Chapter Text
She gets constant phone calls from all manner of international magazines, newspapers, wildlife conservancy groups, and news networks. They all want to know the same thing: Where are you Miss Oswald? Can we offer you this pointless opportunity that won’t interest you because he’ll never be there to experience it by your side ever again? (Not that they ever actually say all that, but that’s inevitably what she hears in her head).
She stopped answering the calls almost as soon as they all started coming in, but these corporations never seemed to get the message. The answer was always going to be no. Not without him.
---
Eventually, she gets a phone call from her super about her overflowing mailbox, which she only happens to answer because he’d changed her super’s ringtone in her phone to the Empire’s theme from Star Wars. (He’d thought that it matched the older man’s ‘dark side tendencies’ and the occasional reminder that she was in love with a massive dork used to make her laugh. Now, it only makes her sad). Apparently, she can get a fine for not emptying the stupid box out, and even if she is an award-winning photographer, she doesn’t really have the money to currently spare for a petty fine.
She dumps all of their mail onto their scuffed coffee table and wishes, for a moment, that she’d just left it all in the mailbox. Paying a fine would have been so much easier than seeing his name written next to hers on all of these envelopes.
She looks up at the blue door in their flat and sighs as she lets her head fall into her waiting hands. Their lumpy, unforgiving sofa has always been bad for her back, but she hasn’t slept in a bed in months.
---
The courage to sort through all of their mail only comes when she realizes that there must be some pressing financial matters that she has to take care of.
Most of the mail is useless—free copies of magazines to which she’d sold incredible photographs, countless coupons for takeaway, and campaign flyers for local politicians. She hesitates only slightly when she notices the newest envelopes addressed to her and her alone from her family and her friends before she throws all of them in the bin unopened, fingers trembling.
She sorts through their joint bills as she takes deep breaths and figures out what she needs to pay right away. (She also attempts to calculate how long she can wait before she inevitably has to get back to work because the world will move on with or without her, and she’d like to still be able to pay for food in a year). She gets frustrated thinking about the numbers because that used to be his thing, not hers.
Then, she stumbles upon a letter addressed specifically to him from someone named Amy Pond. She opens it.
“Raggedy man,
We’re going to do a big one soon. We’d love to have you back on the team…”
---
She reads the rest of the letter and feels a strange sort of confusion, like she can’t quite grasp the very core of what she’s reading because she’s already missing too much information.
The letter is dated from March of two years ago, but the postmark on the envelope indicates that it was sent within the last month. She’s not totally sure what that’s supposed to mean, and the contents of the letter itself leave much to be desired.
There’s talk of some dangerous expedition involving a team that he apparently used to be quite familiar with, but Clara can’t even figure out who this Amy Pond is. He’d never mentioned that name to her before, but the tone in the letter suggests that they used to be rather close.
She sets the open letter down on top of the rest of the mail and stares at it, trying to puzzle it out. There are clues littered all throughout the letter’s language, and she gets frustrated when she can’t manage to piece them together because she’s missing the larger picture. All she knows is that he used to be their go-to man for some risky journeys that maybe dealt with climbing or swimming or both. She doesn’t understand why the letter has arrived two years late, who its writer really is, and what he had to do with all of it. The fuzzy picture in her mind gives her a headache.
Sharing bad news is never easy, but she wonders if maybe it’s harder to do it through something as undeniable and as tangible as a letter. She feels her hand shake when she forces herself to write the words ‘passed away’ on a piece of old notebook paper. (She hates to use that phrase because it doesn’t suit him. He would never do something as acquiescent and as painfully boring as that, not even in death).
She doesn’t ask about their previous adventures or how they even knew each other, but she does ask if she can visit this mysterious team in the vague hope that it will help her feel closer to him somehow. She anticipates that Amy will say yes.
---
She does. Clara packs the same day that she receives Amy’s letter.
