Chapter Text
Ashildr walked into the chamber. “I have forgotten many things in my life, Doctor. But one thing I cannot forget was her scream that awful night. Clara told me she believed hearing her scream might have been what pushed you over the edge. She wouldn’t have wanted you to hear it again. And we can’t take that risk.”
“But I left her lying in the street, Ashildr! I just stumbled back inside like the cold-hearted idiot that I am. I never …”
“Would it have really made it any easier for you, then or now?”
“She was everything to me.”
“And we took care of her. I even allowed Rigsy to retain his memory. We never retconned him because I knew you wanted Clara’s sacrifice to mean something. We let him go home to his wife and daughter. We treated Clara with the greatest of respect. We took her home, we put her into bed, and I contacted UNIT and let them know, well, not all the details but enough. They took care of the rest.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I’d infiltrated UNIT decades before. They never knew about Trap Street so yours was not an empty threat, Doctor. You remember Osgood? She took a lot of the burden on herself to tell Clara’s family, her school. I’m sorry, but the general consensus at her school was she died of a broken heart from losing Danny.”
“Don’t be sorry. She loved him too. No law against loving more than one person, is there?” Rose, River, Romana, Reinette, even Sarah Jane. And there were others in his long life. Most of whom had no idea how he felt, because he always loved his companions more than they loved him. But only a select few … like Clara … oh, my Clara. She’s gone. She’ll always be gone… No, not in front of the other Time Lords. Not again. He’d already lost enough face. Weep later. In the TARDIS.
His mind raced, still trying to figure out any possible way of fixing this. He’d fixed it before. And Clara got to live for years more as a result. Without him, which was heartsbreaking, but still, she had had life and, from all accounts, it had been a pretty good one. In a brief moment, the Doctor worked through every contingency, but could find nothing. He wondered if it might be possible for him to take his TARDIS back to Trap Street so that he could hold Clara one last time. Maybe … maybe the healing factor that had protected her from injury all these years was still working. Maybe Clara sat up gasping a few seconds after the Doctor had been transported away?
“Ashildr, I have one question, and you will answer: did you ever see me on Trap Street after Clara died. I mean moments after?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor. I did not. I know what you are thinking and we retrieved her body the moment you left. Rump and Rigsy helped to bring her inside. There was no time for you to have seen her. And I sat vigil with her after we sent Rigsy home as we worked out how to get her home without alerting the authorities. You never came. I oversaw Trap Street until the mid-twenty-first century when we were forced to relocate, and, as far as I am aware, you never set foot in that part of London again, in any of your lives.”
That was that, then. He could not be party to yet another paradox. And Ashildr made it plain that there was no miracle resurrection for Clara; surely if there had been, she’d have said. To be honest, he never expected a last-moment miracle. Time saved those for people other than the ones he loved.
He took a deep breath and turned to the assembled group. “You heard my wife’s final orders and I expect them to be carried out. End this chamber and all others like it. Now. I don’t want to be on this godforsaken rock any longer than I need to so you will need a new Lord President. Don’t wait a century. I appoint Ohila.”
“Screw that.”
The Doctor decided he liked Ohila after all and was actually grateful to share a smile with her. Then he continued. “The General then?” The General bowed her head in acceptance.
“I have a final order and Article 3 be damned, it will be followed: no one here is to ever forget what Clara Oswald of Earth, my wife, did today. This woman had immortality in her grasp, and now she’s dead so the pudding brains on this and every other planet can go on with their insignificant lives. You will not forget her. When Gallifrey is dust I want the final grains of sand to stand as a monument to that impossible girl who as far as I am concerned is the greatest hero to walk the face of Gallifrey. Keep naming your toilets and broom closets after Rassilon for all I care — this is what matters. Do you understand me?”
The General-cum-President nodded.
The Doctor strode out of the extraction chamber without glancing at anyone. By the time he was at the lift down the hall, he could already hear the demolition of the chamber beginning.
He didn’t realize Ashildr was with him at first.
“What are you doing here, Me?”
“I don’t belong here any more than you do. Our TARDIS has been confiscated. I have no way of leaving here except with you.”
