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There were things in space that were magnetic, the Doctor told Clara once, as he wrapped one arm around her shoulders and pointed upward with his other, toward a delicate cluster of silver stars that shone in a scarlet sky. Certain celestial things had this force around them, he’d explained, that couldn’t help but draw everything else to them.
The Doctor, Clara thinks, is the same way. He’s like something luminous that belongs up in the sky, and every Wednesday she steps onto the TARDIS and gets caught in his orbit as he whisks her away to anyplace on Earth or anywhere ethereal. And maybe he feels as much of a pull toward her as she feels toward him, Clara thinks, as she stands on the steps of the Maitland's and waits for the TARDIS.
After all, this man has all of time at the tips of his fingers and all of space as his backyard and yet every week he comes back to her, like he feels there’s something magnetic about her too.
The TARDIS appears then, flickering in and out like an old movie screen until it grows solid and steady, and when Clara opens the door and steps inside, she sees the Doctor’s bent over the TARDIS console, the glow from it shimmering across his face like a nebula.
“London,” he says, without looking up.
One word. Two syllables.
Clara has no idea how he can take those simple things and make it sound like he’s promising her something dazzling.
Not that she’d ever let him know that.
“London?” she questions, overly casual, as she steps toward the thrumming TARDIS console.
“London in 1893,” he adds with a flourish, and then he finally does look up at her, and she can tell he’s wearing that look, the one where he’s grinning and there’s stardust in his eyes and the promise of adventure on his lips.
Clara tries to keep the smile that’s threatening to spill across her face under control as she says, “That’s a very specific year.”
“Nah, not really, just made it up on the spot. We could go to 1891, if you’d like.”
And this time Clara really can’t contain her smile. She can feel it spread across her face, unbidden and giddy and bright. This is the effect he has on her, the effect he always has on her.
Clara feels like she should probably mind.
(She doesn’t.)
“Alright, then,” she says. “Show me Victorian London.”
#
“Okay,” the Doctor says as he steps out of the blue TARDIS doors and peers around at the mist filled sky and cobblestone roads and quaint little town signs. “Not London 1893. Yorkshire 1893. Near enough.”
Clara is both unsurprised and unbothered by this. At least it’s not like the time he promised her a San Francisco pier and then landed them squarely inside Alcatraz when it was still a functioning prison.
“You’re making a habit of this, getting us lost,” she says as she comes up next to him. Despite him insisting that he’s flying toward someplace specific, Clara’s still not entirely sure he’s really, actually picking a place to land and not just blindly flicking a switch and pulling a lever and flinging them around just for the fun of it.
“Sorry,” he says blithely, not sounding sorry at all.
“Hmm,” she hums, and almost absent-mindedly, the Doctor reaches out for her. Clara feels his arm wrapping around her, the weight of it warm and comforting as it comes to rest along her shoulders, and then he pulls her close to his side, tucking her under his arm as they walk.
There he is, doing it again, Clara thinks, drawing her into him like he has some sort of gravitational pull.
And perhaps this is why Clara doesn’t care that he hurls them blindly into the unknown. Because whether they stand in Venice or on Venus or anyplace else, he’s always there, right by her side, and 101 Places to See are only as good as the person you see them with.
Besides, as long as the two of them were together, what could go wrong?
It’s as Clara’s thinking this, ironically, that there’s a blood-curling scream, echoing off the cobblestones and slicing through the fog.
The Doctor turns toward her, smiling widely, “Brave heart, Clara.”
#
They’re in a morgue. There are cold, crimson colored bodies on slabs and pictures in the eyes of dead men and a man called Edmund who led them there, spinning them a tale of something sinister.
(“They call it The Crimson Horror,” Edmund tells them gravely, pointing to the dead, red body found in the canal that triggered the scream they’d heard. “You’ll never look at that shade of red the same way again.”)
According to this Edmund, these bodies have started to regularly appear in the Yorkshire canal overnight, and though no one else believes him, he thinks the person dumping the bodies is from a community called Sweetville, owned by a woman named Mrs. Gillyflower.
