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Clara and the doctor are running for their lives, a pack of bloodthirsty aliens on their heels and a labyrinth of dungeons between them and the TARDIS. Clara’s arm is bleeding where one of them has bitten her and she knows that if either of them stumble, they’re dead meat.
None of this scares her. Sure, her adrenaline levels are probably high enough to send her to an early grave, but only one thing in this whole mess is actually, genuinely worrying Clara, and it’s this: the doctor has let go of her hand.
It’s not like he has to hold it, of course. But she’s hurt, and they’re running for their lives, and she kind of wants him to. And whenever she wants him to be there for her, the doctor is always, always there. So she’s scared. Even as the doctor takes a sharp right, calls out, ‘In here!’ and they burst into a grungy-looking room. Even as he slams the door behind them and hits it with a burst from the sonic, and even as, despite some howling and pounding on the door, the horde behind them fail to get in.
Clara is scared, but she’s determined not to show it. Instead she catches her breath and then straightens up to scan the room. It’s empty, just four walls and a ceiling, all of it stained and streaked with rust. Clara looks for a second door and quickly realises that there isn’t one. ‘Doctor,’ she says, fixing him with the sternest look she can muster while still panting slightly, ‘did you just trap us in a cell?’
The doctor, twirling the sonic distractedly between his fingers, nods. ‘This place is full of them. Luckily one happened to be free.’
‘Right. Luckily, we’re locked in. What happened to running for the TARDIS?’
The doctor has meandered off into the corner furthest from the door. He’s done it casually in a way that she’s not supposed to notice, still playing with the sonic as if it’s just a coincidence that he’s standing on the opposite side of the room to Clara.
Outside, the howling and pounding starts to fade. ‘What are those things?’ Clara asks. ‘I thought this species was supposed to be peaceful.’
Again the doctor doesn’t answer and Clara starts to move towards him, but as soon as she does he spins to face her, taking half a step back. Clara stops. She’d be offended if she wasn’t starting to get properly scared. He’s not answering any of her questions and he won’t hold her hand.
‘Something’s wrong,’ she says. He won’t make eye contact. She takes another step towards him. He doesn’t move – not that he’s got far to go – but he’s watching her in a way that he usually doesn’t. The doctor should be pacing around the cell, scanning the walls, talking to her about the monsters outside. Not looking at her like she’s the biggest threat in the room. ‘Doctor, tell me what’s wrong.’
‘They’re vampires.’
Clara almost laughs. ‘What?’
‘Those things outside, they’re vampires. Creatures of the night. Bloodsuckers.’ That last word sends a chill down Clara’s back. ‘At least,’ the doctor continues, ‘the thing that’s infected them is.’
‘Infected them?’
‘The last time I visited this planet, the species living here were the Tevari. Peaceful race—good conversationalists. Loved a Sunday roast.’ He pauses, face darkening. ‘Somewhere along the line, something came along and infected this lot. Turned them into something else.’
‘Into vampires?’
He nods.
Clara looks down at her arm. She’s not had a chance to examine the wound but now, hidden under her ripped sleeve and all the blood, she can see two small but unmistakeable bite marks.
Ah. Well, then.
She looks up at the doctor, who is also eyeing her arm. ‘Doctor,’ Clara says, in a very even voice, ‘are you telling me that I’ve been bitten by a vampire?’
‘Well, erm—yes,’ the doctor says. ‘Yes, that about sums it up.’
She takes a step closer and he has the decency not to back away again. ‘Doctor! I have been bitten by a vampire! Tell me there is a cure for this!’
‘Well, step one would be to calm down,’ the doctor says, raising his hands in what he clearly thinks is a placatory gesture. ‘The transformation will be starting right about now and having a lot of adrenaline kicking around in your system is only going to speed things up.’
‘Transformation?’ she says through gritted teeth. ‘What kind of transformation?’ And now she’s examining herself, running a diagnostic and yeah, she’s stressed—heartbeat elevated, senses on high alert and the doctor’s not wrong about the adrenaline—but she’s fine, that’s nothing new, and if the lights in the cell seem brighter than before it’s only because she’s pissed off, although now that she’s paying attention she does feel a bit lightheaded but also somehow heavier than before, and cold, and hungry, god, she had a sandwich a couple of hours ago in the TARDIS but now the thought of it makes her sick, like that’s not what she’s hungry for, because oh god she’s hungry for—
‘Clara.’
She snaps back to herself. The doctor’s voice is coming from much closer than before. Somehow, without noticing, Clara has crossed the room and is standing right in front of him. He’s got one hand braced against the wall; she’s backed him into the corner. For a second she stares at him, speechless. He hasn’t moved but there’s a certain set to his jaw, a tension to his shoulders that he’s trying and failing to hide. She’s not the only one who’s scared.
And even while she’s digesting this, Clara is noticing more things about the doctor. The veins running up the backs of his hands, snaking faint and blueish up his wrists and under the cuffs of his jacket. The double-pulse beating in his neck, defended by nothing more than skin. Skin that could be torn through like wet paper.
Two needlepoints of pressure push down gently, insistently, on her lower lip. Clara realises with horror that she is salivating, Slowly, soundlessly, she brings a hand up to cover her mouth. ‘Doctor,’ she says, around the sudden new additions to her teeth, ‘what do we do?’
The doctor looks grave, and deeply sympathetic. It’s not an expression Clara ever wants directed at her. ‘We wait.’
Clara shakes her head. Now that she’s paying attention to it her stomach is on fire—in the last minute she’s gone from peckish to full-on late-stage hunger cramps and she feels both jittery and lightheaded, like her blood sugar can’t make up its mind. Waiting is not a good plan. In fact, just being in the same room as the doctor is starting to sound like a very, very bad plan. ‘No, I mean—how do we fix this? How do we get out?’
