for the back bedroom, where a double mattress lies on the floor under a picture window.]
I sold the frame. [And bought Murder Sofa and her motorcycle boots with the proceeds. Smart girl.] Didn't really plan to use it much.
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A pragmatism we may be forced to revise if my working hypothesis does, in fact, work. Or I don't know. Find something more fittingly upscale.
[ The need to find his guitar wherever he left it when he woke up becomes ever increasingly pressing. He's used to Clara's bed being... however you describe it. More? More.
The Doctor detaches only to fetch a thin quilt that looks more
sleptlaid upon than beneath, suddenly feeling the need to keep his head cast down and flap a hand at the bed between fussing with the quilt. ]Right, two months of two a.m.s too long, you're up past your bedtime.
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Do you love him?, the last man she invited to her bedroom had asked. She had only half-lied. Love, as a human understands it, is a narrow and desperate thing. This isn't that.
(She's not sure when she stopped considering herself a human.)]
I thought about getting a four-poster one, like I had on the TARDIS. Get a canopy, maybe.
[She sits down, legs crossed and smile easy. Then, a hint of teasing in her face, she reaches up and tugs at his hand again.]
Get down here, you giraffe. [Leaning back on her pillow, she makes plenty of room for him and all his elbows.] Now, how do we do this?
1/
No. It isn't. Not that he's ignorant of the human way of expressing it, but that the Venn diagram of that and how he might convey it does share a wider cross section than it used to. Never wants to dip back into Hair And Pinstripes levels of push-pull, coming closer and distancing in perpetuity until it's just a day late and a quick reaction short.
He won't be blindsided again. ]
2/
She had to bring giraffes into it. ]
3/3
[ Arms: crossed, and the Doctor: only performatively cross, a point proved by the immediate softening around his edges as he half shifts toward her and holds out his first two fingers. ]
Our mutual friend Rupert caught the express train, but if you don't fancy hitting your head on the [ A glance up - no headboard. ] wall, there's gentl- easier grades down the mountain.
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Just in case, she thinks about it harder.]
I don't care. [Can't do any real damage, surely.] Give me your worst.
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