Chapter Text
Trenzalore, 1847 AS (After Siege)
She is a leaf on the wind. An autumn leaf, withering from crimson to brown and crumbling away on the breeze. She is scattered, and her splinters are swept away in the gale, the torrent, the fire. The storm is a vortex of flame, and its light sparkles in her eyes like stars. It burns, but even so, a smile curls her lips.
She knows her name, and what she has to do. She knows what she’s seeking, and what she’s meant for, and where the pieces of her are headed in the tearing current. They are heading to him, because she was born to save the Doctor.
She crumbles until only one piece remains; the core of her, with all her echoes stripped away. The inferno spits her out, digested, and she falls to the ground.
It seems strange, there being ground beneath such an endless descent. The dirt beneath her is damp, and with a hitched, ragged breath, she inhales petrichor. She inhales, which is surely a good sign. It means she’s still breathing. What’s more, her breath is travelling through something, a pair of lungs, a throat, a mouth. Upon placing all these connected parts, she uses them to cry out. She screams the only word that holds any clarity in her mind.
“Doctor!”
She doesn’t like this place. The soil is rich and black, and things crunch beneath her feet like a thousand scattered autumn leaves. Upon closer inspection, she realises they are bones, as is the brown dust coating the topsoil, ground under the feet of fellow wanderers. The sky is black too, with no hint of the fiery vortex she was falling through mere moments ago.
She is no longer smiling, because down here she isn’t sure of anything. She doesn’t know her name, or where she’s from, or where she’s going. She wasn’t born to do anything. She’s not even sure she was born at all.
“Doctor?” Quieter, hope fading. Tears sting her eyes.
The sounds of gunfire and rocket blasts blare dull and muffled from some faraway battlefield. The wind carries screams along with its chill, and they echo throughout the cavernous space.
This is where things come to die – forgotten things, pushed down from the forefront of memory and into this smoking charnel pit. That is what she is, just like the decaying bones beneath her; a memory, a life constructed from raw data and space-rot and time. This is the bottom of the abyss, there is nowhere else to go, so why is there an outcrop?
Ahead, the ground drops off abruptly. The cliff's edge looms over a vast emptiness, distant war fires dashed across the dark. She walks towards the drop.
At the edge, the sands beneath soften and slick to a smooth, velvety black stone. Rocks skitter from the edge, raining dust into the darkness beneath. She doesn’t hear them hit the ground. Somehow, she knows it’s bottomless, and yet there are voices whispering, hands reaching, as if something is trying to claw its way up. Her breath catches in her throat (which is good, because it means she’s still breathing, still has a throat, still alive). There’s more down there, more of this place, more memories. Farther to fall, where the dead things are deader.
If this is where things come to die, then where do the dead things go to rest? Where do memories go when they’re forgotten?
The question grips her beating heart, a mystery worth solving. A dull, persistent light penetrates the darkness beneath, purple and rippling. She longs to touch it, because she was born to save, and born to see.
If only she could keep her eyes open.
She trains her gaze on the light below, drinking in the sight and, from within her head, birds begin to sing. The ground shifts below her, and in a blink, where once there was nothing now stretches a plain of arid, dark soil, and above, the chiselled underside of a great cavern. No more precipice. No more light.
This world, this hell, is editing itself, correcting itself, because something’s coming. Whatever it is, it’s not supposed to be here, it’s really not supposed to be here. She feels that simple fact like a deep ache in her bones, toes to teeth. When is a timestream not a timestream? Perhaps, she thinks, when it drowns the very thing it once flowed through. Paradox on paradox, purple on purple.
The Doctor is here.
Her limbs become water – just a part of the stream – and she falls to a heap in the bone-riddled dust. Her eyes stay open for a moment, tears and dirt blurring her vision as the Doctor speaks, and dark figures walk past.
Hellfire rages on the horizon, and within her; encroaching, blistering, burning like a stalwart candle flame in her chest. As she slumps, and sleeps, she is once again suspended over the edge of the abyss, mind-deep in purple light. Jagged stripes of violet are slashed in undulating strokes across a pale blue sky.