---
When she lands in windy, cold Kirkwall, the primary headline that runs through her mind is that things would be so much better if he were around (and that choosing to do this in the middle of winter might have been a bad idea). If he were with her, they would have already been on their merry way to their destination because he would have made a fast friend on their little flight who would have happily let the both of them tag along on their small trip off of the main island. They would have laughed, and he would have complained about something daft like the fact that she didn’t keep jammie dodgers in her jacket.
As it is, Clara is alone on the very last ferry of the day after a stressful rush to find some sort of shuttle to get to the correct ferry station during which she thought about him no less than two hundred different times. Her hands are freezing, and on the water, the air smells like fish. She stares down into the dark, unfathomable ocean as it reflects the light of the moon, and hopes against all hope that she’ll find some new part of him with this strange group of people who used to rely on him for something.
Staring at the imposing concrete bunker that looms in front of her as she reaches her final destination, Clara cradles her camera bag tenderly against her chest and realizes that this is the first adventure she’s embarked on without him since she was twenty-three. She used to rely on him, too.
---
She meets Amy and her husband Rory a minute after she knocks on the building’s massive metal door, and she almost instantly senses a kindred spirit in the fiery redhead that greets her with a hint of sadness at the corners of her mouth. The couple’s eyes linger on the hollow spaces that surround her in the doorway, and Clara pretends that she doesn’t feel those empty spaces pushing in on her. She’d almost forgotten that they knew him too, and she suddenly thinks that maybe some part of them had been hoping he’d be with her.
Rory’s the one that finally gestures for her to enter through the heavy, rusted door, and she gratefully rushes in from the freezing air outside. Amy’s eyes are a world of hurt after being hit with the harsh reality of their situation, so Clara relies on Rory to guide her through the winding, damp corridors of this ancient base to reach the room where she’ll be staying.
“Sorry about Amy,” he says as they stop in front of a slate gray door. “They were really close. I think part of her had been hoping that it would be some sort of nasty joke.”
“That’s okay. I wish it wasn’t real either.” She offers him a sad smile. “Thanks to both of you for letting me come here, anyway.”
Rory nods. “You and Bill are the only ones that will be living in this particular wing of the base. She’s probably talking to her girlfriend on the phone in that room down there.” He gestures further down the hall to their left, towards a room with an army green door. “She’s really great. You’ll probably get a chance to meet everyone tomorrow morning.”
Clara nods and feels her fingers drift towards her camera bag. “Thank you.”
Rory gives her a sympathetic smile and nods before awkwardly turning and walking back down the hall.
---
She gets lost the next morning trying to find this place’s equivalent of a kitchen or kitchenette or mess hall or whatever. She’d just wanted tea, and now she’d been wandering up and down a labyrinth of corridors that all looked the same for about an hour.
She stumbles upon the same huge room no less than eleven times through six different doors, but they’re all locked. It’s like the base is specifically designed to make this room the easiest one to find, even if an inhabitant actively doesn't want to find it. (She can attest to this).
Through the two doors that have smudged windows still clean enough to peak through, she isn’t able to see much more than the instantly recognizable visual of light reflecting off of water. She only really knows that the doors all lead to the same space because they all display the same number: B-012.
The next time that she stumbles upon The Forbidden Room (the apt name that she uses in her head), she feels an urge to scream. Food and company shouldn’t be this hard to find, and her randomized steps shouldn’t all lead her to this same bloody room.
Leaning her back against one of the heavy locked doors, Clara takes a deep breath and decides that it might be best if she just turns in the same direction over and over and over, dragging her fingers along the wall until she finds something.
---
She’s been turning left for five minutes when she discovers a narrow corridor that she’s positive wasn’t there before. She wanders in, and the sound of voices echoing all around her has her nearly jumping out of her skin until she remembers that voices are a good thing. Voices mean company and maybe even tea.
She follows the sound of chatter until she stumbles in through a door that leads to a large common area. Her eyes instantly land on the kettle that’s sat next to the shite microwave, and her fingers twitch.
“Clara! We were about to send someone down to twelve to look for you. This idiot,” Amy gestures towards her husband, “should have told you to wait in your room until someone came to get you, but it’s good to see that you’re clever enough to find this place on your own. Could use another one of those around here.”