The Doctor, it seems, is absolutely delighted by this.
Sweetly named towns that hide something sinister and cadavers that glow red in the dark are apparently all hallmarks of a great trip, because the Doctor’s enthusiastically babbling a mile a minute as he peers through monocles and swipes off samples and starts mixing substances in a makeshift chemistry lab he’s found on a table. Clara, Edmund, and the mortician are all temporarily forgotten as the Doctor conducts his experiments and comes to conclusions.
The red, the Doctor finally decides (if Clara’s deciphering his half-unintelligible, half-overly excited muttering correctly) is some kind of chemically created poison, and it’s only when he’s pouring a beaker full of ruby liquid into a cup with smoke curling out of it that he pauses to look up at Clara for the first time since they got there.
“We’re in a morgue,” he says.
“I noticed,” Clara replies, studying a dead man’s red fingers through the silver monocle the mortician handed her. “A bit hard to miss, what with the corpses and all.”
“No, I mean,” the Doctor jerks his arms about in the way he does when he’s trying to explain something, and the liquid in the beaker he holds bubbles ominously at the movement, “we’re in a morgue. Highly doubt you wanted to spend your day in Victorian Yorkshire here.”
Clara shrugs, “I’ve been on worse dates.”
The Doctor blinks, mouth coming open before snapping shut again. He looks to Clara like he’s torn between wanting to fluster and sputter about how this is not a date, and being morbidly fascinated with finding out that a visit to the morgue’s not the worst date she’s ever been on.
He chooses the latter option.
“So,” he says, putting a drop of something that smokes and fizzes into the beaker, “what was the worst one?”
“Tommy Johnson. Drank too much. Hit on the waitress. Threw up on my brand new boots,” Clara says, shuddering at the memory. “This is definitely only the second worst date.”
The Doctor hums, staring at the bubbling beaker in front of him, and then, quite unexpectedly, he goes, “Want to make it the third worst?”
Clara tilts her head, raises an eyebrow, “What’d you have in mind?”
“Fancy a trip to Sweetville?”
“Sweetville?“ Clara repeats flatly. ”The sinister little village all these red corpses supposedly come from? That will most likely want to turn us into red corpses as well?”
“That’s the one,” the Doctor confirms, and with that he looks up from the beaker and at her. He leans forward toward Clara, crossing his arms on the table, his grin widening as his eyes lock into hers, and it feels a little like a dare.
And it’s not in Clara Oswald’s nature to back down from a dare like that.
Clara mimics him, placing her elbows on the table, leaning in closer to him just like he’d leaned toward her, and then she gives him a daring smile of her own. “Let’s do it.”
The mortician in the background mutters something under his breath, and it’s hard to tell from his thick accent, but Clara thinks it sounds suspiciously like, “Stop flirting over the corpses!”
(He is ignored.)
#
“Wait,” Edmund says, “there’s a problem.”
“Isn’t there always?” the Doctor replies quickly, and Clara can’t tell whether he’s being serious or sarcastic.
“Mrs. Gillyflower just recruited a good number of people to live in Sweetville. There’s a rumor that she’s no longer accepting applicants, especially not from single folk,” Edmund explains. “I’ve heard, though, that if one of her people spot a married couple, and they deem them worthy, they’ll occasionally offer them a spot.”
There’s silence for a minute as they all mull this over, and then the Doctor turns to look at Clara, and when he does, Clara can already tell that he’s about to suggest something completely, totally, utterly mad.
“What do you say, Miss Oswald?” the Doctors asks as he grins at her, and he’s got that look in his eyes again, half-mischief, half-madness, all magic. “Fancy becoming Mrs. Smith?”
Clara smirks, raises an eyebrow, “Is this a proposal, Doctor?”
“’Course it is,” he says, holding up a silver band in his hand that he’s somehow procured out of thin air. “That’s why I’ve got a ring.”
