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He loves Clara.
This is a fact the Doctor knows, like how he knows that daylight lasts on Filea IV for exactly fifty-three minutes, or that the rain on New Saturn sounds like a song.
It’s just a simple thing. An obvious, everyday notion. The TARDIS travels in time and space, his two hearts beat, and he loves Clara Oswald.
But he doesn’t say it.
#
“Everything you’re about to say I already know,” Clara tells him on trap street. “Don’t say it now.”
Outside, the raven is waiting, but here, she pulls him into a hug and he stands there in her embrace, feeling the weight of her arms around him, like she is his anchor, holding him steady in a world that’s nothing but a stormy sea.
But then all too soon, her arms unwind from around his neck and his anchor leaves him.
His anchor dies.
And all he can think is:
He didn’t get to say it.
#
He is in his confession dial, and every day he slams his fist into the wall and every day he burns himself up and leaves blood on the stairs while grief eats away at his bones because Clara’s in his mind but she’s not in the world.
And then there are those words, the words he never got to say. They got buried like a seed deep down in his chest, and now they blossom there, blooming against his ribcage like roses, their thorns piercing his skin, and it hurts and it hurts and it hurts.
Which is why, when he’s at his weakest, when the stars change or when her painted portrait weathers yet again with age or he finds himself drowning with grief and rage, he thinks about saying those words to the Clara in the TARDIS in his mind.
It never quite works out.
#
Once upon a time (so, so, so very long ago now) he stood in an arena, with a guitar in his hands and sunglasses slipping down his nose, and stared at the (wonderful, beautiful, impossible) girl standing in front of him and said:
“When do I not see you?”
And he meant it then and he still means it now because it’s true.
It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.
“I see you,” he says again, and it’s slightly different than the three little words his two hearts beat out, but it still has the same meaning.
He’s spent at least a thousand years inside his confession dial and yet Clara’s still as clear as day to him. There was once a time - when he had a different, boyish face - when he couldn’t see her. He had thought she was a trick or a trap, a ghost or a riddle. And he had been wrong, she was just a girl, an ordinary girl with an extraordinary heart and he had been blind. So when that old body died in golden flames and this new body was born, he’d made sure it was born with the promise that he would always, always, always see her.
He’s never broken that promise.
He thinks maybe he should say this to the Clara mirage in his mind. That he should tell her what he never told the real Clara on trap street, confess what he’s kept locked up tightly. The words wait there, beneath his breastbone, wanting and waiting to be said.
But he’s not that sort of man, not really. He’ll have to let her know how he feels the long way around.
So what he says out loud is: “There is an emperor, and he asks the shepard’s boy, ‘How many seconds in eternity?’”
#
“I figured out it was you, you know,” he tells his imaginary Clara in his imaginary TARDIS.
(He’s not entirely sure how many centuries it’s been since he’s started this conversation with her. It’s hard to keep track.)
“You were the voice in my dreams, when I was a child in that barn on Gallifrey. You were the one whispering those words in my mind. Did you think I’d never put two and two together?”
Clara raises an eyebrow. She has just as much sass as the original, this mental copy of Clara, always ready to cut him down to size.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
(Stars, he misses her.)
“Well,“ she says, “it did take you this long.”
He exhales a laugh and closes his eyes. He still remembers her soft whisper in the night; her voice curling out from the darkness like music, speaking words that’d get woven into his dreams and sewn into the idea behind the name he calls himself.
He’s always loved her, he thinks. Right from his very first face.
But he doesn’t say it.
“’Fear is a superpower,’” he says instead, repeating her exact words from that night. “‘Fear can bring us together, fear can bring you home.’ And that’s exactly what I’m going to do, Clara. I’m going to bring you home. I swear it.”
(He dies with that promise on his lips, and he comes back to life with it written into his bones.)
#
“Look at you, with your eyes and your never giving up and your anger and your kindness,” he’d told her one time, when she was by his side and breathing, when they were somewhere back in history. “One day, the memory of that will hurt so much that I won’t be able to breathe, and I’ll do what I always do. I’ll get in my box and I’ll run and I’ll run.”
And he’d been right back then, but he’d also been wrong. Because it’s true that the pain of his grief is gut-wrenching, true that it’s blinding and leaves him breathless. But instead of running, he’s staying. He’s staying here in this nightmare, for Clara. Because tasting death every day for billions upon billions of years all in the hope of seeing her again is nowhere near as frightening as the idea of running and dealing with the fact that she is gone and he cannot get her back.
He wonders if Clara ever knew how far he’d go for her, and even more than that, he wonders if he should just say it all now, out loud, so the words can be out there in the world.
But it’s like he’s on the edge of a cliff, tips of his shoes right over the precipice, and he just can’t jump. So he doesn’t say those things. Instead, he continues to tell her the story he never finished from before.
“And the shepard’s boy says, ‘There is a mountain of pure diamond...’”
#
“Have I ever told you the story of the shepard’s boy?” he asks her.
Clara looks at him sadly.
“Yes,” she whispers, “you have.”
(Of course he has. He has every day for thousands and thousands years.)
“I’ll tell you another story then,” he decides.
“Doctor,” she says gently, “you’re dying.”
He ignores her.
“There is a story,” he continues, “about how the sun loved the moon so much, he died every night just to let her breathe.”
He sighs, shuts his eyes, feels the pain pulsing through his mind.
“I suppose, Clara, what I’m trying to say is...” he’s only got seconds left, ticking away. “What I’m trying to say is...”
The seconds slip away, he closes his eyes, and as he dies, he thinks:
I understand the sun.
#
He’s dying.
Again.