As she dreams, Clara remembers something that, according to the Doctor, she is not supposed to remember.
This seems strange to her. She isn’t supposed to have memories she can’t remember.
More importantly, she isn’t supposed to have memories that he remembers, but she doesn’t.
She is (was) standing on a jagged black cliff face overlooking a bottomless white void. Hair stuck to her face in sweat-soaked clumps, heat slathered upon her skin like perfume, fear tight in her chest. Behind her, in the overloading neutron reactor of the TARDIS, monsters reach and rage and scream. Her future is set in magmatic stone, banging on the porthole window, yet her present is (was) much worse. Sure, the monsters are terrifying, but Clara can deal with terrifying. She deals with terrifying every day, twice if she’s lucky.
Terrifying is good, fear keeps her fast, but there’s more than one sort of fear. The sort that grips her now (then) keeps her rooted to the spot and drains the colour from her face despite the heat crawling through her cheeks.
The Doctor’s eyes are cold, face rigid, jaw clenched. He mutters, gesticulating, hunched, mad. Not the usual sort of mad. There’s more than one sort of madness too. He grips her tightly by the shoulders and shakes her so hard that a gasp is forced from her lips.
“What are you, eh?” he snarls, bearing down, accusing. Afraid, though she can’t imagine why. “A trick? A trap –”
“Clara.” It’s a different Doctor talking now. The hands on her shoulders are softer, kinder, and she leans against the blackened, rotting stone of a tomb, catching her breath. “Clara, stay with me. You’re remembering things, things you shouldn’t be able to remember.” He smiles, but there’s a hint of that very same, inexplicable fear.
“Don’t think about it,” his voice is soft, nearly whispering. “Just keep going.” In her mind, she remembers something else – a book on a pedestal in a library she’s never seen. A book about a war of time. “Come along Clara.” She obeys, against her better judgement.
Her better judgement has been telling her to stay away from the Doctor for a long while, and she’s gotten rather good at telling it to sod off.
In the dream, she walks toward a pillar of twisting, sparking red light. The Doctor is hunched, convulsing, screaming, dying. That is when she understands what she has to do, what she has already done. The logistics of the paradox make her head ache, but it doesn’t matter.
Don’t think about it, she tells herself. Just keep going.
Before her, the time stream glitters; the carcass of a Time Lord, at the centre of his decaying ship, leaking dimensional energy and time-rot like petroleum. She smiles, and finds her last words waiting on her lips certain and impatient, as if she’s been waiting a very long time to say them out loud.
“Run you clever boy, and remember me.”
...
The air pulses with a soft hum. It sounds like salt air, and cool breeze, and Clara blinks her eyes open to a pall of soft sea green. Her head is muddled – no, muddy – her thoughts sink into the swamp before she can pull them back. Her mouth tastes like ash.
“Are you awake?” A soft voice drifts through the calm, mechanical ambiance. In the blurriness of her vision, she makes out the long, sharp shape of a man dressed in a purple waist coat, lilac sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He’s bent over a set of controls – the TARDIS controls. The Doctor. The image of him is tangled up in countless others, different faces sinking down into the swamp, forgotten. Dead.
“Hmm,” she hums groggily, turning where she lay. She is wrapped in a dark tweed coat, one arm trailing towards the floor from her place on the metal steps. The back of her knees feel bruised and raw, and there is a matching ache around her back and underarms, like she’s been carried. Clara moves to a sitting position, careful and slow, trying to remember how her muscles work. They’re stretched and strained. She feels old.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” The Doctor replies. There’s a smile in his tone, and on his face, but he doesn’t look at her.
“What happened?”
“What do you remember?”
An innocuous question, or it should be. It isn’t. Apparently, there are rules regarding this sort of thing. There are memories that she is supposed to remember, and some she is not.
“Bits and pieces,” Clara admits, decidedly vague. “All a bit muddled.” She saw a figure standing in a cave, starry night and firelight around him; leathered, weathered, battle-worn and white. The Doctor of war. “There was a cave…”
She expects him to pay her some attention. He usually does, and she feels a bit silly when she realises just how much she likes it. He’s usually all wide-eyes and sparking energy, but now he’s cold and stiff as stone. “And?” he prompts flatly. He still won’t look at her.
