Chapter Text
Clara Oswald stared at her drink and tried to remember what it tasted like.
Once upon a time, so long ago, she used to enjoy wine. It warmed her up and occasionally made her tipsy enough to forget whenever she’d had a rough day at school, or an argument with Danny Pink or … with him.
Now … it may as well be water. Still, she admitted to herself, they make strong wine on this planet — my tongue hasn’t tingled in a long time, but this stuff is doing the trick, though it took about half a glass. Weird. That isn’t usually supposed to happen.
Bland-tasting food and drink was one of many things she had learned to get used to since she was technically dead. Her heart sat frozen in her chest, her lungs only filling with air out of muscle memory and a habit she never bothered to break. She’d made a promise years ago to never use the Z word to describe herself, but that’s pretty much what she was. Not dead, but not totally alive, either. No craving for eating brains, though.
Not for the first time, she found herself cursing the Doctor. And not for the first time, she instantly regretted it. “Sorry, Doctor…” she muttered as she took another sip of the water-flavoured, yet strangely tongue-tingly pinot noir.
It had been half a century since she’d last seen the Time Lord, a man who no longer remembered her. The thought of that still made Clara immensely sad. He didn’t deserve the punishment she herself had orchestrated. Not intentionally, never intentionally, but, like so many things on that very bad day, nothing had gone as planned.
No, that’s not quite fair, some things did go right. Instead of lying dead in a hidden alleyway in London, Clara was on some alien world she’d forgotten the name of already, “enjoying” some alien wine while her companion and fellow immortal, Ashildr, was off visiting a museum somewhere. And most … well, many … well, a reasonable number of days after she had left the Doctor had been good. This was just an off day. Who knew that tomorrow had in store, right?
It was a lot of fun at first. Ashildr, who thanks to the Doctor was rendered functionally immortal back in the ninth century, had spent trillions of years living the slow path, eternally youthful. And then, when she lost the Doctor, Clara found herself not only with her own stolen TARDIS, but also with her own companion in Ashildr. And a few technical issues notwithstanding, she was still thinking and walking around. She could still enjoy life, even if she wasn’t really alive anymore.
And they had had a blast, travelling from world to world, from time to time, exploring and occasionally helping people in need. That seemed to be a new concept for Ashildr and it took some effort on Clara’s part to convince her that it was worthwhile.
“We’re superheroes,” Clara once told her. “I can’t die until I return to Trap Street, you can pretty much only die if you fall into a sun or something, so let’s help people when we’re not killing time on planets where they celebrate new year’s for two centuries.”
Ashildr had gotten into the swing of it, and was responsible for saving many lives. But even so, Clara realized that, while Ashildr provided companionship, she just wasn’t the Doctor.
Beyond the physical aspects — although it admittedly took a while to get used to the stern-faced, grey-haired visage that had replaced the open-faced, joyful appearance of his predecessor, Clara had come to consider the Doctor ruggedly handsome, enough to make her heart (when it was still working) lilt a bit at the sight of him — it took her a long time to realize what she really missed the most about the Doctor.
It was the hugs.
From someone who proclaimed himself to be “not a hugger,” to someone who would embrace Clara without hesitation, and who enjoyed it just as much in return — especially those spontaneous, out-of-the-blue hugs that really meant so much more than three little words could convey — the Doctor becoming more affectionate was perhaps Clara’s proudest accomplishment.
Taking another swig of the wine, and this time realizing she could actually make out the taste now (man, this is strong wine, she thought again), Clara caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was loose and straight, her large brown eyes bright and shining. A small rose was stuck into her hair over her left ear. Her skin was virtually unblemished and smooth, and definitely did not resemble the skin of a woman who was technically well north of eighty.
The whole not-aging thing was one plus of being time-looped. In her former life, she’d been staring down her thirty-somethingth birthday the day she faced the raven and had started the ritual so many of her generation experienced of scanning her face every morning for that first grey hair, or that first wrinkle suggesting you’d laughed once too often. Both of which she could have seen herself developing after spending so much time with the Doctor.
But now, she’d never have to worry about any of that. And her time with the Doctor had made her lean and strong; she had been in the best shape of her life on her last day as a regular human and this was now preserved, technically forever. Not just from all the running from Daleks and Cybermen, but she’d taken it on herself to train when she wasn’t with the Doctor. He never knew about the black belt she’d attained in judo in-between their adventures, nor that she also had one in tae kwon do. She was hoping to surprise him sometime by shoulder-throwing a Cyberman or body-slamming Missy, but she never got the chance.
