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“The Doctor is no longer here,” they whisper, “you are stuck with me.”
‘Sorry, what was that, Doc?’ the Graham in their mind pipes up, and they quash him, with no remorse.
There is no room for a conscience among four-and-a-half billion years of pain.
When the fam are at home, or asleep, they will take a minute to stop - to fly to Gallifrey, hurt themself with the sight of the moonless sky, or sit in darkness for as long as they can stand the stillness.
Eighty-two minutes.
The sight of Gallifrey, broken and burning, is one that is seared into their mind. The feel of their TARDIS, the heartsbeats in four-four time, the sensation of time itself flowing ever on, all these are as familiar to them as their own mind.
But there is something else, something they know by heart.
It hardly seems fair, that Clara’s Mona Lisa smile and the sound of buzzing flies and the ache in their fist and the burning of their flesh is more familiar to them than their own TARDIS, their own home - but the slow tapping of seconds echoes more often than the four beats in their head.
It’s almost funny. They have their own drums now.
‘Can you hear them, Doctor?’ the vindictive Master spits in their mind, and they squash him, too, because they haven’t been the Doctor in a while.
They spent their days in prison sassing the guards, telling themself stories and marking the days.
They spent their nights in prison tapping out the seconds, itching to run, the phantom flies in the back of their mind.
Now that they are back in the TARDIS, in what should be their home, the TARDIS doesn’t know what to do. She’ll create a corridor to run down, a bedroom to rest in, a garden to sit in, and everything she tries will pain them.
There will be empty space above the mantle, the garden will have no grave, and every corridor will lead somewhere they don’t expect.
Sometimes, in the dead of relative night, the TARDIS will be so sick of trying to take care of them that she just recreates the castle, and lets them slip into familiarity.
It might be hell, but it’s familiar, easy - and they’re woken up by their own eighty-two minute count, never by flies.
Yaz is asleep now, and they’re stood in the dark of the console room, the gentle glow of the pillars muted to almost nothing.
Their fingers are tapping.
It’s been seventy-nine minutes exactly since they last bolted from a room, head consumed with the buzzing of flies and dirt under their nails, and already they can feel the urge to run. Their legs ache, because they do nothing but run, nowadays.
When they can sleep, they dream.
Yaz’s wide eyes become Clara’s, and they wake with pleas on their tongue, for her to stay, for someone to understand what four-and-a-half billion years means.
Yaz will never be Clara. It’s a Martha-Rose situation, and they know it, but the thought of being as cruel to Yaz as they were to Martha is - painful. So, they do their best to be good for her. To be the person she wants them to be.
She wants them to be the Doctor. They’re trying their hardest, but they don’t think they’ve been the Doctor for a long time. Not, they think, for all the seconds in eternity.
The eighty-two minute mark strikes in their head, and the flies are almost real, filling their ears.
The TARDIS transforms, the corridors widening, windows opening onto a grey sky and a skull-filled moat.
(By the end, the skulls raised the water level too high. The ground floor flooded. The firewood was too wet to light; their clothes never dried.)
They run, making their way from the lowest point to the bedroom, where Clara’s smile taunts them. They begin their count.
Sleep comes.
They dream of Clara, of course. The diner docks against their TARDIS and Clara steps through, wielding her key. She runs her hand along the pillar, rests her fingers on the console, tries out the custard cream dispenser. She finds Yaz, asleep, and moves on.
She finds the Doctor, trapped in their own hell, and she leads them out of it by the hand, as if the Doctor is no more than one of the children she used to look after.
They wake up with a start, expecting to see Clara beside them - but it’s Yaz who has her hand on their shoulder.
They shrug it off, sitting up, and stare at Yaz.
Yaz stares back.
On the wall, from her permanent place haunting the TARDIS, the Clara made of cracked paint stares at them both.
“What woke you?” they ask, fingers tapping. It hasn’t been an hour since they fell asleep; Yaz should still be in bed. It must feel like the middle of the night for her.
“I were dreamin’ of a castle,” Yaz answers, voice scratchy and accent thick. “This were it.”
“Psychic overflow,” they mutter, “sorry. My mind must have pushed it onto yours.”
There’s silence for a while, utter stillness but for the tapping of their fingers.
“Who is she?” Yaz asks, gaze flickering to the painting.
Their fingers still.
“Clara,” they say, their own voice hoarse. “Clara Oswald.”
*
In a TARDIS on the other side of the universe, a girl trapped between heartbeats is reading.
The book is not a book, but a diary.
(When one has infinite life but a finite memory, one finds a way of remembering.)
The diary tells the story of a bird, who spent four and a half billion years sharpening their beak on a diamond mountain.
Or maybe it tells the story of a saviour, who spent a second of eternity fighting for a girl.
