Archive of Our Own ^beta

1. Way back when, in '67,
I was the dandy of Gamma Chi

"So what're these, chess pieces?"

"What're what?" The Doctor glanced over, distracted, before turning back to the bookshelves. "Oh. Those. Hold them until they get warm from your skin, then watch."

Three figurines lay in Clara's hand, weighty and with a dull pewter sheen: a little king—or so she'd guessed—with an elaborately sculpted headdress and flowing high-collared robes, a queen in tiara and belled sleeves, and a smaller figure she'd first taken for a pawn, but on closer examination looked like a child in skirts, holding a hoop. She did as the Doctor advised, curling her fingers around them to envelop them in flesh-heat and then, to her delight, saw them slowly lift their chins, raise their arms and begin dancing in solemn circles around her palm, their tiny clockwork footsteps like the gentle prods of a fingertip.

"Paërsomæn XI souvenir. Just cheap little tourist-shop trinkets that do that one trick but Victoria—I told you about Victoria, didn't I?—she loved them, she had dozens of them by the time she left. Those must've got lost in the shuffle. They were painted but you handle them enough, it all peels off." The Doctor pulled several more volumes from the shelves, shook the pages as if expecting something to fall from them and then, frowning impatiently, shoved them back into place. "Useless to me, you've got to be a Paërsi or a human or some other creature with a core temperature like the inside of a sauna or you can't activate the—where did I put it?"

"If you'd be halfway sensible and tell me what you're looking for, I could help you find it—"

"Don't be ridiculous, the last thing I need is you tearing the entire TARDIS to pieces. Look at the state your room's in!"

Clara glanced around her, taking in the rifled bookshelves, the upended banks of drawers behind the console, the piles of paper and old clothing and dozens of bizarre—and occasionally sentient—knickknacks scattered from console room to wardrobe room and back again, raised her eyebrows, and decided to let it slide. He was quite clearly in A Mood, which, while always amusing, occasionally required careful handling. She placed the dancing figurines on a shelf, watching them slow and halt in place. "It's disgusting," she agreed, "the way I sometimes leave my shoes beside the bed or a jumper thrown on a chair—and what are these?"

He turned around again, not hiding his impatience, then frowned at the half-dozen metal discs, none of them bigger than a fingertip, she now held out for inspection. "Put those away."

"Why?" Clara asked.

"Because I told you to. Put them away."

"I might, if you tell me what they are."

"Sleep patches," said the Doctor, after a pause. "You slap them on your skin, like for motion sickness. Too potent for a human, you'd be narcoleptic for weeks on end. You lot already waste a shocking amount of your lives unconscious—"

"Not even just one?" said Clara. "It's the end of term and I'm worn out, and since you won't let me help you look for whatever the hell you lost I might as well have a nice long nap."

"You can't have one." He actually strode over to her, scooped the discs from her palm and tossed them back into an open drawer, then began rummaging through its neighbor muttering beneath his breath. Whatever he was seeking, it wasn't there either. "You're like the cat, you know—she figured out how to hook her paw around those raised edges there, on the top, and pull all the drawers open. It was all a marvelous profusion of toys, especially anything razor sharp or poisonous or explosive—"

"Cat?" Clara glanced around her, as if expecting a phantom animal to materialize and twine itself around her shins. "You had a cat? Since when?"

"Ages ago. Bodies ago. After Donna left, when I was traveling by myself." A shadow crossed the Doctor's face, then departed. "Renne, 1943, right after the Germans had bombed it to a crater. I don't remember why I was there, that one was always finding places he could go sulk and feel sorry for his exquisite self—but there she was, half-dead in one of the rubble piles, little black cat with bits of white. Some family's cherished pet, she still had a collar on, but the family were all gone. Fled, or dead." He stalked back behind the console, kneeling before a steamer trunk buckling at the seams and tossing its contents every which way. "Where the bloody hell is it—"

"I like cats too," Clara said. "What happened to her, then? She didn't fall into a vortex or get some sort of space-distemper or—"

He wrenched his head from the depths of the trunk. "What d'you mean, what happened to her? Lived out her life on the TARDIS. One day she went into hiding, like they do when they feel the end coming, and when I found her again she'd already gone. Thirteen, fourteen years, that's not such a bad eyeblink." He gestured vaguely toward one of the half-opened drawers. "Her collar's in there, somewhere. You can't have it, it's mine."

Clara smiled. She couldn't help it. "So what did you call her?" He blinked in apparent confusion. "Her name, Doctor. Thirteen, fourteen years shedding all over your console, you did bother to give her a name, didn't you?"

"Of course I didn't give her a name—she told me her name, once she'd got her bearings and stopped hiding in the back kitchen. I speak cat, it's not exactly linguistically complex. Rather like most human languages."

"I'll take that as a compliment, just to spite you. What was her name, then?"

"'Myself.'" He shrugged at Clara's slightly disappointed expression. "What? She was a cat. Cats aren't terribly long on imagination, too much brainpower given over to self-regard and murder. Rather like most humans, come to think..."

He dove back into the trunk, muttering to himself in escalating irritation. Clara leafed idly through the book she'd been reading and, unable to concentrate on it, opened another drawer (curling her fingers together, in imitation of a paw, and pulling strictly by the fingertips) and, unexpectedly, released a strong, nostril-tickling odor of tobacco. Bit of a sweet-cherry scent to it, not unpleasant. So, she wanted to ask, but wouldn't, if she was Myself then who are you, the Great I Am? Not that she took names as some all-important test of affection—she'd once had an absolutely marvelous night with a man whose (marvelous) body she'd committed to very fond memory, but the music in the club had been deafening and she'd never quite got his name—but it was just one of those things that, because she had no way of knowing it or even how to start searching for it, made her brain itch for the answer, just a bit, like her nose beneath the tobacco. She pulled out a filigreed snuffbox, wondering idly how many kings she could've ransomed with the sapphires thickly studding its sides, then something stuck to the bottom fluttered free and she picked it up. One photograph, two fleetingly familiar faces.

"Found it!" she called out.

The Doctor was halfway across the room before his steps slowed and he scowled. She grinned, unrepentant, and held the picture out for his inspection. "How," she asked, "did you manage not to go all Isadora Duncan with that ridiculous scarf? Is that why you regenerated?"

"Those stilt-shoes you clomp around in, how d'you manage not to fall off them and snap your neck? They don't make you look the least bit taller, you know—"

"I haven't got at all far to fall, I'm safe. So," Clara asked, "am I right? Was this you?"

The Doctor looked taken aback. "What do you mean, was that me? You met him!"

"No, I didn't—I saw him, or some fragment of me saw him, and I barely remember it anyway. And you said you could regenerate female too, right? So, was he you?" She tapped a finger on the other face in the photograph, blonde hair and a straw boater and a smile that was simultaneously open and beaming and filled with reserve. A rather alien reserve. "Or were you her?"

The Doctor contemplated the question, and then he smiled. "For a bit there, just a little while? I wasn't entirely certain. I recommend the feeling."

Clara studied the picture again, glancing from the Doctor she knew to the strange man with the mad hair and the piercing, protuberant, faraway eyes (though that much hadn't changed, hardly a whit), then the woman beside him. They looked, just the smallest bit around the reserved, alien edges, like they might've just had a wonderful time in bed, rolled out, got dressed and decided to wander around Paris until that post-bed feeling of ludicrous, what-a-great-wide-wonderful-world well-being finally wore off. Lather, rinse, repeat. So, no matter how he behaved like a random hug was a garroting wire, did he miss all that? He'd had plenty of it with River, she'd figured that much out (Donna, she still wasn't certain what had gone on there but there was something, only discernible around the edges, that seemed to hurt even worse than River's death), doubtless all sorts of other women. And men. And plants and birds and rocks and trees and more power to him. "So, was this what you were looking for?"

"No. Why didn't you try to talk to him, anyway? Bit rude of you."

"Did you know," she asked him, "that a full-grown North American grizzly bear can decapitate a human with a single swipe of its paw?"

He blinked. "That's marvelous for the bear but I don't see what it's got to do with—"

"He looked a bit like he could do that. Just a tiny bit, around the edges. If you pushed him. That, I remember." She frowned. "What's so funny?"

The Doctor shrugged, not concealing his amusement as he strode back across the room. "I just never imagined you could feel really intimidated by anything. Much less...him."

This dismissiveness irked her. "I liked him," she said. "At least I think I remember deciding I liked him, he looked very...himself. What's wrong with him, anyway?"

"God, where to start? Pop-eyed swollen-headed dribble-mouthed histrionic mad git, thought he'd worked out the whole universe and all its parallel pockets on a cream cracker—well, you know how it is, when you're young." He looked up from the trunk again, clutching something that resembled a petrified raccoon in a space helmet and giving Clara an appraising, not entirely approving glance. "Though I suppose that's becoming a bit of a receding memory for you too, never mind all the paint and stilts—"

"Thank you very much, I'm only twenty-nine!"

The Doctor waved a dismissive hand. "In the linear sense, yes, but that's worthless. The actual number of years you've spent traveling? Back and forth, forth and back? You're a hundred and eighty-five on a good day. It's starting to show on your skin, you know, nothing etches in the crow's feet like diving into the time stream again and again like some mad puddle duck—"

"And if you're this played out," she retorted, "I don't even want to think what your portrait in the attic must look like." His jibes and baits were about as cutting as one of her duller students' taunts, and she gave them precisely as much consideration. "Look, whatever it is you won't tell me you lost you're not finding it any time soon, so can we go somewhere? If I wanted to stand around watching someone tear their house apart, I could visit my stepmother before one of her bloody jumble sales. Let's go somewhere."

"We just got back from somewhere."

"Weeks ago." Clara ran fingertips over the edges of her hair, currently in that shaggy, slightly irritating in-between stage; she'd meant to grow it out from the bob, but was now wondering if that were a mistake. Danny had been useless on the subject, he liked it "just fine" both ways, and for reasons she couldn't quite articulate—it wasn't, she was certain, any fear of a tactless rejoinder—she felt shy of asking the Doctor. "This, right here, Doctor? This is not an awfully big adventure. It's so awfully small I'm about to set fire to your jacket, just for the novelty of watching you run around flapping your arms and yelling. Can we—"

"Why is it absolutely impossible to find anything when I need it!" This was shouted at the ceiling, while the TARDIS continued to hum and murmur without taking notice. "You organize everything just as you require it, decades' worth of work, and then someone"—he shot an accusatory glare at Clara, who snorted and made a show of resuming her book—"throws everything every which way just to see what'll happen, because I'm surrounded by addlepated children. I give up, I'll find it some century wedged in one of your slippers. Let's go somewhere. Where d'you want to go?"

"New York City," she said promptly. "Two days from now."

He blinked. She waited for him to ask how she'd fixed on that precise moment—it amused him, she'd often noticed, to indulge an extremely specific temporal whim, the more frivolous the better, then pretend he'd been the one to think of it. Instead, though, he looked like Clara had felt as a child, whenever Dad wanted her to be excited about a week with Gran in Wakefield. "Must we?" he said.

"Why couldn't we?" Her fingertips rubbed at the ends of her hair again. "I know, New York's not an alien interstellar luxury train but—"

"Stop fiddling with your hair like that, it'll all fall out." His expression was hesitant, almost wary. "I've still got a bit of a grudge against the place, if you must know. I...lost something quite valuable there."

"Not the thing you've been looking for? Just now?"

She waited. Silence. He studied her face, observing her with intense concentration, and yet, at the very same time, he was somehow somewhere else entirely. How many different versions of events in how many different, equally possible timelines could that brain of his grasp, all at once? Could he actually experience them all simultaneously, so he really was here before her and yet still somewhere far over there (and there, and there, and there)? She envied that, rather ferociously sometimes. The closest she could ever get was making it all up in her head, all the ways something could have been instead, and wasn't—but in the end, humans always got only the one choice, and usually a choice thrust upon them. It wasn't fair. Why couldn't five, seven, twenty-six different ways something might have gone, if only the smallest variable were altered, be the truth for her as well as him?

"Would you really like to go?" he finally said.

"It's just...there's this reading, and a book signing." She held out her book, feeling a little abashed but not nearly enough to back down. "Figures, doesn't it, I miss her every time she's doing one in Britain, but now she's got a big new American publisher and they're doing all sorts of publicity and I never got to properly see New York, the last time I was there, and I've always wanted to, so I thought...maybe we could go. We can leave right afterward, if you want."

The Doctor took the book from her hands, and with almost startling speed his expression changed. He frowned at the cover, seeming to read the title and the author a dozen times in succession as if assuring himself of something, and then leafed through a few pages, seemingly at random. Except, Clara sensed, it wasn't at all at random. Then, strangely, he smiled.

"Set the controls for the heart of the rotten apple," he declared, and without further protest or explanation headed straight for the console.

******

2. There's a silver star in the book of liars by your name

What Danny often asked himself was, did Clara really think he believed her? That he hadn't long since worked out for himself—not right away, not without thinking it through, but it hadn't exactly been Fermat's Last Theorem—that when she promised up and down she was finished traveling with the old man, had said goodbye to all that without any second thoughts, that she was lying through her teeth? He hadn't said a word, hadn't even hinted he knew, but did she even suspect that he could, metaphorically speaking, almost smell it on her? There was a difference about her when she'd been somewhere with the Doctor; Danny could sense it, a sort of gently enthralled well-being that emanated from her like a scent, a perfume, an aura. It wasn't that she wasn't hiding it, it was—he suspected—that she didn't even realize that she couldn't. Love was hard to hide, that way. And yet things went on, just as before. Clara never seemed bored or distracted around him. Often Danny forgot all about the Doctor, for long stretches of time. And then, there were times like now.

The thing was that, as their headmaster would insist on phrasing it, Clara's skill sets were not commensurate. There was lying, and then there was fronting for all your lies, and as they'd grown closer and she'd begun to relax around Danny, to lose the natural protective distance anyone had with a semi-stranger, she'd started to forget exactly what she'd told him and when. Her mother—the obituary clipping was right there to read, wedged in the corner of the framed photograph on Clara's desk— had died of some undiagnosed heart condition, it turned out, and not in the Helios Airways plane crash. She didn't have an older sister, in Toronto or anywhere else. She hadn't actually read English at Birmingham, nor Newcastle, nor London, and when he asked how she'd come to Coal Hill she always became vague and changed the subject. She didn't have an Israeli ex-husband who'd become some big Silicon Valley boffin—or any sort of ex-husband at all—and Mr. Boffin hadn't bought her that flat he'd always wondered exactly how she could afford.

Why lie so often, and so ludicrously? It was, he sometimes thought, almost as though the urge to lie about something, it hardly mattered what, was some sort of innate itch that kept building up inside her, a permanent sub rosa chicken pox, and that the more petty, fantastical falsehoods were the most harmless means of scratching it. Well, it was nothing to him if she had ditched Elon Musk to teach Thomas Hardy, and there were plenty of things about his own life he had no intention of ever disclosing. But this...this was different. They both knew it. The chicken pox lies, those were careless and contradictory and sometimes outright shoddy because even piled up in proliferation, their weight and substance didn't really matter. This, though. The thing that hurt wasn't even the lie itself, or the fact of her lying; it was that he could see her, sense her, being so very careful, about this falsehood and this one only, never to let her story slip.

He rubbed his temples, then reached over to the stereo and turned the music up: Coltrane, Ascension. (Clara was clearly telling the truth, more's the pity, when she said free jazz made her want to leap out a window to make it stop.) It didn't help. If he could even explain to himself why sometimes all this barely bothered him at all, amused him actually, and why at other times—like right now—it gnawed at his insides like an ulcer, he'd be far closer to either reconciling himself to it, or making a clean break.

He'd told Clara he was worried for her safety. And that was absolutely true, he worried about that every day (but then he'd been born the sort of person who worried that every traffic delay was a fatal car accident, every school memo was a surprise redundancy, every doctor's visit would unearth a terminal cancer, but as someone like Clara would surely have no patience for all that he'd tried his best, from the very start, to keep it to himself)—he worried about that, but it wasn't the real reason. They both knew it wasn't the real reason. The Doctor himself and what he meant to Clara, that was the reason, and that fact was an insurmountable embarrassment, and if Danny hated anything, absolutely anything in life, it was to be embarrassed, caught out, in front of anyone who knew they had the upper hand. And reveled in it. Welcome to Danny Pink: The Formative Years, all over again.

(That he hated, and also what d'you teach, anyway? P.E.? Got to be P.E., soldier, it couldn't possibly be maths. Keep it up, old man. You go right on and keep that up.)