‘We don’t. You see—’
Clara starts to interrupt him, takes a breath ready to argue—and chokes. She can smell something metallic, rich and coppery and deliciously oxygenated, strong enough that she can taste the iron sitting heavy on her tongue. She tries and fails to breathe through it and maybe the adrenaline isn’t helping because she can feel the warmth of the doctor’s body from two paces away, can hear his hearts beating and smell the blood under his skin and it’s just dawning on her that she’s absolutely desperate.
‘Doctor,’ she says, forcing it out – and even the act of opening her mouth reminds her how empty it is, the dryness of her throat, the nausea clawing its way up from her stomach—‘doctor, we have to get out of here, I have to—’ Clara breaks off and turns away with clenched fists to hide her shaking hands, to hide how even the fear is being subsumed by this awful hunger. She makes herself take one step and then another, just to put empty air between them. There are no distractions, nothing in this room except four metal walls and the doctor, pulsing with life, the starving man’s banquet.
‘Clara,’ he’s saying, and he’s not coming any closer and she’s so grateful for that, ‘Clara, listen to me. We have to stay here. You’ve been bitten, but it’s not permanent. It’ll pass.’
That catches her attention; hope, wild, overriding the hunger for a moment.
The doctor keeps talking, steady and intent. ‘The vampire bite is only stage one of infection. To make the change permanent, the subject then has to drink the vampire’s blood.’ The flow of information from him is familiar, soothing. ‘You can feel it, can’t you? The hunger. The need to feed. That urge, driving you to drink—if we made a run for it out there, you’d be pouncing on some vampire before you could stop yourself. You’re safe in here. The other vampires can’t get in. All you need to do is wait it out, let the toxins in your bloodstream starve and die off.’
Clara shakes her head. She’s having trouble concentrating; she wants to believe him, to think that this is all going to be okay, but she can hear the doctor’s hearts beating from across the room and it’s starting to drown everything else out. ‘How long?’ she manages. ‘How long will it last?’
There’s a split-second’s pause from behind her, and alarm bells are already ringing in Clara’s head when the doctor coughs and says, ‘For a human of your size…anywhere between six and eight hours.’
‘Eight hours?’ Clara whips around to face him, panic giving her temporary clarity. ‘Doctor, I can’t—we can’t be in here together for eight hours!’ she doesn’t want to spell it out, how she can taste him on the air and hear the blood pulsing just under his skin, how every fibre of her being is screaming at her to close the distance between them and sink her teeth into his neck. ‘You need to go,’ she says instead. ‘Make a run for it, go to the TARDIS, I’ll catch you up when I’m—when it’s out of my system.’
The doctor just looks at her. He’s got that face on where he knows there’s no point saying sorry. ‘Clara, you have minutes left before the bloodthirst takes over and you lose whatever shreds of self-control you’re hanging onto now. If I left you alone, the thirst would drive you out to the other vampires, and that’d be that. No—the only way out of this is for you to stay locked in here, with me.’
Clara is taking sharp, shallow breaths, the only form of panic she can allow herself because the deeper she breathes the more she can taste it – iron and copper, heat and salvation, making her dizzy with thirst. ‘But—doctor, if you stay then I’ll—'
‘I know.’
For a split second she stares at him, horrified, uncomprehending. And then it dawns on her: the doctor has orchestrated this. This is his way of saving her. ‘You’re a distraction.’
The doctor nods. ‘Having a target in here will stop you from going outside to hunt for prey. Keeps you fed, keeps you safe. And my blood is uninfected—it’s harmless. Just a nice nutritious meal until your ability to digest it wears off.’ He grins in the face of Clara’s speechless horror. ‘I’m more than a distraction. I’m dinner.’
She shakes her head, backing away towards the opposite wall. ‘Doctor, I—I’ll—’
She doesn’t know how to say it, how to put into words the vicious strength of the hunger, the way every cell in her body feels like it’s burning up, dying, crying out to eat. How she could rip the doctor’s body to pieces, drain him dry and still be starving. ‘If I start, I don’t think I can stop,’ she whispers. ‘I’ll kill you.’
He waves a hand. ‘No you won’t. I’m a time lord, Clara. I have a highly sophisticated binary vascular system and if necessary I can redirect my own blood flow to wherever I choose. I can regenerate blood cells ten times faster than an ordinary human, and almost twenty times faster than a Tevari.’ He fixes her with a stern, patronising look. ‘I might not be up and about running marathons when you’re done, but don’t think for a moment that you can kill me. Even vampire-you isn’t strong enough for that.’
It's a convincing speech, with just the right amount of pompousness and bravado. Clara might even have believed him, if her senses weren’t working on overtime.
But Clara can hear the doctor’s heartbeats and sense his blood pumping, diverting itself to his muscles in preparation for flight, and there’s a sharp tinge of adrenaline on the air. She thinks of that night so long ago, sitting in an attic bedroom with the child that would grow up to become her dead boyfriend and the doctor comforting him by describing fear in fantastical, biological terms.
Fear is a superpower. It is also, in this case, a dead giveaway.
Maybe he can see her seeing him, because the doctor’s eyes narrow a fraction and his heartbeat slows conspicuously. But it’s too late.
‘If that’s true, doctor, then why are you scared?’
He stares at her for a long moment. Then he swallows. ‘Prey instinct. The more the infection changes you, the higher you’re climbing up the food chain. You are rapidly becoming an apex predator—which makes me your prey.’
He hasn’t taken his eyes off her, not once, even though they’re on opposite sides of the room. Like a deer, Clara thinks against her will, like a deer in the woods, watching the circling wolf. Except the doctor has nowhere to run. He has waltzed into the wolf’s den and locked the door behind him, offered himself up to the starving animal.
‘Even time lords have instincts. Old, buried, but somewhere deep down every species remembers what it’s like to be hunted.’ His eyes gleam. ‘And what it’s like to hunt.’