“Well, I remember falling through this red light. I felt like I was splitting apart. Then… a cave, and you were there.” A pause, collecting her thoughts, her memories. She clutches them close and counts them like pennies. “It was your time stream.” She remembers jumping into it. Born to save, born to die, born to run – but she’s still here. She’d been so sure, her life heading towards that one, branching moment.
Clara voices her confusion. “How am I still alive?”
“I pulled you out,” The Doctor says simply. He stares down at his hands, fiddling with machinery in a pointless pattern of flicks and flourishes. Below, the ship groans, its lights blaring sickly teal. “It was impossible, me entering my own time-stream, and you surviving it. All of it… it’s impossible.”
An impossible feat for an impossible girl. She aims to please. Maybe, when it comes to the Doctor, she aims a little too high. She remembers what Emma Grayling told her. Don’t trust him. There’s a shard of ice in his heart. A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a cheery grin and far too much tweed.
“What’s wrong?” Clara asks, knowing he won’t give her a straight answer.
“Nothing’s wrong, what do you mean? The day is won,” the Doctor grins. He leans back on his heels and spins on the spot, his hands clapped clumsily together in the air. “Visited my own tomb and circumvented the ensuing paradox and saved the universe from a thousand simultaneous collapses. But that’s all in a day’s work for the two of us, eh?”
“Something’s bothering you,” Clara insists. Sitting up, she draws her shoulders back and tilts up her chin. For the first time since waking up, the Doctor looks at her. Clara catches a glimpse of fading violet light in his eyes. He’s forgetting things too, memories drowning in a swamp of his own. His fingers are trembling.
The Doctor flashes her a hurried grin, and his gaze flicks swiftly away. She can see it, in the hunched line of his shoulders and the shifting of his eyes; fear. “It’s nothing, promise. I just have a lot to think about.” His grin widens, but he looks past her.
“Where are we going?”
“Well, I was thinking... home.” The Doctor laces his fingers together, twists them up into pale knots, his slab of a jaw still clenched tight. It contrasts jarringly with his bright tone. “You’ve had a big day, I think you’ve earned a rest – besides, Angie and Archie can’t be left to their own devices, who knows what trouble the world would be in then.” He forces out the beginnings of a laugh, but it quickly dies out.
“What will you do?”
“Oh, just take a bit of a break. Collect myself – literally, because I’m all a tad,” – he waggles his fingers absently, eyes darting around, – “scattered, so to speak. Still slotting things back into the right order,” he taps the side of his head with a finger.
Clara fixes him with an interrogating stare; wide-eyed and unyielding. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
He furrows his thin brows. “Of course. I’m always okay.”
The Doctor smiles at Clara, and she nods, plastering on an uneasy grin of her own.
“Tell me Clara,” he says after a drawn-out moment, during which all that permeates the space is the ship’s quiet drone, “in the timestream, did you see… “The Doctor hangs his head, shaking it slightly.
“What?”
He doesn’t look at her. “Never mind.”
Utah, 1994
The dead waitress stands behind the bar with her arms crossed over a clean white apron. It’s been a slow day, so there’s been nothing to stain it. Most days are slow days, because people don’t tend to notice the diner.
The coffee machine rattles and groans as it spills forth a steaming dark stream into her awaiting mug. The waitress cups it in her hands and raises it to her lips straight away. The black brew is near boiling, but the waitress doesn’t flinch. It’s a thrill to let the heat scald her tongue without the damage and lingering blistering that comes with a burn. Nothing can burn her, not anymore. The caffeine has no effect either, but it’s easy to fool the human mind. Coffee still gives her a bit of a kick, like a placebo.
Instincts are hardwired, and carried from generation to generation since the dawn of her species – instincts like flinching when you try to drink something that’s too hot. Even instincts can fade, given enough time. The waitress has lived through an awful lot of it, or perhaps none at all. It all comes down to semantics.
The waitress drinks, and lets the heat fill her throat. She sets her mug down on the bar top behind her, its plastic polished to a glittering sheen. Wiping it down is a therapeutic act. It reminds her of home.