Clara stands in the doorway a bit stunned, but she chuckles. “Er, thanks. This place is… strange.”
At this comment, a young woman with big hair and frankly amazing eyebrows jumps up from her seat. “I told you, Amy! This place doesn’t make any sense! Floor plans shouldn’t work the way they do here. I get lost all the time.”
“And that’s Bill Potts,” Rory gestures broadly with his arm.
The young woman flops back into her seat and adjusts her colorful bomber jacket. “Hi. I’m Bill. And you’re gorgeous. Like really, properly gorgeous. Wow.”
“Don’t you have a girlfriend?” Amy shoots back.
“Yes, and Heather is also gorgeous. Compliments are nice.”
Amy probably says something in response, but Clara doesn’t hear it. Her focus has wandered back to the sad kettle sitting on the chipped counter in the common area’s small kitchenette.
“You can help yourself, you know. We don’t bite,” a woman sitting at a small table in the corner looks from Clara to the kettle and back. “Or, at least, we don’t bite our friends.”
The woman is wearing a black jacket with its hood up, but Clara can still see that she’s got markings on her face—two thick scars that run across her cheekbones and tattooed scales that run from her temples, down her neck, and under her purple shirt to some unknown end. She’s got an olive complexion and bright blue eyes and Clara doesn’t fully realize that she’s been staring until Amy speaks up. Her face heats with embarrassment.
“Oh, that’s Vastra. She’s one of our most competent out in the field.”
She’s about to ask what Amy means by ‘out in the field’ when a short, bald man with an unbelievably fat head and dark skin stomps into the room from a door to the right. “I’ve been informed that a new boy has arrived. When shall I begin my diagnostics?”
Bill is smiling brightly at the man from her seat, like she finds his existence endlessly amusing. “Oh, mate. When will you ever figure out the whole people thing?”
“You, boy, have failed to complete your lung capacity examination.” He points a thick finger at Bill. “Do you have any last words before your summary execution?”
“Strax,” Vastra calls out. “Sit down. I do believe there are subtler ways of proceeding.”
The short man frowns as he pulls out a chair opposite her and sits. “Suit yourself.”
Clara assumes that she must look about as lost as she feels because Bill gets up and approaches her with a look of empathetic understanding.
“As you’ve probably picked up, that’s Strax. He’s not great socially, but he’s mostly harmless. He’s tough and useful most of the time, and he makes great tea. Oh, there’s loose-leaf in the cabinet there, by the way. You can feel free to use it whenever you like.” She smiles and gestures towards the old, yellowing refrigerator in the corner. “You can eat anything in there and in any of the cabinets, too. Just don’t touch the marmalade or the jaffa cakes. We do breakfast at nine and dinner at eight. I’ll show you where we do those later.”
Clara nods, though she fears she’s missed most of the valuable information that Bill just spewed out. The only things she really heard were: one, that there was tea in the cupboard and two, that touching the marmalade was a no-go.
---
Apparently, they all live at this old base for about half of the year. It’s a weird place for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it’s centered around a horrendously massive pool that she’s apparently not allowed to swim in. (Amy took her to see B-012 on her second day, unlocking one of the doors with a key that she keeps on her wrist at all times. Clara was surprised by the fact that she couldn’t see the pool’s bottom).
No one sees fit to mention the fact that they live in a place dedicated to a watery abyss, and Clara won’t admit that she’s afraid to ask.
She wonders how many times he’d been here with these people and whether or not he knew what it was all for. She snaps pictures of the deep, deep water and tries to understand how it's possible for a pool to make her feel so out of place.
---
It’s about a week into her visit, and Clara’s noticed a number of things.
One, Amy knew him almost as well as she did. It doesn’t bother her like she thought it would, and she thoroughly enjoys hearing stories about him, even if they have nothing at all to do with her. Rory walks in on her and Amy laughing about ‘stupid bowties’ more than once, and even Vastra and Strax have their own strange tales to share. (None of them ever really say his name, but Clara likes that. Saying his name now would bury his spirit right alongside his body).
