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Clara keeps her attention fixed firmly on the console as the Doctor walks into the TARDIS and stands a little way away from her.
“So, you must have thought I was dead for a while.”
“Yeah.” The nonchalance is so forced that she can’t even look at him.
“How was that?”
He pauses for so long that she begins to think that he’s not going to answer, but when he eventually speaks it’s with such ache that she can’t help sneaking a glance at him, “Longest month of my life.”
“It could only have been five minutes!”
She feels the weight of his eyes of her for a moment, then he looks down again, letting out a broken whisper of, “I’ll be the judge of time.” before walking around to her other side.
The smile he offers her as he flips the lever is so weary that she gets taken straight back to only a few hours previously, and his words to Bonnie in the Black Archive.
“When I close my eyes. I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count!”
She watches as he walks off up the stairs without his usual energy and wonders when the last time he actually slept was.
“And you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it? You hold it tight. Till it burns your hand.”
Is he ever okay? Even for a second?
She knows that she wouldn’t be in his position.
Quickly, she follows him, catching up with his slow, plodding steps easily.
She’s handling this all pretty well, considering the latest near-death experience that she had to quickly talk herself out of, but then again, most of her time was spent in the Zygon pod, fighting off Bonnie’s mental invasion rather than her physical one.
She’s triumphant – Bonnie is helping them now and, while they can’t erase the death that’s already happened, no one else is going to die because of this – he, on the other hand, looks fragile.
The way he carries himself as if he holds a great weight that’s crushing him, the way that every line on his face seems to have deepened and the way that his haunted eyes swirl with sorrow and guilt.
Seeing him like this, she doesn’t know how she ever thought that he was okay.
Carefully she takes one of his fingers in her own, slowing initiating more and more contact, giving him every opportunity to pull away until they’re stood in a random corridor – she thinks by the kitchen, but possibly not – and she has herself tucked into him as if she’s a human-sized teddy bear that he’s clinging onto like a lifeline.
She rubs his back gently and he slumps a little against her, letting the exhaustion leak out of his body. They just stay like that for a while, rocking slightly, until he slumps to the point that she thinks he’s going to fall over because she doesn’t have enough strength to completely support him.
Pulling back, she helps him into a chair that the TARDIS has helpfully generated for her thief and crouches next to him, placing a hand on his cheek and staring deep into his eyes.
“When was the last time you slept properly, Doctor?” she asks gently, softly.
“After the Vikings.” He doesn’t even have to think, like the memory is seared onto his brain, like it doesn’t happen often enough for him to confuse it with another event.
She blinks a few times; it’s been at least a month ago that they shared a tent after the adventure with the Mire and the Vikings and he hadn’t even slept for a full night then, staying up to the wee hours shivering until she finally persuaded him to share the one bed with her.
“That long?” she asks, silently berating herself for not checking on her friend between adventures.
“A few power naps during conversations every now and then is all I need.” He shrugs, eyes slightly unseeing with exhaustion, “And before then, I hadn’t slept properly since before Trenzalore, so you really helped.”
He’s being freer with his words than usual, and there’s a part of her that doesn’t think he even knows he’s saying this stuff out loud, but that part of her is drowned out by the part that’s telling her that he spent nine hundred years on Trenzalore.
Which means he hasn’t sleep properly for over nine hundred years. That can’t be good for him, Time Lord or not.
“How have you not passed out from exhaustion?” it’s more of a question to herself than anything, but he answers her anyway, head lolling slightly as he fights the bone-deep mental and physical fatigue.
“I do eventually, but I stay away from you when I’m pushing on exhaustion. I’m not good at staying out of danger and I get grumpy. Well, grumpier than usual.” He forces a chuckle then takes a shuddering breath, “It's not up to you to deal with me when I'm like that.”
“That's not how this works, Doctor. You take care of me and I take care of you.” she chastises him gently, giving his cheek a few light taps with her finger to emphasise her words, “Equals, partners, friends.”
As she runs her fingers softly over his cheek, he looks up at her with something that can only be described as reverence, then he closes his eyes and a single tear slips out from beneath the lid.
She wipes it away tenderly, wishing she could see into his eyes again, even if there’s only pain to see there.
“I just keep going until I pass out because I, I just can’t stop.” A few more tears leak, and she wipes each away, letting him talk, “I can nearly drown them out when I’m awake. If I talk fast enough, or run far enough, the memories stay just deep enough in my mind that I almost don’t notice them. But when I’m asleep, there’s nothing stopping them, no barrier to hold them back and I – “
He doesn’t finish, just buries his face in her shoulder as she wraps her hands around his neck, rubbing soothingly at the fine hair on the nape of his neck and shushing his sobs quietly.