They arrived at the Doctor’s TARDIS. They went inside and the first thing Ashildr noticed was Clara’s farewell message on the blackboard.
The Doctor’s eyes met Ashildr’s for a moment, and the Viking immortal nodded. The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver and aimed it at the blackboard, which shuddered as the chalk words evaporated.
The two stood staring at each other for a few moments. And then the Doctor enveloped Ashildr in a hug. It was not a hug of friendship, per se; both new that there were too many issues between them for that to ever apply. Instead, like two strangers hugging after surviving terrible disaster, it was a hug between two people grieving the loss of someone of importance to both of them.
“I won’t presume to ask for your forgiveness, Doctor, but I was glad that Clara forgave me.”
“That was very like her. She even forgave Missy for what she did to Danny.”
“Clara asked me to give you this,” Ashildr said as she took a small square of plastic-like material out of her vest pocket.
“A TARDIS memory chip,” the Doctor said. “What’s on it?”
“Clara,” Ashildr said. “When we returned the TARDIS to you the first time, we erased all records of her from the memory banks, but Clara hoped someday your memory would return and you’d probably want to have this information back again, so she made a backup first. Photos, audio recordings, video.” She laughed. “Even that bizarre situation where the TARDIS played a trick on Clara and put her in a time loop while you were away. It’s all here.”
The Doctor smiled. Another fond memory. He snapped out of his reverie. “Thank you. So, where would you like to go?” The Doctor asked, honestly curious where a trillions-year-old immortal who had spent decades already with a TARDIS of her very own might possibly want to be taken.
“Only one place, Doctor. You see, Clara is not the only person who owes a debt to the universe….”
***
Trillions of years into the future, the TARDIS arrived on the final flicker of what was once Gallifrey. Through the monitor, the Doctor and Ashildr watched as their past selves walked over to what would later become Clara’s TARDIS and go inside. The future versions exited the Doctor’s TARDIS and walked over to where two plush armchairs and a chess set were sitting. Ashildr sat down – the seat still warm from where her past self had sat moments before. The Doctor sat in the second chair, and they waited.
Clara’s TARDIS sat immobile, and the Doctor frowned as a memory returned. “Right now, Clara is pleading to be allowed to keep her memories. And in a few moments I’ll be losing mine,” he said.
“I know, I remember, Doctor. But you might not want to know what happens next.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. So do you want to ask me or don’t you?”
“About what?”
“Why the chess set? Why the two chairs?”
“It had crossed my mind.”
“A final beacon, a final call. One last bit of hope to see if anyone else existed out there besides me. I rather hoped it would have been you, to keep me company at the end. Although the circumstances were adversarial, I was glad you came here with Clara, because it not only saved my life, I wasn’t alone anymore.”
“You seem to have gotten your wish the second time around, too,” the Doctor said with a warm smile.
Just then, the Doctor heard a single scream of anguish from inside Clara’s TARDIS.
Although designed to be soundproof, there were occasions where sound could bleed through the dimensions. The Doctor jumped at the sound. It had been Clara.
“What just happened, Ashildr?”
“You’ve just passed out and that was Clara realizing she’d lost you. I had to force her to dematerialize the ship because I knew the universe was ending and at that moment I was unfamiliar with the operation of the vessel.” Out of respect for Clara, Ashildr chose not to tell the Doctor that after he’d fallen into unconsciousness, Clara had broken her vow to Danny, quietly repeating, “I love you, Doctor, stay with me. I love you, stay with me,” as she’d cradled him. They never spoke about this afterwards and Ashildr would have pretended not to have heard if they had. She’d regretted intruding on such a private moment.
For a moment, the Doctor regretted everything. The billions of years in the confession dial, the extraction … because it led to Clara being so utterly heartbroken. He never wanted that.
“What happened after?”
“It wasn’t a happy few minutes. After the ship dematerialized, she tried to kill me.”
“What?”
“Pure emotion. Understandable. She blamed me for everything — Trap Street, turning you into a monster, losing you. Even then I knew how much she was in love with you, just like I saw through your understatement when you said she was ‘just a friend.’ I let her rant and I let her strike and I let her take me by the throat until she was spent. Of course she was unable to harm me. And then we took you home.”
“You mean to Earth.”
