Chapter Text
He had no awareness of anything until, suddenly, he did. A whisper, surrounding and infusing, within and without, asking, “Will you come back? She needs you back, please say yes.”
It was a choice that wasn't really a choice at all; Danny, who was not even aware of his own essence until that question was asked, but who immediately recalled who she was and whose voice he was hearing, whispered back:
“Yes. For her, anything.”
*
Birth could not have been so painful. His lungs burned for something, and it took him a moment to expand, to breathe in and pull air to himself; gasping, he opened his eyes and then clenched them shut again, the dim light too much, the noise of the quiet room too loud, the temperature at once too hot and too cold. He could cry out, if he remembered how. Tears formed at his eyes.
A needle slid into his forearm, sounds like words were issued by someone else not him, and he slipped into comforting darkness.
*
When he woke up again, he only felt groggy. Some part of his memory dragged up the word hangover, though everything else about him screamed that it was a foreign concept. “Welcome back, Mr. Pink,” said a voice—a woman, commanding and calm. He forced his eyes to look at her.
Blond, strong featured, keen-eyed. Behind her, a pair of soldiers in dark uniforms. Danny felt the bed under him, saw the hospital room around him—no window, though. Not a normal room. “Where-” His throat was raw, and he felt an ice chip pressed to his mouth.
“UNIT headquarters,” the woman said. She was quiet, thank goodness, apparently understanding that everything was too much at the moment. “I'm Kate Stewart. This is...probably going to be a lot to take in.”
“Clara?” The name formed on his lips the same moment that her face formed in his mind. He'd done this—he'd done something, at any rate, for her, and his heart and brain and body remembered her with an almost painful yearning.
“We didn't want to tell her until we'd known it would work,” Kate said. Her hand took his. “How are you feeling?”
An infinite void bloomed in his mind. Everything all at once, winnowed down to a single sharp edge, spread throughout him like the universe at creation. There was no way to speak it. “Clara,” he begged.
“Shh.” A different voice, familiar, deep and lovely as the dark of night. His pale fingers touched Danny's forehead, soft and soothing. “Let me help.”
With that came order: his mind settled, memories fell into place and cracks smoothed over as something that couldn't be cool but which felt cool anyway swept through him. He didn't sleep, but he felt as though he had. “What did you do?”
“I helped,” the Doctor said with a shrug. His eyes were still as cold as Danny remembered, his face still as severe, but there was something different about him. “Just like I said I would.”
*
“Your biological signature was still on the bracelet. The long and the short of it is, you existed both in a single point, and stretched infinitely through time,” the Doctor said. Off Danny's confused look, he patted Danny's knee and added, “It's all right. I don’t think Clara would quite understand it, either.”
“Clara knows?” he asked. “Is she here?”
“Patience-”
“Don't you 'patience' me. Where is she?”
The Doctor held up his hands, trying to calm him, and said, “I need to know you're safe to be around first.”
There was a tightness in his chest; the fear of coming back wrong, of missing some integral part of himself, was deep within him as much as it was in the Doctor. “I'm safe,” he pleaded. “For her, I am.”
“Then prove it.”
Danny grasped for anything he could, but there was nothing to prove that he was safe, not really, and he knew it. “I can't,” he said, defeated. “And—there's no point in me being back if I could hurt her.”
Eyebrow raised in mild surprise, the Doctor asked, “You'd choose to die once more?”
“If there's any chance I'd hurt Clara, any at all, then I'm better off dead.”
The Doctor looked at him, calculating, pursed his lips and said, “Can't do that. Well, I can. I won't.”
The despair he'd felt earlier turned boiling, seething into something else, though something about it felt odd, off, deep under the surface. “You brought me back, without knowing if it'd be safe? And now you won't undo it?”
“It'd be wrong to-”
His hands found the collar of the Doctor's coat, and before he knew it he was slamming his wiry frame against the wall. “It was wrong to put her in danger,” he spat; the anger inside him made it almost impossible to speak, shaking him and clenching his jaw near shut as he trapped the Doctor in. It was an unfamiliar feeling, almost as though the rage had seeped in through cracks in his mind from the outside, and it was overwhelming in both its power and its strangeness. “Why'd you even do it? Why bring me back if I might hurt her?”
“Because she asked. She wanted me to, if I could. Are you cross with me?”
“Yes, of course I am. I should've known you would do this.”
“But you're not cross with her.” Off Danny's confused look, the Doctor smiled tightly. "Congratulations, PE. You passed the test."
He looked back, wariness and disgust growing inside of him. It felt new and familiar all at once, looking at that face and feeling those things. "That's it? Me saying I'd rather be dead, me getting mad at you, how is that passing a test?"
