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Even stares at Clara until she gets uncomfortable and looks away first. The awful scratching sensation Even gets at the base of their skull when they have to look someone in the eyes abates. They’re glad they won. If Clara had ignored that and tried to speak to them, they wouldn’t have been able to understand a word she was saying. Now, she’s finding anywhere else to turn her gaze, and Even can take in every detail of her.
Missy was right. She’s very pretty. Even had tuned out most of the rest of what she’d said about Clara, around the time her gestures started getting vaguely violent and her voice took on a harsh, mocking slant.
“You’re supposed to say something,” Even prompts, in case Clara also forgets how conversations are supposed to go.
“I-” Clara glances back, meets Even’s eyes long enough for Even to narrow them like that will keep the buzzing pain of eye contact away, and then breaks again, eyes down as she snaps with sudden frustration. “Will you stop that?”
“No,” Even answers, shortly, and now, because Clara has had her turn, they ask, “Is he listening in?”
Clara’s lips pull tight. “No, actually. He’s not.” Even tilts their head. Their fingers itch, and they keep them down. A selfish part of them doesn’t want Clara to see what they’ll reach for. She can see the curve of the chain, Even knows, where it reaches up around their neck, but not what it holds and barely what it’s held together with. “Because I’m not doing this for him. I’m doing it for you.” Clara can’t make herself look at them while she says it. “You have no idea how dangerous she is.”
Even blinks. They touch above their mouth, the layer of skin hiding their teeth, feel the rounded outline of them beneath.
“I know,” they say. It’s laughable that they couldn’t. This is one of the tricks time plays on you when it chokes you up from the back of its throat. You have more life in your body than you should, and no one ever believes it.
“No,” Clara insists, as though she knows better. She’s talking to Even slowly. They have time to miss the Master’s dancing pattern of speech, even to reminisce on the pitter-patter of the Doctor when he explained things to them once so long ago. “Whatever she’s shown you, whatever she’s promised you-”
“She’s going to kill me,” they interrupt, trying not to be impatient and failing.
“-you can’t believe that she’ll treat you any different than everyone she’s hurt- What.” Even thinks they understand what Clara is trying to do. They don’t want it. No more than they did when the Doctor came first, to try and bring them into his TARDIS.
“She’s going to kill me,” Even repeats, with the same casual cadence of telling someone the sky is blue and the stars are burning up. Clara’s mouth rounds in brief horror before she sets it stubbornly, determined to succeed where the Doctor didn’t.
“We can protect you,” Clara says. She says ‘we’ very easily.
Even frowns. “Clara, she’s going to try to kill you, too.” They do try to be gentle there. They haven’t had much use for gentleness in a long time, and they think it comes out less kind than they wanted. They try to remember how the Doctor used to apologize, and say, “I’m- I’m so sorry?” It fits their mouth wrong.
“She can’t,” Clara says, not hesitating. “The Doctor-”
Even feels their throat go tight, and they don't hear what Clara says. They know very well what happens to the people the Doctor protects.
There’s a flood in their mind, bright and brief panic, cold as ice, that is ringing with please, please, no, no. It’s worse than the electric, angry fear that takes control of their limbs when they hear people shouting or car engines that growl too loudly. They can’t do anything about it, but choke it down. The watch is warm, pulsing against their chest and frantic heart, and too heavy.
“I won’t leave her,” Even bites. “I want to stay. The rest of my life.” They think Clara is angry at them. They aren’t sure. Her face is harder to read than the Master’s. Her voice has sped back up, though, her words blurring together rather than enunciated carefully.
“And you’re okay with that? With helping her to- Were you even there? Didn’t you see what she did to- To the dead?” Even coils in on themself, looking away.
“No one ever had to get hurt again,” they say, quietly.
“I didn’t see you volunteering to get turned into one of those things,” Clara lashes out, sympathetic savior lost to grief, and Even… can’t look at her now. They don’t want to be here. They don’t want to- It was all meant to work out perfectly. The Doctor was supposed to- He was supposed to-
They don’t-
“The Master wouldn’t,” Even says, focusing on what is true and unchangeable. Their eyes burn, hot at the edges. They squeeze them shut to try and stop it from happening.
“She’s Missy,” Clara corrects, almost cruelly, like that changes anything.
“She wouldn’t,” Even insists. “She’s- She’s going to kill me.” How do they explain it all to Clara, who wasn’t there? How do they tell her how much they hate the Master? How do they tell her that they wouldn’t let Missy hold their life if they knew she held even the slightest bit of affection for them?
“And she would have turned your corpse into a Cyberman just like the rest.” Even shakes their head, hard. It hurts. Clara is wrong. Clara doesn’t understand. Clara is the Doctor’s, and she’s too close to see how this all works. That’s how it goes.
They don’t know how to make Clara see.
“Did it help?” they ask. “Standing close to him? Did it stop anything?”
“At least he doesn’t threaten to murder me.” Even shakes their head again. Their fingers are fraying, twist and interlock, nails pulling at their own skin.
He already did, they want to say, or he will, whatever you there is that lives in his world.
“She doesn’t threaten,” Even defends, which is a deceptive truth. Of course Missy threatens. She loves to. It’s what having her attention costs. Her threats have little bearing on what Even knows is true about the world: that the Master will be the death of them.
Clara sets her will in stone. “Come with me,” she demands. She sounds so much like her Doctor. “I can save you,” she pleads, a little softer. There, she sounds like Even’s Doctor.
Even couldn’t trust either of them.
“No.”