Clara stares at him. She’s aware of it now, the power coiling itself inside her. Alongside the wildfire of thirst is the drive to move, to fight. She’s not shaking from hunger, but from the effort of holding herself still. And the doctor is right there, sounding so reasonable, giving her permission. She wants so badly to believe him—that she can give in, that she has no choice, that it’ll all be okay.
But Clara is scared. Not just of herself and what she has the terrible potential to do right now, but of the lies the doctor might tell if her life is on the line, the lengths he’ll go to keep her safe. The thought of herself standing over the doctor’s dead body is completely and utterly unacceptable. She needs an alternative. Isn’t that what the doctor says – that there’s always another choice? A way out?
She racks her brain. ‘Can’t you stop me? Y’know—tie me up, knock me out?’
The doctor shakes his head. ‘It’s too late for that. The infection is diverting your body’s resources to your muscles, your senses. It’s building tissues and writing new neural pathways in your brain. You’ve been far stronger than me from the moment we walked into this room. I couldn’t stop you now if I tried.’
And the worst thing is, it’s true. There’s ten feet between them and Clara knows that she could close the distance before the doctor could even think of reacting. She needs to snap herself out of it – she tries to think, to remind herself that he’s the doctor, her best friend, and this life with him is the only reason she gets up in the morning – but it’s no good; she can’t focus. Her stomach is cramping like she’s suffocating and he’s right there, thin-skinned, a bag of blood for the draining.
Clara is going to kill him. And, even worse, the doctor is going to let her.
She closes her eyes. She needs to think but she can’t get the doctor out of her head; his circulatory system is imprinted on her mind’s eye, white-hot and bright as the sun. She swallows a mouthful of bitter saliva. Okay. Clara and the doctor, trapped in a room for six to eight hours.
If he can’t stop her, then she’ll have to stop herself.
‘I’ll fight it.’
She hears the doctor’s head snap up. Even with her eyes shut she can track him so precisely, could pounce and find his jugular by touch alone. ‘Clara, you can’t—’
‘No.’ Her voice is shaking and she’s really, really trying not to breathe in, but she carries on. ‘Doctor, tell me the truth. I know I’m sick, I know my neural pathways are being rewritten or whatever, but is it physically possible for me to not…bite you?’
‘I don’t think you understand how aggressive the virus—'
‘Is it possible?’ she asks through gritted teeth.
He sighs. ‘Technically, yes. But, Clara—’
‘Then that’s what I’ll do.’ She doesn’t have to look at him to know that he’s about to interrupt. ‘No, shut up! Just—shut up, and stay over there, and…tell me how to do this.’
He doesn’t speak, and for a moment Clara thinks he’s going to abandon her to this. Then— ‘It’ll hurt.’
Clara nods. Slowly and with her eyes still shut, she moves back until she’s flattened against the front wall of the cell, as far from the doctor as she can get. ‘Keep talking.’
‘The hunger is distracting you. If you can keep yourself focused, you might be able to stay in control.’
Clara huffs, frustrated. ‘Focused on what? I am trapped in a really small room with you and nothing else!’
‘Try to hold onto your identity, your humanity. Anchor yourself. Think of…I don’t know, your home, your family.’
Clara bites her lip. She doesn’t really talk about her family to the doctor – this is the first time they’ve come up since that disastrous Christmas – and she doesn’t know how to break it to him that she hasn’t seen any of them in months. She used to visit her gran at the weekends to do some cooking and tidying because gran’s eyesight isn’t what it used to be, but her mum took over after last year and Clara dropped out of seeing any of them.
Oh god, last year, the doctor had better not—
‘Think about Danny.’
Clara’s eyes snap open. ‘Don’t.’
But the doctor thinks he’s got it now, thinks he’s helping. He even takes a step closer, the suicidal idiot. ‘Picture it. You and Danny, I don’t know—eating chips. Or shopping, or whatever you humans do when you’re not brushing your teeth or changing your outfits. What about all those dates? You and Danny were always going on dates. Think about those—appetisers and awkward conversation and bread in a little basket. Nothing in the universe is more distracting than bread in a little basket.’
Clara puts her head in her hands but it’s impossible to block the doctor out; right now the world is just the two of them and the spectre of Danny and the thought of him is not nearly as helpful as the doctor thinks because the thing is—
The thing is that Clara failed Danny spectacularly, in a number of ways. And then he died, and a part of her died with him. The Clara who cooked chicken soup for her nan and remembered to ring her mum has been replaced by someone who has stopped living by Earth time, who thinks she might just have had a birthday in the TARDIS without noticing and for whom, really, the label of human doesn’t really fit anymore. The woman who would curl up on the sofa and browse Netflix with her boyfriend is long gone. And Clara can’t bring herself to mourn her – maybe she was always too good for a human life.
Always too strong. Too hungry.
She’s alerted to the fact that something has changed by the difference in airflow across her skin. Clara opens her eyes and finds herself staring up at the doctor, whose face is inches from hers. The air stops moving: he is holding his breath. She can see the pulses beating in his neck, a constant thrumming heartbeat, knows that if she were to pull him down by the shoulder he would have nowhere to run and she could drain him dry from the jugulars. Or she could sever a carotid and he would bleed out in seconds, a corpse fit for a king. The choices make her mouth water.
Then she blinks, and he’s the doctor again. Clara freezes, horrified, hands flying up to cover her mouth like she can stop herself that way. But she can’t even look away: she’s hovering, inches from the kill. To his credit, the doctor also hasn’t turned and run. He’s breathing again, slow and steady and she can’t even make herself match his breaths because this close she can smell him, the life of him, all that body heat and strange alien blood, practically bursting from his veins, close enough to taste. ‘Doctor,’ she says from between her fingers, ‘doctor, I can’t…’
He looks down at her, and though she can hear his heart double-thumping like a rabbit’s in headlights, his expression is nothing but kind. ‘Clara, your blood is laced with toxins. Right now, it’s cannibalising itself; your red blood cells are attacking and engulfing each other because they are so, so hungry. Your whole body is calling out for the only counter-toxin out there: more blood. Until the sickness burns itself out, your circulatory system is going to keep on digesting itself until you eat someone else. I can only imagine how painful it is.’ He’s moving, she notices. It’s difficult to focus on anything except his heartbeat and the exposed skin of his neck but blurrily, in her peripheral vision she sees that the doctor is taking off his jacket. ‘Clara, you’re hungry.’ So kind. So understanding. He rolls up his sleeve.