The diner is all red and blue, stars and stripes, a painting of Elvis on the back wall. Red leather booths and red plastic barstools, a jukebox in the corner and tables plastered over in tacky white. A parody of America. People are often taken aback by the waitress’ accent, seeing as she’s from Blackpool.
It’s a tourist town, so there’s a fair few diners like hers. People want to see the America they see in the movies, and eat the sort of food you can get just about anywhere in the world now anyway. The diner has come to rest in Southern Utah, though in the past, and the future, it has, will have, and is currently making its home in centre state, and to the west, and sometimes as far as Nevada. The steering is never exact.
The people who stay here never stay for long, they pass through on their way to a more exciting attraction further down the desert roads. Maybe the locals notice the little diner that comes and goes, wheezing in the night and twisting the air with static, fizzling energy, but they don’t do anything about it. It’s part perception filter, part determination to ignore that which threatens the illusion of sanity.
The waitress likes the nineties. These years remind her of her childhood, and she’s lived them over a few times, soaking it all in. She’s sentimental, living with a perpetual craving for the nostalgic. She’s like an old woman, alone in an empty house, looking at long-faded photographs as an anchor to who she used to be. She is an old woman, in a roundabout way. It all comes down to semantics.
It’s been a slow day, but the nights are slower, so the waitress starts when the chime on the front door rings, announcing a customer’s arrival. She still startles, though it’s a rare thing. A persistent instinct.
A tall, hooded figure walks cautiously over the threshold. It’s a young boy, maybe a man by legal standards, but his eyes are still wide with youth, and his figure is stretched out and gangling. The boy’s skin is dark, his shoulders hunched under the weight of an overstuffed backpack.
“Welcome,” the waitress calls brightly. She pulls a notepad from the pocket of her cornflower blue uniform and pulls a pencil from behind her ear. “What can I get for you?”
“Umm, hi,” the boy mumbles. He looks tired; there circles under his eyes, and his posture is tilted down towards the chequered tiles as if he were melting. “Just a… err,” – his eyes flick up to the garishly-coloured menus above the bar for half a moment – “just a coffee, thanks.”
She nods, flipping her notebook shut and stowing her pencil away. “Milk and sugar?”
“Yeah, thanks.” The boy dithers over to the bar, swinging his backpack onto the floor with a clang as the zipper strikes the metal stool leg. He winces at the noise.
“How many sugars do you want?”
The boy takes a moment to answer, settling himself on the stool and resting his elbows on the bar top. He turns back to her with a sheepish smile. “Err, much as I can have, I guess.”
She grins. “Good choice.” Bustling around to the other side of the bar, the waitress sets the coffee machine going again. “So, you out on your own?”
“I’m old enough.” He jumps straight on the defensive. By trying to prove he’s not a kid, he succeeds in proving the opposite.
“I’m sure you are,” the waitress nods, eyebrows raised in bemusement.
“Are you British?” He asks. As for his accent, she can’t precisely pin it down. It’s American, but she can’t pick out the specifics.
“You noticed,” the waitress says dryly.
“Why are you working in a place like this?”
“What are you doing in a place like this?” she retorts, sharp elbows resting on the bar opposite him, chin in her hands. She gives him her best teacherly stare, the sort that’s stern with just a hint of mischief.
The boy hesitates. “Out.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Are you running away?” She can tell immediately that she’s struck a nerve. The muscles in the bot’s neck twitch and go tense, and his eyes flick away hurriedly from her interrogating gaze.
“No.” He adds in a scoff for good measure.
“Yes you are.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” the waitress insists, eyebrows raised.
The boy falters, and the waitress can see his mind working away behind his eyes, deciding whether he can trust her. The waitress softens her eyes and widens her smile into something kind instead of scrutinising. She knows vulnerable when she sees it. She used to deal with troubled kids all the time, and prided herself in being approachable. She hopes she hasn’t forgotten how. It’s been a very long time.
“What’s in the bag?” the waitress asks. She keeps it casual, turning around to grab him a mug and placing it under the spout of the coffee machine.