Sometimes, in between marking papers or planning activities for his little school squadron or absorbing himself in what—since the Doctor, after all, claimed that time was not linear but a sort of snarled twisted loop—was still even now the shape of jazz to come, Danny found himself in silent internal argument, ticking off all the reasons why despite everything, despite what might be happening even as he sat here at his kitchen table, he should not decide it was over. He liked Clara, was the thing; besides caring about her and loving her and thinking she had a pretty face and good legs and a really marvelous bum he simply liked her, her company, the whole scattered collection of beliefs and habits and outright peculiarities that made her what she was. Not that it was a shock, English teacher and all, but she was a great reader, something not as true about himself as he'd wish but that he admired immensely in other people. She took a perverse pleasure in embracing anything anyone else wrote off, declaring offhand but with complete sincerity that Schubert's lieder weren't a patch on Barry Manilow or that Pamela was the funniest, if most unintentional comedy ever written in the English language. They had a lot of fun in bed. He enjoyed hearing her talk about, well, nearly anything. She hadn't asked about Afghanistan, not after the one time. She hadn't, thank God, ever even hinted at his meeting her (actual) family—not that she was hiding him, he knew that, it was just that wasn't how her mind worked and he was grateful it didn't. He wasn't good with people's families. He'd never had any practice.

And so what if other things were going on, the obvious things you'd suspect if your girlfriend was going behind your back with another man and leading you a merry dance about it? The things she'd sworn up and down hadn't happened, never would or could happen, but then if she could happily keep a secret like this for that long then what were the chances she really—

And now, even he knew he was being ridiculous. Think, Pink. What if she were? So? Seriously, Pink, be rational and clear-minded and scrupulously fair about this: Yes, he, Danny, had turned the TARDIS down, had chosen his own home planet with no regrets—but what if some other immortal mad genius had offered him the floating box, the free rides around the universe, the whole of time to reshape and refashion (because he didn't believe that "history can't be rewritten" line, didn't believe it for a second)? What if it hadn't been the cranky two-faced condescending self-righteous sanctimonious turkey-necked prune-faced berk, but instead...oh, just hypothetically, some alluring spacewoman? Very tall, sumptuous shape, dark velvety skin, wearing something with a low neck and high hemline and spangles, a great shiny lot of spangles. How about that? (Grace Jones? That worked. Tina Turner? Outer space Tina Turner? Definitely. The Ikettes years, Auntie Entity, he wasn't fussy.) Could he, would he, really resist that? Honest answer, he wasn't entirely sure he would. And if he didn't resist it, would he want to hurt Clara's feelings by pushing that fact in her face, at every turn? No, of course he bloody wouldn't. So, if the circumstances had been just a little bit different...mightn't he have done exactly what she was doing now? And in that case, getting angry at Clara felt like the height of hypocrisy—so when you got down to it, really, who was he to fault her?

All right, then, he thought, as he leafed through the small, wine-colored book he kept returning to despite the teetering pile of geometry quizzes right by his elbow, that was Clara sorted. (She didn't like it, his speaking of feelings and thoughts and people as though they were numbers to be jotted up in long neat columns, but he'd learned years ago, when the most minor worry or mishap or fleeting memory could send him veering into panic, that such methodical, bloodless thinking calmed him down and even now, when his head had settled down a bit more, it was an ingrained habit.) Parson Parsec, though, that was another matter. Entirely.

He had work to do, papers to mark, he needed to put this book down once and for all and get started. They were nearing the end of term and poor Alfie Harris still couldn't tell a secant from a tangent line and if Danny didn't put a good dent in things now, tonight, all this weekend, he'd end up hopelessly behind. He definitely didn't have any time to travel across London, on a wild hunt after even he didn't know what breed of goose, possibly to find out things that would only make him feel even worse—although, all he had to do was get off at the Ealing Broadway station and walk a few blocks northeast. And he wouldn't possibly be there more than an hour or two. At most.

He'd got the address from the Doctor. Or, to be perfectly precise about it (precision, he informed his students, whenever they balked at his insistence they document every last step in solving every equation, precision was the one hallmark of any worthwhile endeavor and roll your eyes all you like, doesn't make it less true), when he'd stepped into the TARDIS for the first and only time and heard what the Doctor was saying about him he'd felt angry enough to want to take something. Something small but significant that the Doctor might actually miss, tear the place apart looking for, and yet never even once suspect dopey lunkheaded old P.E. had swiped. (Was it really as drearily petty as you-took-from-me, I-take-from-you? Just that sort of bog-standard macho pissing contest? No comment.)

He'd opened a random drawer behind the TARDIS console when both their backs were turned and grabbed the first thing he saw, a little cloth-bound, wine-colored book with all sorts of loose papers stuffed between its pages. A diary, it looked like, hopefully with some awful adolescent space-poetry Danny could snicker about at his leisure, but in fact it was a scrapbook of sorts, with a little bit of writing and a great number of ephemeral souvenirs. The writing, he couldn't read; much of it looked like little drawings, circles and arcs and loops that clustered, intersected, danced in each other's orbits like a thousand-some tiny constellations in ink, and whether they were ideograms or astronomy symbols or just an obsessive series of doodles he hadn't any idea. The other things, though: so many small details, significant keepsakes, truly personal mementos that quite despite himself and his own wish to embarrass back Danny felt, leafing through it, increasingly persistent twinges of guilt. He still kept it, though. That was the rule he'd set for himself: he got to keep it precisely one month for each time the old man called him "P.E." which meant it was his, Danny's, rightful property for, oh, a good two more years at least? Your fault, old man. Happy hunting.

And in the meantime, so many artifacts, who knew of what. A perfume advert, its scented sample still attached, folded up to fit the page. A letter on what looked like very old, fragile paper—he'd handled it very carefully, using the bare edges of his fingertips so their oils wouldn't stain it—but he couldn't read French either so he refolded and restored it. Some pressed, half-crumbled petals, luminescent blue, from he couldn't guess what flower. A yellowed flyer for Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall. And, jammed in the back with a recipe for bananas Foster, a photograph of a whippet-thin bloke in horn-rims and an ill-fitting pinstriped suit, grinning, arm thrown around a woman of fifty-five or sixty; they looked like they were out on a pier somewhere—Cleethorpes, Bournemouth?—their dark hair windblown and his body leaning and spilling against hers like a collapsing umbrella. His expression, his posture were half-theatrical, half-yielding, as if he'd started out mugging for the camera and then suddenly, just before the shutter clicked, realized that he was allowed to dispense with the pratfalls and relax, and simply be. She, her own arm around his listing shoulders, the other hand clutching her hat to her head, she simply looked happy. On the back, in small, neat handwriting:

My favorite of the pictures Maria insisted on taking. She was this close to having me send it taped to a jar of Horlicks, she thinks this new you needs feeding up. (Can't entirely say I disagree!) When you reach Arcturus IX, tell them 13 Bannerman Road says hello.

"Your" Sarah Jane

A red pen with fresher, newer ink had edited this note, underlining the Your and excising each quotation mark with a twin little loop and line. There were several other photographs wedged in the book's pages—Polaroids to daguerreotypes—and he wasn't certain why he kept returning to this particular one, sometimes actually pinning it up like a souvenir from his own seaside holiday, to glance at while he worked. It was the woman, he thought. He liked her face, but he couldn't have said why; plenty of people had open, kind-seeming faces, often deceptively so, but he'd have bet money he didn't have that what she looked like, she really was. He had no logical justification for that feeling, it was just...something he sensed hovering around her, like a scent. An aura. Perhaps it was the handwriting, its quiet, weighted economy of words, its careful but not miserly use of a very small available space. Precision.

Sarah Jane. Maria. He was certain he'd never heard those names from Clara. And what had happened to them both? Safe and well, apparently, despite their run-ins with Pruneface Né Pinstripes, back on Earth refreshed and taking in the salt air. But then again, just how old was that photograph?

13 Bannerman Road. He kept turning that address over in his mind.

******

3. Who is the gaucho, amigo?
Why is he standing in your spangled leather poncho
And your elevator shoes?

The bookstore was small and cramped but flooded with light from large banks of windows, and it was a real bookstore: no shelves cluttered with stuffed dolls and sweets and desk toys and greeting cards, just actual books and, bowing to reality, a discreet display of e-readers. Even the Doctor looked approving, and even if not Clara didn't care; despite the banks of tourists blocking every sidewalk, the astonishing piles of bin bags and a persistent, mingled smell of popcorn and urine in the air, New York was just as she'd hoped. She'd practiced her best scowl for the streets but still managed to get smiled at by a busker in front of the bookstore, a middle-aged violinist whose long trenchcoat, lipstick-red ankle boots and cascades of curly, salt-and-pepper hair looked immediately familiar, though Clara couldn't think why. Danny would've loved her music, strange rapid-fire atonal stuff that, while it wasn't at all to Clara's taste, obviously took a formidable amount of skill. As they stepped inside the Doctor craned his neck, taking in the bookstore staff setting up a microphone, the woman patiently waiting beside them, and the rapidly filling rows of folding chairs before her; he nodded to himself, as though pleased with what he saw.

"It's always the quiet ones," he said. "Well? Go on then, get a seat."

"Don't you want to introduce yourself?" Clara asked.

"I think she might've had quite enough of me and mine for one lifetime," the Doctor said, without rancor. "I'll be at the concert outside."

Twenty more, deeply irritating minutes of mike-tapping, cord-untwisting and needless, droning introduction—what did they think, that everyone clutching their copies and jostling for chairs had just wandered in off the street?—and then, finally, the author herself stepped up. Her hair was in a neatly braided knot, her clothes as conservative as some rising corporate functionary's—which, given the incendiary nature of her writing, Clara suspected was a deliberately perverse optic. She smiled at the audience, looking abashed enough to evoke a smattering of friendly laughter.

"I'm Tish Jones," she said. "Like you just heard. And here's a few stories from my book."

She read with a straightforward, matter-of-fact calm, like a court reporter reciting the transcript from some particularly awful trial, and that only lent her words more power. Clara, listening, felt transfixed, and from the weight and tension of the silence around her she was far from the only one. Stories. What wasn't a story, what mundane, innocuous truth couldn't be wrenched and twisted inside out to expose some far greater, more important reality—and why, Clara thought as she joined in the applause, were writers and artists applauded for doing that, but not anyone else? And why—she thought, as the audience Q&A session devolved into inevitable speechmaking—did everyone want to believe everything made-up was actually "real" at the root, when the point was that reality was what you made it?

Stand There and Look Gorgeous, rejected by dozens of publishers before a microscopic press picked it up, had been a tiny pebble in a field of boulders, and then fervent reviews and word of mouth had sent it rolling downhill faster and faster, gathering speed and power until the pebble revealed itself to be a grenade, and exploded. Nobody was saying "obscure" anymore, they were saying things like "harrowing" and "mindbending" and "new feminist classic" and even though Clara—even having read it four times—still wasn't certain just what she'd read, she agreed with all of that. She could've spent whole classes just on the lead character Letty and her antagonist in all the stories, a mysterious Saxon soldier who followed her across centuries of British history in hundreds of different, surreal guises: Letty's assassin, her slave, her husband, her grotesque clever-Hans beast of burden. Who the hell cared if any of it were "metaphorically factual", as that berk monopolizing the audience microphone kept insisting? The signed copy would go on her special shelf, just above the desk where she marked all her student papers, sitting quietly but not placidly alongside Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Jane Bowles, Kathy Acker, Audre Lorde, Joanna Russ. ("Ah, your whinging-women shelf," a former boyfriend had cheerfully commented, on what he did not then realize would be their final date.) And the Doctor had met her, not just met her but knew her whole family, apparently had practically lived with them all at some point and he had never, until about three hours ago, seen fit to mention this fact? Not even in passing? She could bloody kill him sometimes, she really could.

The line to the autograph table inched forward steadily and slowly, very slowly because nearly everyone in it seemed compelled to grasp Tish's hand, indulge in verbose admiration or a sotto voce story of some bad time, some hard emotion, some "unacceptable" thought she'd captured for them on paper, to tell her how deeply she understood them. Clara, watching all this therapeutic American oversharing, determined to hold her tongue, get her signature and leave the poor woman in peace. She turned away, peering idly out the bookstore's front display window and contemplating lunch, and there she saw the Doctor standing with the busker, her violin set aside as he gripped her hands in his own, staring into the busker's eyes with an unblinking, almost feverishly intense hunger.

Clara blinked, and stared too, and as the line propelled her a few steps forward kept her head turned back as she waited to see—she didn't even know what. The busker wore lipstick-red gloves against the early spring chill, a little splash of color against the Doctor's black jacket because he was, just now, practically holding her hands against his heart. Hearts. Her face, half-hidden by all that unkempt hair, looked solemnly attentive as his lips kept moving, as he said something Clara had no way of making out, but his eyes. They were absolutely fixed on the woman, they'd gone wide as if he were trying to take in absolutely as much of her as he could, and that smile, Clara knew that smile. His predecessor's, whenever he looked at something he thought impossibly wonderful, and rare, and precious. Like, say, Clara herself.

Some part of her twitched to duck out of line, to go out there and discover just what the wall of glass was concealing, but that was just childish and besides, her interruption would surely spoil...whatever this was, for the Doctor. The unsettling thing wasn't that he'd stumbled over someone else he apparently knew, knew very well—frankly, old as he was and the places he'd gone, she was only surprised that didn't happen nonstop—but his face. That smile. Who was that woman? Was it the blonde woman, from that photograph, also regenerated into a brand-new body? But that was impossible, with Gallifrey and all its Time Lords save one forever lost. Wasn't it?

Or was that just another story?

And why—and how—was she, Clara, dead certain she'd also seen that face before?

"Are you still in line?" a voice behind Clara asked, with unconcealed impatience. Clara started, wrenched her attention from the window and, only slightly distracted, approached the author's table. When she'd got her signature (and, because she couldn't stop herself, gushed just a little bit, and got another abashed look of sincere pleasure) and weaved her way through the crowd, the Doctor was standing there in the bookstore doorway, waiting for her.

"Well?" he asked. "Was it worth the wait?"

"Completely," she said, because it had been. "How was the music?"

"Occasionally melodic. Mostly harmolodic. So where are we going now?"

Clara gazed at him silently, as if considering the question. He didn't look transported, not any longer, just...serene. Distantly serene. His face was like the bookstore's front window: an attractive, illuminated, only seemingly transparent wall.

"The Cloisters?" she finally said. "I know I said we'd leave right after this, but—"

"You're always all promises, that's no surprise." He offered his arm. "The lilacs aren't in bloom yet, but we might catch the last of the winter aconite if we hurry..."

As they exited the bookstore she glanced swiftly to her left, then her right, along the visible length of the sidewalk. The busker and her violin were long gone.

******

4. Any world that I'm welcome to
Is better than the one I come from

Bannerman Road was wide and spacious and thoroughly suburban, so much so that as Danny craned his neck to read the house numbers (57, 53, 49...), he felt a sort of nebulous nostalgia: Exactly the kind of place he'd longed to live in as a child, with a mum and dad of his own fresh out of the box and still smelling of new-molded plastic. It might all be a bit quiet for him now (37, 33, 29...), but traces of the old fondness lingered, gave him a pleasant ongoing distraction (21, 17...) from the question of just what the hell he was doing here. What exactly did he imagine this woman could tell him, assuming she didn't dismiss him as some loony or stalker and slam the door in his face, assuming she even still lived there? There was a car parked on the curb, and as he stood there in the empty street contemplating just turning tail he saw a small flash of movement at one window, a half-seen figure crossing from one room to another. Right, then. Time to step right up and be thrown out on his ear once and for all.

Several moments passed after he rang the doorbell, and nothing. Probably for the best. Caught between disappointment and relief, he turned and started back down the driveway, and then heard a voice from behind him calling, "Excuse me!"

She looked almost exactly as she had in the photograph: neatly trimmed dark hair just barely touching her shoulders, an open strong-boned face, dark eyes with a permanently inquisitive arch to the brows. Plain neat clothing, utilitarian but not drab, no different than a hundred thousand other middle-aged women you might pass on the street every day. Perhaps he had passed her, unwittingly, perhaps every day. "Sorry," she said. "The kettle was on and I didn't hear—"

"Sarah Jane Smith?" he asked. His voice was stiffer and more formal than he'd planned. The military in him still came out when he was nervous.

She studied him, a little line appearing between her brows. "I'm sorry," she said, "have we met?"

There were different ways of asking that question. There was plain, honest, open inquiry, a frank acknowledgement of ignorance, and then there was the freezing, hostile politeness of imminent dismissal. From her eyes, her smile of someone confused but willing to place the confusion on her own shoulders and be convinced, it was the former. There was something questing about her expression, he thought, something perpetually and hungrily curious, but it wasn't intrusive or presumptuous, it was just...an ongoing need to know. Clara had that, a little.