She catches on and, belatedly, shakes her head. ‘Doctor. Please, I don’t—I can’t—’
But he’s pushed his jumper up past his elbow and she can see the veins tracing their way up his arm and again she moves without knowing she’s moved; neither of them have time to take a breath before she’s on her knees, holding his arm in a vice grip, teeth bared and salivating. Her fangs are millimetres from his skin. The doctor stiffens and she can hear the sharp jump in his pulse, feels the muscles in his forearm tense and then relax.
Clara looks up at him, trying to be lucid, but his face is hazy behind the drumbeat of his hearts. Still, she tries. She really does.
‘It’s okay,’ the doctor says, as if from very far away. ‘It’s okay. I know. You have to.’
And she loves him. In that moment it is all she knows. Clara can’t tell whether it’s affection for a dear friend or the kind of love the wolf feels for a lamb as it tears out its throat, but for a second it’s enough to make her hesitate.
Then the feeling passes. The hunger rears its head, and she bites.
Most of her prefrontal cortex shuts down. Awareness comes in flashes. Her fangs, piercing with almost medical precision. The delight when she finds a vein. The doctor’s skin, warm under her hands. Her lips pressed gently, almost reverentially against his wrist—to any outsider it would look like a kiss.
And oh, the blood. At first the craving makes her mindless and all she can do is drink and drink, great gulps of warmth like the first breaths of a drowning man. Clara loses track of time, forgets herself, forgets the doctor and feasts. But after a while, other senses begin to filter in. The drinking loses its desperate edge and she starts to taste the blood: sweet, metallic, coating her teeth and the back of her throat even after she’s swallowed it down. She becomes aware of her body, has the presence of mind to stop gripping the doctor’s arm so tightly and delights in the rush of blood produced by this loosening of the torniquet. The warmth of his skin becomes less pronounced, and she doesn’t know if it’s because he is cooling down or she is getting warmer. Her breathing steadies, and she stops shaking.
She doesn’t know much time passes before she becomes aware that the flow of blood through the doctor’s arm is weakening, becoming sluggish. She digs in deeper with her fangs and only manages to pierce the other side of the vein. Frustrated, Clara pulls out and looks up, and it’s only then that she notices the doctor.
He’s leaning against the wall behind him, eyes closed, breathing raggedly. He’s always been pale but now his face looks almost translucent. ‘Doctor?’ she says sharply, and there’s a second’s delay before his eyes flicker open.
‘Clara.’ He looks at her down the slope of his nose, head lolling a little to one side.
Clara blinks at him, trying to gather her thoughts, to come back to herself. She’s tempted to ignore him, just find a better vein and carry on drinking, but she shakes her head and forces herself to focus. ‘Doctor, are you okay?’
Again, it takes him a moment to process what she’s said. She’s still holding his arm, loosely now, and he looks down at the place she’s bitten. Clara follows his gaze and, even though she’s expecting it, is shocked by the sight of the wound there. The two bite marks are a deep, vivid red, still bleeding slightly. A trail of blood runs from them down the doctor’s wrist, dripping from the ends of his fingers, and Clara has to fight the urge to lick it.
‘Oh, it’s just the venom,’ the doctor says, catching her attention again. She frowns at him and even through his wooziness he manages to give her a familiar, exasperated stupid humans look. ‘Yours. Your venom, from your—you know—’ he bares his teeth, does a fake-vampire grin, ‘—your bite. Disorients your prey. Stops them from running off.’
‘But your blood,’ Clara says.
‘Right, right.’ The doctor seems to catch her drift. He gestures vaguely with his free hand and Clara tracks the loose circle it makes in the air. ‘Natural defence mechanism. My body is—diverting the flow of blood away from the wounded area.’ He pauses to catch his breath. ‘I’ve been overriding it, but—like I said, bit lightheaded now. Blood loss doesn’t help. Unfortunate catch-22—I should really tell Joseph Heller about it. Would’ve made a much better metaphor for the second world war. Probably.’
He trails off, leaning heavily against the wall. Clara has mostly stopped listening. The thirst has started needling her again, an emptiness in the pit of her stomach that intensifies into a clamouring need for more. She’s had a taste and that’s almost worse than nothing: she feels better now, driven by her hunger instead of shaking from the sickness of it. She is a predator who is fully capable of hunting.
And the doctor is weak. Clara surveys her prey. Her key stage three level knowledge of the human circulatory system doesn’t exactly cover time lord biology, but it doesn’t matter: she doesn’t need her schoolteacher knowledge now. According to Clara’s new senses, the doctor’s pulse is sluggish and his extremities are cold. The bulk of his blood is moving deeply through those invisible great vessels, curled around his hearts, fully aware of the threat outside. But he is still conscious, because even though the doctor’s blood is alive and maybe even intelligent in some way that Clara, a non-time lord, will never understand, the doctor still looks like a human. And the one organ that any humanoid species values as much as its heart, is its brain. The doctor has two major arteries on each side of his neck, with veins to match. They are pumping blood in a steady circle, heart to brain to lungs to heart again, keeping him awake and alive.
They will be delicious.