Again, he takes a moment to answer. “Just stuff.”
“A lot of stuff for a one-night trip,” she observes, feigning innocence. The waitress makes the coffee weak, and loads it with three sugars. She knows how kids are, even when they won’t admit they’re kids.
“So,” she broaches, at the boy’s silence, “you hitchhike into town?”
“Maybe,” he says begrudgingly, cautiously. The waitress spins around and places his coffee in front of him.
“Here you are.”
“Thanks,” he eyes her warily as he wraps his hands around the mug.
“So, why’re you running away?”
A beat, during which the boy glares down at his long-fingered hands where they curl around the fabric of his jumper sleeve, digging in. He can’t seem to stop fidgeting.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you probably do.” The waitress takes a sip from her own mug, now cooled to a more pleasant temperature, though it makes no different to her. “I’m Owsin, by the way,” she tells him. An exchange of names, chosen or given, is the first step in building trust. Her buried teacher skills are coming back to her.
“That’s not a real name,” the boy replies derisively.
“Is too,” she insists, swallowing another sip and smacking her lips. She sets her mug down and turns back to the counter behind her.
“I’m John,” the boy pipes up. Oswin can’t help but smile to herself. She’s getting somewhere.
“So, John, do your parents know where you are?”
Guilt twists his lips into a frown. “No.”
“They’ll be worried.”
He chuckles slightly, unsmiling, and turns his gaze down. “No they won’t.”
Oswin presses her lips together in sympathy, a respectful pause.
“Where are you headed?” she asks. John’s eyes dart around, never meeting her own, and his grip tightens around his wrist.
“Just away.”
“Things a bit tricky at home?”
A rueful smile spreads across his face, and for the first time, he meets her gaze. John’s eyes are dark and youthful, and full of a pain that no eyes so young should hold.
“You could say that, yeah.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.” He finally takes a sip of his drink. Despite the sugar, his nose wrinkles at the bitterness.
“Can I get you something to eat?”
“I’m alright.”
“You sure?”
“I don’t have much money, got to save it for buses and stuff.”
Oswin eyes him shrewdly. “I’m making you something, yeah? Free of charge.”
She ducks into the kitchen just as he opens his mouth to protest. “Stay put,” she calls over her shoulder.
Out of his sight she calls, “so, how do you feel about chips?”
John chuckles. “You really are from England.”
Oswin pokes her head out from the kitchen entrance, frowning. “Fine, fries.”
“Yeah, sounds great,” John smiles, “thanks.”
Oswin throws him a parting wink before ducking back out of sight.
In the kitchen, one of the fryers is already conveniently bubbling away, heated almost instantly by the diner’s onboard intelligence. It can manifest boiling oil, among other things.
Above her, the fluorescents hum a lighter shade of blue, brightening the large, white tiled space of metal benchtops and outdated appliances. Oswin’s diner is just a tad alive.
It’s also a spaceship, and a time machine. Being a diner is just its hobby.
Oswin came upon the machine – the TARDIS – in an unorthodox way. Essentially, she stole it – or was an important accomplice in its thievery. She’s been keeping it warm ever since. Oswin wasn’t built to converse with such machines, her being just a regular human, apart from the being dead thing. She does her best, but the connection she has forged with her ship lacks the depth possible for one of its intended pilots. Still, it knows her, understands her, protects her.
Her late partner, in business and romance and general adventuring, was the one who made repairs to the ship – maintaining its systems, and fighting off the constant attempts to retrieve it by its original owners. Me, as she was called – singular, unattached, until she wasn’t – spent half the lifetime of the universe studying machines of a similar sort, and the teachings of their creators, trying to grasp the secrets of time and space for herself.
It infuriated Me, living so long yet being forever unable to see the full breadth and beauty of the universe. In cosmic eyes, ex-humans like Oswin and her partner were destined to remain small in cosmic eyes. No telepathy, no time-sense, and in Me’s case, no past beyond what data could be loaded onto a 41st century memory backup chip. They could never hope – and Oswin never did – to reach the level of Time Lords.