#
Clara, the Doctor, and Edmund are in the process of discussing plans and pointing out potential problems, when Clara turns her head to look at a map of the town and feels one of the buttons on her high velvet collar come undone in the back.
Victorian clothes, Clara decides, are as nonsensical as they are pretty. She doesn’t think she could ever live out her life in the Victorian era.
“Top button,” Clara commands, turning her back toward the Doctor, and dutifully his hands come up, and she feels his fingers brush against the back of her neck as her finishes buttoning up her collar.
Button done, Clara turns back around to find Edmund staring at them.
“You sure you two aren’t really married?” he asks.
“Positive,” Clara says, at the same time she hears the Doctor say, “Absolutely not, no.”
Edmund stares at them in utter disbelief, as if the idea of The Crimson Horror’s more believable than their protests.
(Clara tries not to think about that too much.)
“Anyway, the plan,” she says, putting them back on track, “is to attract the attention of one of Mrs. Gillyflower’s recruiters in town and secure an invite, yeah? So, how do we do that? Where do we find them?”
“I don’t think we’re going to find them, Mrs. Smith,” the Doctor says, bending his elbow and offering her his arm, “I think we’re going to let them find us.”
#
“So,” Clara says, as she walks down the quaint Victorian street, her hand nestled in the crook of the Doctor’s elbow, “this plan...”
“Yeah?”
“If you can even call it a plan -“
“Oh, it’s definitely a plan. You want to hear about plans? I once went onboard a cyber ship with nothing more than a hunch and a licorice twist, so trust me, Clara, when I say I’ve had plans much, much less pulled together than this.”
“Now that I believe.”
“Oi! Watch it!”
“So, this plan,” Clara continues, completely ignoring the indignant look the Doctor sends her way, “is just to walk through town and hope to get recruited?”
”Edmund said the past three couples to move to Sweetville were reportedly found and recruited on Main Street, and so here we are. And look at us! New, fresh, walking slabs of flesh, ripe for the picking, or killing, as it were - “
“Really not making me feel good about this - “
“How can they resist us? Trust me, Clara, they’ll find us. When have I ever been wrong before?” And before Clara can answer with an itemized list, the Doctor says, “Oh, here we go.”
Clara blinks, nearly getting whiplash from the sudden change in his tone, but she notices that, up ahead, there’s a lady walking down the street.
“No idea if she’s one of Mrs. Gillyflower’s or not, but we’ll pass her by and say a few words,” the Doctor whispers. “Get ready to look married and willing to move to a sinisterly sweet looking community, Mrs. Smith.”
Before Clara can ask exactly what a happily married, eager-to-move-to-a-horror-town woman looks like, the lady gets closer, and the Doctor pastes on his biggest, brightest smile, and moves his hand to wrap around Clara’s waist, pulling her ever so slightly closer to him.
“Hello, there,” the lady says, smiling at them as she approaches. “Are you two new in town?”
Clara‘s completely, utterly, and totally unprepared for what happens next.
“Eh oh, we definitely are,” the Doctor says, in what perhaps is the fakest, most outrageous Yorkshire accent Clara’s ever heard in her life. It’s half over-excited, half over-exaggerated, and all together hilarious. “And we’re enjoying this cozy little town, aren’t we, love?”
Clara nods, desperately trying to keep a traitorous, treacherous bout of laughter down.
She’s failing.
The Doctor must sense her losing it, because Clara sees him raise his eyebrows at her, and she can feel his fingers tighten around her waist in warning.
“Aw, how lovely,” the lady coos, thankfully not noticing that Clara’s half a heartbeat away from dying from laughter. “You two haven’t been married long, have you?”
“Nah, not long now,” the Doctor replies, plowing on in his heavy accent. “Feels as though we’ve only been married minutes, doesn’t it, Mrs. Smith?”
Clara makes a garbled, choking noise, a pearl of laughter escaping her lips in the process, and she hurriedly and hopelessly tries to turn it into a cough.