"I—I heard you used to travel with the Doctor. In the TARDIS." The short speech he'd planned had dissolved on the instant. They were smarter in the old days, he thought, writing it all out first in letters of introduction. "My—Clara, a friend of mine, my girlfriend, she's, sometimes she's traveled with the Doctor, I mean, the Doctor as he is now, and I met him, and—" Dear Christ. "I was just wondering what you could tell me about him. Things that aren't too personal. Since I re—since he said you've known him for a long time." Stop talking, Rupert. Stop. "I'm—Danny. Danny Pink. I'm not some sort of nutter, I swear. I teach maths. At Coal Hill. The Doctor was there, sort of undercover. For a little while."

She still hadn't said anything. He shifted from one foot to another, his face starting to burn. "Sorry. I don't mean to—I really have met him, I'm not making it up. I swear. Sorry for bothering you. I should leave—"

"I babble a bit when I'm nervous, too," she said, before he could turn and flee. "It's all right. I was just standing here marveling that I could possibly intimidate anyone else into it."

The humor in her expression took any sting from the words. "I'm not good with new people," he said. "Sometimes." As if she couldn't see that for herself.

"I think you're doing well enough. So what's he doing lurking around another school?" she asked, not bothering to hide her amusement. "He's either got a chronic chalk dust habit or we've been invaded, yet again. But we're still standing here so it can't have been quite so bad, this time."

Another school? "It's a long story—"

"Well, in that case," she said, "you have to come in and tell us about it. Like it or not."

Her smile broadened. Past her shoulder he could see a bare few feet of hallway ending in an open door and, half-visible beyond it, someone sitting at a table, craning their neck to see what was keeping Sarah on the stoop. "You've got company, I can't—"

"Come on," Sarah insisted. "Jo loves new people. If I don't introduce you, she won't forgive me."

He felt slightly trapped, but then he'd got himself into this, hadn't he. He followed Sarah over the threshold and down the hall into a small, pin-neat kitchen awash in the afternoon sun. Another woman sat at the kitchen table. Sarah's age, give or take, pale blonde hair gone white, big eyes and a broad smile in a sharp-boned little face that moved in the oddest way as she examined them both: tilting far to the left, then to the right, then so far downward her chin nearly touched her collarbone. It was frankly unsettling, as though she were an archaeologist examining some bizarre artifact from every possible angle, but Sarah didn't seem to notice or think anything amiss.

"Danny Pink," she said, "meet Jo Grant Jones. Danny knows the Doctor, too—"

"Really? Oh, good." As she smiled at him, Jo tilted her head yet again, back to the right. She sounded, he thought, genuinely very pleased. "You can tell us all about the new model, we haven't met him yet. I keep inviting him round for tea—"

"You know he likes inviting himself so much more." Sarah rummaged in the cupboards, producing a white- and gold-striped box of tea, then pulled forks and spoons from a drawer. "Or at least the ones we've known all have, if this new one's gone over all bashful—"

"I don't actually know anything about him." Danny, now sitting across from Jo without being entirely certain how he'd got there, felt the need to clarify once and for all. "I only met him the once or twice, and it...didn't really go well."

They both looked unfazed. "Oh, that's him," Jo said, Sarah nodding in agreement as she steeped a tea smelling faintly of coconut. "Right old grouch, always has to bristle a bit before he decides to smile—you can't take it personally, you know, you really can't. He thinks he knows humans up, down, left, right and center but we still confuse him. It's our one deadly weapon." She leaned forward, a confiding look on her face. "Honestly, between you and me? I think he really is a bit shy."

"Shy!" Sarah laughed, heartily enough that despite his discomfiture, Danny's own lips twitched. "Shy? That's the Doctor all right, shy and retiring and blushingly modest—I love the man but Danny, you've met him too, if egotism could fly his brain is Heathrow."

"Well, anyway," Jo said (and, Danny noticed, she didn't argue the point), "it's nothing to do with you, Danny—d'you mind if I call you Danny?—I swear on a stack of Venusian postcards it isn't." Her head was moving back to the left, with a smooth, steady rotation that made Danny suddenly think of a satellite dish. "He gets his back up and that makes the other person get their back up, because naturally they think it's to do with them, as you would, and then everything starts off on the wrong footing and he doesn't even see it. It's like I said, humans still confuse him."

"He seems to do just fine with female humans," said Danny.

She must have heard the edge in his voice, they both must have, because he'd entirely failed to conceal it. Again, neither of them seemed put off, or surprised. "Well, he's horribly old-fashioned that way," Jo said. "Even now. Thinks women are all made of finer, better, more malleable stuff and all that Victorian rot—just ask Sarah, he won't admit it but he's never shaken that, no matter how much she's worked on him about it. He's such an uptight old duffer sometimes, y'know?"

She laughed, and to Danny's surprise reached out and pressed his hand. "And he does fine with us now, when it's it's ages gone by, but he didn't even want me near him when we first met. Though of course, it was his lab and I was terrible about breaking test tubes and things. D'you want some Paris-Brest, Danny? Neil, my son, he's a marvelous chef, he baked it for us but Cliff, that's my husband, he's got to watch his sweets and it turns out Sarah's allergic to almonds and I can't finish it all myself. Have some."

Danny half-rose from his chair. "I shouldn't—I mean, I should go. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your tea—"

"Oh, no," Jo said, dismayed. "You're not leaving now, are you? You just got here. Don't let me put you off—"

"You haven't got to sing for your supper," Sarah assured him. "Promise. I was just teasing. But at least have a cup of tea."

"Please?" Jo said.

The two pairs of eyes intent on him made his face go hot—it wasn't at all like dealing with a few dozen students, however obnoxious, who mistakenly thought they could stare him down—but as he hovered half in his chair and half out of it Danny suddenly realized that more than anything else, even if he learned no more from the entire experience than that the Doctor was crotchety and vain and besotted with another species' women (and tell him something he didn't already know), he wanted to stay. It was something about the sunlight, the way it streamed unimpeded into the little kitchen. The play of the light over that entire quiet street. Sarah's smile and Jo's easy solicitude and that had been a bit of a good one, he thought, that crack about Heathrow.

"As long as I'm not in the way," he said, as he resumed his seat.

They actually seemed glad to have him stay, was the thing. But just for an hour or so, he admonished himself, no matter what; rude enough to drop in on them like this, he wouldn't monopolize their afternoon. He took his tea, and his Paris-Brest (and it was, as promised, the work of someone who knew his pâtisserie forward and back), and listened to them talk and occasionally talked in turn, and now that first agony of self-consciousness was in retreat he realized, very suddenly, that he was starting to feel relaxed, at ease in his own skin and bones and place in the universe, for what felt like the first time in weeks. No. Years.

******

5. The things you think are precious I can't understand

It was Danny's turn to pick the restaurant and Clara had expected either the Italian place on Trinity Road or the "American-style" diner on Sherwood, because he invariably picked one of those two, but instead they were sitting in a cavernous den on Wardour Street that looked like some strange Swinging Sixties throwback: bead curtains separating the tables from the kitchen; fringed, dust-caked Indian print cushions littering the floor; piped-in music alternating strictly, and tediously, between sitars and guitars. Everything was pink and orange and smelled far too strongly of jasmine. It wasn't a conscious, wink-and-nod kind of kitsch, either, the place just looked like nobody'd ever told them Hendrix was dead and Harold Wilson no longer at Downing Street. The name, Ummagumma, made her think unpleasantly of sticky things, cold congealing sauces trapping flies on the kitchen counter, but the food, to her surprise and relief, was actually very good. Frankensteinian concoctions of seeds and weeds and various defenseless fungi and fermented who-knew-what, a lot of it, but still good.

"You going vegetarian on me?" she asked, laughing but also a bit wary. "Didn't you say just last month, you could live on the cha siu bao at that place in Dalston—"

He shrugged. "Just eating a little less of it. Better for the planet and all that."

There was something different about him and she couldn't quite place it. It wasn't that he looked relaxed and cheerful; he had so much more of that in him than anyone, including the Doctor, cared to realize, a dry, sly humor that she loved. It was....a different sort of cheer and relaxation, one that didn't exactly exclude her but also had nothing at all to do with her, in fact if she'd been feeling a bit more waspish she'd have been tempted to ask am I interrupting something? He'd been here before, she could tell by the server's greeting, by how he barely glanced at the menu before rattling off his order, and it simply didn't seem like the sort of place he'd wander into off the street; the Danny she knew liked steak pie and toad-in-the-hole and those revolting Yank burgers where they cooked the cheese right into the center. She watched him spooning up mouthfuls of carrot and ginger soup, feeling a vague, prickly unease she couldn't begin to explain.

"So how was that English conference?" he asked, working the gomasio shaker.

A little flash of guilt darted through her, a minnow beneath the surface of a lake, which was ridiculous because she had gone to it—soporific, shock shock, but undeniably useful for her job—and if thanks to the TARDIS she'd gone to New York City and a bit of the outer Pleiades first and then been dropped off ten minutes before she'd left, well, so what? Didn't make it any less true, now did it? "All right," she said, "boring as you'd think. So what'd you get up to while I was gone?"

"Just family stuff," he said, as his starter arrived. "And some of that film festival at the Curzon, they were showing The Harder They Come and Quadrophenia. Nothing exciting."

Was it just her or was something, well, a bit off? All right, "off" was unfair, it was hardly a crime to get that enthusiastic over courgettes stuffed with some sort of macrobiotic...paste (though it probably should be), but it really did feel as though he were so pleasantly preoccupied he'd have been just as happy sitting there alone. Which she knew was unfair, he simply wasn't a good enough actor to feign that smile when he saw her outside the restaurant, the pleasantly possessive hand on her arm steering her inside—but that was just it, she realized. It was the very ease of him, the unstudied, unlabored relaxation in his face, his voice, his posture, that were, for him, for the Danny she'd thought she knew...not normal. Not at all. But what did she want, exactly? That he remain as rigidly tense and unhappy, as quick-flash defensive as on that first date whose memory still made her wince? (And she blamed herself for that, even though she knew it was ridiculous, though he'd apologized more than once, though you could know someone your whole life and still unwittingly step on some long-buried emotional minefield—) Why couldn't she fix that, after she'd been trying as carefully, as subtly as she possibly could for months? What had she done wrong, that he was suddenly thriving in her absence?

Or it could be her brain was just misfiring on her, from all that bloody flowery perfume in the air crowding out the oxygen. Still, though, it could've been so much worse. Could've been patchouli.

"So," she asked, as the server set down around round of plates, "what've your cadets been up to lately?"

Visiting a lot of pensioners' homes, apparently, and all manner of ecological stuff. This, at least, was exactly the same as it'd always been, so as he narrated tales of sapling plantings and readings to the blind and his triumph at convincing Cadet Katie-thingummy that she, too, might get something out of The Dangerous Book For Boys, Clara let her mind wander, just a little; not that she wasn't interested, she was very interested, it's just that she had heard some version of it all before and so she could relax, just a bit. Even though she still had no idea exactly what was making her so ill at ease, when he was clearly happy and that should make her happy. Shouldn't it? Wasn't that the whole point of being with someone, that you made each other happy? Except when you began to think you really didn't know how to do that, and maybe you would know if you weren't...preoccupied, a good part of the time, and she really had gone to that conference and what business was it of his if she hadn't? Weren't they both allowed to have their own friends, and lives? And who asked him, anyway?

"Watch out now, beware of thoughts that linger, winding up inside your head..."

Hare Krishna, rāma rāma, give me money. She made a face, wishing she had the Doctor's sonic so she could blast the restaurant speaker system, and then realized that Danny was humming along. In a way suggesting he knew all the words.

"Since when d'you like all that old hippie stuff?" she said.

He laughed, unruffled, ducking down to retrieve his carrot-stained napkin as it slid off his knee. Indian print, of course, like everything else in this place. "It's growing on me," he said, as he straightened up. "It's all a bit hilariously earnest, I know, but sometimes you really start to appreciate the sentiment."

"Because they certainly weren't all just spouting a lot of trendy nonsense to sell millions of records to layabouts."

Danny gave her an incredulous look, then laughed again. "Layabouts! That's downright Tory of you."

"No," Clara said, stabbing at a mushroom more forcefully than necessary, "it's honest. What kind of muppet thinks lying around Glastonbury in last month's pants stoned out of your head is changing the world?"

"Ask our esteemed headmaster, it's the highlight of his year. Besides, thought you'd be happy with me listening to anything that wasn't Albert Ayler—"

"There's limits, you know," she muttered. "There are bloody limits."

His eyes grew thoughtful. A penetrating sort of thoughtful.

"Are there?" he asked her. "Really?"

The music was seriously getting on her nerves. Not the least because she could already feel it burrowing its musty, relentless way inside her skull, so even after she got out of this place she had hours to look forward to being earwormed with apple scruuuuffs, apple scru-u-u-u-uffs and this is the tiiiiime of noooo reply. "It's an expression, yeah?" she said. "Figure of speech. I know you do numbers all day, but—"

"Still," he said, forking up a bite of apricot tart, "it's a good question."

He finished his pudding in silence, a quite companionable silence. He'd had a perfectly nice dinner, while she'd sat here imagining things. And imagining what? He'd said it himself: cadet projects. A movie or two. Family stuff. Same on her end, really truly, barring the Pleiades. Nothing exciting. Nothing out of the ordinary for either of them. Really, truly.

She drew her spoon idly across her plate, a thin trail of golden syrup following in its wake. The lotus root soup, the miso-roasted veg, the bean and barley stew, they had all been good. The date pudding was very good. There was absolutely no disputing that.

Family?

******

6. Could it be that I have found my home at last?

Now that months had passed, now they knew each other so much better, and long after he'd stopped noticing the peculiar, questing way she slowly ducked and weaved and turned her head and peered in close whenever she looked at him—or at anyone—Jo had spontaneously apologized to him about it. "There's spots that've dropped out of everything I see," she explained, "like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing from the box. Or like always looking at the world through binoculars, and I've got to sort of wiggle the binoculars around, to get a full look at anyone's face."

Glaucoma, which he knew nothing about save for the frightening afternoon when Aditi Patil, from his fourth form class, interrupted an exam clutching at her eye and almost retching with pain and they'd had to rush her to A&E. They'd saved Aditi's eyesight, but Jo had been visited, very possibly starting at the same age, with a painless, insidiously slow variation that pressed down silently on the optic nerves, biding its time, until they buckled, warped, suffocated under its weight. She'd always been a bit clumsy, so when she started knocking things over and insisting she'd never even seen them she'd laughed as much as anyone: Put away your best crockery, here I am! It wasn't until the day she glanced from the corner of her eye and realized that nothing was there—not a blur, not a natural blind spot, but simply a large, amorphous mass of darkness and nothing—that she got frightened and went to a doctor. She could measure out her life now in medicinal eyedrops, sunglasses even in the cloudiest weather, a sadistic-sounding annual test where you had to try and spot faint, split-second flashes of light against a barely contrasting background (he would never complain about the dilemma of "Better with the first lens, or this one?" ever again), but then, she wasn't exactly in despair about it. Her real problem, as she seemed to see it, was that there was no knapsack, handbag or jacket pocket so small that her dropper bottles couldn't get hopelessly lost in its depths, like plastic pebbles hurled into the Mariana Trench.

"Isn't there anything else they can do?" he asked. "Besides the medicine slowing it down?"

"Well, there's this surgery where they cut slits in your eye with a laser and let the excess fluids drain—oh, you don't feel a thing," she assured him, as he winced at the thought. "And it works. The only bad part is you can't put your arms above your head or your head below your heart for days afterward, it raises the eye pressures or something. Your muscles just twitch to do it, simply because you've been told you absolutely can't."

Danny contemplated this. "What about the Doctor, then?"

Jo seemed puzzled. "What about him, dear?"

"He can travel anywhere in the future, and there's all kinds of alien tech on the TARDIS. He's got to have, I don't know, a machine that regenerates nerve cells, or at least some Geordi La Forge thing to fix it—"

"If the Doctor knew," Jo said, quite firmly, "he'd want to magic it away even knowing perfectly well he shouldn't, that in Earth's timeline there won't be better treatments for another seven or twenty or eighty-nine years, and it'd cause about a hundred time paradoxes I wouldn't even find out about until there were giant koala bears all over my kitchen and Caligula up to his elbows in Fairy Liquid. And then—you did say he's gone over all grouchy again—he'd probably find a way to blame it all on me!"

She laughed at the prospect. For her, clearly, the Doctor's temper inspired neither fear nor personal affront; it was no more than any longstanding flaw you might overlook and forgive, automatically, in anyone enough loved. Like tetchiness about any question starting with So when you were in the army..., or a propensity for petty lies. "So no," she concluded, "I'm not telling him and neither is anyone else. Besides, why bother? I do just fine."