Two, the sugar in the cabinets is consumed at a frankly ridiculous rate, which she thinks is kind of strange because Bill is the only one who she knows takes sugar in her tea, and she certainly doesn’t use the equivalent of twenty spoonfuls per day.
Three, Bill makes chips almost every night, and she always gives her a heaping serving at dinner time with a wink and a heartfelt smile. Clara suspects that the greasy food reminds her of her girlfriend.
Four, there’s always an extra plate set aside once dinner is served, and the same is done with breakfast. No one talks about it, but Clara sometimes finds the empty dishes in strange places. (Once, she’d found a plate covered in the sticky remnants of marmalade sitting next to a boiler. She’d been trying to get hotter water for the bathroom in her wing of the base when she’d seen it there, lying on the floor. She felt like she was tidying up after some delinquent ghost).
Five, Orkney is bloody freezing in the winter, and she should have packed more socks.
Six, Strax takes his job very seriously. He’s asked her to let him administer a physical exam almost nine times now.
Seven, mirrors at the base don’t work the way that they should. She can’t pinpoint what it is, but she almost feels like her reflection is delayed somehow and that rooms always look bigger than they really are. Sometimes, looking in the mirror for too long induces vertigo. (She considers that letting Strax do his job might not be the worst idea).
Eight, B-012 is always locked. She tries to hypothesize all the possible reasons why a pool might be dangerous enough to keep under constant lock and key, but all she comes up with is sharks.
Nine, Rory is hopelessly in love with his wife. Occasionally, he looks at Clara like he just doesn’t understand how she’s there—living and breathing and talking with them—after having lost what he assumes is her personal equivalent of Amy. Those looks make her sad sometimes, but mostly she thinks his utter devotion to his wife is sweet.
Ten, mapping the base is a futile exercise. She’s becoming more and more certain that the rooms move. There are strange corners all over the base that don’t make physical sense, and yet, she’s having a harder and harder time remembering what a normal corner might look like. The dimensions of all the rooms feel strange, and even her professional camera struggles to capture the way that space seems to warp around the edges. There are a number of corridors that feel like they disappear and reappear constantly but irregularly. (She finds the greatest number of abandoned dinner plates in those places. She's decided it's all pants).
Eleven, the number of jaffa cakes in the cupboard steadily decreases, but she doesn’t ever see anyone touching them.
Twelve, there is almost certainly someone living at the base that she hasn’t met yet. (She comes to this conclusion when she finds a pair of hideous tartan trousers left on a drying line in the laundry room).
---
She’s sitting on the floor facing one of the many corners of the base that defy general logic, strategically and methodically trying to capture the wrongness of the space with her camera by using different angles, when she hears two sets of footsteps come to a sudden stop behind her.
“Who is this?” The unfamiliar voice is decidedly male and decidedly cross.
She rotates in her seated position and comes face to face with black tartan trousers bunched up around a pair of old boots. She thinks to herself that this is probably the person that she’s been expecting to meet. Amy’s trainers are already familiar.
“Doctor, this is Clara. Clara, the Doctor.”
The angry mess of scowling eyebrows blows right past the introduction. “So? What is she doing here?”
“She’s sitting right here.” Clara doesn’t need a spokesperson, thank you very much. She stands. “And I’m just visiting.”
His head whips down to make eye contact with her. (He’s tall). “Can you dive?”
“What, like into a pool?”
The gangly pile of limbs turns back towards Amy, and his eyebrows achieve a level of fierce exasperation that Clara’s never seen before in her life. “You’re kidding, Pond.”
“No, Doctor, I’m not. She asked to come, I said yes, and she’s not leaving. She’s not in anybody’s way.” Amy crosses her arms and gives him a look, daring him to challenge her.
He flaps his arms out. “How can you say that when she’s clearly drinking all the tea?” He pauses, and his frown deepens. “Wait, is she the one that keeps moving my dinner plates about?”