(She can’t help it, his accent sounds absolutely ridiculous.)
“Ah, right then, better get the missus indoors,” the Doctor says, “sounds like she’s coming down with a bit of a cold.”
Hand still on her waist, the Doctor half-drags Clara down the street, away from the lady, and they don’t even make it half a block before Clara loses all self-control and nearly doubles over with laughter, clutching onto his arm to keep herself upright.
“What was that accent? Was it even an accent?”
“It’s a Yorkshire accent.”
“That’s an insult to everyone with an actual Yorkshire accent. You sound like you’re talking with a jammie dodger stuffed in your mouth.”
“Clara,” he reprimands, still using that terrible accent he seems terribly proud of, “I’ll have you know that my accent is flawless.”
“Cheekfulls of jammie dodgers, actually, like a chipmunk.”
”Oi, is that any way to talk to your new husband and apparent the love of your life?”
“It is when he sounds like that.”
He glares at her, she grins back.
“You can’t be very mad at me,” she informs him. “Your arm’s still around me.”
He blinks, like he’s forgotten.
“Cover story,” he says primly.
“Right.”
“Shut up.”
(He still doesn’t move his arm.)
#
“You’ve got to do the Yorkshire accent too, you know,” he whispers to her as he pulls out her chair in the tea room on Main Street, where they’ve decided to see if they can attract a Sweetville resident’s attention.
“No,” Clara says, taking a seat. “Absolutely not.”
The Doctor scoots her in closer to the table, his hands curled around the back of her chair, and then he bends forward, and she can feel his lips close to her ear and his breath hot on her cheek as he whispers, “It’ll be fun.”
Clara turns her head, nearly bumping her nose into his chin, “I think you and I have different definitions of fun.”
“Come on, Clara,” he pleads, as he moves away from her, walking around to the other side of the tea table and plopping down in the chair there, a tangled blur of limbs and hand motions. “You’re my Yorkshire wife, from Yorkshire! We both have to be Yorkshire. The key word here being Yorkshire.”
“Are you sure you said the word Yorkshire enough times there, Doctor?”
He waves his finger around the tea room in a circle, like his hand’s imitating the kind you’d find on a clock, “Any single one of these people could be from Sweetville. So you’ve got to do an accent, and you’ve got to start it now. When the waitress comes, give it a go, eh?”
“I’m not doing an accent.”
(She does an accent. It actually is quite fun.
She’s never admitting it.)
#
They’re being watched. Clara can feel it. She just can’t tell who by. But there’s a distinct shiver down her spine that has nothing to do with the autumn wind, and a deep, instinctive urge to stop and turn and look. This was the plan, after all: Get watched, get followed, get invited. Clara’s certainly not getting cold feet, not when they’ve gotten this far, but there’s a distinctively uncomfortable feeling to being watched like you’re the little rabbit in a nature documentary, and there’s a great big fox around the corner.
The Doctor must feel it too.
“You know what the best thing about a plan is?” he asks her.
“What’s that?”
“It working,” he answers. “And do you know what the worst thing about a plan is?”
Clara huffs out a quiet laugh, watching as a puff of pale fog escape her lips, “Let me guess, it working?”
“Bingo,” he says, and then he pauses, sniffs, licks his finger, sticks it in the air, and says, “Ah, looks like rain.”
And with that announcement, he opens up the umbrella he’s brought with him from the TARDIS, and no sooner than he has, does rain start to fall, glittering in the glow of the streetlights and dusting the pavement around them with raindrops.
Clara has no idea how he does that.
“Funny story about this umbrella,” the Doctor says, and she has a feeling he’s trying to distract her from focusing on being watched, “well, when I say funny story, I mean funny story if you’re not a tremendously grouchy actor. I borrowed it from Gene, when he was on one of his movie sets. Bit temperamental, that man, but a superb dancer.”
“Doctor, are you telling me you stole this umbrella off Gene Kelly while he was filming Singin’ in the Rain?”