Not that her physical training hadn’t come in useful. On the planet the Doctor called the “second most beautiful” garden in the universe, a masterful act of derring-do on her part had literally saved his life only a few hours before she lost hers. Jumping off the side of a balcony perched a mile up, Clara had impressed the Doctor and herself by hanging one-handed as she connected two cables together to close a hatchway, saving them from having to deal with a sentient plant that wanted the Doctor for his, her, or its mate. He’d helped her up, but she was already halfway there. When they had returned to the TARDIS afterwards, they’d been giddy with adrenaline, and, if Clara didn’t know any better, she would have sworn the Doctor was even a little turned on as he prowled around the console with a smouldering look that burned right through her. She wouldn’t lie; she felt the same. There had been an increasing number of those moments since Clara rejoined the Doctor after that bizarre Christmas with the dream crabs, though they never seemed to take it further than gazing at each other, even when Clara had given him the signs that she was interested (like the time he told her to find a new relationship and didn’t process the fact that she already had and she was smiling at him).
The Doctor never knew that she had finally decided to take matters into her own hands, pollen-covered dress or no, after the garden planet incident. She’d have started with reintroducing him to the idea of kissing (a step up from hugging) and see where it led from there. She even had an excuse prepared if he’d reacted negatively to being snogged (she was going to play dumb and pretend she was playing a joke or winning a bet with Osgood or overtaken by the influence of love pollen or something). She’d even had the TARDIS move her bedroom just outside the console room, just in case.
If only that damn phone call hadn’t changed everything.
“Sorry, Rigsy,” Clara said aloud as she regretted cursing another friend now, too, as she ran her fingers through her hair. That wasn’t fair at all, she thought. You were a friend, in trouble, and of course you had to call us. And we had to help.
One thing she regretted was cutting her hair before the Trap Street fiasco. She’d done so after the dream crabs out of practicality; long, flowing locks didn’t go well when you were running down corridors, they tended to get caught in things like alien pincers, plus a few too many desert and jungle planets had made her realize how hot a heavy head of hair was. The Doctor seemed to like the shorter style, too, which was a bonus, and he’d developed a bit of a habit of sniffing her hair when they hugged. She never asked him about that and she wasn’t sure if he even realized he was doing it. It was a sensation she often remembered when she sat and thought about the Doctor for too long.
Clara also tried not to think about the fact that she had an appointment with death. Of course, everybody, eventually, had to face this, except maybe Ashildr. In her case, she knew the exact day and time and place. Someday, she’d have to go back. Face the raven. Die.
It was an appointment Clara was in no hurry to meet. And it wasn’t because she was scared of dying — if she kept telling herself that, she hoped it would eventually become true, at any rate — it was because of the Doctor that she didn’t want to go back until the last possible moment. Because she knew what seeing her die did to him.
Enhanced memory was one aspect of being immortal that was a curse, as Clara was able to relive, moment by moment, so much of her life before and after Trap Street. Something to do with her brain cells being time looped. She could gain new memories, new experiences and wisdom, but whatever was in place back on Trap Street were hard-wired in as well. No finite memory problems like that faced by Ashildr, who reacted to Clara’s ability with sympathy, not jealousy. “You’ll find it a curse, trust me,” she’d said with her usual optimism.
One still-vivid memory was from Gallifrey after she’d been reunited with the Doctor. When he’d told her, in the Cloisters, what he had gone through, the hell he’d put himself through, for four and a half billion years, just for a chance of undoing her death, all out of a “duty of care” which was as close to an “I love you” as the Doctor was likely to give her, Clara didn’t know whether to slug him or kiss him to death. She ended up doing neither. That wasn’t their style. Instead, she told him a secret. Something that she had kept bottled up for a long time. The Doctor had bowed his head, and for the first time, she’d seen tears. Just for a moment. She’d kissed his forehead then, stroked his face, and told him to open the trap door and get his arse to a TARDIS while she distracted the Time Lords.
She hadn’t needed to fake her outrage at what they’d forced the Doctor to endure. She hated them and she told them so. And then like a knight in, well, if not shining armour, at least something that looked like he’d stolen it from the set of an old TV western — knowing him, he probably had — the Doctor had swooped in and rescued her with a brand-new TARDIS.