She'd traveled the universe but her eyes wouldn't let her drive across town, so when there were intriguing things happening in the night skies—and so much more was happening up there than even the most brilliant astronomers knew about—it was Cliff or Sarah or Danny who would take her in the flotilla of cars streaming out to the countryside. Clear views of the stars and so many stories about them, and every being inhabiting them, and a memorable once or twice a few of those beings actually there to tell the story, in the flesh or light-beams or sentient clouds of gas, and none of them had any trouble remembering his name. Though, to be fair, he'd met a good deal of Jo's family by now, and Sarah's, but even with the practice of new classrooms every year he himself had a hard time keeping all the names straight. Normally Jo and her husband, and all the kids (dear God, she'd had kids!) and the grandchildren were scattered like the stars themselves, but Cliff had a bio-engineering fellowship and Jo was teaching a class on conflict resolution and so the lion's share of them, for a little while, were all back in Blighty with dozens of plans and projects. "You found us in the busy season," Sarah told him, quite happily, as she pushed her place settings another quarter-inch closer to try and accommodate one, three, seven last-minute guests. There was always room for one more, and usually many more. Unlike what he'd feared, that first afternoon, drop-ins and newcomers were more than welcome.

There was always something happening on Bannerman Road. Even when nothing was happening, so much felt like it was happening—guests and consultant scholars and friends of friends and unannounced "interns" and the most pleasant-natured sorts of crackpots going in and out, cold-case investigations suddenly threatening to reheat, nitro-9 canisters nearly detonating by accident, the night K-9's sensors picked up Ramón Raquello's Orchestra live from Sophronisba VI and all of them, even the Ionian gas clouds, danced until dawn. Rather than simply being among people, surrounded by people, ducking and weaving through throngs of indifferent preoccupied people, he actually got to know people, more people than he'd ever properly known in his life. And so many of them knew the Doctor, knew him well. Martha, another one who'd traveled with him for years on end (her sister was some sort of writer, apparently, he'd have to ask Clara sometime if she'd heard of her) came to dinner a few times, with and without her husband, and the stories they both told made him laugh until it felt like something long pinioned had snapped loose and was spinning round, flywheel-like, inside him. There was nothing cruel or bitter about their reminisces; they loved the Doctor, or, at the very least appreciated him greatly, but they also had a mercilessly clear-eyed long view that, perhaps, you simply couldn't have when directly in his orbit, and with that and Sarah's stories and Jo's and all the rest it was...quite a picture, far more than he'd bargained for. Not that he was complaining. But he was even more confused than when he'd started.

"Embrace it," Mickey advised him, when Danny mentioned this to him, tentatively, once. "The confusion, I mean. Because it's not just him, it's all of us. The only difference between him and us is that all the other people we are, or could be, they're all scattered around, like, all the different universes, but he carries them all around inside himself." Mickey thought this over for a moment, then grinned. "Well, that and none of us are married to a magical box. Not in this life, anyway."

"What's it like?" Danny asked. "Meeting your other self?" Was I there too? he wanted to ask, childishly, no matter that Mickey couldn't possibly know the answer. Is there another me, somewhere, who never killed anyone at all? How do I become him? Right away?

"Disturbing." Mickey shrugged. "But lots of stuff is." (True that, Danny thought.) "But it's real. The you that you know, and the ones you never thought existed. And Time Lords don't know everything about it, either. I mean, fine, they set themselves up a special monopoly on time travel and self-induced reincarnation and all of that—who did they learn it from?"

He was gazing at Danny now like he expected an actual answer. Like an earnest student awaiting the wisdom of his teacher, which was flattering and bewildering all at once. "Search me," Danny finally said. "Why couldn't they have thought it all up first?"

"Everyone learned everything from someone else. There's no tracing anything back to the real beginning—all you can be sure of is that anyone who says they're the godlike source, is just trying to seize the advantage. And of course they say it's for everyone else's good, what empire doesn't say that? So even though we'll never know, and the Doctor probably doesn't either, ask yourself anyway, who'd he learn it from?" Mickey, warming to the discussion, flung a palm ceilingward, then looked down ruefully at the bits of doner kebab he'd scattered off his plate. "Maybe there's a reason we don't know. Maybe, long ago, longer than an eternity, the Time Lords erased all the evidence of them that they could find."

Evidently satisfied he'd got his point across, Mickey licked yogurt sauce off the side of his hand. "Anyway, like I said, you've just got to embrace it. The whole double-consciousness thing. You're here, but you're really not. But you are. Once you do, the whole thing is so much clearer, because it's so confusing. The question is the answer. You see? There's no limit."

Danny didn't see, not really, not then or on further reflection. But he still found himself thinking about it, more and more.

But the confusion, the absolute inability to get any of this sorted, it felt increasingly beside the point. The constant references to people he'd never met, experiences he'd never had, with hasty expository explanations that often entangled themselves in tangents or foundered on a half-dozen different, competing memories of the same events, strangely none of it made Danny feel left out—rather, it was the sensation of having picked up a book, opened it to the middle and found a story so full of color and adventure that even ignorant of who most of the characters were or what was going on, the pleasure of reading it surpassed everything else. (And it was completely worth it, all by itself, to find out that Sun Ra really truly was extraterrestrial, and that George Clinton and Bootsy Collins were definitely hiding something in that regard.) He wasn't sure, still, why stepping into the TARDIS had been almost a disappointment but the first sight of Mr. Smith filled him with a tight-chested, yet expansive sensation that he realized was something new: a sense of genuine awe and wonder. Was it simply the incongruity of such a thing being permanently here, on Earth, among ordinary people? Not that anyone at Bannerman Road was really ordinary, of course, but—

"Oh, yes we are," Jo declared. "We most certainly are, and proud of it, this isn't some bloody royal court—anyone on Earth could do what we do, if they'd had the chance to learn what the universe is really like. If they'd had access, and our dumb luck." She rapped a small, bony fist against a small, bony palm for emphasis. "We're working on that, you know, sowing the seeds wherever we can so that when we're not around anymore, and in case someday the Doctor isn't—the poor man's come closer to snuffing it than you think—the whole world can benefit from it. That's our responsibility." Her eyes were bright with purpose, nearly blazing in fact. "We were waitresses and auto mechanics and state school teachers and salesgirls and nurses and freelance journalists and laundromat operators and library assistants and me, I flunked all my science O-levels, every one. Don't tell the Doctor that when you see him again. And look what we've all been able to do, working together."

He'd only started really talking to Jo because she'd been the first one after Sarah that he'd met, the one at his elbow when he was coaxed to that first chaotic Bannerman dinner, and even after he stopped being too nervous to say boo something about her talk, more than anyone else's, drew him back again and again. She believed all this stuff she said, was the thing, that your brother ain't heavy and that love is all you need and that despite all its countless tragedies and horrors (and she wasn't under any illusions about those, she'd been in favelas and war zones and had an adopted daughter rescued from a brothel, and a permanent dent in her temple where a Los Angeles riot cop had kicked her in the face), it really was a great wide beautiful wonderful world. She was, perhaps, the sincerest, the most unguarded, the most relentlessly idealistic person he had ever met.

And that was dangerous, because what he should have scorned as all that old hippie stuff drew him in, and then farther in, in a sort of yearning he'd never known he had for all of it to really be true, and that made him tell her things, things he had never told a living soul. He told her about the foster family he'd been certain would adopt him, and didn't. He told her about being sectioned. He told her about Aarif. He began to cry during the telling of that and was utterly mortified, not from any loss of stoic soldier manliness but because there was nothing so disgusting as the murderer sobbing into his lager about the blood drenching his hands. Jo listened, her eyes behind the dark glasses unblinkingly steady and her hands folded in her lap, and when he'd collected himself just enough to feel grateful they were by themselves, that cold windy afternoon out on the dunes of Camber Sands, she handed him some tissues from her pocket, put a hand to his shoulder.

"I worked for UNIT, you know," she pointed out. "I was dying to work for them, because I thought it all sounded like a bit of fun. All soldiers, and military intelligence, which means propaganda and deceit and dirty tricks. And I worked with some very good men—it was nearly all men back then—but they ordered people about and lied to them and threatened them when they had to, and people died, and they upheld all sorts of policies I didn't even think to think about when I was young. And being practically the tea girl until the Doctor came along isn't any excuse." The wind lifted the collar of her coat, sending it sailing up to her ears; she peeled it away, not bothering to try and fold it back in place. "That's why they get you when you're young. Because you just don't know, but you think you know everything. What you especially don't know is how easy it is, to get good people to do bad things. Including me."

But it is different when you're just wheeling the tea trolley, Danny thought. It is. He showed her the magazine clipping he carried everywhere, hidden in his wallet, so creased and folded that its pictures were marred by white lines but he'd memorized them anyway, knew them like he'd snapped them. Aarif, the little boy he'd shot, gap-toothed grinning and clutching a football in one photo and in another, full color and taking up the rest of the page, in a box being borne to burial. His parents on either side of the small coffin, his mother's face hidden behind her hands and his father's twisted inside out by grief, howling into a mercilessly bright blue sky. They'd had no other children. Whether Aarif had been an only child, or the others had also been stripped from them one by one, by people just like Danny, the article didn't say.

"The bad things you did," Danny asked her, "did you do this?" His voice was going unsteady, a warning sign he couldn't afford to ignore, but he was beyond caring about that just now. "Did you do anything like this?"

"I was still part of the machinery," she said. "The things I did, whether or not I knew it, led to all sorts of—"

"But you never, don't tell me you ever did anything like this. You didn't do this, you didn't pick up a gun and aim it and pull the trigger and do this."

He could feel his heart picking up, thudding faster, his chest squeezing tight like a contracting accordion, and he turned away and breathed in slow, slower, like he'd taught himself to do. Not taking her hand from his arm, letting it rest there, Jo waited. This wasn't the first time she'd witnessed this. He'd stopped being embarrassed about it. He ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek, where he'd bitten down hard enough to hurt, and folded the magazine page back in half, fourths, eighths.

"My students, they asked me one day if I'd killed someone when I was in the army. I don't think they were trying to be funny, or make some point—they just wanted to know. Because it's not real to them, really. Because they don't know. So what do I tell them? The truth?" He held up the square of paper, Aarif's living eye peering oblivious from one corner. "When someone asks me, what did you do in Afghanistan, you and your so-called humanitarian mission overseas—they already know what really happens, everybody bloody knows, but how do I say it? How do I look them in the eye and say that this, right here, this is what I did?"

Silence. She didn't have an answer for him, she had nothing, and something inside him was glad of that. There was no answer for any of this. It was foul, he thought, to imagine there should be.

He shoved the clipping inside his wallet, his wallet in his pocket, and rose to his feet, pacing a few steps forward and back on the sands. "What are we supposed to be looking for out here, anyway?" he demanded, mopping his eyes afresh. "That ion storm you and Sarah were talking about, Mr. Smith said it had nothing to do with the bloody Sontarans and I can't see a thing—"

"He said," Jo corrected him, "that there was a 97.4 percent chance they hadn't anything to do with it, so there was still a chance of it. I didn't lie." She stood up in turn, pulling her coat collar beneath her chin. "But either way, I thought we should come out here. After seven kids, I can tell when someone needs some time away from the herd, just me and them. Oh, Lord, that did sound conceited, didn't it? I didn't mean you were simply longing to pour it all out to me, Danny, well, I mean, if you really were then so much the better but I wasn't trying to—"

"Stop," he said, wearily, but with affection. "Stop."

The wind had subsided, for the moment, as if it could sense they both needed the respite. A lone seagull strutted past, gave them both a disapproving look and spread its wings to depart.

"I'd give anything to change what I did," Danny said. "But there's no fixing it. Not ever. That's what I can't live with knowing."

Jo pushed into a sand drift with the toe of her boot, used its edge to push sand aside like an animal digging a burrow. "It's not," she said, "that there's no changing it. It's that only a very unethical, power-mad sort of Time Lord would do it, and only for their own ends, and—"

"That Master," Danny said. It disturbed him, knowing there was an entire year of his and Clara's and everyone else's life that had been there, and yet however awful was now forever lost—it reminded him much too much of when he'd been out of his head—but perhaps that was more of that double consciousness thing Mickey banged on about. "But he's dead."

"Well, in theory. But he was supposed to be dead plenty of times before this too, I'm not entirely certain I believe it." She picked up a bit of driftwood, examining it as though it might wish to join the conversation. "But it's what he would do. It's what the Doctor wouldn't do—I mean, I can't even imagine him stopping time in its tracks just to get someone back, no matter how he loved them—and it's what we can't do. Just like he can't bring back Gallifrey. So you're right." She dropped the bit of wood back to the sand, into the divot her boot had dug. "There's no fixing anything we've done. There's just remembering, and trying to go forward."

"You said, though," Danny pointed out, "that the Doctor would do it. For your eyes."

"Only that he'd want to," she corrected him. "And you know, I could just be getting a big head about all that. He's the genius here, not you or me."

She smiled at him and, to his surprise, Danny felt himself smiling back. He, Danny, he'd fix her eyes. In a heartbeat. Koala bears all over the kitchen, well, he'd heard koalas were a bit aggro but that's what tranq darts were made for. He studied the clouds, a flat blue-gray expanse over the restless gray water.

"I didn't mean to do it," he said. "I didn't."

"I know," Jo said, very soft, very steady, compassion suffusing her face. "But that doesn't really make any difference, does it."

Her, and Sarah, and Martha, and Clara too: just under the peppery-sweet or, in Jo's case, candy-floss surface, that core of steel. Perhaps that was what the Doctor kept looking for, time and again, in the women—and Danny's intuition had been correct, nineteen times out of twenty it was women—that he invited on board. Perhaps for the very same reason he, Danny, was sitting here talking to Jo right now. Perhaps he'd been mistaken, from jealousy, guilt, fear, about a lot of things. The thought that he had been didn't embarrass him the way it once would have. Apparently, that was just life. Like a lot of other, infinitely more horrible things were inescapable parts of life.

"No," he agreed. "It doesn't."

The saying of that wasn't awful. It was, in its way, a relief.

"We should go back," Jo said. "It's a bit freezing."

He nodded and headed back up the beach, searching in his jacket for his keys. Jo followed beside him, sliding and nearly capsizing on a small dune ridge but he caught her arm just in time.

"I haven't upset you," she asked, "have I?"

"I was already upset," he said. "All the time. But at least I can say it."

She stopped short, so abruptly that he stumbled a little in turn, and threw her arms around him. She'd never done that before. He embraced her back, a little awkwardly, and then they continued toward the car.

"I'd give anything to take it back," he said. "To let him live. I mean it. Absolutely anything."

She squeezed his hand, and said nothing because there was nothing to be said, and nothing to be done. There was no changing anything, not if you weren't a Time Lord. There was only forward motion. His entire life, he sensed, was going to be one long process of trying to accept that. Already, he felt exhausted. But in afternoons like this, there was a strange feeling of mercy and rest.

He wouldn't be alone with his thoughts tonight, anyway, not for many hours. Some of Cliff's students were hosting their version of a vernal equinox fête, the highlight of which would be their—what was it now, thirty-sixth?—attempt to activate integrated circuits grown from bio-electrified moss; all a bit Swamp Thing for Danny's tastes, but the literal handsprings Cliff would turn if it ever actually worked would make it worth the wait. Martha might be there tonight, if her schedule at the refugee health clinic allowed it, and Dr. Caldwell from that Further Intelligence Institute, and those two Cambridge professors Sarah was always talking about. There'd be table-buckling amounts of food, and dancing, and lulls of quiet to contemplate the season, the universe, the company all around them. As Danny pulled the car onto Lydd Road he hoped, and it was an entirely sincere and heartfelt hope, that Clara wasn't at home right now with schoolwork or bill-paying or a dog-eared book but was also seeing in the spring on some indescribably strange planet, having a marvelous time.

******

7. You know I'm cool, yes, I feel all right,
'Cept when I'm in my room, and it's late at night

It took Clara eighteen pages of scrolling backwards through the website, once she'd remembered—abruptly one night, as she was drifting off to sleep—where she'd seen it. But she found it: the photograph of the busker in front of H.M. Welsch Ltd., at the book signing now weeks past, there in the archives of Humans of New York. Same hair, same boots, same violin, same angular olive-skinned age-lined face, same serious expression and easy smile. Her caption:

My parents lost a baby and couldn't have any more children, so they adopted me. Everyone tells their kids they don't care how successful they are as long as they're happy, but mine meant it. Mom knew about sticking with your art; she wrote for decades before one of her books really sold. She made up bedtime stories for me about "Raggedy Man," a friendly hobo who made a spaceship out of cardboard boxes and traveled all over the universe with his astronaut wife. Dad loved astronomy and he said there really was a music of the spheres, and when Raggedy Man and Astra Naut came back to Earth they'd play it for us. I used to stay up way past my bedtime, waiting to see them land in front of our apartment, and then I decided I didn't want to wait, I wanted to make that music myself. All my albums and my paintings—I do all my own cover art—they're all about that. I've had all sorts of shit day jobs, like you do, but that's my real life's work.