“If you say so. Anyway, we meant to take you to some place like Glasgow but we missed and ended up in the American desert. Not bad for a first try, really. She’d really been paying attention to all those years of lessons you were giving her. She got the planet right, the time zone right, so two out of three ain’t bad, as they say. Fortunately there was a man driving nearby and we were able to leave him with you. That was going to be farewell, but Clara insisted that she wanted to know you were okay. It took us months to set up that little charade with the diner. We knew you’d eventually return to Nevada to find out more about this mysterious Clara — and perhaps find clues as to who nicked your TARDIS. After all, you could never resist a mystery.”
“Why not just leave the TARDIS where it was and let me retrieve it?”
“I wanted to. I understood completely your rationale for undergoing the memory block and I supported your decision. But Clara wouldn’t let it be. She said it was the only way she could move on. At first, her rationale was sound as we realized we had to ‘de-Clara’ the TARDIS anyway — erase any records and images from the TARDIS’ computer, retrieve Clara’s things, to help you forget her. She wanted to leave you that message on the blackboard and we also stopped off at a shop she knew in London where she bought you that coat to replace the one you’d worn the day she visited Trap Street. But that wasn’t good enough for Clara. We argued for days about how dangerous it was, but ultimately she told me either I went along with her plan or she’d leave me behind.”
“And that plan was?”
“To try and get you to remember her. I said it was a fool’s errand. I told her if she’d outright said she was Clara it might have caused damage to you since the block was still settling in your brain. I observed through the monitor and she tried virtually everything to get you to remember, even playing ‘your song’ on the jukebox.”
A long-suppressed memory of a young brunette singer warbling an old Queen number on the Orient Express. The warmth of Clara hugging his arm and nestling her head on his shoulder, even as she was working up the courage to say goodbye to the travelling life and give herself over to Danny completely. It was the same night she came close to kissing him outside their cabins. It was the same night he’d thought Clara might have asked him to spend the night with her; he honestly had no idea how he might have replied had that have happened because as much as Clara was conflicted, so was he.
Fortunately, there was a mystery to solve which took his mind off Clara for a while. He could never resist a mystery. Which is what got Clara killed, of course. The Doctor forced himself to suppress this thought (he hoped it would eventually get deleted like he'd forgotten sign language) and instead focused on remembering the song. It had been playing when he first entered the diner and saw Clara resplendent in a bluer-than-blue waitress costume. He hadn’t noticed, he thought with guilt. He hadn’t noticed anything, then, dammit. Even before the memory block, he had no idea Clara considered anything to be “their song.” Though it was the song the Doctor had composed himself that Clara wanted to hear during their final interlude on the TARDIS.
“She tried, but it didn’t work,” said the Doctor only now registering the hurt on Clara’s face after he’d finished telling her his story about Gallifrey and losing Clara and how he’d said he’d always be able to recognize her. Yet in truth her face had been kissing distance from his the whole time and he hadn’t been able to recall her. How that must have hurt her, he thought, realizing that she must have felt worse than he did that awkward day after his regeneration when he begged Clara to “just see me.” Would she have done if his previous self hadn’t had the brainwave to phone her from the past? He never wanted to ask her. For half a second, the Doctor entertained an insane notion of phoning his past self, the idiot with the guitar, in the diner and telling him that he was with Clara and to hold onto her and never let go. To tell her she was loved. Paradox be damned. But no, the Doctor dismissed the idea almost instantly. Paradox not be damned. There was too much at stake.
“No, it didn’t work,” Ashildr acknowledged. “And she was even more upset than before — not in front of me, but after we dematerialized the TARDIS and she went to change out of that waitress costume, her cheeks were wet when she came back and I knew she’d been crying. But at least she could say goodbye to you one last time, in her own way. And it did some good as she remembered the heartbreak and was determined to let you live your life without her.”
“I never told her that I was very impressed with that ‘waitress’. If she hadn’t dematerialized her TARDIS, I might have asked her to travel with me. I hadn’t felt that connection with someone so quickly since I met one of her echoes in Victorian London. I never know when; I only know who.”
“Why do you think she left in such a hurry? She knew the signs. She’d been through that before. And she wouldn’t have been able to say No if you had asked. You were the Hybrid — and you nearly became the hybrid again today.”