“I had to, there was a misplaced alien Slider cat loose there, trying to soak up the warmth from the set lights. If you watch the movie closely, you may still be able to spot it,” he tells her. “Anyway, yeah, kept the umbrella, I was going to give it back, but not with Gene yelling at me like that. Figured I’d return it later after he’d had some time to calm down. We can take it back to him, if you’d like, after we’re done here. You might like him, Clara. Just don’t try to take any of the movie props while you’re there. He’s rather touchy about that.”
Clara laughs and intwines her arm with his, leaning in close to him under the shelter of the umbrella. It’s then that she catches their reflection in the rain-dotted shop window they’re passing. There they are, reflected in glass, the Doctor and his Mrs. Smith, her in velvet and him in tweed, walking a little too close to each other, her arm wound around his. It strikes her then, how much they look like an actual couple. Clara had wondered, honestly, if she was going to feel uncomfortable with pretending to be married, or nervous. And she probably would be, if it was any other guy, but it’s not any other guy, it’s him. It’s him and it’s her and it somehow feels right.
(This idea that they're this comfortable together pretending to be a couple should probably surprise her more.
It doesn’t.)
#
They’re still being watched, and possibly followed, but when they duck into a bookshop, Clara completely forgets about who’s following her. Or why she’s even in Victorian Yorkshire in the first place. And how can she remember silly things as insignificant as that? It seems impossible when she’s surrounded by so many books.
Clara closes her eyes and inhales deeply, enjoying the comforting scent of fresh paper and ink and leather bound covers, and then she’s moving down the aisles, getting lost in a maze of books, and dragging the Doctor behind her, one hand clasped in his as she pulls him along, and her other hand reaching out to the shelves as she runs the tips of her fingers down the book spines as she goes.
She finally stops in one aisle and spins around in a half circle, soaking it all in.
“I don’t even know what to look for,” Clara suddenly admits as she spots a card advertising the ’brand new’ book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. “What was going on in the world of literature in 1893?”
“Ah, 1893. A good year,” the Doctor says, pulling a book out from the shelf, lifting it up to his nose, and inhaling, like he’s at a wine tasting instead of a book store. “Somewhere out there, writers of the golden age of detective literature are being born, and Arthur Conan Doyle is getting ready to surprise fans by resurrecting Sherlock Holmes, and Oscar Wilde’s new play is premiering.”
Clara listens to him, a small smile on her lips as her eyes browse the shelves, and then she sees it, right up there, toward the top.
Could it be?
Clara reaches for the book that’s caught her eye, but she’s far too short, the tips of her fingers not even coming close to reaching it, and she harrumphs in annoyance.
It’s then that she feels the Doctor takes a step closer, the warmth from his proximity seeping into her clothes and onto her skin as he comes to stand behind her. He stretches his arm up and easily grabs the book she was reaching towards before depositing it into her waiting hands.
Clara looks up to thank him, but he’s distracted, watching something else by the counter, and Clara knows she should be paying attention too, but she just can’t, because she’s holding a vintage copy of one of her favorite books in the world.
It’s an 1893 copy of Pride and Prejudice. The cover is a pale, robin’s egg blue, embossed with a bright gold that glints off the bookshop’s lighting and makes Clara’s breath catch beneath her collarbone. She runs the pads of her fingers over the cover, nearly afraid to touch it. If she were back home in her proper time, she’d never, ever be able to afford it or even hold it in her hands. And it’d be old and weathered, if she got it the long way around, but here it is fresh off the printing press, new and pristine, and absolutely beautiful.
Clara’s not sure she can let it go.
“Doctor,” she whispers, eyes still on the book, completely absorbed, “can I -“
But she’s interrupted.
“Hello,” someone says suddenly from somewhere behind her, and Clara jumps, hastily placing the book back on the shelf before turning around to see a woman standing close to her. The woman must’ve been who the Doctor had been watching, and Clara can see why. There’s something eerie about her, almost as if she’s a wax figure come to life. Her skin’s a little too glossy, her eyes a little too blue.