A spaceship, that was a box, traveling the universe. With a companion. Hell of a coincidence, wasn't that, and she hadn't even noticed when she'd first read it. If she'd bothered reading the caption at all, she couldn't remember. Who is that, Doctor? Oh, nobody, Clara, nobody worth even mentioning. Not even in passing. Go on about your business. Jealousy? She wasn't an idiot, he'd had more companions before her than she'd had hot dinners and he fell in love with everything, everyone, it was part of what she loved best about him—but to stand there, in one of the biggest cities on Earth, in front of a bloody pane of glass with her, Clara, smack on the other side of it, and act like he couldn't possibly have been seen? Like she, like anyone, couldn't simply turn their head and get the whole story in a split second? Except she didn't have the whole story, not even a full chapter (context, she kept telling her depressingly, thuddingly literalist students, stories, words, ideas are less than worthless out of context), and she didn't want to ask because it was so clearly so private, so precious. But not wanting to ask wasn't at all like not wanting to know.

The lighting in her room, the warm suffused gold it always was this time of "night," suddenly sparked up a garish pink and green and, for a split second, went out entirely. Clara sighed, put her phone back on the bedside table and tried to suppress her irritation: The TARDIS had been acting up for hours, the lights going wonky and corridors reversing themselves and, at unpredictable intervals, the air vents emitting an overpowering fish-and-chip smell that made Clara alternately hungry and nauseous. Some hangover from the Tr!yx Nebula's banks of deceptively beautiful toxic clouds, the Doctor had explained in one of those technobabble rat-a-tats he'd always toss over his shoulder like any idiot should've known, and she'd held her tongue not to point out all his babble could be boiled down to their having just sailed through a massive cosmic fart. Which felt far too much like a metaphor for certain things, just now.

You can't kid a kidder. Her life certainly looked all jam and jelly babies: work, friends, youth, love, Danny and the Doctor and each blissfully ignorant of each other and frankly there was no reason to feel guilty about that, not really, not a jot. The Doctor was an arrogant berk about Danny and Danny meddled far too much and she loved them both, not at all in the same way of course but that was what you called life and as for what either of them thought they knew, well, wasn't it so much better this way? Who was owed only one mundane, innocuous truth, when reality was so much more complicated? Neither time nor facts were immutable or straightforward—the Doctor had taught her that—and neither was she. They were both happy with her. She was happy with both of them. That was all that mattered.

Except. Except it was one thing to say that when you were telling the story, quite another when you began to feel merely a peripheral character in everyone else's story, slowly but surely slipping off the page. She was walking through Danny's book over a sea of scribbled-over and torn-out chapters, the words Danny, are you seeing someone else? hovering on her lips, in the pit of her stomach without her able to voice them (someone vegetarian, possibly older, could we please go back to the Italian restaurant next time?). The Doctor's book was just the opposite, a logorrheic explosion of wild monologues and insane exposition and alarming illustrations and the dramatis personae list alone ran for hundreds of pages, so though she'd been assured time and again she was the true protagonist she could hardly find her name for looking. (Doctor, is that woman your daughter? That blonde woman's or River's or God knows whose with you? Did you hand her off to human parents and then just—take off, and never tell anyone, not even her? Or did someone take her away? Or do I just sound completely mad?)

What was she, what was she really, to either of them? How did you even ask that, how did you not sound depressingly, thuddingly defensive saying I need to know, because you're both that important to me—never mind that that was the absolute truth?

Danny didn't suspect a thing, she was certain, and that should settle the matter. Except—except perhaps that was why he was maybe, possibly, seeing someone else, because everything was just a little too settled for him, a bit too dull now he thought she'd given up the TARDIS for good. Perhaps, maybe, she'd only been interesting to him in context. The Doctor didn't suspect Danny's ignorance, and she knew she'd made him happy (that smile, when she'd told him she'd wanted to stay and nobody stood in her way, its unhidden warmth and joy had almost made her shiver and he was so lonely, so badly needed someone to mean the world to, he and Danny weren't half so different as they thought), but what did that really, actually add up to, against everything he'd lost? What was she doing wrong? Why couldn't she just bloody fix everything, for them both?

Was that the real reason she was—she felt, she feared—being shut out of so much?

But I love her, she'd said in disbelief, when her mother's heart had unexpectedly, catastrophically failed her, when they'd pulled Clara out of history class to tell her, on a day that had started just like any other. If you loved someone, you should be able to fix everything for them and yourself, make everything happy by any means you could. That you couldn't, sometimes, no matter what, was something she still could not, would not accept. There was a way for everything, whatever it took. The Doctor had taught her that, too. But you couldn't do anything, no matter what, if someone quietly, gently closed a door in your face.

The bedside table, her phone, the water glass trembled and clattered in a small earthquake, then her armchair suddenly capsized onto its back and, outside, she heard what sounded like great avalanches of glasswork and concrete crashing to the floor. Belting her dressing gown as she ran, Clara headed in the direction of the noise—imagining entire TARDIS rooms smashed to pieces and flying off into the void of space—rounded a corner and ran smack into the Doctor, almost hurling him into the opposite wall.

"What are you doing faffing about at a time like this?" he yelled into the cacophony, flapping his arms to like a great underfed rook to keep balance and grabbing at Clara's hand. "Get into the console room and help me recalibrate the interspatial gyroscope, I haven't got eight arms!"

Without protest Clara let him drag her the opposite way, both of them careening like pinballs across the corridor and back as the TARDIS rocked on an invisible, dizzily tilting axis. She stumbled behind him into the control room—thrown nearly on her face by the TARDIS's pitch and yaw—half-crawled to the console and, clutching the edge for balance, watched him flip and turn a bewildering array of gears in rapid-fire succession. A confetti shower of blinding pink sparks flew around them, landing with the heat of embers and making her duck and weave and squeeze her eyes shut to avoid getting burned; he barely seemed to notice, even when his jacket sleeve let off the acrid smell of singed cloth. A shrill whistling sound emanated from the walls, like they'd both been trapped in a hob kettle ready to boil over.

"Which one controls the gyroscope?" she shouted. Exasperated, he waved his arm in the vague direction of a dozen different switches and levers; she chose one at random, because it had the largest handle, and tugged it two-handed toward her. The pink sparks flared into green fireworks and she retreated in haste, but one or the other of them had got lucky: The seasick lurching slowed to mere rough rocking, the fireworks subsided and the infernal steam-whistling was reduced to occasional, though startlingly sharp squeaks.

"Right," Clara said. "That the ion gas again?"

"Ion gas plus a nasty asteroid belt. Which the TARDIS would've avoided without any trouble, if she weren't still mewling and puking up the fumes." The Doctor turned to Clara, his fingers still at the gears nonstop. "If I can alter the internal orientation a few more degrees I think I can get—"

His lips were still moving but there was a bizarre, nonsensical collection of sounds emanating from them: a few syllables here and there that seemed to start out familiar, then trail into unintelligibility; an odd popping noise that put her in mind of the clicks in some African languages; a stream of consonantal sludge full of sounds she was certain she'd never heard in her life, in any context whatsoever. Was this the ion stream too, some sort of "computer virus" of the tongue? She waved an arm to try and get him to stop, opened her mouth (hoping he could still understand her) to say she couldn't make out a word, and then some invisible force seemed to tug and wrench at her ears so harshly she almost cried out with pain.

"—seventh moon of Braxforagon," he said.

The expression on her face made him frown. "What? What did I say?"

"I—haven't got any idea what you said, actually." Clara walked back up to the console, her ears still stinging as if someone had boxed them. "You were speaking normally, then it was just all this sort of, I don't know, gibberish, and then—"

"Ah," he said, his fingers slowing at the controls as he nodded with pleasure, distant pleasure, at a not terribly important mystery solved. "The ion gas must've got into the translation circuits, sent them going in and out. Anyway, it's all down to a dull roar now, so—"

"So that's really how you've been talking to me?" Clara asked. "All this time?"

He frowned in confusion. "Well, you didn't actually think I was speaking English to you, did you? Why would I?"

He fiddled with a few dials, flipped a random switch back and forth half a dozen times and, as the TARDIS stabilized and merciful quiet ensued, strolled over to the bookshelf looking supremely unconcerned. Clara watched him, feeling a tightness and weight in her chest that she couldn't have begun to explain.

"So all this time," she said, as he perused the shelves, "without knowing it, I've been depending on the TARDIS to interpret absolutely everything you say."

"That is what translation circuits do, yes," the Doctor said. Like it was nothing. Not even bothering to turn around.

"And I'm just supposed to trust in that, am I?"

He turned around. "Why wouldn't you?" he said.

"She wasn't exactly fond of me, you know, in the beginning. In fact, she didn't like me at all." Clara folded her arms. "Don't you remember?"

"Well, she got over it, didn't she? And you weren't exactly a prize to start with, she had her reasons. What are you going on about, anyway, I don't understand—"

"Then how do I know she told me what you were really saying?"

The Doctor just stared at her, a book dangling from his hand, as if he were hoping that might end the conversation. "So," Clara persisted, "you'll speak cat to a cat, but you won't speak English to me."

"The translation circuits don't work half as well with lower life forms and why are we even having this discussion? I understand you. You understand me. That's all that matters."

"No, what matters is that I'm hearing your words, some of them, but I'm not hearing you! I've only heard you just now, for the first time ever, really, purely by accident, and it was—" Utterly alien, and it hurt my ears, and my first thought was what is that ghastly noise and it was you speaking to me and if that's how I react to your real voice, your real words, what does that say about me? Or us? Or anything?

She took a breath. "There's a reason people always say a translated book isn't the same book at all, because it isn't. You're getting it all through someone else's filter, whatever they pick and choose to tell you, however they decide to phrase it, all the puns and idioms and little reference points you can never—"

"Clara? Do you want me to speak English to you? Here's some. Untranslated. From, as you say in English, the horse's mouth." He moved his lips slowly, letting her see him form each separate syllable in turn. "Stop fussing."

As he walked quite deliberately past her and toward a chair, the book tucked beneath his arm, she felt her teeth clenching hard enough to hurt. "There, you see?" she nearly shouted, to nobody in particular, "I was right! Nobody wants to talk straight to me anymore, do they? About anything! Ever!"

The Doctor stopped in his tracks, his eyes starting to spark. "So that they could listen to this nonsense?" he said. "Who could blame them?"

"This is all just a joke to you, isn't it? Just a bloody—"

The Doctor flung the book toward the chair, where it landed with a barely audible thud. "Clara, I've got no idea what you're banging on about, is that getting through? Again, in English, apparently the most important language in the whole damned universe's entire history—"

"Don't you bloody patronize me, I told you what the problem was! You just don't give a damn, do you?" Clara's hand clenched into a fist at her side, the fingers itching to grab at his lapel, his collar, to make him take her seriously like it or not. "I mean, do you know what it's like," she demanded, "to always feel like wherever you go, whatever you do, you're always being talked to in another language? By everyone?"

Again, the Doctor didn't say anything. He settled for just gazing at her, steadily, until her face grew hot.

"Figure of speech," she muttered. "Figure of bloody speech."

"I know," he said. He didn't seem angry. "Other languages have them, too."

"Not that I'd know," she said.

The silence felt deafening. Clara glanced down at her feet, examining her bare toes as though they were an unprecedented sight, and when she couldn't avoid it she looked up again. The Doctor smiled at her, an attenuated upturn of the lips and patiently tolerant eyes; it was the kind of look she might've given a student who'd got mouthy in class and then slunk back later to apologize, and that only added to her embarrassment.

"Sorry," she said. "I'm sorry. Telling someone they can't speak their own—it was a stupid thing to get upset about. You don't have to tell me that."

"Good," he said. He gazed at the time rotor's pulsations, seeming to calculate something in his mind, then turned a few more dials to the left, to the right. Clara stood watching him.

"Could I learn it?" she asked, after a few moments.

"Learn what?"

He was going to insist on making this difficult, wasn't he? Well, she'd been a bull in a china shop, she had it coming. "Gallifreyan."

He pulled at a lever, the same one Clara had; she braced herself for more green sparks, but she only heard a faintly rusty creak. "Can you memorize 36,922 temporal verb tenses?" he asked her. "For starters?"

She wanted to give him a bit of the old bravado--Well, that's before breakfast taken care of, then what?—but it wasn't coming. "Probably not," she said. "Not even thirty-six, if my German O-levels mean anything. Well, if everything's all right here, suppose I'll go read a bit before—"

"Clara."

He put a hand to her shoulder, the long thin fingers resting there without taking hold. "What I say, you hear. All right? There's no...distortion, there's not some deep hidden meaning to everything that—"

"There is," she said, stubbornly. "There is. You know it, and I know it, and it's not the TARDIS playing tricks and it's not anyone's fault, but—" She broke off, shaking her head. "Just forget I said anything. All right? I would really be grateful if you could just forget I ever said anything."

"If I forgot my own language, Clara, along with everything else I've forgotten, I think I would—"

He didn't finish the thought. His fingers curled suddenly tight, and then eased. There was something entreating in his eyes, almost desperate, that she felt ashamed of herself for ever having provoked.

"I could learn to speak it with you," she said. "Then you wouldn't—we could speak it together."

No answer. But then, she'd hardly expected one. German, those damned noun cases had been the death of her, and there were a mere four of those. Never mind all those wretched adolescent attempts, right under Marcus Aurelius's withering eye, to teach herself Latin. And that popping sound, that wasn't quite a pop or click or snap any other sound she could even imagine how to imitate. But she should be able to do that, a voice inside her kept prodding and persisting, she should, if she really tried hard enough. If she really wanted to. No matter that her own palate, molded to suit her own speech and only hers before she'd even been aware of it, was now just another lost opportunity.

"It's just that some languages," she said, "you really have to grow up speaking them."

His hand, the one resting on her shoulder, rose and passed over her hair. It was such a swift, fleeting touch that for a moment, Clara wondered if she'd imagined it.

"I know," he said.

******

8. We hear you're leaving
That's okay
I thought our little wild time had just begun

"Bloody hell," Jo said, softly. "Bloody, bloody hell."

Sarah sat across the kitchen table from her, dry-eyed and somber. "I know," she said. "I know."

It was Rani who'd heard about Danny first. Her cousin had something or other to do with Coal Hill (he was, it happened, entangled in a messy extramarital affair with an art teacher, but Rani joined the rest of her family in pretending not to know), and he'd casually mentioned it, and Rani phoned Sarah with the news and burst into tears telling it. It was Luke, usually so remorselessly rational, who'd insisted it couldn't possibly be true, there had to be plenty of other Danny Pinks who taught maths at schools whose names sounded like Coal Hill, and then, hearing the echo of his own words, had gone into his old room and kept the door shut the rest of the day. It was Sarah, and Martha, and Mickey, and Jo, who had conducted their own, independent investigation of the accident—and later, after certain ominously familiar, world-threatening events occurred, the investigation had been quietly reopened and intensified, but their conclusion (and too, shoring it up, Mr. Smith's calculations) was always the same. Namely, whatever horrible, awful advantage certain parties had attempted to take of Danny's death, its actual cause had been exactly what it looked like: a horrible, awful, lethally careless accident. He didn't notice that the lights had changed. That was all. And everything.

"Did you get a chance to talk to Clara?" Sarah asked. She tilted her mug idly back and forth, watching the cold half-drunk tea swirl around its depths. "Because I didn't, really—"

"Oh, I tried, but I'm not sure she heard a word I was saying. I mean, she was poleaxed, who could blame her?" Jo shook her head, recalling Clara, that statue at the memorial service—the ludicrously stiff, bloodless, platitudinous service, not a thing at all to do with the man they'd all known—so perfectly composed, so sickly pale, those big dark eyes eating up her entire, frozen face. "And on top of it all, there wasn't anybody else. I mean, yes, a few of his students, but no other friends, nothing. I hadn't imagined—" She wiped her eyes. "I didn't know."

