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The Doctor is particularly grumpy today – it seems to be his modus operandi since he regenerated but for some reason, a perfectly lovely April afternoon has left him even more Scottish and ill-tempered than usual. Usually, Clara can pull him from his bouts of moodiness easily enough with a little prodding and teasing but right now, he radiates a sort of quiet, mournful shroud that makes her hesitant. She lingers on the other side of the console, Danny hovering behind her with a hand pressed to the small of her back, and watches him with unease.
He scrubs a hand over his weathered face and sighs. “I’m sorry, Clara.” He attempts a smile but it’s tight-lipped and doesn’t reach his eyes. “Bad day.”
She nods, managing an understanding smile. “It’s alright. Even Time Lords aren’t immune to them.”
Rubbing his hands together in a shadowed caricature of anticipation, he drops his eyes to the controls. “So, where to today? Danny boy?”
Behind them, Danny wavers, clearly caught between wanting to go somewhere – the Doctor has never asked his opinion before – and the same uneasy feeling Clara is getting. They exchange a glance while the Doctor is preoccupied with fiddling over the settings. The Doctor is in no mood to travel today but outright pointing it out it will only upset him. Satisfied that they’re on the same page, Clara nods once.
“Actually, Doctor,” she ventures brightly. “I thought I might show Danny around the TARDIS today. Y’know, give him the grand tour.”
The Doctor glances up, suspicion warring with relief. Finally, relief wins out and he only says, “Don’t get lost.”
Ever polite, Danny clears his throat. “You aren’t coming?”
“I hardly need a tour of my own ship,” the Doctor says with a frown. “I know her like the back of my hand.”
Considering how new his most recent hand still is, Clara doubts the accuracy of that analogy but offers no witty retort. The Doctor’s mind is already far away, by the look in his old blue eyes, and as far as he’s aware, they’ve already left the room. With one last worried glance at him, Clara reaches for Danny’s hand and mutters, “Come on.” Together, they slip from the control room and into the next corridor.
The moment they’re out of earshot, Danny shoots a look over his shoulder just to be safe and says, “What the bloody hell is the matter with him? One minute he’s picking us up like usual and the next he looks like someone shot his best friend.”
Clara shrugs, still troubled. “Something to do with the date,” she murmurs thoughtfully. “He didn’t change until the monitored showed him the date.”
Danny frowns. “What’s so special about April 22nd?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“You’ve got that ‘let’s investigate’ look,” Danny surmises, voice dripping with reproach. “He’s not going to tell us anything.”
Clara smiles. “Maybe not him.” She and the TARDIS get on a little better now, barring the occasional disagreement over how much hot water she thinks Clara needs to shower – always less than Clara thinks she should have. At Danny’s confused look, Clara tugs on his hand. “Come on, let’s see what the TARDIS will show us.”
The TARDIS shows them just about everything but actual answers – the zero gravity room, a kitchen with an enormous pizza oven, a room made out of foam building blocks, another with trampoline floors, a wardrobe filled with nothing but seventies disco suits, a closet that plays Party Rock Anthem every time the door is opened. Danny finds a room dedicated to making nothing but candy floss and refuses to leave, so Clara slouches against the wall and pouts, arms folded as she glares at the ceiling.
“I thought we had an understanding,” she mumbles, toeing at the floor like a petulant child.
The TARDIS makes a noise almost like a scoff, if boxes could scoff.
Clara’s frown deepens. “Why don’t you like me?”
After a brief pause, there’s an uncomfortable pressure in her head and while she knows it’s only the TARDIS trying to communicate, it feels more like rushing water in her ears. Clara swats at thin air and ignores Danny’s raised brow.
“I’m only trying to help,” she reasons. “I want to know what’s bothering him.”
“Are you talking to the box?”
She huffs, glancing at Danny. “Sort of. Yes.”
“And…” He eyes her with mock concern. “Is the box talking back?”
“A bit.” She shrugs. “Trying to anyway. I get the feeling she thinks I’m slow.”
Danny snorts and licks candy floss from his lips. “Well -”
“Oi! You’re supposed to be on my side!”
He shrugs. “How long did it take you to notice me following after you like a puppy?”
Clara blushes. “That’s different. I was distracted.”
“Yeah, by the distinguished Scot with the time machine.”
“Shut up, it’s not like that.” She rolls her eyes. “And he wasn’t always Scottish or distinguished. He used to be so young – massive chin. Lots of hair.”
Wandering to her side and wiping his sticky fingers on his jeans, Danny noses at her temple. “Should I be jealous?”
“It still wasn’t like that.” She nudges him with an elbow. “Besides, he had a -”
The door to the candy floss room creaks open before she can finish her sentence and they both turn to stare. In the corridor outside the room, a light flickers. Without looking at him, Clara slips her hand into Danny’s and says, “I think we’re supposed to follow.”
He nods silently, no longer scoffing at the idea of a ship that can communicate.
Once they’re in the hallway, the flickering light leaps to the end of the corridor and they follow once more. It goes on for several minutes, the light overhead flickering and leaping from place to place, leading them deeper into the TARDIS. Finally, it stops and a bulb flashes continuously over one door in the middle of the latest long and winding corridor. The plaque on the door reads Water.