Despite pouring over the odd TARDIS manual, Oswin never quite committed herself to understanding the intricacies of the technology. Without the necessary telepathic and intellectual disposition, penetrating even the basics seemed insurmountable. After all, it had taken Me billions of years to become as proficient as she was.
Since Me died, Oswin has let the ship run itself, and hoped for the best.
Oswin sets a fry basket beside the deep frier and goes about finding something to fill it with. The fridge keeps itself stocked, in case of customers. Oswin doesn’t need to eat, though she is able to, and makes sure to do so when she comes across some new delight amongst the stars, but the food does nothing. A shame, she was feeling a little peckish on Trap Street prior to her death, and nothing she does now will ever change it. She is frozen in time, that means blood pressure, hunger, fatigue, hair-length, weight – everything is still. A reanimated corpse, forever preserved.
She goes to the freezer drawer and pulls out a bag of chips, clumped together into a thick mass of potato. The ship could have whipped them up piping hot to begin with, but Oswin enjoys these little rituals. Mundane tasks to complete in a necessary order of steps. It reminds her of being human. The old woman she has become is going blind. White cataracts in her eyes cloud her vision. She can’t really remember what it felt like to be alive.
Often, she would breathe just to simulate the effect, to remember the way her muscles used to move on instinct, without instruction. Manually, she told her lungs to expand, to contract, to push oxygen into her blood. These days she doesn’t bother. She’s forgotten the necessary order of steps of that particular tired ritual.
Her lungs sit stagnant and lukewarm in her chest and she opens the bag of chips, shaking the solid contents into the vat. Ice crystals scatter at her feet.
An anomaly cannot be hurt. Blades don’t move through her as much as move around, bend. Bullets dodging her impossible presence and right their course on the other side. Floating through the vacuum of space, she would come away unscathed, if only a little bored. She knows from experience, having been thrown from an airlock once or twice in her time.
In all their reckless adventuring, Me was the more vulnerable one, but also far more skilled in a scrape. She was trained to expertise in nearly all known forms of combat in the universe. Underneath her age, and her bravado, Me was still Ashildr – the village girl who once dreamt of becoming a warrior. There was rage in her, which Oswin calmed for a time, but then she began to feel it herself – a sputtering, stubborn little flame in her chest. At best, they mellowed one another out – Me’s old apathy balanced by Oswin’s fierce empathy. At worst, they sharpened one another’s edge. They were swift, and smart, and righteous. Sometimes they were ruthless. Oswin has done things she isn’t proud of. They say that regrets are the mark of a rich life long lived.
Oswin lowers the fry basket into the sizzling oil vat with a harsh simmer and a dash of salt-smelling steam.
An alien medical chip bolstered and repaired for human compatibility via Time Lord technology is incredibly robust – robust enough to last nearly the lifetime of the universe – but it is not eternal. Nothing is. It was a fair way into that second go round the lifecycle of the universe that the technology in Me’s head began to degrade. Small injuries began to stick – muted bruises, small cuts – and in what felt like no time at all, though in the uncertain measurements of time travellers it was centuries, Me ceased to heal at all. They tried a quieter life, which suited neither of them, but Me’s condition only worsened. Skin wrinkling and rotting, bones weakening, muscles tearing. Going blind, and deaf, and senseless to the world as the technology keeping her alive broke down inside her. She flaked away like metal in the sea. Both of them, rusting through like clockwork.
As Me’s physical body faded and weakened over time, so too did Oswin’s mind. Year by year, century by century, her time spent alive was dwarfed by her time spent suspended in death, until that brief flash of life felt like an insignificant blip upon her vast, sprawling, tangled timeline. The line stopped at Trap Street, and from that final point expanded, circular, breaking the bounds of its two dimensions and swelling out wide in three. Ancient in all directions.
After all this time, Oswin has learnt to cope by taking things as they come. Life – or death, in her case – is a string of simple, moment-to-moment decisions. Encounter, examine, execute, move onto the next. She’s grown mechanical, in her old age. Rusting clockwork.
She stopped counting the years long ago.
Time is difficult to keep when one is travelling through it, in the company of immortals. It’s even more difficult to keep when travelling alone.