“How do you keep going?” again, she’s just wondering aloud, but he answers her.
“I have to. I don’t want anyone else to ever have to feel like this.”
It’s a broken whisper that cracks open her already fracturing heart.
“I don’t want you to feel like this.”
He doesn’t answer for a long while, but when he does, it’s with the same determined edge to his voice that he had when he was about to use the Moment to end the Time War.
“But how many people has my pain saved?”
The question drudges up a half-forgotten memory of a war-weary Doctor asking a very similar question.
“You asked me that, you know? The you that you don’t talk about; when he was trying to decide whether to use the Moment. You probably won’t remember it because of the weird timelines, but I told him that the future you regretted it, and he asked me how many worlds I thought your regret had saved.”
He sniffles slightly and she pulls him even closer, whispering close to his ear, “I’ll tell you now, what I told you on that day; be a Doctor. Be a Doctor and heal yourself.”
“I, I don’t think I can.”
“You don’t have to do it alone, never alone. I might not understand or know everything that you’ve gone through, but I can help you to carry on.”
“What about when you leave me? Like I thought you had today.”
The question is plaintive and holds an almost childlike innocence, like he’s hiding from the fact that he already knows how it will feel, and she wonders how much of their time together he spends thinking about when she’s going to leave him.
“If there was something I could do about that, I would.” She takes a deep breath, “I can’t promise you forever Doctor, but know that I will stay with you for as long as I possibly can. I want you to promise me that you will enjoy our time together without spending every second thinking about how much it’s going to hurt when I – when I leave you.”
He doesn’t say anything, just breathes shallowly, so she nudges him gently, “Promise me?”
“I – I promise.”
It’s a hard promise, she knows, for someone who’s lost as much as he has, but she knows that he’ll try his best to keep it.
“Now, you said that you slept after the Vikings, how come you were able to sleep then?”
The answer is so soft that she almost doesn’t catch it.
“You were there.”
She takes a few breaths, her fingers tightening almost reflexively in the fine curls at the nape of his neck.
“Would you like that again? To sleep next to me?” He hesitates, and she’s quick to reassuring him, “I wouldn’t mind. I’d like it, in fact, I slept well then too.”
There’s another hesitation, but then he nods slowly against her shoulder, and she can’t keep a smile off her face.
“Come on then.”
He leans on her as they walk, but it still doesn’t take long for them to find themselves in her bedroom which is already lit with a soft orange light.
“Take off a few layers.” She prompts him gently as she pulls some sleep clothes out of a draw and darts into the bathroom for a moment to get changed.
When she emerges, it’s to find him stood uncertainly in the middle of her room in just his t-shirt, holey jumper and soft trousers, his jacket and hoodie folded over and his boots tucked under her nearby reading chair.
Smoothly, she pulls back the covers and sits up against the headboard, patting the space by her side to encourage him to join her. Cautiously but without anxiety, he slides in next to her and places his head where she guides it, onto her lap.
She tucks them both up in the duvet and a few soft blankets before dropping a kiss atop his mass of curls and running her hand through them lovingly.
“Sleep.” She orders him softy, “I’ll be here.”
Focusing all her attention on massaging her hands through his hair, she just sits as he relaxes.
It’s a slow process, he’s clearly trying to stop himself from fidgeting, but then he stops fiddling with the cuffs on his hoodie and instead begins to tilt his head slightly, pushing it into her hand. She’s sure it’s almost subconscious at first, he catches himself doing it a few times and tenses back up, but she just pushes back firmly and reassuringly, massaging her fingers against his scalp in what she hopes is a soothing way.
A few times he’s nearly asleep but jerks himself awake and she shushes him back to peace with a light kiss to his hair and a few murmured words of reassurance.
And all the tension slowly, slowly seeps out of his body until his breaths are deep and even and his frame shows none of the tightness he carries about with him so permanently that it’s almost disconcerting to see him without it.
Then she picks up her book – it’s still a bit early for her to go sleep and she wants to keep an eye on him away – and thumbs through the pages with all the skill of someone who spent their childhood reading with one hand while doing some different activity with the other.
And she never once lets her hand stop swimming through the soft silver waves.
When the Doctor wakes, it’s after several hours of sleep that, for once, weren’t completely overrun with nightmares. There’d still been some, but they’d been muted from his desperate clinging onto the knowledge that Clara is right here.