Clara glances at Danny, who nods again encouragingly, and pushes open the door. It actually opens – she almost believed the TARDIS might have led her all this way just to show her a locked door, the cow. Stepping inside, Clara lets Danny slip past her and leaves the door open just in case the TARDIS decides to lock them in.
Squinting in the darkness, she fumbles for a light switch and her fingers brush against it accidentally, bathing the room in bright light. She winces, looking at her surroundings through half-lidded eyes until she adjusts. The room isn’t as vast as the others they’ve seen today but still large enough to contain what looks like a lot of unused furniture, if the sheets draped over everything are any indication.
Clara doesn’t move from the doorway, watching dust motes dance in the light and feeling inexplicably sad, but Danny starts removing the sheets with a curious hum. Beneath the first is a trunk, heavy and wooden. Clara goes to it, like a moth drawn to heat and light, and sinks to her knees in front of it. Running a finger over the top of it, she gazes at the heavy lock keeping whatever is inside hidden from view, and feels her eyes fill up.
“Clara?” Danny presses a hand to her shoulder.
She shakes her head hurriedly. “I’m fine. I don’t know why I’m -” Her eyes fall to the book resting atop the trunk and for a moment, her voice leaves her. It’s placed directly in the center, situated with such reverence, like a Bible on an altar. “I’m fine.”
With one last concerned look, Danny squeezes her shoulder and leaves her to it, walking around the room and tearing the sheets off of everything else – a bookshelf packed with aging manuscripts, a collection of guns, several dress forms draped in gorgeous gowns, a vanity with perfume and lipsticks and hairpins, a gramophone that starts to play a Stevie Wonder record when Danny cranks it to life. Clara sits motionless and stares at the blue book for a long moment, letting the melancholy tenderness of this room wash over her in waves.
Finally, she picks up the book with shaking hands and very gently begins to flip through it. Every page is covered with ancient, faded handwriting and Clara scans them curiously, picking out words like sweetie and my love and my wonderful idiot or sometimes simply Himself.
Wore the blue dress tonight. Sweetie approved.
It’s been months, my love. I miss you.
My wonderful idiot took me ice-skating on the River Thames for my birthday. He fell more than he skated but kissing him better was no hardship.
Himself showed up three hours late tonight. I made him sorry. With handcuffs.
“It’s a diary,” Clara realizes aloud. She is invading something clearly private and sacred. She should close the book and back away. She turns another page instead.
Behind her, Danny trips over the sheet he’d just pulled from a baby grand piano. Distantly, she hears him fiddle with the keys, teasing out a tinkling melody, but her eyes are too focused on the page in front of her to tell him to keep quiet. Spanning the entire page is a pencil drawn sketch of the Doctor – his previous regeneration. He is in repose as she’s never seen him before, lying amongst rumpled bed sheets, bare-chested and sleeping, his hair flopping over his forehead and into his eyes. On his lips is a small, content smile. He looks peaceful. Clara didn’t even know he slept.
Every single line of the sketch speaks of a love and tenderness that shakes her to her core. Feeling more like a voyeur than ever, Clara snaps the blue book shut, determined to put it away, but a slip of paper slides from between one of the pages. She pauses to pick it up and tuck it back into the book, flipping it over to examine it, and realizes it isn’t just a slip of paper. It’s a photograph.
The Doctor sits on a sofa, surrounded by what looks to be every member of the Beatles, but it’s the other familiar face that makes Clara’s breath catch in her throat. Curled up on the Doctor’s lap, arms around his neck and her lips puckered in a kiss against his cheek, is River Song. She looks a little younger than the version of her Clara is familiar with, and her short little dress is nothing like the shapeless garment she’d worn in the afterlife but it’s definitely her.
The picture is black and white but Clara can still make out the Doctor’s blush, can still see the happy gleam in his eyes. He smiles at the camera widely, a smug sort of grin that she imagines has a lot to do with the lapful of curves and curls in his arms. He looks happy. More than happy. Those ghosts behind his eyes are faded in this picture, the hollowness of loss in his smile nonexistent. This is the Doctor before he lost his wife.
Clara’s mind flashes back to the plaque on the door. Water.
Scrambling to put the photograph away and drop the book back onto the trunk, she whirls around and says, “Danny, wait. We need to -”
Across the room and in the middle of pulling the last sheet from something leaning against the wall, Danny doesn’t hear her. He rips off the sheet to reveal a large, exquisite painting of River in full Egyptian garb. Her gown clings to her breasts, hips and waist like something sinful, her curls are wild around her face like she’s just been shagged within an inch of her life and her lips are curved in such a way that Clara guesses she’d definitely enjoyed it.
Danny whistles, staring. “Well. Hello.”
She rolls her eyes despite herself. “Put that sheet back on. We need to leave.”
“What? Why?” He turns to her with a good-natured pout. “This is just getting interesting.”