“Pardon me,” the woman says, “but I have an invitation to offer you on behalf of my employer, Mrs. Gillyflower.”
#
“Oh, yes, Doctor and Mrs. Smith,” Mrs. Gillyflower tells them as they stand in her Sweetville office, being interviewed. “I think you’ll do nicely.”
“Grand! Smashing,” the Doctor exclaims happily, in that terrible, no good, very bad accent of his. “Eh, the missus and I couldn’t be more chuffed, could we love?”
At this, he brings his arm up and slides it around Clara’s shoulders, half-hugging her close to him, as if he can create a cocoon around her with his arms if he tries hard enough.
Clara turns to look up at him, raising an eyebrow. She hasn’t, in all honesty, seen this much hammy overacting since Artie’s disastrous performance as Peter Pan in his school play when he was seven. The play had been tedious, and the urge to groan nearly unbearable, but she’d loved Artie anyway.
(She thinks she loves her idiot, fake husband too.)
#
The sky looks like it’s a breath away from pouring down rain, and Mrs. Gillyflower’s leading them through Sweetville.
There’s something disturbingly perfect about it, Clara thinks, as she walks past it’s garden and mill that both look a little too flawless. It all reminds Clara of a plastic dollhouse she once had when she was a little girl, where everything was plastic and perfect and pink, unlived in and unreal.
Her grip tightens around the Doctor’s arm as her eyes get drawn up toward the brick chimney on top of the community mill. There was something very wrong about the chimney, something Clara couldn’t quite put her finger on. Clara didn’t even know a chimney could look wrong until she saw that one.
“The name,” Clara says suddenly, “Sweetville.”
Mrs. Gillyflower glances at her, “Yes?”
“Why not name it after yourself? After all, it’s your creation.”
“Gillyflowertown, no, Gillyflowerland,” the Doctor says, his accent getting lost a bit in his excited ad-libbing. “You could have rollercoasters!”
“It’s named after my silent partner, Mr. Sweet,” Mrs. Gillyflower says cagily, ignoring the Doctor’s roller coaster comment altogether. “But you needn’t worry about that. All you need to know is that we only recruit the brightest and the best.”
As Mrs. Gillyflower says this, she reaches out to pat Clara’s cheek, and the gesture somehow feels sinister. Clara’s breath catches, her posture stiffens, and then she senses the Doctor protectively taking a step closer to her.
Magnetic, she reminded herself, they were magnetic, him and her. And as long as he was there by her side, she’d be okay.
It’s only when Clara turns to see men with gloves coming toward her, and feels hands on her shoulders ripping her away from the Doctor that she remembers that not everything magnetic can’t be pulled apart.
#
Clara’s screaming and screaming and screaming, and all she sees is crimson.
And then all she sees is black.
#
The world is dark and dizzying and Clara is falling. The last thing she remembers is being frozen, of her world turning black, but now she’s thawing, and she feels like she’s made out of ice and wax.
She’s barely awake, darkness and sleep still wrapped around her mind, but she feels herself tipping forward, her legs coming out from under her. Clara tenses, bracing herself for impact, but before she can hit the floor, she feels strong hands catch her around her waist and pull her into a warm embrace. There’s the feeling of tweed under the tips of her fingers and the sense somewhere in the back of her mind that she is somewhere safe, so it’s really no surprise when she opens her eyes and sees she’s in the Doctor’s arms.
Clara thinks that she’s never laid eyes on anything better.
He smiles, “Hello, stranger.”
Clara smiles back, and it’s like it’s automatic, her lips curving upward even before her brain can catch up to what’s happening. She doesn’t even feel fully awake yet, like she’s still in that soft, hazy place between waking and dreaming, but she’s dimly aware of the warmth of his hand on her face, the way the tips of his fingers rest in her hair, and the feel of his thumb brushing gently against the edge of her cheekbone, over and over again.