And she still is, although she’s asleep now, having slipped down the bed so that his head is pillowed on her stomach rather than in her lap.
Not able to bring himself to move, he stays there, feeling her chest expanding with every breath just behind his head and tracing Gallifreyan symbols in light lines across the back of the hand that isn’t still buried in his hair.
He feels safe here, the safest he’s felt in years. And calm too, drinking in the scent of cherry blossom that seems to be hanging around the room.
He’s lost track of time when she finally stirs; it may have been ten minutes, it may have been a few hours later, but he feels the fingers trailing his scalp and has to resist the temptation to push against them, wondering if she knows just how much of a comfort that action is.
“What time is it?” she mumbles, her voice still thick from sleep as he glances across at the clock.
“Six oh seven.”
“Hmm.” She hums contentedly, “How’d you sleep?”
“Better than I have in years.” He answers plainly, loving the way that her lips curl into a slight smile and her large eyes crack open, showing the depth and expression that he’s grown so used to over the years.
“Good.” She pulls him closer, “We can make this a regular thing then.”
He doesn’t answer – he knows that he doesn’t need to – just snuggles deeper into her because now he’s started, he can’t stop.
She dozes for a while and he continues to lie, idly working through a few calculations in his mind to keep himself from doing something stupid like fidgeting.
Although he does keep tracing the symbols over her hand. She doesn’t ask what they mean, even though he’s sure she knows what they are, because she knows that this is his way of speaking to her.
She understands him so well that he doesn’t need to say anything aloud. So even if she doesn’t know the exact translations, he’s sure that she gets the vague idea.
But then she’s brought out of her doze by a rumbling in her stomach.
The Doctor freezes because it’s right under his ear, then lifts his head up because his pillow is moving as she chuckles.
She pulls herself up in the bed and runs a hand through her sleep-mussed hair.
“I haven’t eaten in a while; I think I need some breakfast. You coming?”
A flash of panic rips through him because, of course, fragile humans and their need to eat so regularly; he should have made sure she had something last night.
“Hey.” He’s brought out of his mental berating by her nudging him, “Stop beating yourself up because I didn’t take the time to eat and come and get something with me now.”
And he has to smile because of course she knows exactly what he’s thinking.
She knows him better than anyone.
Once they’re in the kitchen, the Doctor is in charge of whipping together a batch of drop scones while Clara makes the tea and chops up some fruit.
They work in silence, partly because they don’t need to talk, partly because Clara is still half asleep and is taking all her concentration to not cut herself (he would offer to help, but chances are he would lose a finger himself if he did) and partly because he’s too busy studying her.
She’s perceptive, he’s always known that.
She knows him better than he knows himself really; she was the one to notice that the past him hadn’t used the Moment yet and she always seems to know exactly what he’s thinking or what’s bothering him.
He can’t hide much from her, not anymore, he’s like an open book.
But she’s more open to him now too.
When he first met her, he had been too wrapped up in the mystery of who she could possibly be to learn the little things.
Like how she takes her tea or how she’s fiercely loyal to those close to her, or how lonely her life has been or how she’s often a lot more scared than she lets on.
Emma Grayling had said it to him, all those years ago, when he was looking for ghosts and answers. More scared than she lets on. He hadn’t really thought about it at the time; everyone gets scared. but not everyone does everything that Clara Oswald has done, despite that fear filling them.
She’s changed so much since he met her, because of that fear but also that bravery.
Her mother dying changed her, made her more scared. Jumping into his timestream changed her, made her stronger. His regeneration changed her, made her unsure of herself. Danny dying changed her, almost broke her. The six months he hadn’t been there changed her, left her drained and empty. Him coming back changed her, gave her a kickstart to begin living again.
And after every little change, he knows her a little better, finds her a little easier to read.
She doesn’t have any fear about her right now, but she does look older, wiser, sadder.
She can’t go back now, can’t erase Missy giving her his number, her agreeing to travel with him, or jumping into his timestream, or watching him regenerate. Can’t change Danny dying while on the phone to her, or him coming back last Christmas.
And he even doesn’t know if she would change any of it if she could. He doesn’t know if she regrets the person that she’s become because of him.
He’s pulled out of his thoughts by her walking towards him; he supposes he hadn’t been very subtle with his staring.
“Is everything alright, Doctor?”
He just looks down into her abnormally large eyes and cups her face with gentle hands.
“Smile for me.”
She does; it’s a little uncertain, but it’s trusting and soft and warm.
Time has left its mark on her face. It’s older, sadder, wiser, than anyone of her age should ever be.
But it’s still filled with love, and hope and never giving up.