And how they’d run — right to the end of the universe, in the most literal sense. She was heartbroken when she saw the Doctor gradually lose hope at keeping her alive. But he scared her too. He’d once told her about the time he became the Time Lord Victorious when he tried to save a soldier named Adelaide Brooke from a fixed-point death on Mars, and it had not ended well. And then Clara was faced with him in this dangerous mindset once again, shouting at her, and it wasn’t until it was almost too late for redemption that the Doctor realized he was hurting her. Clara was forced to play hardball — to threaten and to even scheme to be allowed to keep her memories. And she knew she was hurting him by doing so. They were too much alike — they knew how to push each other’s buttons to the extent that, if Clara hadn’t been aware of the Doctor’s complicated history with his wife, River Song, she could have easily seen herself as the Doctor’s wife at some point.
The Doctor had come to his senses, and Clara had forgiven him and she’d even offered him one last chance to forget the whole thing and just fly away with her. Clara had always loved the Doctor, but hearing the words “four and a half billion years” had changed something within her. She had once splintered herself into a million lifetimes out of her loyalty to the Doctor. The Doctor had paid that back a billion-fold. If the Doctor had said yes at that moment, she’d have stayed with him forever. He once joked to the Daleks, “Same old, same old, just the Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS.” But she hadn’t been joking when she invited the Doctor to elope with her instead of activating the neuroblock. “Why don’t we just fly away somewhere?” she had asked him. She might as well have asked, “Doctor, will you marry me?” And they both realized it. Everything had come to that moment.
A brief moment, a fantasy.
“That would be great, wouldn’t it?” he had said. “God, yeah,” she had replied.
For a second she had considered kissing him, but just as she had chosen not to during their first farewell on Trap Street, she knew if she did, or if she’d broken her promise to Danny and told the Doctor how much she loved him (as if her words to him in the Cloisters hadn’t already made that clear enough), neither of them would have had the courage to activate the neuroblock.
But a button had to be pushed and a memory erased. And seeing the Doctor collapse to the floor, his memory slipping away like sand through fingers… it hurt nearly as much as …
Clara shuddered and took a big swig of the wine and not for the first time wished she could get drunk again. Dammit, I wish I’d never pressed Ashildr into telling me what happened at the end on Trap Street. I wish I’d never asked her to always be truthful to me, no matter what. So my last words weren’t “Let me be brave” after all — instead, I screamed so loud, Ashildr was forced to retcon a bunch of cops who’d heard it outside in the “real world.” And apparently a few of her own citizens requested it as well because they’d been traumatized by it.
And the Doctor was right there, seeing it, helpless. No wonder he lost his mind. She knew the Doctor retained basic memories of their adventures; that was one memory she hoped was lost forever.
Sitting at the table, Clara absent-mindedly scratched at a sudden pinprick feeling just above her stomach. Maybe it was a side effect of the extraction, but occasionally Clara would find herself doubled over in pain. It would pass after a few seconds but, considering she wasn’t normally able to feel pain anymore, Ashildr surmised that she might be experiencing some sort of “flash-forward” phantom pain of her death since, technically, it hadn’t happened to her yet so a flashback didn’t make sense. But since when did anything make sense anymore?
Normally, she couldn’t feel pain. A stab wound, a gunshot, closing a door on a finger, all of which she’d experienced over the years — it was just dullness to Clara. Sadly, being unable to feel pain meant she couldn’t feel the opposite, either. She had never been a particularly sexual person — Danny brought some of that out in her, but it was never a huge priority in her life (though with the Doctor — both of them — on a few occasions she would have gladly made it one, like after the garden planet, or on the Orient Express when he’d looked so incredible in that train-car hallway, like Gary Cooper in that Audrey Hepburn film she loved). Small mercy then, considering that while she could still appreciate feeling the warmth of sun on her skin, or a cool breeze, and the comfort of a touch or a hug (in lieu of the Doctor, Ashildr was happy to give and receive the occasional embrace, though it wasn’t the same as Clara often felt she was being humoured rather than the friendship of the hug being appreciated), anything beyond that simply no longer registered.