“Doctor,” Clara says happily, and before she can fully wake up out of this post-unfrozen haze and change her mind (because, really, Fully Awake Clara would probably reprimand her later,) Sleepy Clara reaches a hand up and taps him on the nose with her forefinger, a giddy smile coming across her face when she does.
“Mmhmm,” the Doctor hums in apparent amusement, mirroring her own smile as he stares down at her. She still feels somewhat unsteady from being frozen, and he must be able to sense it because he’s still holding her up, and he shifts to slide his hand from her side to the curve of her spine.
They stand there for a moment, grinning at each other like idiots, like the universe has narrowed down to them, just them, but then something catches Clara’s attention out of the corner of her eye, and it’s enough to make her realize three things at once:
One - They were still in Sweetville.
Two - They were still in danger and her and the Doctor (probably, maybe, very likely) shouldn’t be standing there as if they had all the time in the world.
Three - There was a lizard woman in a dress standing there too.
“What’s going on?” she whispers.
The Doctor smiles, and Clara notices he still hasn’t bothered letting go of her.
“Oh, haven’t you heard, love?“ he asks in that terrible, terrible phoney accent of his that she’s secretly missed. “There’s trouble at the mill.”
#
The Doctor’s talking a mile a minute and he’s got that look on his face again, where Clara can practically see the cogs turning like clockwork in his mind as he tries to figure things out. He’s frowning now, and pacing back and forth and back and forth.
“A parasite’s created this red poison, and it’s been hanging around, lurking in the shadows of Sweetville,” he says, still pacing, a dizzying blur of flapping hands and long legs. “As has Mrs. Gillyflower.”
“Doctor,” Clara says slowly, her thoughts coming together bit by bit, like a constellation connecting, “I’ve been thinking. The chimney I saw - “
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says repeating the word like it’s some sort of touchstone as he continues pacing and Clara hums in annoyance. “We’re way past that now. Yucky red parasite from the time of the dinosaurs pitches up in Victorian Yorkshire.” He makes a face, “Didn’t see that one coming.”
“Yeah,” Clara agrees, “but the chimney -“
“But what’s the connection to Mrs. Gillyflower?“ He asks, still not stopping in his movement. “Where’s she keeping it? What’s the -“
“Doctor,” Clara says, and this time she reaches up (and up, because no matter how high her heels are, he still towers over her), and firmly places her hands on his shoulders.
The Doctor stills under her touch, like he’s a runaway ship and she’s his anchor, settling him in place.
“An empty mill,” Clara says, hands still on his shoulders, holding him there with her. “A chimney that doesn’t blow smoke.”
She watches as her words sink in and his eyes travel up to the ceiling, where they stare for a moment in thought, before coming back down to her.
“Clever clogs,” he says.
Clara tilts her head back, grinning up at him, “Miss me?”
In reply, the Doctor reaches for her, cupping her face in his hands, and she can feel the warmth of his palms against her cheeks, the tips of his long fingers brushing against the tender skin behind her ear. And Clara can’t help but smile as he leans in to press a kiss to her forehead.
“Yeah,” he says. “Lots.”
#
The poison’s found in the mill, Mrs. Gillyflower falls to her death, and the inappropriately named poison-creating parasite Mr. Sweet ends up smashed and scattered into a hundred tiny little pieces all over the floor.
Clara can’t bring herself to feel very sorry about that fact.
#
Now Clara’s back in the TARDIS, sitting in front of the vanity in the wardrobe and undoing her bun, her hair spilling across her shoulders as she does.
It’s then that she hears footsteps approaching, and when she puts down her hairpin and glances back up in the mirror, Clara sees the reflection of the Doctor entering the doorway.
“You’ve been gone a bit,” Clara tells his reflection, not bothering to turn around. “You get things sorted?”
“Yeah, and then some,” he says, and then, completely unexpectedly, he adds, “Now, hold out your hands.”
Clara’s guard goes up, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. The last time he’d told her that, he’d dumped a handful of murky teal water and a sticky alien octopus in her cupped hands.