“Because these are her things.” Clara moves around the room quickly, yanking sheets back over everything to keep the dust off, just like the Doctor had it before they invaded his personal shrine. “We shouldn’t be here.”
“Whose things?” Danny watches her scurry around the room with a puzzled frown. “This woman?” He glances back at the portrait. “Who is she?”
Pulling the needle from the record and abruptly interrupting Stevie Wonder in the middle of a ballad, Clara drapes the sheet back over the gramophone. “The Doctor’s wife.”
“Wife?” Danny stares incredulously. “He has a wife?” Once more, he turns to study the portrait. “That’s his wife?”
Clara nods sharply. “Had. He had a wife.”
“Oh.” His shoulders drop and Danny falls silent, a respectful pause for the dead. “Did you know her?”
“Met her once, yeah.”
“What was she like?”
“Mad.” She reaches the trunk and adjusts the blue book on top, offering an apologetic pat to the cover, before pulling the sheet over it too. “Sexy. Brilliant.”
Already dead.
“So just his type, then?” Danny grins fleetingly, eyes straying once more to the likeness of River behind him. “He never talks about her.”
Clara pauses in her frantic attempt to clean up their mess, pursing her lips. “I think it hurts too much.” Recalling the only time the Doctor ever spoke of his wife, and the uncharacteristic tears that followed, she ducks her head and closes her eyes. Whatever has the Doctor in such a mood today, it surely has something to do with this woman. She’s the only one who is ever able to invoke such a strong reaction in him. They must have been something incredible to watch when she was alive. “Must be why he put all of her stuff in here. Didn’t want to look at it.”
“And I didn’t want companions snooping through her things.” Clara stiffens, head shooting up to find the Doctor lurking in the doorway, eyes fastened on the floor. “I thought a locked door deep in the TARDIS would be enough of a deterrent but I always underestimate the curiosity of humans.”
“Doctor,” she begins, with no idea how to even start apologizing.
“Show Danny the rest of the TARDIS, Clara.”
She frowns. “But -” He lifts his gray head, eyes piercing, and the rest of her protest dies in her throat. “I’m sorry.”
His smile doesn’t even come close to reaching his eyes and looks more like a pained grimace. “So am I, dear girl.” Across the room, Danny attempts to tug the last sheet over River’s portrait and the Doctor’s half-hearted attempt at good humor withers away as he snaps, “Leave it.”
Danny jumps, startled, and turns to look at him with wide eyes.
Shoulders slumping, the Doctor sighs, looking so defeated Clara wants nothing more than to cross the room and hug him, to smooth the grief from his brow and promise him he will get better. He will move on. But looking at him now, she begins to doubt it. “Just go.” He watches them stare at him, both of them frozen in place. “Please.”
Snapping out of it, Clara blinks away her tears and nods once, turning to Danny. He’s already at her side, hand slipping into hers to lead her away. She pauses beside the Doctor, hesitating only a moment before reaching out and squeezing his arm lightly. He doesn’t look at her, eyes fixed on the portrait, and Clara leaves him alone with his wife, heart aching for him.
The moment the door shuts behind Danny and Clara, the Doctor finally blinks, gazing around the room in painful remembrance of the day he dragged everything that could possibly remind him of his wife into this room, thrown sheets over everything, and locked it all away, collapsing into angry, bitter hysterics outside the door. He’d left their bedroom just as it was, like a snapshot of their life together, and hasn’t been in there since. But everything else in the TARDIS was fair game and all of it had ended up here. Including the portrait that used to hang in his study.
He starts toward it slowly, eyes locked on it as he approaches. River had been so excited to give it to him, as giddy as he’d ever seen her as she watched him unwrap it. She’d wrapped her arms around his neck from behind, pressing her lips to his cheek as he blushed and stared and stammered. He’d loved it, of course, and he’d done his best to show her by kissing her and holding her and letting her help him hang it over the mantle in his study, but he’d never truly found the words to say it – that he would treasure it and everything else she gave him, right down to a blossom she tucked behind his ear on a picnic. Everything River touched was precious.
His last body had been so rubbish with words.
As he comes to a stop in front of the portrait, River’s painted gaze smirking at him, the Doctor realizes this body isn’t much better. His throat closes up, his eyes sting. He swallows the lump in his throat and reaches out a hand that trembles, caressing the painted image of his wife’s face. “Hello, honey.”
She doesn’t break into a grin and toss back a Hello, Sweetie. She doesn’t scold him for being late. She doesn’t make tease him about finally looking his age. Her stare is blank, empty. Lifeless.
His stomach lurches and he pulls the sheet over her frozen visage quickly, saving them both the indignity of pretending she’s really here. She’s in the data core. She’s sleeping. She’s happy and having adventures with his younger self, the one he’d uploaded with his sonic plugged into the console as he regenerated. Somewhere out there, in some wonderful, mad book, the echo of River Song is running with the echo of her younger looking husband, straightening his bowtie for him and calling him an idiot.
She is not here with him, in this place filled with her things, in the portrait holding her likeness. But it still doesn’t stop him from whispering “Happy Anniversary” into the empty room and hoping that somehow, she hears him.