Not that she’d put that much effort into trying. Ashildr had suggested they visit a brothel at one point, both in terms of an experiment (at least that was Ashildr’s story and she was sticking to it) and also, as she so bluntly put it, to get the Doctor out of Clara’s system. As if that was going to happen. Fortunately, a Sontaran battlefleet decided to choose that moment to try a random invasion and Ashildr’s idea became moot when the brothel got blown up (after Clara and Ashildr got everyone to safety, of course; their TARDIS was decidedly not family-friendly for a while and, after the evacuation, Ashildr and Clara strongly considered activating the ship’s rarely used internal-flush-and-sanitize function). Regardless, Strax probably wondered why he received a big kiss on the top of his bald head the next time Clara saw him.
Another gulp of wine. Clara tried to get her mind out of the dark place. Look to the bright side: she was travelling the stars in her own (awesome) TARDIS, even though the cool factor of its chameleon circuit being stuck in the form of an American diner had worn off once they realized how it limited where they could actually land.
Ashildr eventually fixed the thing, though not until Clara fulfilled an obligation to the Doctor’s timeline, parking it in Utah in 2011, hiring some part-time staff, and reconfiguring the interior to allow the bathrooms to actually be used as bathrooms (otherwise visitors would have wandered into the console room).
She didn’t expect the Doctor to materialize his TARDIS inside the diner, though; it took some quick work on her and Ashildr’s part to avoid an accidental time-ram scenario, which would have been fatal to the Doctor, his companions, Clara, Ashildr and probably would have blown a hole in the earth’s crust. But it had worked out and Clara watched on a monitor as not one but two versions of the Doctor — the younger, bow-tie-wearing Doctor appeared twice over the course of a few hours but from his perspective some two hundred years had passed — met with Amy, Rory and his future wife, River. Clara had suppressed the urge to throw her waitress costume on again and just stand near the Doctor, serve him coffee, make eye contact. Ashildr told her in no uncertain terms that this would be dangerous and stupid. So she made do with a pleasant nod and a “hello” to Amy when she passed her in the hall on the way to the ladies room, at the same time reaffirming her earlier assessment that the Scottish lass was totally made of legs. Rory wasn’t bad to look at, either; she tried to imagine him with a beard for some reason, playing a superhero. River she remembered from Trenzalore, but this was a younger River, still a long way away from facing her own raven at the universe’s biggest library.
That was then. Now, Clara’s TARDIS looked like a tree. Not quite the same cool factor as a diner, and a bit harder to spot in a forest, but easier to park. And you didn’t tend to get random people wandering in off the street looking for hamburgers or the toilet or men in suits asking why you didn’t have your certificate from the health board posted in a conspicuous place.
Clara glanced at the plate of crackers the waiter had provided with the drink and wished she could chow down on them. But she didn’t have to eat anymore — and in fact she couldn’t, because her body could no longer actually digest food. So no more sampling exotic alien crackers, even though these just looked disappointingly like regular saltines. She smiled when she remembered trying something alien for the first time back on Akhaten that first trip off-world after the Doctor had monked his way into her life. It looked like a sno-cone but tasted more like yellow snow. After that, though, she’d become something a space-food connoisseur. Or, at least, that used to be the case. At least she didn’t feel hungry, either.
But she still got thirsty and had to drink, she found. Liquids — like that final lemonade she shared with the Doctor in Nevada, and the wine she was tippling now — were absorbed by her body and helped to keep her from drying up. She might be nearly kinda dead, but she’d found out the hard way that she needed moisture to keep her joints lubricated, her tear ducts working (never mind the crying, without tears her vision took a major hit, she found), and even her tongue and throat moist just so that she could speak. It required her to drink about three litres of water or other fluids, like wine, a day, which proved to be a challenge that one time the TARDIS broke down on a desert planet — including its water producing plant. Things had gotten desperate before the ship was finally repaired and Ashildr actually broke their Z-word rule in describing how Clara looked and sounded for about a week after.
At least she didn’t have to stand on her head after taking a drink like that poor fellow Owen who used to work for Torchwood and found himself in a full-out undead state. She heard about him through Jack Harkness, a mutual acquaintance of both Ashildr and the Doctor. She found Jack fascinating and would have been a liar if she said she wasn’t attracted to him a little. Jack had flirted with her mercilessly and even offered to help her figure out a workaround to her inability to feel physical pleasure. Any other guy making such a proposition would have gotten a slap in the face. But Jack was so damn charming and boyish, she let him get away with it. She turned him down, of course, but she had been damn tempted. If it had been the Doctor sitting close and touching her knee as he made the provocative suggestion, then she might have considered it.