Or, the girl thinks, it tells the story of a Doctor, who had a duty of care.
It doesn’t matter which one, she thinks.
They’re all sad stories, in the end.
*
“She was a teacher,” they continue, swinging their legs over the side of the bed, back to Yaz. “She used to travel with me.”
They can’t see Yaz’s face, but they can picture it. Curiosity. Confusion. Worry for them, because she’s found them in a mysterious bedroom with a smashed window and the taste of salt on the air.
“She was far too much like me. She was… she made me want to be kind.”
“And she’s gone?” Yaz’s voice is soft, quiet. They aren’t sure what she thinks must have happened to Clara. She's imagining what Ryan and Graham did, probably. Hopefully.
“She’s still out there. Travelling the universe with a friend. They stole a TARDIS and ran off together.”
“And you miss her.”
*
She puts the book back on the shelf, and cracks open the next one.
It’s sad. Again.
This one doesn’t tell of the bird or the saviour or the Doctor. Instead, it tells of the girl.
Clara. That’s - her.
These are her thoughts.
They’re hard to read. The ink is smudged, and the writing is disjointed and messy.
The words, too, are hard to read.
It’s a book of crushing loneliness.
The girl has someone with her - Me, it says, Lady Me - but she misses someone with all her heart. She puts on a front, tries to distract herself with adventures and with running away, but she feels the separation like her heart has been torn out.
The diary says that she wonders that if she could die, she would, from the pain of loss.
The girl wonders how the other person feels. She can feel the twin phantom ache of loneliness in her chest, though she can’t remember who it is she’s missing.
She wonders if they miss her, too.
*
How can they answer that? They spent four-and-a-half billion years burning themself up and punching through a wall four hundred times stronger than diamond - for her. Always for her. Of course they miss her.
“I miss a lot of people,” they answer. It’s true - they miss River this way, and Rose, and Jack, and they miss Susan and Ace and Sarah-Jane and Bill and all of the people whose lives they have ruined or stolen.
“She’s different.” Yaz sounds sure, though they don’t want to turn around to see.
And she’s right. Clara is different, because her timeline is wrapped around theirs. Because sometimes, they’ll see an echo of her, someone who saves them and ultimately dies of it, and it kills them to see her, so close, and yet out of reach.
And the knowledge that they could see her - that she could ring up her TARDIS, could make contact, could reach out and touch her - that breaks their hearts.
They’ve known Clara all their life. Every face, every body, every Doctor. Clara probably knows them better than they know themself.
And it kills them to be apart from her.
“She’s different.”
*
The girl puts the book back, and runs her fingers along the spines of the others. All of them are cracked, worn - she’s clearly read them all, many times before.
She starts at the beginning.
There’s a story about a leaf, about a planet with a little girl and a man who tried to save her, and a girl who did.
The leaf becomes a girl, who becomes a hundred thousand fragments, echoes, protecting the Doctor throughout their lifetime.
Today’s a good day for remembering. The loneliness in the back of their mind is so pronounced that she’s resorting to reading all the material on the Doctor that she has, and as she does, her image of them grows clearer.
It’s the second face she truly knew that she pictures - not the one with the chin, though he was her first Doctor. It’s eyebrows, a creased face, a Scottish brogue that fills the outline of them in her mind, and she clutches onto what she can desperately.
She made them forget her because she wanted her past, and now both of them have lost it.
*
“She thinks I’ve forgotten her.”
“Why?”
“Because she made me forget.”
They stand up at last, and stick their head out of the smashed window. It’s not the real thing. They don’t have to continue with the endless running.
Talking about Clara had made them forget, they realise, as their fingers twitch by their sides.
“But she’s still alive! You could tell her you remember. You could see her again.”
They turn around, and face Yaz. They let her see the pain, the hurt, the love.
“At this point, I doubt she remembers me anymore.”
*
The girl knows there’s something she’s missing, but she’s too busy clutching at the blurry edges of her image of the Doctor that she can’t grasp it.
Another girl comes in, and takes the book from her hands.
“Clara, you’ve been here for hours. Come to bed.”
She shakes her head, the memory of the Doctor slipping even as she chases it, begs it to stay.
“He’s gone, Clara, he’s not coming back. I thought you wanted this.”
She craves the respite that forgetting brings her, wishes for the dull of the pain of loneliness that comes when she forgets what she’s missing.
But today is a good day for remembering.
“Is there a way to fix this, Me?” she pleads. “Is there a way to stop this? I don’t want this anymore.”
Me’s face twists, and Clara sees her own loneliness reflected on her face.
“No, Clara. We’re stuck like this forever. Because of him.”
*
“I don’t want to hurt her any more than I already have.”