The Doctor smiled and looked out at the remaining star in the sky. “Not long now.”
“Your calculations are actually a bit off. It’s not quite five minutes to hell. More like fifteen. But I liked your metaphor earlier so I didn’t really want to correct you. And Clara was in no condition to debate specifics either. So what do you say, Doctor — a quick game of chess before the end?”
Somehow the Doctor produced a bottle of wine and two glasses, seemingly out of thin air. He poured them both a glass of pinot noir.
“Here’s to the universe, to wise immortals, and to Clara.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Ashildr. Something caught her attention in a corner of what used to be the Cloisters. “Well, what do you know? I don’t remember seeing that last time I was here.”
A faded plaque was set into one of the pillars. It read, in part, “In honour of Clara Oswald of Earth, whose sacrifice ensured a future for us all. Loving wife of The Doctor, Lord President of Gallifrey.”
The Doctor smiled. “I’m glad they paid attention to me for once. They even spelled her name right.” He figured Ohila probably had something to do with the wording, as the phrase “loving wife” would have been alien on Gallifrey and somehow it managed to sound a little sarcastic. Just like Ohila. The Doctor didn’t mind; Clara would have gotten a kick out of it.
At twelve minutes to hell, the two old souls began the universe’s final game of chess. It ended in stalemate six minutes later.
At the actual five minutes to hell, the final star flashed out, leaving the Doctor and Ashildr sitting in near-darkness until Ashildr lit a small pocket light like the type used in camping, casting a faint glow that barely illuminated their features. Not long now; already they could feel the temperature dropping. The Doctor asked Ashildr to reconsider — he even went so far as to invite her to travel with him — but this time it was the immortal’s turn to put her foot down.
“I’d like to think what you gave me back when I was Ashildr was a gift more than a curse, but as you yourself once said, ‘Everything has its time and everything dies,’ and I’m ready to finally die.”
“You might not, you know.” For the Doctor that was a horrific thought.
“Then maybe I’ll become like one of the Ancients who came into this universe from the previous one. Which means I’ll get to explore and experience and establish a brand-new universe. Either way, I win.”
“Just stay away from circuses.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Old story.”
At two minutes to hell, Ashildr poured herself a final drink and told the Doctor it was time for him to leave. For a moment she was no longer the ancient immortal, but the scared little girl the Doctor had saved so long ago. The two exchanged a warm hug. The Doctor said, “Thank you, Ashildr. Not just for everything you did for Clara, but for everything you have done throughout time. I will not forget you.”
“Just be nice to me next time we meet.” She winked at him. “I wouldn’t put it past you to end up in the next universe some day.”
The Doctor laughed. And then he turned to her one last time.
“And Ashildr. I want you to know that I do forgive you.”
“Thank you, Doctor. That means a lot to me. I have one final gift.” She pulled out another TARDIS memory chip. “This is me. My diaries. Please keep them safe.”
“I will.”
“There is a lot of Clara in here, too. She didn’t keep a journal of our travels, but I did. It’s all here.”
“Thank you.”
“Farewell, my friend.”
At thirty seconds to hell, the Doctor ran into his TARDIS and madly flipped switches to dematerialize the ship before the final heat death. He nearly didn’t make it; the monitor showed the last remnants of Gallifrey disintegrating — and, with it, the trillions-of-years-long life of Ashildr the Viking either came to an end or she began a new journey in another realm of existence.
The TARDIS continued standing on a final chunk of Gallifrey before finally dematerializing. The Doctor, awed by this, said aloud. “What do you know, Clara? I was right — I really did become the last person in the universe.”
With his memory of Clara restored, and with Clara now forever lost, the Doctor was able to do the one thing he had been prevented from doing. Something that he needed to do.
As he set his TARDIS on a course for Earth, he made sure to be very careful not to arrive too closely to the date of Clara’s death. He didn’t want to chance encountering Ashildr or Rigsy, and he frankly couldn’t bear the thought of witnessing Clara’s funeral. He chose a sunny summer day a few months later, instead. He was thankful the cemetery was miles from Trap Street. He intended to enter instructions creating a no-landing zone within a six-block radius of it. It didn’t matter if it was 2017, the twenty-fifth century or 1792, he never wanted to go anywhere near there again if he could help it.