In that moment, Clara’s almost certain that this is all a hallucination that has resulted from staring at impossible corners for too long. The delinquent ghost of her imagination has officially taken shape, and he’s appropriately pale.
“What are you on about? She’s here for as long as she likes, and that’s final. This place is so big and so confusing that you don’t even have to see her if you don’t want to.”
Doctor Vexed huffs out an annoyed sigh and looks back down at Clara. “Don’t touch the plates. I’m collecting data.”
She frowns. “Data on what?”
“It’s research. It’s not for pudding brains to know.” He glances at her camera. “What are you doing with that?”
She cradles her favorite Nikon protectively against her chest and glances back at the wall. “The corners are all wrong.”
“Of course they’re not wrong! Amy, —” Clara watches as he realizes that his fellow Scot left him behind to fend for himself. He turns back towards her with a renewed frown. “They’re not wrong. They’re just bigger than they should be. One day, I’m going to flood this place.”
“Flood? Why?” Miscreant wraith, this one was.
“Weren’t you listening? Internal dimensions!” He pointedly flaps his arms towards the corner she’d been methodically trying to document.
She thinks, absurdly, that she actually follows his train of thought. She bends down to pick up her camera bag. “So, why diving?”
“Why not?”
She understands that it’s not really an answer, but she thinks that she just might be getting a better idea of what this team actually does.
---
Sometimes, as she explores the base, she displaces the plates that she finds by roughly a meter in a random direction to see if he notices.
Of course, he does. He leaves an angry, nonsensical note taped to her and Bill’s bathroom door.
“If we were in space, this would be considered academic sabotage. Please keep your tiny hands away from my research.
P.S. There’s a particularly impossible corner by C-135. You should see it, but tell your camera to be careful. I think the corners are getting angry.
P.P.S. Bill, you still owe me your report on the physics of buoyancy. I will not be accepting a song this time.”
---
In all the time that Clara’s been at the base, she’s rarely slept through the night. During her first week, she spends the small hours of the morning in her room, transferring new photographs from her camera to her drive on her laptop. She goes through her best shots and makes minor edits to coloring and exposure, whiling the hours away doing something familiar in a very strange place.
(Her C-135 series has become one of her all-time favorites. There’s something almost eerie about the spatial impossibility that she managed to capture, and she’s quite proud of herself for it. Not that she’d ever thank that grumpy mop of gray hair for the suggestion).
Recently, though, Clara’s taken to spending her sleepless nights sitting in the common area with a nice cup of tea. She learns very quickly that the base’s errant ghost can be found there at any time between 3 and 4 am. He’s usually doing some mixture of drinking sugary tea (she swears that she’s seen him add seven spoonfuls of sugar to a single mug, which is both appalling and impressive), eating jaffa cakes covered in extra marmalade, scribbling on random pieces of paper, and/or fiddling with gadgets that she suspects serve no real purpose.
Tonight, it’s jaffa cakes and something that looks like it used to be a calculator. There are extra wires and tiny bulbs littered all over his favored table.
As she wanders in, he greets her with his characteristic sour frown, which she laudably ignores with an indifferent shrug. She heads towards the kettle and pulls a smuggled bag of Earl Grey out of the kangaroo pouch on her jumper.
“For a human, you don’t sleep very much. This is the fourth night that you’ve invaded my tea time.”
Clara has learned to ignore his many peculiarities in speech, including, but not limited to, using the word ‘human’ to describe what she assumes is just a normal person. She goes about cleaning her mug like she normally does and answers him without looking in his direction.
“Invaded seems a little strong, don’t you think? I’m just making a cuppa. Perfectly silently before you spoke, I might add. Why can’t this be my tea time, too?”
“Don’t be stupid. You can’t eat my jaffa cakes.” He says this like not being able to eat his biscuits has only one natural conclusion, and that is that his tea time will not be becoming their tea time. “Where did you get the Earl Grey?”
“I brought some,” she answers proudly as she watches her tea steep in her fresh mug of perfectly heated water.
He huffs in response and goes back to tinkering in silence.