She wants to taste. And Clara is not thinking anymore, only wanting. She drops the doctor’s arm and stands, crowding him back against the wall. She puts one hand on his shoulder and the other under his jaw, pushing it up, exposing his neck. A small part of her notices him react to this, but he doesn’t try to push her away. She can hear it now, clear as a bell, a steady quadruple pulse beating in his neck. Short of ripping his chest open and biting into his aorta, this is the best place to feed from him.
There’s only one drawback: Clara is not quite tall enough to reach. She’s on her tiptoes, face angled up to the crook of the doctor’s neck, but it’s still not enough. Hungry and impatient, she pulls him down towards her. His legs buckle and he falls to his knees. He huffs in surprise and might have fallen if not for the vice-like grip that she still has on his shoulder. Clara drops neatly to her knees behind him, pulls his crooked torso flush with hers, and wraps a hand around the doctor’s neck. She feels him swallow, but he doesn’t speak. She wouldn’t have listened anyway.
Being this close to the doctor is both alien and achingly familiar. His skin is cool and papery, wrinkled under his jawline. His coat smells like old books and lemon drops. Clara’s other hand is pressed to his chest, and even as she tilts her head to fit her teeth against his neck, the doctor brings one of his hands up and threads his fingers through hers. He holds on tight, as if he’s looking for reassurance from the creature about to drink his blood.
At any other time, all of this would leave Clara deeply, painfully moved. Now, though, it barely registers. She can feel the doctor’s pulse beating beneath her fingers on his neck if she focuses she can see it, an infinitesimal twitch under the skin that betrays the place that his blood has run off to in spite of his body’s best efforts to hide it.
Clara leans in and presses the tips of her fangs against the skin there. She hesitates for a second, pretending she’s in control, as if in her wildest dreams she could stop right now. The doctor squeezes her hand gently, just once. Clara is too far gone to even wonder what he means by that. Her mouth is watering.
She closes her eyes, and sinks her fangs deep into the doctor’s neck.
The hot rush of blood is a delight to all of her senses. The amount of it is overwhelming, a flood compared to what ran through his wrist; it fills her mouth instantly and she swallows, delighted. Clara is merciful enough not to pierce his carotids – or at least, she chooses to interpret it as mercy. It could be kindness or it could be a predator’s instinct, preferring to drain the meat of the living instead of the dead. Maybe there is very little of Clara left at this moment, and very little that she would not do to satisfy her hunger. She’s lucky that both her and the doctor are a bit too preoccupied to be making moral judgements.
She can taste the speed of his pulse as she drinks, the desperate heartbeat of a body under siege, trying to keep itself alive. But Clara was designed for this. She has always been more ambitious than everyone else around her, too capable for her own good, and now all that aptitude – bright, witty schoolteacher, unabashed flirt, collector of motorbike speeding tickets – all of that is focused into one white-hot hunger for blood. The doctor might be a time lord, but he is no match for her. After a minute his head lolls to one side, leaning into Clara’s grip instead of being restrained by it. His hand falls from where it was holding hers. But the blood still flows, warm and rich, and that is all Clara cares about.
Some time later she becomes aware that the doctor is trying to speak. He’s moving too, and Clara assumes it’s some weak attempt to escape until she realises that he’s shifting his head, trying to look at her. She has him pinned by the jugular and he can only go so far, but in spite of this he moves his mouth as close to her ear as possible and whispers, ‘Clara.’
She ignores him. Another heartbeat – slowing now. She swallows the warm rush of blood.
‘Clara. Please.’
A part of her wants to stop. Her teeth are buried in the skin and sinew of his neck, draining him dry. She’s hurting him. But the thought of it – stepping away, the cold, harsh air, the hunger, turning inward on herself – it’s unbearable. She needs him. He knows that. He let her do this.
The doctor’s head falls back, dead weight, and he says nothing else. Clara drinks. The doctor’s life coats her tongue, blood thicker than water, thicker than friendship, thicker than the cruel thread of conscience that keeps her self-aware even as she continues to kill him. She can feel her own grief, the horror yawning in her chest as the doctor’s heartbeat slows and becomes irregular. She chokes on a sob but can’t pull away. His skin is going cold.
And then she sees it: a hand in her peripheral vision. The doctor, drained of several pints of blood and held up by only Clara, is somehow clinging onto a scrap of consciousness – and he is reaching for her. It’s clearly an effort: his arm is shaking badly and she expects it to fall at any second. But even as one of his hearts wavers and the other struggles to keep up the rhythm, the doctor manages to rest his hand on the side of Clara’s face.
She would shake him off, but the doctor in this state is hardly a threat. Instead the part of Clara that cares interprets it as another plea or perhaps a goodbye, and she closes her eyes and leans into the touch. The doctor’s fingers are clammy and very cold. They are arguably the part of him that she knows best and there is something unbearably intimate about the gesture; she wishes he wouldn’t be so kind, that he wouldn’t remind her of who she is killing.
The sadness grows, the desire for him to move his hand intensifying until Clara realises with a sudden shock that it’s not just emotion. Her instincts are screaming at her that she is in danger – her eyes snap open but it’s too late—
The world goes dark and she is ripped away from her senses. A small sun is exploding in the centre of her head and it hurts; her brain is burning, it’s too crowded, something is pressing up against her consciousness and there’s no room, her skull is going to split – she can’t think; god, get it out!
And then the doctor is here. All that pain resolves into the shape of him like someone standing in front of the sun, except he also is the sun, so much of the doctor inside Clara’s head that there is no room for her and she squints, cowed and tiny, waiting to be crushed. But she knows him now, and even though the tables have turned and he is predator and she is prey, some small part of her shouts out in recognition. And perhaps it reaches him, because the pressure lifts just enough for Clara to hear her own body crying, somewhere very far away.