He thinks it might be for the five-hundred-thousandth time.
And he’s not sure he can go through everything again. All the pain, all the dying, and the way his mind screams and his skin bleeds. He is so, so tired. How easy it would be, he thinks, to just stop. To just sleep.
But he can’t sleep, not peacefully, not yet, not until he tells Clara what he never did. Which is why he finds himself back in his mental storm room, staring at her.
Her back is to him, and there is white chalk in her hand and a blackboard in front of her bearing the sentence, “How are you going to win?” and for once, he ignores it. He is too tired to strategize, too weak to spend the rest of his life here in his mental TARDIS storm room, trying to think his way out of this impossible maze. He just wants her to listen.
“Clara,” he says quietly, as he feels his breath getting shallower, the space between his two heartbeats getting longer, “I’ve got to tell you something before I die again, before it’s too late.”
But Clara isn’t interested, she just taps those familiar words on the board again. How are you going to win?
“This is important, Clara.”
She shakes her head, a motion that sends her dark hair flying around her shoulders, making it look like raven feathers, and he inhales sharply at the sight, his hearts twisting painfully in his chest.
“No, Doctor,” Clara says, and she still won’t turn to face him, won’t let him say what he needs to so he can go in peace. “What’s important is this: How are you going to win?”
“You don’t understand, Clara,” he says, and he hears the frustration in his voice, hears an almost feral sort of desperation there too. “Maybe this is how I win. Maybe it’s by finally, finally telling you what I should’ve told you before. Now, before I fade away.”
He loves her, loves her like she is the sun and the moon and then stars. Loves her so much that it hurts, hurts so badly he cannot breathe. And perhaps this is what victory is, what winning feels like: getting to say these words to at least one Clara, even if it’s not the one that counts.
“Look, Clara - “
She still won’t face him, so he reaches for her then, trying to take her shoulders, spin her around to face him, to listen just for once, but the Clara in his mind slips through his fingers like smoke, and he’s left holding a handful of air as he realizes once again that she is not there, not really, not in the way she should be.
He shuts his eyes, sinks down to the floor, puts his head in his hands, and thinks:
She’s right. She’s always, always right. What’s important is that he win.
And then he’ll tell her everything after.
#
It’s been four billion years, he thinks as he stares at the sky. Maybe, maybe almost four-and-a-half billion. So the stars have changed, the constellations been broken and reformed, and every star is unrecognizable.
Every star except for her.
You’re my North Star, Clara Oswald, he thinks silently as he looks at her. You’re always going to be guiding me home.
And out loud he says, “Not much longer now.”
#
This is it. He knows it. He can feel it in his bones and in the beat of his hearts and in the steady way he breathes. All the wall needs is one more punch. Just one more. He can see the daylight coming through it already, all golden and bright and promising that tomorrow will come and tomorrow will be better.
The Clara in the TARDIS in his mind takes his hand in hers for the very last time.
“‘And when the entire mountain is chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed,’” she says, finishing the story he started oh so very long ago. “Today’s the day. First second of eternity. Got anything to say to that, Doctor?”
He glances over at her. There are so many things he aches to tell her, so many things he wants her to understand. But they’re close to the finish line now. So, so close.
So he simply says:
“See you on the other side, Clara Oswald.”
And for the first time in what feels like an eternity, he smiles.
#
Clara, Clara, Clara. For all those years, her name was like a never-ending melody, always winding its way through the back of his mind, and now she is here, with him. They are kneeling together, side by side, in the cloisters on Gallifrey, darkness wrapped around them like the night.
And the universe, well, the universe is burning. Time is fractured and stars are dying and the universe is burning, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care at all, because he’s got her back. Clara - his Clara - is there beside him, and that is all that matters.
He’d do anything for her.
(No, the back of his mind corrects him, he’d do everything.)
”What is it?” Clara asks (and oh, how good it feels to hear her voice out loud and outside his mind). “What were you bargaining for in that confession dial?”
He nearly laughs at that. He’s died every day for a sliver of eternity; broken each of his precious, pithy rules; killed a man (and perhaps, he thinks idly, time itself); and the notion that he’d do all that for anything less than her is incomprehensible.
He looks up, and he expects Clara to be teasing him or testing him, but he’s surprised to see that she is not. She is serious, her eyes studying him, waiting for an answer.
He falters for a second, feeling lost as his light blue eyes search her questioning dark brown ones.
“What do you think?” he asks.
She shakes her head, and he frowns, because Clara is clever. So, so very clever. But she can’t see it. Why can’t she see it?
“You,” he tells her, like the answer is as simple to him as breathing, as obvious as the moon in the sky. He can’t imagine a universe where he wouldn’t die every day for her. “I had to find a way to save you.”
He can’t fathom his words being a total surprise to anyone. (It’s obvious, isn’t it? he thinks. Obvious he’d go this far - farther, even - for her.) But Clara sits there, speechless and stunned by his words.
Then she blinks, inhales sharply (she needn’t, her lungs no longer need air, but muscle memory is there), and says, “l have something I need to say.”
So does he. He’s filled with sentences he never said, with words he’s held inside for longer than stars have been alive.
But he can’t say them, not now, not when they’re so close to escaping, “We don’t have time.”
“No, my time is up, Doctor, between one heartbeat and the last is all the time I have,” Clara says. Her fingers curl around his wrist, and he is struck once again with the sensation that she is his anchor, holding him steady in the eye of the storm. And slowly, under her touch, he stills, letting his anchor stabilize him.
“People like me and you, we should say things to one other,” she tells him. “And I’m going to say them now.”
And, finally, after four-and-a-half billion years...
So does he.