No other friends, besides them. No family. No will either, but then young healthy people didn't tend to write those, which complicated things but Clara had taken charge of his flat and his accounts and what were so horribly called his effects, and she was as close as Danny had to next of kin so it only seemed right. She'd found their names and numbers in Danny's address book—Clara told Jo, after the service—scribbled down in the back, and though she hadn't any idea who they were, Danny never wrote down anything he didn't think was really important. So she'd invited them all, she'd insisted they come. So you were friends of his, yeah? Clara had asked Jo, her voice dull and dimmed as her eyes. That I never knew about. That I never asked about. Not even once.

Cliff, without Jo's asking, had volunteered himself to play chauffeur and stenographer and lab tech during their private posthumous investigation, had led the sifting through the mountain of police and UNIT records Mr. Smith retrieved (nothing truly useful, of course, absolutely nothing), was helping her organize what would be their own Danny Pink memorial, for the man they'd all known, who apparently wasn't the man anyone else had ever known. Cliff was doing a great many things she knew he wouldn't have been capable of, as a younger man—or, more to the point, that it would never have crossed his mind he should even attempt doing. But he had changed, a great deal, since their marriage. He had changed, sometimes under her impetus, often of his very own volition, because people could do that and they did do that when they had time and encouragement and the means to look at themselves, to look at their lives, and decide change was not only attractive, but necessary. And then, sometimes, because of one stupid, careless, split-second mistake, one horrible moment of the worst possible luck, their chance at change and growth and all the rest of it was gone, lost forever. And now, because it always accomplished so bloody much, she was crying again.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," she said, around a lot of wet sniffling, as the faint, insistent beeping of her eye medicine timer sounded from the depths of her handbag. She rifled impatiently through the loose and zipped compartments, fumbling for the timer and the tiny little bottle with its tiny plastic dropper, mopping her eyes dry because she didn't need tears making the stuff wash right out again on top of everything else. Nearly empty, absolutely had to get the prescription refilled this week—she shook and squeezed the bottle, playing catch with the final few drops still lurking at the bottom, and shook it hard enough that some of the liquid sprayed onto her hand.

"Blast," she said, starting to laugh in spite of herself. She tilted her head back, dosed an eye, pressed a fingertip against the corner so the medicine couldn't leak. Four minutes per eye. Which always felt like ten or twenty.

"Sarah?" she asked. With one lid forcibly closed Sarah's face looked even more piecemeal than usual, a friendly blur at the far end of a cavernous, fog-darkened tunnel. "I know we looked into it all already but I just can't get the thought out of my head—I mean, you saw how unhappy he was, a lot of the time, d'you think that maybe he, I mean, that he accidentally on purpose—"

"No," Sarah said. Immediately, and firmly enough that Jo felt a sudden fluttering of relief. "I know how unhappy he was. He wasn't exactly hiding it well. But I absolutely do not think that."

"All right," said Jo. Two minutes, forty-six seconds to go. "I didn't want to think so either, just—" Two minutes, thirty-three seconds. "There must've been something more we could've done, don't you think? Something more to help him—"

"He had to help himself," Sarah said. "Just like everyone else. You know that. And he did. And he would've done much more, I'm certain of it, if—" She sighed. "If."

"It's not fair," Jo said. One minute, forty-seven seconds. "Thirty years old. Thirty. Remember when we were young and stupid and thought that was senility? I hate this. I hate it. It isn't bloody fair."

Sarah was silent for a few moments, tilting her mug back and forth. Forth and back. "I think," she said, slowly, as if weighing her own words, "I think—well, it's going to sound horribly self-satisfied, and that's not at all how I mean it—"

"You never sound self-satisfied," Jo interrupted, quite sincerely. "Frankly, you should be a lot more satisfied with yourself than you are."

Sarah smiled, in spite of herself. "Leave the self-actualization books to your daughter," she said, without malice. "Summer's a better writer than we'll ever be. But what I think is, he found us when he did because he had to—because he had to find something, somehow, somewhere, and he knew it, and it just happened to be us. And it did make a difference. You saw it. Think about what he was like, when we first met him, and—"

She rested the mug against the table. "He came into the world unwanted and unloved, and grew up all alone, with nobody who really cared what happened to him. He died in an instant, before he could feel more than a split second of fear, surrounded by friends and companionship and love. For most people, frankly, it's the other way around."

Jo contemplated this. And continued to as the timer went off, as she released her fingertip's hold and repeated the whole ritual with her other eye.

"You've always got such a clear way of looking at things," she told Sarah, with equal parts admiration and sorrow. "I wish I did."

Sarah shrugged. "Survival mechanism," she said.

Three minutes, thirty-seven seconds.

"I feel as though this isn't it," Jo said. "I know that sounds mad, I know it, but I feel like—like we've not quite heard the last of him, you know? I know," she said, before Sarah could speak, "that's probably just me not wanting to believe anyone that young could ever just be done with this life, finished, I realize that, but I don't care, something in me just feels like this isn't it. I don't mean that we're going to see him, that he's going to show up at your door all over again or anything lunatic like that, just..." She flung her free hand into the air, helplessly. "I can't explain it. I just feel like, look, whatever it looks like, this isn't really it."

Sarah gazed down at the table, at the faint scratches and ring marks in the wood. "I do too," she said, after a moment. "I just don't know why, or how."

Sarah's voice was steady and even and suffused with determined belief, Jo could hear it in every syllable, and it was good she could hear it because her open eye was the really bad eye and she could barely see anything of Sarah's face. Just a smudged pale dot surrounded by opaque, gray-black clouds. "All right," Jo asked her, "then what do we do?"

Sarah considered the question. "Hurry up and wait," she said.

The timer beeped a second time. They sat there, Jo blinking against the medicine's faint sting, both of them listening to the faint noises of traffic on the late afternoon streets.

******

9. I'd like to run out now
There's nowhere left to turn

It had been one of the best Christmases of her life, so much better than any Christmas since her mother died, so that all January and all February and most of March had passed before she had—literally or figuratively—come back down to Earth enough to face what she'd been putting off since Danny's accident. The cardboard boxes she'd carried, refusing all help, from his flat to hers were still there, as they had been for months, piled higher than her head in her spare bedroom; they were the last remaining task, the final remnants of his life she couldn't bear to face sorting out, but the sooner she finally rolled up her sleeves and tackled them, the better. A gray, minging Saturday afternoon like this one, a steady trickle of freezing sleet outside her window, a vaguely gray and lonely feeling inside her and the Doctor off on some solitary day trip Lord knew where, it would do. It'd have to.

Danny's clothes and shoes had been easy, she'd long since done those; everything except a jacket that still, even now, smelled faintly of him had gone off to Oxfam. His furniture and kitchen stuff, same. All these other boxes, though, the paperbacks and old music magazines and textbooks and Making Math Easy workbooks he'd been testing out for school use, would anyone want those? He was a terrible margins scribbler, Danny was, and some of his textbooks from uni (because of course, he'd kept them all) had entire pages highlighted in green or blue or orange, surely that ruined them for secondhand. Then there was his turntable, and the huge collections of CDs and vinyl painstakingly organized from Absolut Null Punkt to Zappa, Frank, some used record shop would surely snap them up but though none of it was her sort of music, she still hesitated. They were the most personal thing he'd owned; right there, look at that big smear of his fingerprints on Bish Bosch when she tilted it toward the light—out they went. She didn't have room for them anyway.

She'd set aside mementos for each of the kids in his cadet squadron, memorialized his Facebook page, closed out as many other online accounts as she could find and it was in the process of double-checking this, sifting through piles of papers looking for any stray scribbled-down passwords (and had he saved every instruction manual for every electronic item he'd ever bought?), that she'd found a padded brown mailing envelope, something oblong stuffed into it, addressed in a wide, careless, familiar scrawl to The Doctor, c/o Clara Oswald. Fragile! Do Not Bend Or Get Wet. She held it in her hands for several minutes, turning it over and back again like the words on the front might change in the interim, and her fingers itched to tear open the seal but she left it intact, running a hand back and forth over her name, there in his writing. Written how long before he'd—

It was stupid, she told herself, as she'd told herself again and again even in the fading buoyancy of January, February, a good part of March, to carry on like this inside when she had seen him again, when they had had something like a proper goodbye (the thought they might owe it to that...woman who'd revived Danny made nausea crawl up into the back of her throat, but circumstances were what they were), when he'd returned to her vividly as life more than once, more than twice...it was stupid of her and more than that, it was selfish. He hadn't chosen his death, no, but he had chosen his fate, and it was his choice and no one else's to make, and she did respect that. She did. Really.

He is the man I will always forgive, always trust. He is the one man I would never, ever lie to. Him. Not you. And that was the truth. And I said it to your face, not knowing I did, and is that, even a little, part of why you decided to—

She'd decided to tell Danny everything, no matter if it meant they were finished, because she couldn't stand lying to him anymore. She really had, and then, in a split second, she'd lost the chance. But then she'd told him the truth after all, hadn't she, without realizing she'd done it until she'd seen the face behind the metal mask. And it was a truth so far beyond the mere dry fact of I've been traveling with the Doctor all this time, and you never knew it, and one about which she'd deceived not Danny but herself, for months, for years—

And this was why you lied, conscience be damned. This was why you said only what someone wanted to hear, needed to hear, and you didn't examine any of it too closely. Because if you did look at what you were saying, really look at it, you might find out you were lying to yourself most of all. And then what?

He is the man I will never understand, even when I hear every word he says. But then you were too, Danny, weren't you?

And the common factor there isn't him or you, Danny. It's me. So what does that tell you?

The rain was coming down harder. She pulled herself from the small mountains of paper and cardboard and went into the front room, returning again with the photograph of Danny she kept on her desk now, next to her mother's. Sitting back down cross-legged on the floor, she pulled the frame open, removed the printed-out news article she kept between the picture and the frame backing: there, up at the top, a photograph of a boy of nine or ten, arms wrapped tightly around a woman's knees, a man standing next to the woman with a tentative hand on the boy's curly hair. Their faces looked beyond overwhelmed. Mystery Boy, Parents Reunited, read the headline. He'd been found wandering the London streets, polite, hungry, disoriented and speaking not three words of English; a man had brought him there, that was all the Afghani interpreter could get from him, and something about another man keeping him in a big room, but he insisted he hadn't been kidnapped or trafficked. More than that—including, for many weeks, his own name—he couldn't seem to remember. With the aid of a young doctor at a London refugee clinic, a months-long search finally found his parents, who'd just been granted asylum and were convinced their only child was dead. Long dead. Separated somehow in the UN camps, was one theory. The definition of a heartwarming Christmas story, that is unless you were the local UKIP hopeful so obsessed with the family you'd have thought he was their PR agent. The comments on the paper's website were so foul Clara had stopped reading halfway down the page. Didn't matter. There he was.

She put the clipping back behind the frame, studied the picture of Danny standing in front of Coal Hill with two of his cadets. Nasreh and...Kevin? Keith? Ken? She couldn't remember. Danny looked thoroughly ill at ease, his smile a typically self-conscious grimace, but then he'd hated being photographed just that much. Those friends of his, at the memorial, they'd said something about having other pictures of him, she was welcome to any she liked, one invitation after another to see them and talk to them and talk about him but she just wanted them all to sod off before she blurted out Look, I don't need your sympathy, yeah? I need this fixed and I know who can do it, and it isn't you. She'd trusted the Doctor to do that, like she trusted him in everything, and he hadn't let her down, even when she'd done exactly that to him. He hadn't lied. She'd got what she told him she wanted, what she considered she was owed.

And now, even now, she had to wonder if that was the real reason the Doctor had forgiven her betrayal: because he knew, like almost no one else could, that there was no punishment in creation like getting back everything you had lost and then watching it, of its own volition, with you utterly helpless to stop it, gently, quietly close the door in your face.

There was a faint sound in the front room—that sound she privately called the warping-and-woofing and that's what it had become, inextricably, part of the warp and woof of her own life—and despite the closed windows, the papers strewn around her fluttered in a sudden airless breeze. Clara grabbed the mailing envelope, cradling it in her arm as the TARDIS door opened and the Doctor stepped out, nearly slammed his shins against her coffee table and, swearing under his breath, swiftly backed away. Clara waited for the inevitable raillery, a demand to know why humans insisted on cluttering up their living spaces with actual furnishings when all civilized beings floated through empty air, but nothing was forthcoming. Which was good, as right now she simply wasn't in the mood.

"So where've you been, anyway?" she asked.

"The eye of a storm," he said, after a moment, and didn't elaborate. "What's with the papers? You that far behind marking essays?"

"Hopelessly," she said, drawing the spare room door closed with her foot. "Ready to head out again? Because I am."

"What about your—"

"It can wait," she said, stepping past him and over the TARDIS threshold. "It can wait."

He looked nearly as out of sorts as she felt: long bluish shadows beneath his eyes, his hair disheveled, the lines of his forehead and jaw drawn taut like someone fighting a bone-deep fatigue. It didn't surprise her at all to see her own mood reflected in his face, or the other way around; that seemed to be happening more and more often lately between them, this unbidden ability to read themselves in each other. It wasn't entirely pleasant, that phenomenon: It allowed for that many fewer lies.

"So," he said, pacing thoughtfully round the console, "the Lakes of Oitolorgia? Or we could go to the seventh Hyrkryspsian moon, if you ever wanted to see what Pepperland looks like when it's not some shoddy two-dimensional cartoon imitation—"

"I hate old rock music, let's do the Lakes. Got some mail for you, by the way," she said, attempting for reasons she couldn't fathom to sound offhand and lighthearted. "I'd have given it to you earlier but I...didn't find it, until just now."

The Doctor took the envelope from her, turned it over in his hands—of course, Clara reminded herself, he'd no reason to recognize the handwriting—then tore it open like a child demolishing gift wrapping. Two items inside: a piece of notepaper with something taped to it, and a small, wine-colored book nearly bursting at the seams from the dozens, hundreds of loose papers stuffed to bursting between its pages. He started at the sight of the book, glanced at the note, and looked up at Clara in apparent bewilderment.

"My diary," he said. "My old 750-Year Diary, I've been searching for it for months. What the hell was P.E. doing with..."

He was reading the note properly now, staring at it, the long-lost diary already seemingly forgotten. He glanced up at Clara, only for a moment, but the stricken look in his eyes made the hard little knot she'd been feeling in her chest all that day, all that week, pull that much tighter.

"Let me see," she said.

"Clara, I don't—"

"Let me see it," she said, every word separate and distinct as a rifle shot.

The Doctor handed her the piece of paper. There, in a smaller version of the envelope's scrawling hand:

22 March '14

Doctor—I know I wasn't "on deck" very long but I couldn't resist taking a TARDIS souvenir, though I didn't mean to take one quite so personal. If you're reading this it means I got a conscience, or just did a spring clean, and gave it to Clara to give back to you. Jo's husband took the picture, when we all went to Dorset. Add it to the collection if you want, or chuck it, either way if your ears weren't burning that day you weren't paying attention. Take Clara somewhere fun, no killer robots or anything like that. Namaste (just kidding).

Happy trails, General—
Danny

She read it again, and a third time, and then examined the photograph taped to the top. There they were, crowding together into the frame: so many of the strange faces she'd seen at Danny's funeral, at the reception afterward, pressing her hand between theirs and giving their disorienting damp-eyed consolations. All those stories about him they'd simply assumed were mutual knowledge and she'd had to nod politely, lie, pretend she had any idea what they were talking about until she felt like she might scream. Young and old, dark heads and blond and ginger and gray, huddling shoulder to shoulder on the beach sands against the hair-whipping winds; Danny was third from the right, standing between a tall, broadbeamed woman wearing a drab blue anorak and blazing pink hijab, and a white-haired stick insect in huge dark sunglasses that swallowed up her thin little face. He was laughing at something, a real laugh, she would ever know at what, and he wasn't grimacing and he didn't look the least self-conscious, not at all. He looked like he had that day in the restaurant: happy. At ease. Absolutely elsewhere.

Danny, are you seeing someone else? No, of course not, but. Not the way you think, but. Just like her.

Take Clara somewhere fun.

"Jo," she said. "I met her at the funeral. Another companion, back in the day?"

"Yes," said the Doctor. He put the diary down on the console, peering over Clara's shoulder at the photograph. "She left to get married, and to try and save the Earth her own way. Apparently the right decision, though I still have my doubts." He pointed to another figure, on the left. "That's Sarah, and that's her son and daughter. That woman there in the middle, wearing the fisherman's jumper, you'd never know it from the picture but she's got to be pushing ninety, she was one of the very first humans I ever—"

"I don't care who they are."

Another lie, that was, and at the same time not. The Doctor contemplated it in silence.

"All right, then," he said. He turned back toward the controls. Clara couldn't stop staring at the picture.

"'Take Clara somewhere fun.' So he knew, then." Clara put a fingertip to the photograph, touched the edge of Danny's face. "All that time. All along."