The Doctor shrugged and slid out from Danny's grasp. "She asked.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And you're cross with me, not her,” the Doctor said. “At any rate, I agree with you.”
“About what?” he asked.
He turned to leave. “I'd rather be dead than hurt her, too.”
*
He didn't know how he had survived without this. Clara was warm, soft, curled up next to him and he was so hyper-aware of her—this was what he'd come back for, and the sterile walls of the hospital room fell away around him. “I missed you,” he said. “I don't know how long it's been, but I've missed you without knowing it.”
She kissed his neck and jaw, and said, “Nine months.”
Danny twisted around and looked at her with surprise. “That long? Not that I could tell, mind.”
“It took a while to figure out how to bring you back,” she said. “Honestly, I didn't even know if it was possible, the Doctor told me he would try, and I just didn't get my hopes up. But he did it.” She broke into a wide grin, one that warmed him to his core. “And here you are.”
“Here I am.” His own smile faded slightly as he said, “The boy that I sent back—”
“He's fine. UNIT found his family, they're taken care of. He's happy.”
It didn't undo what he did, not in his conscience, but he closed his eyes and kissed her. “Good.”
For a moment, she lay quietly next to him; when she shifted and propped herself up on her elbow, he could feel a change in the room. “Danny, there's something I should tell you. I mean, I have a lot of things to tell you, but I’m going to tell you this first. It's in the past, it's not going to happen again, but—while you were dead. I mean, I didn't know if you could be brought back.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “You told me that, right? You didn't get your hopes up.”
“Right,” she said. “And so I—that is, me and the Doctor. We-” She stopped short, biting her lip and looking at him apologetically.
“Hey.” He pulled her down against him, soaking in the warmth of her and the feel of her heartbeat. “He's your best friend, there's nothing wrong with wanting someone there for you.”
She smiled sadly, shook her head. “That's not it. He wasn't—I mean, it's not his fault. I pushed him away, I thought he'd found his home and I didn't want him to feel like he had to stay,” she said.
“He found his home?”
“No,” she said. She looked up at him. “He thought—I told him you'd come back, and then he didn't want to be in the way. Danny, he was gone for months, and he only came back because—well, it doesn't really matter, it's just, long story short, we didn't see each other for a while. And when he came back, I left Earth. I was gone. It was overwhelming, I tried to move on but I'd been so alone without either of you and I just left with him.”
There was some part of him that thought he should feel alarm, or confusion, or some sort of concern over the Doctor drawing her away from humanity, but after all the things that had happened in the last few hours—he shook his head and said, “He's your best friend. When he came back, and you went with him, were you happy? Was it your choice?”
Clara looked like a weight had been lifted off her, and she collapsed against him again. “Yes.”
He smiled with a sigh and wrapped his arms around her. “Then I'm happy.”
She propped herself up again and looked down at him, her hair falling like a curtain around them. “You're really okay with it? It's not weird? I know you don't like him, I know you think he's dangerous.”
“Clara-” He let out a sigh and pulled her back down. He'd been dead, and now he wasn't, all thanks to her and her friend; and long before any of it, before he'd even ever met her, she'd been traveling the universe with this man. In the grand scheme of things—if he were being honest, and he was, he couldn't comprehend the grand scheme of things.
Still. He'd been dead. And now he wasn't. And even though he was with Clara, even though it was absolutely the choice he'd make over and over and over again, something burned inside of him. She was right that he still didn't like the Doctor—no matter what the Doctor had done, no matter how grateful he was for the Doctor finding this second chance for him, he was even more scared of him now, given he had the power to bring people back from the dead. But Danny looked at her, and saw the worry in her eyes; worry that he'd reject her, maybe, her true question hidden from even herself, the question of whether it was too much for him and whether he'd walk away.
“I know what you're thinking,” he said, with a half-grin to disarm, “but you're stuck with me. You've brought me back and I'm not going anywhere. I'll be following you around like a lost pup in no time, just you watch.”
Something worried and worrisome flashed through her eyes, as though she didn’t quite believe him, but it was soon washed away by something so whole and open to him. “I love you.”
“I know. I love you too.” He hesitated. He remembered what she’d told him, barely, about him being the last person who’d hear that from her, but he knew her too well. Let her know, he thought. Let her know it’s fine. “And you love him,” he added.
She looked away, swallowing, and it took her some time to answer. Finally, she nodded, her eyes hooded and not quite meeting his. “Yes.” Her voice was brittle through that one word, thick. “I can't choose, I can't-”
“I know,” he said, pulling her back to him. He kissed her cheek, her lips, her brow, in quick succession, as tears streaked down her face. “I know. You don't have to choose. You have so much love in your heart, Clara, I know.”
“I missed you,” she said.
He held her tighter and let her bury her face against his neck. “I'm here.”