After about three minutes—when she deems that her tea has reached its peak—she pulls the bag out, pours a spot of milk in, and sits down at his table. (This is something that she usually avoids doing in favor of being diplomatic, but tonight, she feels like pushing his many buttons).
His fingers twitch on the pliers he’s holding as she sets her tea down on his workspace, but he doesn’t say anything. He’s attaching tiny light bulbs to a number of wires that point in different directions, and she wonders what in the world he thinks this new thing is actually going to do.
“What is that?”
“It’s a tracker.”
“For what?”
“World hoppers.”
“What are world hoppers?”
He looks up from his work and scowls fiercely at her. “Do you always ask so many questions? Go back to drinking your tea.”
“Not until you explain world hopping.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be clever?” At that, she shoots him a murderous glare, and he sighs in submission before actually answering. “It’s what it sounds like. It’s hopping between worlds. It’s a lot like walking from your room to this room, but bigger and weirder.”
“Funny. Am I supposed to believe that there are multiple worlds out there and human beings can just travel between them? I mean, I knew you were a little different, but that’s just nonsense.”
“Who said anything about humans?”
“What?”
“Humans. They’re not the ones doing the world hopping.”
“Am I dreaming? Am I actually asleep right now? Oh my god, have I finally fainted in front of a mirror? I knew it would happen! Those things are a bloody menace.”
She starts pinching her arms and gently slapping her cheeks, and he watches her do this for a full fifteen seconds in absolute bewilderment before recovering his ability to speak.
“What in the name of jelly babies are you doing? Stop that. Stop the pinching.”
She looks up at him, and he’s frowning like he always is. She checks the rest of her surroundings. The table seems steady, her tea is steaming, and the room looks normal (as normal as possible in this base, anyway). She’s very much awake. She shakes her head to clear it and nods to herself, mentally recalibrating and taking the reins.
“Right. So. World hopping. Real thing, according to you. Humans aren’t involved.”
“Are you malfunctioning? Should I go get Amy or something?” He stands from his seat at the table and pulls a whirring stick-thing out of his jacket pocket. He points it at her head.
“Nope. No need for Amy. I’m perfectly fine.” She tolerates his hopping about with his stick gadget for about ten seconds before she finally addresses it. “What are you doing?”
“You don’t have a fever, and you don’t have a case of the Countercurrent spins. Not that you would have those, because you’ve never been there, but you never know with this old base. The mirrors are tricky when they’re furious.”
Counter-something spins, places to which she’s apparently never been, and angry mirrors. Scratch that. Furious mirrors that might take her some place. Or something. What? The whirring and the words and Doctor Ghost were making it hard to think.
“Not that I’m not absolutely loving whatever this is, but can we start speaking in sentences that actually make sense now?”
“What do you mean?” He sounds offended. “I am making sense!”
“Fine, then. Just stop talking. Stop talking about hopping and mirror spins and angry currents or whatever.”
He rolls his eyes. “Oh, it’s a rollercoaster with you tonight, isn’t it?” He waves his hands about. “First, you won’t stop asking me questions, and now you don’t want the answers. Just drink your tea.”
Clara frowns angrily at him but feels chastened enough to actually do as she’s told.
---
She’s agreed to a comprehensive physical and general health examination. It has nothing to do with the motion sickness of being at the base. She’s just tired of Strax’s relentless requests.
She’s sat on a bench in a room that looks remarkably like a proper doctor’s office and Strax is asking her to take her hat off for the fourth time.
“It’s not a hat, Strax. It’s hair. Can we just move on?”
“Very well. I will overlook your hat for now.” He pulls out something that looks a bit like a magnifying glass and points it at her forehead. “Oh, now that’s interesting. Definitely a foolish human female. Twenty-eight years old, narcissistic, lots of bow ties.”
“What are you looking at?”
He doesn’t answer and moves to point the magnifying glass at her eye. “Say ah.”
“Aaah?”
“You didn’t move your lips, Miss Clara.”
“You’re looking at my eye.”
