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She doesn’t hear him follow. He wants to pull her back into the house, catch her in his arms and hold her tight, and pray silently that the shade will take him too. Life without Clara Oswald is not something he can fathom anymore.
But Clara, brave and foolish and wonderful Clara knows him better than anyone else ever could. And this last act is the best she can do for him. There is no salvation from this end (careless, reckless, oh my Clara what have I made of you?), and she will not allow him that sharp, steep fall he feels himself teetering on as she walks away. Clara Oswald is a star: brilliant light and heat and gravity, and she is about to go out. She does not want him to watch.
The Doctor follows anyway. Because he made a promise. Because he has a duty of care. Because he cannot bear to let her face the raven alone.
The raven that is not a raven sits atop an awning at the end of the street, twisting its head to fix the newcomer with one sharp eye like jet. The last handful of Mayor Me’s refugees scatter, pushing past him as though he were part of the scenery, a lamp post in a velvet coat. He fixes his eyes on Clara, burning the sight of her into his mind. Let me be brave, she whispers, the sound breaking across the cobblestones of the empty street, and the Doctor cannot tell if it is meant for her or for him.
A thousand words hover on his lips, so many thing left unsaid, a life never lived but for their own foolishness, love and grief and longing and regret and so so much pride. He swallows them all. She knows. Oh she knows.
The raven caws once, a horrible squall like a rusted hinge, and takes flight. She opens her arms wide, as if to welcome it, to embrace it. It hits her in the chest with a swirl of smoke and a flash of light, her body jerking from the blow. Her arms stick out stiffly, thrown back. There is a beat, a horrible horrible beat as she draws in one long, ragged breath and a tiny, stupid part of him hopes that maybe maybe just maybe please...
And then that last traitorously hopeful breath looses itself in a scream.
It tears through him, sharper than any knife, and he can feel his own scream rising in answer, a violent negation, a scream to undo the universe. It takes everything he has, but he chokes it down. For her, he cannot, he will not.
Her scream dies away with a trickle of soot-black smoke and Clara Oswald, his Impossible Girl, falls lifeless to the ground.
The silence after is almost absolute, the echoes of her screams ring in his ears, and he wonders if he will ever truly stop hearing them. For a moment all he can do is stare at the fallen form in the middle of the street, small and broken and empty. Unreality washes over him, a bizarre certainty that this can’t be real, it simply can’t be. Not her. Not now. Not like this. He almost goes to her, his knees weaken with the need to move, to run, to drop to her side and gather her up. Oh Clara....my Clara.
He’s breaking, he can feel it. Anyone who ever said no one could die of grief has never been lost in its grip. His hearts could stop right now if he let them. He could fold himself around her and let it all end now, burn himself up as the last of her light dies. Let Ashildr send a corpse back to her employers. That wavering feeling intensifies, and he holds onto it like a lifeline. If he goes to her now, it will make it all real, painfully, irrevocably real, and it will be the end of him.
Numbness creeps over him, cold and painless, stealing the shuddering pain in his chest before it can rip him apart, and there is a sense of bitter relief. Death would be preferable to this, but she gave him an order. She gave him life again and has ordered him to live it. His feet finally engage, but they don’t carry him to her, not this time.
There is no gravity anymore.