Clara! She can’t separate him from herself. Clara, you have to stop. She’s had enough. She’s full. Is she? Is that her, thinking? You’re dying. No—I’m dying. Which of them is dying? Both? Or as one, together? A pain deep in her neck. A hand on her chest, listening to her hearts fading. At least I’m not alone. Venom in his veins, slowing his synapses, making it difficult not to hurt her. Is he hurting me? Are we hurting ourselves? Our self? She can feel her tears on her skin. The doctor’s skin. Clara’s skin. Both of them in pain. They need—we need—
And then the solution is clear. Separation! The doctor’s hand on her face and her fangs in his neck and both of them trapped as a single organism, a serpent eating its own tail. The solution rings clear as a bell and Clara snaps back into her body with a surge of adrenaline, the panic of a dying man and she rips her teeth out of the doctor and shakes her head to make sure that his fingers are gone and she’s up on her feet and stumbling away, back, taking great sobbing breaths and feeling the tears on her cheeks and the tightness of her own skin choking her, the bright lights of the room and the sight in front of her. The sight in front of her. Oh god, the sight of the doctor. She can’t close her eyes. She can still remember it, the feeling of her hearts failing, the pain in her neck so deep and cold, her life ebbing away. He is lying on the floor where she has dropped him, crumpled. Head thrown back, twisted to show two deep holes in the side of his neck. His face is chalky and his mouth is slightly open. He was glad that she was with him, at the end. She was murdering him and he thanked her.
His neck is bleeding steadily. Clara presses a hand to her mouth like the damage hasn’t already been done. Watches it puddle, staining his hair. The worst thing is that she’s still hungry for it. No – the worst thing is that she has killed the doctor.
Blood, more blood. She can’t look away no matter how much she wants to. Hyperaware of it flowing, pulsing from those stark, dark wounds in his neck.
Except…the doctor’s hearts have stopped. His blood shouldn’t be flowing. Clara stares at his body for a second, her critical thinking skills fighting an uphill battle through the horror and grief. Finally the thought crystallises: the doctor should not still be bleeding.
Clara’s heart skips a beat. She falls to her knees and then she’s moving, crawling desperately through the gory mess that she’s made but she doesn’t care; she puts her ear to the doctor’s chest and holds her breath for one second, two, three. Four, and the grief comes rearing its head again. Five and her throat burns from fresh hunger and grief – and then she hears it. A heartbeat. Just the one, and so slow that Clara has time to grieve and hope and grieve again in the space between beats, but a heartbeat nonetheless.
The doctor is not dead. Clara makes a sound that she thinks would be awful if anyone in the room was alive enough to hear it, and then she shoves her feelings aside and puts pressure on the wound in his neck. The warm blood trickling through her fingers is a strong distraction and she has to close her eyes for a second, force herself to relive the horror of those few moments where she was standing over the doctor’s dead body. There’s no pulse on this side of his neck, just the faint flow of blood that suggests that his other heart is still beating. Is she even helping? Should she be doing CPR? Or should she just give up and stop wasting perfectly good blood?
No. Come on, Clara tells herself, focus: he’s the doctor. The doctor. Her eyes fill with useless tears but she kneels up, puts both hands firmly on his chest. Under her left palm, a heartbeat. Under her right one, nothing. She ignores the instinct that tells her to switch sides and drink from the circulatory system that still has a pulse and locks her hands together over the heart that isn’t beating. A couple of tears roll off her chin and soak into the doctor’s jumper. He’s so still. She wishes that he would move, hold her hand, look up at her and say something clever, but his face is slack and empty of life.
She starts CPR.
The last time Clara did this was with Danny, back at school when she offered to help out with life support training for the DofE kids. She told the children off for sniggering at the mouth-to-mouth and shared an oh-my-god-we’re-so-old look with Danny when one of the year nines had never heard of stayin’ alive, but what she most remembers is the warmth of Danny’s mouth when they kissed after the workshop had ended, how it felt like cleaning something off of her, all that silicone and death. She remembers wondering which of them had seen more corpses, her or Danny, and being faintly disappointed that she couldn’t ask the question out loud because it would upset him.
Now Clara is a hundred light years and one dead boyfriend away from that day and it’s not a joke anymore. She’s lost her balance and she can’t kiss away the taste of death, can’t lie with a smile on her face and make it all better – and the worst thing is that she would do it all over again. Isn’t that the question that the doctor has been asking, all this time? If you could go back and try again, what would you do? And Clara has been giving the same answer, over and over: smile, and lie, and bite down on everything delicious that crosses her path.
On the twentieth compression she feels a rib crack and sobs. After thirty she hesitates. But she has no choice, so Clara pinches the doctor’s nose shut and puts two fingers under his chin, bites down hard on the inside of her mouth and then seals her lips over his.
He is so cold. Clara has lost her appetite, would bleed herself dry in a heartbeat if it was possible to give all the doctor’s blood back, to hand it over and say sorry like a child. Instead she gives him her breath and it’s so inadequate that it’s a joke.
Her eyes are closed like it’s a kiss and when she pulls back it’s a fight to get herself to start compressions again; all she wants to do is hold his hand, to have that companionship that could see her through the darkest hell. But the hand closest to her is cold and covered in blood and it’s all her fault. After another twenty compressions she can’t hold back the tears; after thirty she sobs out loud. But she doesn’t stop. She has two fingers under the doctor’s chin and is bending down, already taking a deep breath, when his eyes fly open and he seizes her arm. Clara jumps violently. The doctor gasps, his eyes rolling wildly until they find her.
‘Clara!’ His voice is hoarse.
‘Doctor!’ So is hers, and she’s still crying and holding herself back from crushing him in a hug. ‘Oh my god, doctor, I thought—I thought I—'
He shakes his head weakly, trying to smile for her. ‘Oh, Clara. Clara, Clara.’ He’s taking long, rattling breaths and she sees the flicker of pain, the acknowledgement of and adjustment to the broken rib in less time than it would take anyone but Clara to notice. The doctor closes his eyes and she wonders whether he’s passed out again, but when he looks up again his eyes are focused on her. ‘I wasn’t dying. Just – focusing on redirecting the blood flow from my left heart into the other hemisphere of my brain. No point wasting power on consciousness, or breathing or any of that—’ he makes a dismissive gesture with the hand not holding onto Clara; she isn’t blind to the amount of effort it takes for him to lift it ‘—any of that ephemera.’