“Ah, yes. Easy mistake. Onto the thorax.” His right eye appears huge and unblinking through the looking glass as he sweeps it up and down her body. “Well, you have an excellent spleen and exemplary bones. Lung capacity is subpar, but that is to be expected in your weak and fleshy body.”
She tries not to be offended by his words because she doesn’t think he quite understands how they’re supposed to be used. “Why are you doing this?”
“If we are going to dive together, I need you in peak physical prowess.”
“You lot certainly like to talk about diving. Tell me. What’s the ocean like down below?”
“Stupid boy. We dive through the Countercurrent, not your ocean with its pathetic creatures.” He places the looking glass back in his pocket and stands. “Now. Time to test your vertical jump. Your stature means you’ll need it to best your enemies in battle.”
The more she talks to this strange team of people, the less confident she becomes in her supposition of what it is that they do. Deep sea diving no longer seems to fit the bill, but she doesn’t have the slightest idea what ‘countercurrent’ is.
---
The minty taste and familiar texture of toothpaste fills her mouth as she absentmindedly scrubs her teeth to wash out the remnants of her nightly cup of tea. (She struck a truce with Doctor Vexed a few nights ago, and tonight, he even went as far as offering her one of his precious jaffa cakes. He made sure she understood that the biscuit didn’t mean he wanted to share his tea time, but she considered it very real progress anyway).
She bends down to rinse her mouth out at her favored sink and feels her heart stop painfully when she stands back up. There’s a woman, an absolute stranger with an evil glint in her eye, leaning against the wall behind her in the mirror.
She whips her head around and holds her toothbrush out like a weapon, but there’s no one there. It’s just her like it always is. She feels her hands shake as she hesitantly approaches the toilets lined up behind her and listens for any signs of movement. As quickly as she can manage, she kicks the cubicle doors open and finds them all to be empty. Even the showers are unoccupied.
She rushes out of the bathroom with her back facing the mirror and her heart beating savagely against her ribcage. She won’t admit that she’s afraid to look at something as harmless as a reflection.
---
“Do you ever see people in the mirrors when you’re using the loo?” She poses her question as casually as she can and sips from her fresh morning tea.
Bill turns to look at her with an alerted frown coloring her features. “Have you seen someone in the mirrors, Clara?”
“I don’t know. I saw a woman standing behind me a few days ago, but I checked the bathroom afterwards, and I was alone. I thought maybe I was seeing things because it was late and I was sleepy, but I just saw the same woman again this morning.”
“Interesting, I’ve only ever heard him mention a man.” She chews thoughtfully on her buttered toast.
“What? Who mentioned what?”
“The Doctor. You should talk to him about this. He’ll know what to do.” Bill grabs her hand and pulls her up from her chair. “Come on, I’ll show you one of his hiding spots.”
Bill guides her through a number of corridors that she’s never seen before, and Clara suspects that that’s intentional. (She would think that the base hides things from certain people if the very idea wasn’t totally barmy. The place is impossible and strange in every way, but sentience is a step too far, even for her). After about five minutes, they make their final turn into a damp hallway with slimy walls and head towards a door that’s painted in a pristine royal blue.
Bill knocks on the door four times, and a familiar Scottish voice calls out from the inside.
“Bill, not now. I’m trying to work out why the A minor chord makes my fingers feel numb. I think it’s spread to my feet.”
Heedless of his warning, both of them barge into his room and see him sitting atop an amp with a guitar, shaking out his left hand by his side as if his arm has fallen asleep. He turns to look at his intruder, and when his eyes land on Clara, he lets his arm go limp and turns a particularly bothered scowl towards Bill.
“What is she doing here?”
Clara speaks before Bill even opens her mouth. “I’ve seen a woman in the mirror.”
“Nonsense.” He waves his hand as if to clear the preposterous idea from the air. “The Master looks like a man.”
“The Master?”
“A world hopper,” he answers as he continues strumming his guitar.
“You mean the woman I’ve seen isn’t a human? She certainly looks like one.”
He stops playing and turns his full attention to her. “The woman you’ve seen isn’t the Master.”