The Doctor parked the TARDIS a few kilometres away from the cemetery and brought Clara’s motorcycle out of the TARDIS’s on-board garage. He’d been asked to retrieve it by Osgood the first time he visited Earth after seeing Clara in the diner. At the time, Osgood had simply said that an anonymous friend the Doctor had once helped had passed away and left the motorcycle to him. It was beautiful, if a bit on the small side for him, and the Doctor had accepted the gift, put it into storage and thought no more about it for the next fifty years. Now, with his memories of Clara restored, he knew full well the story of the bike and what it meant to her, and to him.
Putting on a helmet, the Doctor kicked the starter and roared down the country lane towards the cemetery. He cut the engine and coasted once he passed the gates, out of respect for the dead and the handful of people seen kneeling next to or standing by assorted gravestones. He got off his bike and walked up the hill, stopping along the way to pause at one weathered stone. He placed his hand on it and closed his eyes for a moment. “Thank you,” he whispered before walking away from the marker with the name “Clara Oswin Oswald” engraved upon it.
A little further on, he approached another gravestone. It was a simple marker with a name, date of birth and date of death. Ironically, the Doctor realized he never actually paid attention to what day it was when he and Clara arrived on Trap Street. He discovered it had been early spring. Her favourite time of year on Earth.
There were fresh flowers by the grave. The Doctor felt it wasn’t his business to see who had left them, though he spotted one card with the name “Adrian” scrawled across it. That had been one of her fellow teachers, the lad who in the right light sort of resembled the Doctor’s previous self; the Doctor had once mistaken him for Clara’s new boyfriend and had been disappointed to hear Clara didn’t actually fancy him. Another card had been signed by Osgood. Twice. The Doctor smiled at that. Despite the terrible things she had done, the Osgood that used to be known as Bonnie and who had so masterfully impersonated Clara, even sharing some of her memories (did Bonnie know how Clara felt about him, he wondered), carried some of Clara inside her and was now trying her damnedest to make amends as one of the Osgoods, defenders of the earth. He felt good about that. And it was yet another thing that he owed Clara, because it was her influence on Bonnie that had allowed him to get through to the rogue Zygon and save the world once more.
The Doctor placed a large red leaf on the marker. The same type of leaf as the one that led to Clara being born in the first place, and that she carried with her when they started their travels, only to sacrifice it to appease a hungry "god."
The Doctor frowned. There was something missing from the stone. He took out his sonic screwdriver and made a few adjustments. He ran the device over a blank part of the stone and symbols appeared. Satisfied, he put the sonic away. It would probably confuse a few people to see the added words and he hoped no one would mistake it for vandalism. But he didn’t care.
The symbols were High Gallifreyan lettering, the sonicship a little shaky due to the Doctor not having written the characters for a long time. Untranslatable by the TARDIS, Clara’s family and friends who might someday return here to pay their respects would dismiss the letters as design elements. But for those who could read it, the message was clear.
The closest translation to English was: “Beloved companion of The Doctor, never forgotten, always cherished.” Even though she had become his wife in the end, the Doctor actually put far more power and more strength into the word “companion.”
“That word is yours now, Clara,” the Doctor vowed aloud. He knew others would travel with him, become his friends, his associates, his colleagues. He once eschewed the term, even joking that she was his “carer.” But no … Clara was his companion. No one else would ever be called that. Not by him.
Finally, the Doctor took a deep breath and, with tears welling up, he said one word that he’d said several times to Clara during this whole ordeal, but had never meant it for real. Because he was the Doctor. He was the man who did not like endings, avoided them whenever possible. It nearly — scratch that; it did — cost him so much with Clara.
He knew he would never come back to this place. And he knew Clara would not have wanted him to, either. Wherever she was now, whether with Danny in some alternate plane of existence, walking beside him as a ghost (wouldn’t that be something, he thought), or perhaps reborn in another time and another place to perhaps some day join him again in his travels, he knew an ending had come. One he had to acknowledge. She would have wanted it that way.
“Goodbye.”