She’s not stupid. ‘Doctor, I killed you.’
He rolls his eyes. ‘Please. You might have drained a fair amount from this heart's supply, but I've got a binary vascular system. It's like driving a sports car too fast over a speed bump – you might wreck the suspension but it's hardly going to give up and die on you.’ His neck has mostly stopped bleeding, but the colour hasn’t returned to his face. He looks disturbingly like a talking corpse. ‘I’m a time lord, Clara,’ he says, like he knows he’s not reassuring her. ‘I’m a sportscar.’
He undermines his point slightly by stopping to catch his breath in-between these statements. Then he opens his mouth to say something else but loses focus before he can get started, eyes flickering shut. His face slackens and he’s gone, drifted off again. Clara is struck by the absurdity of all this – the victim comforting the murderer.
‘One of those really good ones,’ the doctor says loudly, his sudden snap back to consciousness making her jump again. ‘With the engines that rev and flames all down the sides. Bright red.’ Then he glances down to the side, where he must be able to see the pool of his own blood in his peripheral vision, and grimaces comically. ‘Maybe not. TARDIS blue? Or would that be too on the nose?’
‘Doctor, stop it.’ She sniffs, and it’s like he notices for the first time that she’s still crying, that this isn’t something he can joke about.
‘Clara. Look at me.’ She does. It doesn’t help. ‘No – look at me,’ the doctor says. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m just – just regenerating some blood, that’s all.’ He ignores Clara’s convulsive reaction to the word regenerating. ‘Takes a lot of energy.’ He blinks and his eyes stay closed long enough for Clara to get scared. But he refocuses, makes eye contact. ‘It’ll be alright.’
She looks at the doctor for a long moment, searching his face. Then she swallows. ‘Okay. Okay, I believe you.’ She puts a hand onto his hand, the one holding her arm. ‘What can I do to help?’
The doctor smiles weakly up at her. ‘To be honest, Clara, I think quite soon you’re going to have other things on your mind.’
‘What do you mean?’
His eyes are closed again, and his fingers are ice cold under hers. ‘The transformation…’ a pause while he takes a long, unsteady breath. ‘Pretty soon, it’ll start…reversing.’
‘Good! I mean…that is a good thing, isn’t it? Doctor?’
It looks like he’s unconscious again and she catches her breath. But he shifts, opens his eyes one last time. Even that seems to be a colossal effort. ‘It’s not – pleasant.’ He coughs and a spasm of pain crosses his face. ‘And I’m sorry, but you’re full of my blood.’
‘What do you mean?’
But the doctor is gone. She leans over him, waiting, hoping that he’ll come around, but it seems like he’s used up all his energy. The sound of his heartbeat is faint – both hearts now, though – and Clara has to focus to be able to make out the unsteady rise and fall of his chest. She has only the doctor’s word that she isn’t sat here watching him die.
‘Doctor? Doctor, can you hear me?’ Nothing. Clara sits back on her heels and allows herself a solid ten seconds of crying. Then she closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and focuses. She would trust the doctor with her life in a heartbeat, but with his own…still, she has no choice. She has to believe that he wouldn’t leave her here, sick and alone – and that if he did, he would at least have the decency to say goodbye first.
If she really does believe that, then he’s healing, not dying. In that case, what can she do to help? Not much – she’s already done enough damage. Still, she can try to make him more comfortable. Clara picks up the doctor’s jacket from where it’s discarded on the floor, rolls it up and slides it gently under his head. He looks smaller when he’s not wearing it, half naked even though he’s got a jumper and who knows how many layers on under that.
What did he mean when he said sorry? What’s so special about his blood?
There’s nothing she can do except sit and wait to find out. It’s difficult to look at the doctor, but she can’t bring herself to look away. If she stares at the wall then the doctor might die without anyone watching, and that would be so much worse. So Clara looks at the bite marks in his wrist and neck where the bleeding has tapered off to nothing, leaving two sets of dark, vivid incisions. She tracks the slow rise and fall of his chest, listens to the catch in his breath, senses the warm air leaving his mouth. He will not die on her. She refuses.
She doesn’t think anything could distract her. For a while, nothing does.
And then, almost imperceptibly, something…shifts. Clara becomes aware of a vague discomfort somewhere between her chest and her gut. A low, deep ache, almost like period cramps; she gets the sense that something is building. Sweat prickles. Her head starts to ache. And then odder things: she starts to hear a faint buzzing sound, coming from no particular direction. Her skin goes hot then cold and then no temperature at all. The air becomes somehow more three-dimensional; she feels like she’s falling in every direction at once.
This can only mean one thing: she’s turning back.
Despite the weirdness of it all, Clara is mostly just relieved. Sure, it’s not pleasant, but what right does she have to complain? The first transformation was rapid and terrifying – it almost makes sense that changing back would be slow and miserable. That she should have to sit here and suffer while the doctor claws his way back from death’s door.
All of that goes out the window when the sixth sense kicks in.
She has no idea how it starts, only that it yanks the world out from under her feet like the sudden drop on a rollercoaster. One moment Clara feels ill but relatively sane. The next, her body is crawling with…everything. She doesn’t know, except she also does: nothing has changed but everything is happening at once. In one split second Clara realises she knows exactly how many pores there are in all of her skin and that her heart is beating at a hundred and thirty beats per minute. That twelve point two pints of blood are circulating inside her and only eight of them are hers.