Clara hadn’t cared much for the surprise.
She swivels in her chair, the fabric of her dress twisting around her legs as she turns toward him. “Why?”
”Got you something to make up for the, you know,” he flaps his hand as if he can wave the whole situation away with a flick of his wrist, “almost dying thing.”
“Doctor, if you got me a present every time I almost died, you’d have to buy me something every Wednesday,” Clara chides lightly. “Besides, I wasn’t really scared. I knew you wouldn’t let me die here in Victorian times.”
At her words, his face goes pale and his posture turns stiff, and he stares at her both in a way that’s sharp as if he’s trying to spot something in her eyes, and in a way that’s hazy, as if he’s not really seeing her at all. Her words must’ve meant something, Clara realizes, she just doesn’t know what, but that look on his face that’s halfway between anger and heartbreak scares her in a way she doesn’t like, so she tries to pull him out of it.
“Doctor,” Clara says, trying to snap him out of whatever mood he’s in or flashback he’s having, “you going to give me my present now? Or are you going to keep me waiting?”
The Doctor blinks, shakes his head. “Right,” he says. “Hold out your hands.”
Clara complies, and then the Doctor places her present in her hands, and Clara finds herself holding a book.
No, Clara corrects herself, not just a book, the book, the edition of Pride and Prejudice she’d admired in the bookshop. She blinks for a moment, shocked into silence and not quite believing what she’s holding.
“Uh,” the Doctor says, twitching nervously when she doesn’t say anything, those ridiculously long arms spasming awkwardly at his side. Somewhere in the back of Clara’s mind, it registers that he’s waiting for her reply, that she should be thanking him, but all her words get jumbled up before they can even reach the tip of her tongue because her brain is still catching up to the fact that this is really, truly, actually happening.
“Was that the wrong book?” the Doctor asks, “I’ll admit, I was a bit distracted by the nutty agent of the even nuttier Mrs. Gillyflower, but I thought that - “
Clara doesn’t let him finish his sentence, instead she leaps out of her chair and up in the air to fling her arms around his neck. She collides with him, and he nearly tumbles over at the force of her hug, but he rights himself, catching her around her waist as he laughs, and she‘s close enough to him that can feel his laughter vibrate through her body, and it feels safe and warm and happy like nothing else she knows.
“So,” he says, “right one, then?”
“Definitely, definitely the right one,” she confirms.
She tucks her face into the crook of his neck for a moment, her cheek brushing against the soft tweed of his coat, and then she pulls away, her arms unwinding and sliding down his shoulders. The movement causes something to catch the light, sending a shimmer around them, lighting up the wardrobe before disappearing, and Clara’s confused for a moment, before her eyes land on the ring on her finger.
“Ah,” she says, her right hand reaching toward the ring on her left one. “Guess I’d better give this back to you then.”
“Yeah, you’d better,” he hums in agreement, before adding, “Unless...”
She cocks an eyebrow, “Unless?”
“The 1920s.”
“The 1920s?”
“The roaring 20s in Los Angeles,” he elaborates, and she can already hear the excitement bleeding into his words, feel the energy radiating off him like a fire-cracker, lighting up the night. “1927 specifically. Prohibition, speakeasies, and...a hotel that’s rumored to have many guests check in but only half check out.”
He pauses there, and his words hang in the air, both an invitation and a challenge, an adventure and a dare, and there’s also the promise of both something dazzling and something dangerous.
“So,” the Doctor says, flashing her a smile, “fancy being Mrs. Smith again?”
He holds his hand out to her, waiting for her to take it, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Clara thinks she should probably feel wary of the danger. She doesn’t, though. She feels like she’s coming alive. This pull he has towards her is something magnetic, something electric, and Clara knows she can’t resist, so she reaches out and takes his hand.
“Go on, Doctor,” she says, grinning as she feels his fingers closing around her own. “Give me another adventure.”
And so he does.