“How would you know? If this Master isn’t human, why couldn’t they change shape or whatever?”
“Have you gone bananas?” He frowns at her like she’s said something completely out of the realm of possibility, which she finds mildly frustrating given that they’re currently having a genuine discussion about ‘world hopping’. “We aren’t shapeshifters. This isn’t Harry Potter.”
“What do you mean we?”
“I’m a world hopper, too.”
“Okay. Right. Sure.” She’ll deal with that information later. “Then who am I seeing in the mirror?”
“I don’t know. This isn’t supposed to be happening. This is all wrong. The time is all wrong.” He’s started pacing about his cluttered space and stops to flap his arms in her direction. “Why you? What’s so special about you?”
“Oi! It’s not like I asked for this.”
He’s rifling through piles and piles of books, seemingly looking for something in particular, until he suddenly stops and starts snapping his fingers. “Wait, wait. Shut up. Shut up.” He turns to look at her with an intensity that gives her goosebumps. “Why did you come to this base?”
“I came to visit Amy. I don’t know, I guess I thought it would help.” She feels her cheeks flush in self-consciousness.
“No.”
“What do you mean ‘no’?”
“I mean no. Why did you come here specifically? How did you know about this place? No one knows about this place.”
“I got a letter from Amy. Or, well. He got a letter from Amy.” She swallows. “I sent a response to the return address in Inverness explaining the… situation, and she wrote back with the directions to get here.”
“How do you know that the first letter was from Pond?”
“It was signed from her. The return address was correct. I mean, she got my letter, didn’t she?”
The tip of his tongue hangs out of his mouth as his fingers tug on his mess of curls, and he continues his pacing. “Was there anything in your letter that would have suggested that it was written as a response to something?”
Clara thinks back, but she can’t remember the specifics. She thinks she probably wrote something along the lines of: Hello Amy. My favorite person is dead. You knew him. I know you don’t know me, but can I visit?
“Er, no. I guess not. I just told her the bad news and asked if I could meet her.”
He leans his arms against a desk and hangs his head. “This could be bad. Very bad. Bill, go get Pond.”
---
Amy rushes in with Rory at her heels, and they’re both panting like they ran through the base’s maze to get here. The redhead’s eyes find the Doctor with a sense of urgency. “What’s going on? Is he back?”
“Pond. I need you to think very carefully. Do you remember having written a letter to your best pal around the time that he died?”
Her eyebrows push together in confusion, but she answers anyway. “No. I haven’t written to him in almost two years.”
Two years. Two years? Tiny bells start to go off in Clara’s mind. She jumps in before the other two can say anything else. “Wait. That first letter I got. It was roughly two years old. You mentioned something about some big expedition in it, I think.”
Amy frowns and starts shaking her head. “No. No that can’t be. I posted that letter as soon as I wrote it.”
“I swear I got it just recently. It’s the reason I wrote you in the first place. Maybe—”
The brooding stick insect cuts her off. “Shush, shush, shush. I’m missing something. What am I missing? What am I not seeing?”
A tense silence settles oppressively over them, and everyone’s eyes land on him. He’s pulling at his hair and biting his thumb and scowling violently at his boots as he paces. His eyes bounce around the room restlessly like he’s trying to find the pieces to some puzzle that no one else can see, and he’s a veritable storm of restless motion and scattered thoughts.
Then, very suddenly, he stops. He stands extremely still.
“Your boyfriend. How did he die?”
“Er. He came home from one of his trips one night and never woke up. The doctors weren’t able to tell me much.”
His hands twitch at his sides. Slowly, he turns towards Clara, and the intensity in his blue-gray eyes causes the hairs on the back of her neck to stand up. “I think your boyfriend got caught up in something that he didn’t understand. I think the woman in the mirror probably had something to do with it. And I’m certain that she’s orchestrated this whole thing just to get you here.”
She tries to swallow past the dryness in her mouth. “Who is she?”
“I’m afraid of who she might be.” He rubs his face. “And if I’m right, she wants nothing good.”