She’s counting. She can’t stop counting. Her heartbeat speeds up and she can feel it, not just at her pulse points but running through her: all that fluid, pints of it, rushing in the dark behind ribcage and muscle. Clara’s descending aorta makes her head spin, that roaring tide of blood splitting, racing, flashing through her veins with every beat of her heart. Blood vessels dividing at a hundred different points and then – her head spins, she feels sick – diffusing out through what must be capillaries and being split, stripped, turned into cells, atoms – oh god, so many, all happening at once – and she loses track of what is alive, what is Clara in this seething sea of matter. And it’s not just her heart. She’s noticing, suddenly, simultaneously, everything in her body. The sandwich she ate earlier is a particular point of agony because it has finished moving through her stomach and its remains have dissolved into paste, splitting into lipids and ammino acids; it is trudging through her gut and being pulled apart by a kaleidoscope of her own cells and she feels it changing, disintegrating, filtering into her bloodstream while she is still aware of every molecule that used to be one object as it is torn apart at the seams and assimilated into herself. The sandwich becomes her. Oh god, she is nothing but cells.
And so many of them are the doctor’s.
Clara is seeing everything but for the first time she understands. This is what he was saying sorry for. This is what she has become: halfway through her transformation back to humanity, Clara is digesting the doctor.
All these time lord cells inside her, and they hurt. Is this how he feels? Is this how he breathes, how his heart beats, how his body functions? Her heart is racing like it’s trying to do twice the work. Does he always know himself, down to the last cell? God, it’s torture. Exquisite torture. Thirty one trillion, two hundred and thirty four billion, nine hundred and eighty three million, five hundred and ninety eight thousand, six hundred and forty four red blood cells are circulating inside her body, and even now they’re dying, dividing, diffusing, racing so quickly that she can’t keep track of them – except she can. She’s not built to bear this. All this knowledge and her brain is bursting at the seams.
Clara realises dimly – a droplet of information in a raging torrent – that she is doubled over with her head in her hands. It’s overwhelming to move her arm with the muscles contracting and releasing, a billion blood cells racing a little faster and the scattershot release of a fraction more oxygen in countless strands of muscle tissue – but she does it anyway, groping through the flow of information until she finds the doctor’s hand. She holds it tight, not just for the comfort but also as a reassurance that he is still alive, somewhere far away outside her skin.
Seconds pass, Clara’s body reconfiguring itself with each beat of her heart. The contact with the doctor helps. And then slowly, like a sunrise, a shape emerges through the howling of the numbers. It’s vague, just a shadow, and she feels rather than sees it. Faintly, like a memory, Clara gets the impression of comfort and safety. Something familiar – old books and lemon drops.
She closes her eyes. It’s a relief to be able to do so. Quiet, the shadow in her head says. She feels the doctor’s pulse, mingling with her own where their fingers touch. Sleep.
Her body is cold and wooden: although she knows how much oxygen is being used by each of her limbs, she can barely feel them. Slowly, like something very old or dying, Clara lies herself down next to the doctor. She curls up in the hollow next to his chest, holding onto that little scrap of peace through the unrelenting flow of information, and drifts off to sleep.
She wakes up panicking. The doctor’s heart has stopped – he’s died and she slept through it, he’s gone, she let him go –
‘Clara!’
She jerks upright, stares around wildly. The doctor’s body is gone and his jacket has been laid over her legs. She spins around, fighting the horror – and sees him leaning against the far wall, fiddling with the sonic screwdriver, alive and healthy as ever.
‘You’re up,’ he says. ‘And human again – always a bonus.’
She stares at him, speechless. He’s leaning with his bitten side away from her and aside from his lack of jacket he looks the same as he did when they first walked into this cell, before she drained his blood and watched his heart stop in front of her.
‘What’s your mile time?’ the doctor asks without looking up. ‘I’ve invented an anti-vampire frequency on the sonic. Should’ve done it centuries ago, but that’s the problem with this lifespan. Time lord procrastination – it’s a force of nature.’
Clara picks the doctor’s jacket up and goes to stand. She doesn’t get very far; her head is pounding and she’s got pins and needles in both legs. The next thing she knows, the doctor is by her side, taking her arm. She leans on him and stabilises. ‘What—’
‘It’s the aftereffects. You’re back to being human, but your body’s gone through a hell of an ordeal.’
‘My body?’ Clara can’t help but laugh. She’s still leaning on the doctor’s arm, and she looks up. With no walls for him to lean nonchalantly against, she can see the bite marks in his neck. Even with the doctor’s regenerative abilities they’re raw and red, and so obviously deep that it makes her stomach drop.
When she looks back at his face, the doctor is watching her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Clara says.
He looks very grave, but so deliciously alive that Clara’s heart can’t help turning over and over, happy and horrified at the same time.
‘Don’t be,’ the doctor says. ‘I trapped you in here with me.’ He smiles down at her. ‘And like I said, I always survive.’
She can’t keep her eyes off the bites. She reaches out, hesitantly, to touch. The doctor’s eyes follow her hand as she traces the bite marks, ever so gently. His skin is warm to the touch. ‘You promise?’
The doctor smiles down at her. ‘Oh, Clara Oswald. Someday you’ll be the death of me – but not today.’
Clara lets her hand fall away from his neck. She’s still feeling the aftershocks of the fear, the grief – but the doctor is alive. Today they have shared blood and breath and even, Clara suspects, thoughts – but it’s nothing that they haven’t given each other before, or wouldn’t again. And as always, here they stand at the end of it all, alive, together. After a pause, Clara returns his smile.
For about a second – as long as the doctor can bear to stand still – they are quiet. Then he takes her hand. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘the TARDIS is half a mile that way, and this vampire-disruptor setting has a battery life of about five minutes. That question earlier wasn’t rhetorical – if you can run a ten-minute mile with a vampire-hangover, we stand a chance of making it.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘What do you say?’
Hand in hand, towards certain danger. Clara grins and pulls him towards the door. ‘Only one way to find out.’