The Doctor glanced at her, confused. "Of course he knew. You told me yourself you talked to him and that he was perfectly fine with..."

His words trailed off and he nodded. "Ah," he said, and resumed his calculations. As if he weren't really surprised at all. As if he'd expected no better. Clara stood there, the knot inside her doubling up and up again until it was like a whole rope of them, hard little beads or nodules, nestling in her gut and lungs trying to crowd out her breath. Suffocation by macramé.

"So she left to get married," she said. "Jo did. And to save the Earth. Did you miss her?"

"Horribly," the Doctor said. He didn't seem to want to look in her direction.

"And Sarah. She talked about you, at the service, was she before Jo or—"

"You just got through saying you didn't care who they are."

The sudden edge to his voice was like a whetstone, working at her own sharp, hurtful corners. "I know bloody well what I said. Maybe I changed my mind, that all right with you?" No answer. "Where were you really, anyway, just before this? Or am I suddenly not good enough to know?"

"Clara?" The Doctor pivoted on his heel, stared down at her as though from a great height. "I'm sorry about all this. I'm sorry about what happened to Danny—"

"Are you? Really? Because I mean, you two were always such marvelous friends."

The dark little solar flare behind his eyes, that was all the warning she ever needed. Or got. She didn't care about it just now, nor the coldness of the smile that followed.

"And despite all your herculean efforts on our behalf," he said. "It's quite sad."

"Don't you put that on me," Clara said, around clenching teeth. "Don't you dare put all that on me, the way you talked down to him and over him and past him like he was just some—"

"And I'm sorry, Clara, that he evidently had a life he never told you about, God knows you'd never behave that way to anyone, and I'm sorry you went through all this without saying a word to me until it was over, and I'm sorry you're feeling guilty now there's absolutely nothing you can do about it—God knows I understand that—but the thing is? Right now, I am not in the mood to have to justify my entire past, again, to another companion who simply can't fathom there was ever anyone else before she or he or they happened along. It was charming the first time, in its own way, but you know what it is now? Especially from someone as intelligent as you?" He shook his head. "It's absolutely, insufferably tedious. So stop. Just, pick a place you'd like to go, we'll go to it, and we can both forget about the school papers you haven't been marking and about—all the rest of it. If you just stop."

Back to the console, again, all those endless dials and switches, running his hands over them like a pet cat's soothing fur; she could actually see it, the way it made the tension in his face slowly, silently recede. Just forget about it all, yeah? Just pretend it means nothing. Ask no questions and I'll tell you—nothing. Just like always. Just don't ever look too closely.

"If I just stop," Clara repeated, quite calmly. "Because it's all me. Right?"

No answer.

"And of course, I'd never have dreamed you had a whole life outside of me," she said. "Have. Because I haven't been up and down your timeline like a damned marching tin soldier, never mind what I don't remember of it, you think I'd just forget all of it like it all means nothing, just like you think I can just forget—"

"I never said that," said the Doctor. He gazed at her, contrite, his anger dissipating. "I never meant—"

"You seriously thought what, I was going to have a big jealous piss and whinge about your other companions, that I give a damn about that whole bloody old age pensioners' home? I told you I didn't—"

"Clara—"

"That's not what I was going to say. That was the last thing I was going to say."

The Doctor rubbed at a temple, the fingers pressing down hard. "I'm sorry," he said.

"And I don't actually care, just now."

As she strode past him she thrust Danny's note into his hand, not slowing down when she heard the crumple of paper against his fingers, and went down the nearest hallway without looking back.

He was intelligent enough not to come looking for her right away, not for a good hour or two in fact. When she heard his footsteps behind her she was sitting in the main TARDIS library, her back to the doors, her shoes and socks off and the edges of her feet dangling in the vast swimming pool that took up two-thirds of the first floor. The surface had a strange purplish-blue tint, as though the fresh lilac-like petals scattered over it (changed out by the TARDIS, somehow, or was sprinkling them an eccentric pastime of the Doctor's?) had bled their color all throughout, but when she'd cautiously dipped a palm in and sipped it had tasted and smelled like plain, ordinary water. The footsteps slowed and stopped; she didn't turn around, keeping her eyes instead on the small Elizabeth Tudor portrait on the near wall—she didn't know a thing about art, all she could've said was it didn't look at all like a Holbein—and the endless rows of books stretching beneath, around, above it. He wanted to talk? Fine. Let him talk.

"The swimming pool library," she said, before he could say anything. "That's the title of a book, ever read it?"

"Ages ago," he said. "Or not. I read a lot of books, titles escape me."

"I have. Didn't like it." She lowered her feet in a little farther, watching the purplish-blue rush in and submerge her toes. "You said once," she continued, "that when you first saw the TARDIS it was all rusted out, nothing but gnawed wires and broken circuitry and great piles of rubbish in every corner. Just a shell. So did you build all this, or what? Did they have a special remodeling kit that you stole too, or some sort of Grow-Your-Own-Luxury-Liner seed packet, just add water and wait a hundred years—"

"She reveals herself, as she sees fit. Slowly. Picks up bits and pieces here and there, finds new facets of herself as she goes. Rather like any perceptive being, I suppose. Perception is conception is reality." He'd come a little closer, just a few feet removed now, but no further. "If she feels safe in doing so, if there's anyone there to understand her. When I first met her she'd been rather hard done by, passed around like some—well, she didn't have any incentive to show her colors, let's just leave it at that. She wouldn't even try to talk to me. At first."

She usually loved hearing him talk like this, the quiet ardent enthusiasm, the unmistakable sense of magic it evoked in her even though she knew full well the magic was all science, however beyond her understanding. Today, it was just exhausting. She placed her chin in her hands, watching a lone petal float along in slow, small circles.

"D'you ever actually use this pool?" she asked him. "I mean, other than to look at?"

He seemed discomfited by the question. "I suppose I have—"

"Come for a swim, then," she said. "I'm having one."

The knotted-up feeling had taken over her whole body, pulling her muscles against themselves and making a tight tangle of her insides. She knew he sensed it, could sense herself without looking in his direction how it put him instantly on his guard. Keeping her back to him, she unbuttoned and discarded her cardigan, folded her arms around themselves to pull her shirt over her head and off. She rose to her feet, undid and stepped out of her trousers, stopped to lay them neatly atop the pile of clothing before removing her bra and pants. Then she turned to face him. No crossed arms, no barely shielding palms. He gazed back at her, his expression unreadable.

"Well?" she said.

He didn't answer, and her voice took on a harsher edge. "What is it, Doctor? Not sure what you're looking at?"

"I've seen naked women before," he said, without rancor. "And men. And all points along the spectrum. You haven't shocked me, if that's what you intended."

"You cover the waterfront. I get it." She laughed. "Bully for you."

Instead of jumping in she sat back down on the pool's edge, bracing her palms to slide herself into the water; she squeezed her eyes shut, ducked her head under and, already half-breathless, came back up. The temperature was perfect, of course, probably it was some sort of bloody sentient super-genius cosmic water that conformed itself to any species that entered it, and that stoked her anger; she wanted to freeze, to be wrenched loose from her net of knots by the shock of the cold and chattering teeth and shivering, prickling skin going its own shade of blue. Or to be scalded. Scorched.

"That 'old friend' of yours," she said. She rested her elbows on the edge, her feet floating far above the bottom of the pool as she stared up at the Doctor. As if from a great depth. "The one who tortured Danny like that. Is she one of the ones you've seen naked?"

No answer. Of course, no answer. "What a surprise," she said, combing her dripping hair back with her fingers. "What a bloody surprise."

"Silence," he said, "isn't an answer."

"The hell it isn't."

His eyes were sad, tired and sad; not with remorse, nor guilt, but with the weariness of someone certain that whatever he had or hadn't done, for whatever reason, he would never find forgiveness for it. As she stared at him his face blurred and distorted, as if she were gazing out a windscreen into a sudden spring rain, and tears ran down her cheeks, her nose, to the surface of the water.

"You were right," the Doctor said quietly. "I wasn't Danny's friend, and he wasn't mine. But that doesn't make his death any less significant, even if not in the same way it is for you, or his friends. And even if I'd despised him, which I never did, it doesn't make him any less important to the universe, God help me if I ever again start thinking my own opinions are that—"

The pool's edge looked fragile as porcelain, a long, shell-thin expanse of purplish blue. Clara slammed a fist against it. Nothing, not even the most hairline crack. She hit it again, and again.

"I thought I was over it," she sobbed. "That it was all sorted, settled, he chose his fate, everything's moved on, life goes on—I thought I was all right with it, that I was finished with all this. I was finished with it!"

"Will you hate me even more," the Doctor asked, "if I tell you that you never will be?"

She cried for several minutes more, as hard as if she'd been all alone, like she never had when Danny was buried, harder than when she'd thought she'd shut the Doctor forever out of his own home. The Doctor stood there, watching her, offering not a word or a hand and thank God he didn't because the slightest touch felt like it would scald, scorch. Shatter. When her eyes had run dry and her temples begun to throb she rested her cheek against her arms, half-ready to fall asleep right there in the water. Her striking fingers already felt swollen, threatening to bruise.

"I want to get dressed now," she said.

The Doctor nodded. He walked to the other side of the pool, opening the cabinet of something Clara had taken for a writing desk, but which turned out to contain bath towels: robin's egg blue, thick-napped, neatly folded. He deposited them next to her clothes and headed for the doorway.

"How the hell do you organize the books in here, anyway?" she asked his retreating back, hoarse and congested and ready to burst into tears all over again; she was horribly embarrassed, and not by her nakedness. "I tried author, title, subject, alphabetical, numerical, by language, planet, galaxy, species, Dewey Decimal, RDA, the bloody periodic table—how do you find anything? Or is half the fun that nobody else can ever find anything?"

He turned round. "That's the TARDIS's department, I'm afraid," he said. "I've nothing to do with it. I've resigned myself to just enjoying, or enduring, whatever she hands me at random."

Clara bit her lip, letting her teeth slide back and forth against the flesh. "I don't want to go to the Lakes of Oitolorgia," she said. "Or to the seventh Hyrkryspsian moon. Or to Près-Pierre XI or New York or Kashmir or Faïsu or back to my own flat. I don't want to go anywhere."

The Doctor considered this. "All right," he said, nodding once more.

He left the library, closing the doors softly behind him.

******

10. Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend,
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again

Days passed. Earth days, of course, which she measured by the special little clock on her bedside table, the one the Doctor had given her back when she'd thought everything she felt about Danny was sorted, settled, over. She loved that clock, sitting there waiting in her TARDIS bedroom as a belated Christmas present: a filigreed oblong of some sort of burnished silvery metal, like an oversized snuffbox, which when opened revealed an exquisite garden of metal flowers—no two of them alike—rising up in silvery profusion but never into the same arrangement twice. The gearworks, hiding in plain sight. It was a bit tricky, to learn how to read them (and the Doctor had refused to drop any hints, was content to let her discover for herself that it was a clock at all, not just some pretty ornament). Every time, though, you worked out another bit of the code lurking in the flowers' unlettered, unnumbered surfaces, one of the flowers would light up softly from within to reveal the date and time in a new Earth city, or some outer galaxy, or some random satellite of a moon ten thousand light-years removed. (So far Clara could thus tell the time in Sydney, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in a flooded-out abandoned former capital city of Iakric A-79, none of which had really come in handy yet but you never knew.) Slightly simplified versions of such clocks, the Doctor told her, had been ubiquitous toys on Gallifrey, one he'd always wanted himself as a child.

It was the middle of the TARDIS's artificial night and, again, Clara couldn't sleep. She moved more of the metal flowers around their clockwork box-garden, looking for any sort of pattern or frequency that might emerge. It was tricky; sometimes you had to tug at the flowers until you nearly pulled them out by the imaginary roots, other times the mere brush of a fingertip against a leaf would trip something in the gears, reveal another clue to another chronological puzzle. And, of course, since the garden changed every time you re-opened the box (and it would close itself anyway, if you didn't), there was no saving your work: Solve it now, or back to the beginning. She'd been this close, once, to unearthing the time in Paris, then lost it again with one foolish twist of a petal...her fingers skimmed the surface at random, half-asleep like the rest of her, but other than the faint twitch of one daisy-stem nothing moved. Once, quite by accident, she'd unlocked not a time but a scent, done something to make one of the flowers smell like jasmine except even stronger and sweeter, but she had no idea how and the perfume disappeared, with everything else, when she shut the lid.

What would happen, if she ever accidentally managed to unlock the flower for Gallifrey? Would it show anything, or just remain blank? Was there even a flower for it at all?

With a sudden inspiration she picked up one of Victoria's figurines she'd found in the console room, warmed it to life in her palm, set it down among the clock's flowers. Its mechanical steps around the flora made a few leaves shake and creak but otherwise, nothing.

But at least she knew that it was currently 8:22 PM in Lincoln, Nebraska. That accomplishment, you couldn't take away from her.

She and the Doctor had kept well to themselves since the incident in the library, neither avoiding nor seeking each other out; a couple of times she heard his footsteps, going past her room or the little library annex she liked to read in or down the main passage to the console room, but his feet never stopped or even hesitated, just walked past. This was a relief. Clara read, desultorily, thumbing through books she knew nearly by heart. She took a long soak in the bath with the carvings of Bladud and Cordelia and Beli Mawr, spent an afternoon in one of the portrait galleries, wandered at random down unfamiliar corridors like one of the figurines set to marching.

Two or three days past, again quite by accident, she'd stumbled over a tiny back kitchen, cluttered and dusty and painted an unappetizing salmon pink but stocked with plenty of food; she took a few tins and some fruit back to her room, a large bag of crisps, then was glad she had because even scrupulously retracing her steps she couldn't find that kitchen again. She ate distractedly, only when her body loudly demanded it. Except right now, she realized, as she closed the clock lid, hunger was making her simultaneously drowsy and uncomfortably awake. She didn't want to risk the main kitchen, the Doctor could be found there far too often, but the Walkers cheddar-cheese flavor and the grapefruit had both run out and perhaps if she tried again, just one more time, she might find the tiny little kitchen at the other end of the—

—was it really as simple as that, that she'd turned left and left the other night, when she should've gone right and then left? Anyway, there it was, sitting where she'd last seen it in all its salmon pink glory. Clara stepped over the threshold, bent down to retrieve a loose slipper and then stopped short, the slipper still in her hand, when she saw the Doctor sitting at the salmon-painted wooden table, his nose in a copy of Euclid's Elements and a tall plate of toast at his elbow. He glanced up, and looked genuinely startled to see her. Clara took a step back before she could stop herself, then felt a surge of irritation, not at him; why the hell couldn't they sit in the same room at the same time? Let him read his book. She still didn't have much to say anyway, to him or anyone else.

At least he didn't get up and leave. She'd wondered if he might, for a split second.

Clara rooted through the top cupboards, standing on tiptoe and stretching out an arm to reach the lone, dusty tin of pilchards stuck in a corner. Behind her, she heard faint sounds of rustling pages, the fainter sound of a book being shut, but didn't turn until she'd opened the tin, found a butter knife, pried up the stuck edge of the breadbox. She could feel his eyes on her now but there was nothing hostile about it; he was only looking. He watched her take an untoasted slice of bread, spread it thickly with butter, lay half the slice with pilchards in a soldier-neat row, then fold the other half over. Her favorite snack as a child, one she'd eaten countless times with her mother when nursing shifts brought her home at all hours. There were rules for this particular feast, that they both stuck to with almost military fervor: The bread had to be Warburtons Toastie, the pilchards in brine but never in sauce, one bread slice only and it had to be folded over, never cut in half. Butter was the only acceptable condiment, that and a light sprinkling of salt over the fish. Clara found a plate, sat down across from the Doctor. His own plate of toast glowed ruby red from all the jam; had he made it just to look at it? She gazed at the toast. He gazed at her sandwich. The silence took on a sudden air of challenge.

The Doctor raised his brows. Then he bit into a slice, frowned and went in his turn to the cupboards, returning with a half-empty bag of icing sugar; Clara watched as he tossed heaping spoonfuls of the stuff over the jam, nearly obliterating the ruby red under snowy white. Another bite and he nodded to himself, satisfied. Clara bit into her pilchards, which tasted exactly as they should have. They ate without speaking.

"So what's with all the custard powder?" she asked, when his toast was half gone.

It was the first words she'd said to him in four days, five, perhaps longer. The Doctor looked somewhat nonplussed, whether by the question itself or her sudden breach of silence she couldn't say. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Over there." Clara inclined her chin toward the cupboard nearest the cooker. "Packed solid with tins of Bird's, I couldn't even count them all."