Me clung to life right until the painful, rotten, spitting end. Flame in her chest like an inferno, she died cursing nonsense through gritted, cracking, blackened teeth. Oswin decided there and then that she didn’t want to die like that. Once upon a time, a very long time ago and approximately eleven years in the future, Oswin died right. She died nobly, bravely, for who she was and who she loved. It was her second shot at it, a good death, and for the second time it was taken from her by the same man.
She has been tempted, on more than one occasion, to simply lower the TARDIS shields and let herself be dragged back to the dominion of the Time Lords, thus completing her eternal victory lap. Returning, the long, long way round. The tattoo on the back of her neck still reads zero. The raven will stay waiting until the Time Lords take her back, or the universe degrades to an old, lawless chaos. Whichever comes first.
Clara Oswald will die on trap street, London, 2015. Someday, Oswin will join her there.
Oswin taps her foot against the kitchen tiles as the chips fry away, glancing through the scant gap between wall and doorway through which she can see the bar beyond. John shifts on his seat every so often, restless. He gazes around at the establishment in trepidation, as if looking for something. Giving himself something to do, Oswin expects. It’s better than having to think about the tough situation he’s in. She’s seen that look before, on her students’ faces and her own; lost and lonely and far too young to cope with either feeling.
Maybe this is the way the Doctor used to feel, observing the beauty of the human race. Eternal, staring out at young, phoenix-bright, brilliant humans, flaring and dying as he watched. She often wonders if the Doctor would be glad to see her again, or simply pity the old woman she has become, twisted by time, fading in mind and frozen in place.
Even the average, time-insensitive being will look at her and begin to feel dizzy, uprooted, nauseous. Vertigo in the belly, as if glancing from a great height. She is anachronistic, sticking out of the texture of time and space because everything about her is wrong. That wrongness only becomes more pronounced the longer she keeps waiting, and the fabric of the universe stretches thinner and thinner around her. Fortunately, it is flexible. It takes a lot of strain to form a fracture.
One-hundred-and-one places to see, but the list keeps on growing. All of time and space – how can she possibly give that up?
She shouldn’t have to give it up.
The Doctor reminds her, when she slips into old patterns like this, these ruthless, angry, spiralling patterns: everything ends.
The boy – John – didn’t seem to react to her strangeness when they spoke earlier. There was no hint of the usual intrigue or apprehension. In fact, he treated her as if she were just an ordinary waitress. Talking to him reminded her of being alive, like talking to one of her students after class. Already, her senses feel sharper, despite their stillness.
Oswin tips the hot chips into a wood-netted bowl laid with red and white chequered cloth, tacky and bright. She plasters on a smile of a similar variety and leaves the kitchen.
John startles as Oswin steps briskly into view, and she catches sight of him hurriedly shoving something into the pocket of his hoodie.
“Order up,” she says brightly.
Recovering from his shock, John grins in return.
“Hope you’re hungry.” She sets the steaming bowl down on the bar top in front of him.
He groans, “I haven’t eaten in months.”
Oswin chuckles at his sarcasm. “Better tuck in then.” She has witnessed first-hand the enormity of the teenage appetite.
“Thanks so much – you sure I don’t have to pay or anything?”
Oswin spreads her palms wide. “It’s all yours.”
John grins again, grabbing a handful of still-scalding chips and shoving them into his mouth.
“Hey, they’re still – “hot, she was going to say, but the boy seems unphased. Although Oswin is immune to burnt tongues and other hard-wired, split-second reflexes, she knows that John isn’t. At least, he shouldn’t be. She gets the feeling his earlier comment wasn’t sarcastic at all.
Oswin leans her elbows on the bar top and rests her chin in her hands, intrigued. She loves a good mystery.
“So, John,” she says, smiling at the boy.
He gazes up at her, eyebrows raised, still crunching on his too-hot fries. Again, Oswin notices his complete obliviousness to her nature. No shifting gaze, no discomfort. Either he can’t see her sharp, time-defying edge, or he’s pretending not to.
“I’ve got some payment in mind after all,” she tells him. “How about you tell me a story?”