"Oh." His eyes flickered in that direction, as if he'd quite forgotten. As he doubtless had. "I wanted to be sure I'd never run out." He dipped a knife back into the jam jar, spread another layer of it over the icing sugar. "But I can't stomach the stuff now, feel free."

She shook her head. "I'm good."

There was an electric kettle, shoved behind a pile of dishtowels and some decades-old art magazines on the countertop, but it was scaly as the amphibian wing at the London Zoo. She wanted a cup of tea, but not quite badly enough to try cleaning it. He ate steadily at the toast, a rivulet of powdery jam trickling toward his sleeve cuff; he caught it just in time, licking it away as a swift afterthought.

"There's also some Angel Delight in there. And Ovaltine," he said. "Somewhere or other."

"Thanks. Yeah, so," she said, quickly, before she could change her mind, "about the library, the other day—"

"It's forgotten," he said. He wiped the last, faint streak of red off his hand. "So just forget about it."

"I...can't, not really." Her face felt hot, the memory of what she'd done somehow more acute than the actual act had ever been. "Don't take this the wrong way but I'm a bit glad you didn't take me up on it, that really would've—"

"You were upset," the Doctor said. He toyed idly with a crust of bread, not taking his eyes from her face. "Distraught, understandably, in fact, and so not yourself. Whatever else I've done, in whatever body, I've never availed myself of anyone in no condition to know what they really want." He ground the dog-end of the crust against his plate as though stubbing out a cigarette, a little flare of sticky ash-crumbs landing on the plate. "And given some of the things I've done when I was feeling not myself, you taking off all your clothes barely even rates. So like I said, forget about it."

Clara managed a nod. "I'm not actually completely deranged," she muttered.

He considered this statement, and raised his eyebrows again. She didn't quite laugh, but almost. She couldn't help it. He gazed at her. She gazed down at the tabletop. There were some deep scratches in the table corner, a cat-eared triangle that looked like someone's crude attempt to carve a heart: R + A. Or perhaps that was the Doctor's work, a tremulous love-letter to whatever unhappy mind invented algebra.

"Every now and then," he said, after a few moments, "you remind me of my wife. My first wife."

Whatever she'd been expecting him to say next, that wasn't anywhere on the list. Wiping traces of butter from her fingers, she turned the thought over in her mind. Was that a good thing? Or was it just, well, a thing? "What was she like?"

"Ginger. Barely this high." He placed one palm perhaps a foot above the other, holding an invisible statuette, and Clara snorted. "Big eyes. Didn't give a damn what anyone else thought of her, including me. Melancholy every now and then—I kept imagining there was some magical means to coax her out of it, when it happened, but of course that's like trying to wish away the rain." He went over to the sink, filling a glass of water. "Married to someone else, when we met."

"Was that not done? On Gallifrey, I mean? Or did nobody care?"

"It was as disapproved of as in most Earth cultures, but—" The Doctor shrugged as he sat back down. "I decided I didn't intend to take notice." Three, four large swallows, and the glass was half-empty. "She gave up a good deal more than I did. Running off with an orphan, no known genetic lineage anyone could trace, on Gallifrey that was worse than if I'd had no money—which I also didn't—or were a lunatic or a criminal. Which I wasn't. Yet." Three-quarters empty. "But she didn't care."

"Were you happy?" Clara asked.

The Doctor thought it over. "For a little while," he said.

A little while. What was that to a Gallifreyan, a few months or a few centuries? Clara reached for his glass, sipped at the remains.

"The other you," she said. "I mean, before this, Mr. Custard. Is that why he liked me so much?" Bit creepy at first, sometimes, to be honest, she almost added, then thought better of it.

"Possibly so," the Doctor said. "I'd been traveling with someone else, and her husband, for a good while, and..." He crumbled off bits of the bread crust in his fingers. "I made the mistake of thinking of her as a sort of daughter, or granddaughter—well, when I first met her she was just a lonely little girl, and I really did watch her grow up. In fits and starts. I danced at her wedding."

His eyes grew distant, the old look, as though he stood at the proverbial two roads diverged except instead it was two hundred of them, or two thousand; she could feel him almost amazed at the memory, marveling at his own words. "I danced at her wedding. I never did that with—" And again, he checked himself. "Mr. Custard. I think I'll use that."

"And what was she like?" said Clara. "The one with the wedding."

He smiled. "Honestly? A bit deranged." The smile broadened. "Deranged, and ginger to boot. You can see why I looked at her and decided, well, there's got to be a family resemblance there."

His smile dissolved and he was off in the distance once more, wandering down four or nineteen or a hundred roads to places she couldn't follow. More stories she wasn't privy to. More people she didn't know, and never would. Not that she was asking. But they were piling up, lately, from all directions. They would require their own special shelf.

That Sarah, that Jo, when they'd said she could come by any time, hear about the Danny they'd swiftly realized she hadn't known. Was that just the usual bilge people felt obliged to say at funerals, or had they actually meant it? They'd seemed like they meant it. Possibly. Perhaps she'd find out things he hadn't felt like he could ever tell her, things she'd never have wanted to know. Perhaps worrying she might was beside the point. It wasn't meant to be about her, this wasn't.

"Why didn't you ever tell me before?" she asked the Doctor. "I mean, the thing about your wife."

"Because no one should have to labor in someone else's looming shadow—even when the comparison's entirely well-meant." The bread crust buckled in his grasp, bent and broke in half. "I've made that mistake before. I don't wish to make it again."

Clara ran a finger over the rim of the glass. "I know the feeling," she said.

The Doctor slid his hand across the table. Halfway to her own it slowed, and stopped.

"You look ghastly," he said. "Those circles under your eyes, if you're not careful you'll have lovesick raccoons serenading you home."

She leaned back, folding her arms. "Sorry, I think the translator's on the blink again—that's flaming berk for 'You really need some sleep,' right?"

"Well, if you strip away all the all-important puns and idioms and—"

"Shut up."

"I see you've recovered," he said. "Somewhat."

Yawning, she pushed the chair back and rose to her feet. He remained where he was, picking up his book. Then he said something, five or six swift, astringent-sounding syllables that she didn't quite catch. "Sorry?" she said.

"You wanted to learn a bit of Gallifreyan, didn't you?" he said. "That was 'good night.'"

She glanced at the ceiling, the walls, a bit nervous. "I was joking, about the translator—"

"I know," he said. "It's working perfectly well. As we speak."

"You didn't switch it off, just then?" she said. "For a moment?"

He shook his head. "It's a telepathically triggered algorithm, there's no switches anyone can flip. It either works, or it doesn't."

"Then how did you do that?" she demanded. "Just now?"

He just smiled. Like the Mona Lisa with a mouthful of canary.

"Gute bloody Nacht," she grumbled, and left the room.

Hours later, deep asleep—while the Doctor did whatever he did when she slept because the Doctor never slept, not like any human needed to, anyway—she dreamt again of Danny. This time he was seated at a table in a small suburban kitchen, much smaller and cleaner than any on the TARDIS, no idea where exactly it was but somehow the word "suburban" imposed itself on her mind. Sunlight spilled through the kitchen windows as Danny sat there with a half-dozen or more of the people from the photograph; she couldn't quite hear his voice but he was deep in a conversation that did not, that had never included her, that it was too late now for her to understand. She didn't want to overhear it, she suddenly realized, as if she were standing back from the dream even as she experienced it; it wasn't hers. It was his. It was all right to say that. To leave it be.

The kitchen wavered and blurred before her dreaming eye but did not quite dissolve. Another, simultaneous image emerged in the same space; a strange double vision took hold, so that even as she still saw the kitchen clear as life there was this new landscape, just as vivid, superimposed. Danny stood in a vacant lot, the wind blowing bits of rubbish past his feet, on the half-abandoned outskirts of some half-deserted place. No idea where it was, but the word "city" came clearly through to Clara's mind. He was naked, pieces of that horrible robot armor piled forgotten behind him like scrap metal and she could see, all over him, the raw-rubbed spots where the diodes and wires and overlapping plates of the cyber-suit had abraded his skin. It would be just like Danny, the Danny she'd thought she'd known, to try and ignore them, and in the dream her fingers itched to apply a cool damp cloth, daub on antiseptic. And what was that, over to the left, a great cylindrical, pale orange object that seemed to hover close to the ground without touching it...some sort of spaceship?

Some sort of TARDIS?

Another man stood in front of Danny, dark-skinned with heavy-lidded eyes, wearing long robes of gold and deep blue and a cascading orange cape; some sort of odd Egyptian or would-be Egyptian headdress, adorned by a great Eye of Horus, weighed down his head. Danny raised his arms, like a small child waiting for his mother to dress him, and the man draped him in a robe covered in red and yellow designs, watched silently as Danny fastened it at the neck. The man held up his hand, displaying something in his palm. A tarot card, whose drawing Clara could see as though she too stood only inches away. The Hanged Man. No, the Hierophant. No. The World. Danny examined the card without speaking, and suddenly, it vanished.

The strange man extended his newly empty hand. The hems of Danny's robe brushed against his blistered ankles, his bare dusty feet, as Danny took a single step forward. Clara's vision was faltering now with the difficulty of holding this scene and the scene in the kitchen together at the same time, one and the same place, even as—she sensed, somehow—that was the only way they could play out. They could only be true, they were only true, happening both at once. And now she heard, was it coming from the vacant lot or one of the people at the table, someone—not Danny, not any voice she knew—repeating, insistently, over and over, Take off for the planet, off for the planet...the planet...the planet... The kitchen was awash in red and yellow, the vacant lot in gold and blue. The planet...the planet...for the planet...for the...for...for...

Clara's eyes opened. For several minutes she lay staring up at the TARDIS ceiling, not moving, concentrating all her energies on remembering every detail of the dream she could; everything from the slant of the kitchen sunlight to the exact shades and colors of the strange man's robes, down to each piece of stray rubbish blowing round the vacant city lot. The fact that she didn't understand this dream, not any of it, somehow didn't seem to matter: The important thing was to hold tightly to it, and keep its memory, and that was all. Briefly she considered writing it all down, but somehow she was sure, without knowing why, that she should not. Nor talk about it. It wasn't, she suddenly thought, even hers to talk about; it belonged to someone else. Namely, Danny. That dream, she decided, with a growing conviction, was his. His property, not bequeathed to anyone else. She was simply meant to keep it safe.

For what? Until when? For a dead man to claim it back how, exactly?

Her room was still dark but, now that the TARDIS had sensed a sentient creature with increasing signs of consciousness, was growing slowly less so. It was 6:32 PM in Sydney. She had no idea how long she'd slept. She pulled on a T-shirt, an old pair of track suit bottoms, and still preoccupied by the dream, wandered toward the console room. The Doctor was sitting in an armchair near the bookshelves, still with his Euclid; as she entered he raised his eyes from the book without raising his chin.

"Awake at last," he noted.

"Were you playing music before?" she asked him. "I thought I heard music. I mean, in my sleep. Or just someone sort of...chanting."

The Doctor shook his head. "No. But you wouldn't have heard it that far away anyway."

Clara walked up to the console, touching a few buttons and switches without activating any of them. She ran her palm, her fingertips lightly over the switches, over the console's metal panels, as she'd seen the Doctor do countless times in more than one body, the tonic effect of the gesture the same for him in any regeneration. She wasn't feeling it, but she hadn't really imagined she would.

He loved this strange machine, she'd long understood that, and that it loved him back. Decorum as much as anything else made her pretend to overlook that, decorum and the certainty that, even if she couldn't understand those feelings, they ran so strong and deep that they were none of her business. Had the Doctor done something like that, affected indifference to Danny for the very same reason? (You and Danny are together now, that's great, that's how it should be--) Had Danny, in all those months of letting her lie to his face and pretending to believe her, been doing it as well? She closed her eyes hard, briefly afraid she might cry again, but it passed. Two different men, two sets of feelings and conflicts and understandings, two attachments that could only have happened together, at all once, nothing compartmentalized even as she imagined she'd kept them far apart. Two hearts. She understood how that felt now, she thought, just a little.

"The photograph of Danny," the Doctor said. "Would you like to keep it?"

Clara wavered, then shook her head. "He gave it to you. It's yours. For your book." She hesitated. "I think he would've liked to be in your book, even if he never said so."

The Doctor nodded. He'd set the Euclid down at his feet, his hands resting against the chair arms.

"That day we went to New York, for the book signing," Clara said. "I saw you talking to a woman outside, the one who played the violin. The busker with the red boots. Who was she?"

If she'd been expecting defensiveness, claims of amnesia, enigmatic silence, he disappointed her. "Her parents traveled with me," he said. "She was after my time—I never met her, never even knew she existed before that day. But when I went back out of the bookstore, while I was waiting for you, she called me something, a name, that only her parents would've known to—"

"Raggedy Man?"

He sat up in surprise. "How did you—"

"Long story. Lucky guess." Clara spread her palms out against the console, fanning the fingers. "Why didn't you invite her aboard?"

"I did," the Doctor said. "She said she didn't think it was time for all that yet, and that I'd know when to come back." He smiled a little. "I did think for a moment, all right, if she pulls out a diary and starts graphing where our timelines meet I'm going to run for the TARDIS like St. Patrick pursued by a pit of king cobras, but it seems to have just been a guess on her part." His expression grew thoughtful. "A good guess, probably."

"Why didn't you introduce me?" Clara asked. "Too personal?" She waved a hand as the Doctor opened his mouth to protest. "That wasn't a jab in the eye, for God's sake, you're allowed to say yes. You know I don't tell you everything, either." She shrugged. "So was it too personal?"

"Honest answer?"

"Please."

"Honest answer," he said, "it honestly didn't occur to me, not just then. I was too...flummoxed. Tish was one thing, but I never knew her very well, I just wished her well. And apparently she's done quite well. Tabetha, as I said, I'd never even known she existed, much less that she knew who I was, much less that I'd ever actually run into her, in the middle of the second biggest city in North America, completely and entirely by accident—well, it's good the universe can still surprise me like that." He stretched his legs out before him, the toes pointing toward the abandoned book. "Necessary, in fact."

"You danced at her parents' wedding," Clara said. Another lucky guess.

"I did," he said.

Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Not talking, Clara thought, could be quite as companionable as talking, in the right circumstances.

"They didn't die, did they?" she asked suddenly. "I mean, her parents, that Tabetha. Whose wedding you went to."

"No," the Doctor said. "Well, they are dead now, but of a ripe old age. That's not—how they left." He was concentrated, quite intently, on brushing a microscopic bit of lint from his trousers. "Though it did feel a bit like that."

"My mum, when I was a kid," Clara said. She slid her hands away from the controls. "I didn't even know she was sick. She didn't either. But she died."

"As did mine," the Doctor said. "Or at least, so I was told."

She was walking across the room, slowly, uncertain of herself even as she was entirely certain. Together, all at once. The Doctor remained in his chair, watching her approach.

"You really can die?" she asked. "I mean, not dying and regenerating but just plain dying? Of old age, like on Trenzalore, or a falling piano or—"

"Under the right circumstances, yes," he said. "I can die. Just like nearly everything that lives can die."

She stood before the armchair. Just out of reach.

"Well," she said, "don't."

He hadn't taken his eyes from her. She looked down at his hands, gazing at them, almost expecting the long thin fingers to produce the Hierophant card, the Hanged Man, the World. She took a step forward. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

"Clara," the Doctor said. As he might have said absolutely anything else. His hands no longer rested against the chair. He was holding out his arms.

Stories, Clara thought. What isn't a story? This one could end in so many ways. She could twine her arms around his neck. She could run her palm over his knee, his thigh, up the length of his chest. She could take his hand and pull him to his feet and lead him back down the corridor, into her room, where the TARDIS would tactfully extinguish the lights once more and, so to speak, depart. He could seize the initiative from her, hold her tightly on his lap and defy his own claimed indifference to touch, let the long thin fingers wander anywhere. Everywhere. He could offer a friendly, distant embrace and then say, no. This can't possibly work. He could panic, and push her away. She could decide she couldn't bear even the chance of that happening, and turn from him right now. The choice, whatever it was, would be made and over in a split second; the time it took to walk just one step forward, or to turn your head the wrong way crossing a busy London road. It was entirely hers.

The problem with stories that came true was that you lost the luxury, the potential, the glorious possibility of imagining them any other way. Choice was a chafing confinement, an invitation to paralysis. To mistake. To lifetimes of regret. But not to choose, to be that much of a coward, that was the one choice she couldn't bear to imagine. And there he was before her, and there was Danny in her dreaming mind, it was all true, all at once, and—

In a moment. In a minute. After just one last split second in the freedom of indecision, of imagining how it all would be and could have been, one more beat of her undoubled heart.

END

(Written 2015)