Once she’d shot down his idea, however, she found Jack to be more of a kindred spirit. Especially when she learned Jack shared many of the feelings she’d had for the Doctor. When she told Jack about her adventures borrowing his vortex manipulator and meeting not one but three Doctors, he was enraptured. Jack was also convinced he’d met Clara before, possibly aboard the Game Station, the satellite in earth orbit in the fifth millennium where Jack had been exterminated by a Dalek, only to be revived by Rose Tyler when she became the Bad Wolf entity; the side effect of this for him was immortality. But he said there was no way that could have been Clara; that girl he witnessed was ginger for one thing and he saw her throw herself in front of a Dalek that was about to shoot the Doctor. Jack did remember her eyes and said Clara had the same large, dark pools that could express a whole sentence with a glance. He also remembered the gist of her bizarre last words, something about a clever boy running and remembering, which had made no sense. He seemed a bit puzzled why a seasoned adventurer like Clara suddenly started crying, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him. Let him think she was just a softie. For Clara, though, it was more blood on her account sheet. Another version of herself dead in order to protect the Doctor from the Great Intelligence’s scheme to destroy his timeline.
Clara tried not to think about her echoes. All those women — and, she discovered to her surprise, a few men — who sacrificed so much just so the Doctor would live. She carried the guilt of her echoes for a long time until she and the Doctor encountered one in the mid-twenty-first century down in, of all places, Antarctica. That was when she discovered that not all of her echoes actually died, that some — hopefully many, hopefully most — had full and complete lives before and, most importantly, after being there when the Doctor needed them. But she still grieved when she learned of the ones that gave their lives.
Worst of all, the Doctor never knew about most of them. He told her after he’d rescued her from his timestream that he had vague, foggy memories of some, but many made their contributions without the Doctor even being aware of them (like Jack’s ginger version of Clara). A fact that made both of them sad and she recalled how the two had shared a drink in their memory, something that was remarkable given how bow-tie Doctor usually refused to touch alcohol, though she got the sense it was for her benefit more than his. Now, of course, Clara assumed that even those foggy memories were probably long-erased.
The months after that first visit to Trenzalore were not easy. At the Doctor’s insistence, Clara entered a sort of therapy to help her come to terms with what had happened. Needless to say, splitting into thousands of doppelgangers creates a form of PTSD not covered under most health insurance plans, so instead Kate Stewart of UNIT put her in touch with Sarah Jane Smith, the grande dame of the Doctor’s former companions. They shared many happy, sometimes tearful hours together, reminiscing about their shared experiences. And it was actually Sarah Jane who first said out loud to her how much alike the Doctor and Clara appeared, adding this was both a comfort and a little disturbing. Her last words to Clara before they mutually agreed that there was no more Sarah Jane could do to help Clara were: “Don’t fall in love with him.” Much like the Doctor, though, Clara didn’t always listen to people.
She’d also spent a month in Victorian London living with Vastra, Jenny and Strax. It had been Clara’s idea, as she thought time spent away from her century, but not being chased by monsters or mad dictators might do some good. Even without the Doctor, though, she found herself engaged in an adventure or two. She’d helped Vastra, Jenny and Strax take down the Marylebone Masher (along the way learning some handy lock-picking skills from Jenny), and she even joined Strax in helping out a pair of eccentric elderly amateur detectives named Henry Gordon Jago and George Litefoot. It wasn’t till near the very end of their adventure that she learned they’d known the Doctor back when he was all teeth and curls.
One good thing that came out of the therapy and her retreat to Victorian London was Clara’s decision to become a schoolteacher and she’d spent the next couple of happy years learning the craft. Unfortunately, it meant she had to restrict her travels with the Doctor to the occasional bank holiday weekend. The Doctor had been sad about this, but they soon realized that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” was an actual thing, and if anything their time together became all the more special for it. When she got her job as a teacher, she tried to keep this going and it worked very well, at least until Clara rejoined the Doctor after the dream crabs. Although she had to separate from him in order to fulfill her obligations to Coal Hill School, in the months prior to Trap Street, she found herself spending more and more time with the Doctor.
Clara still occasionally received text messages from Winnie Clarence, the echo she’d met in Antarctica. Last she heard she’d married some fellow and had a son. She hadn’t the heart to tell her her “twin” was texting a dead woman, and rarely replied to the messages once she found out that Winnie’s husband’s last name was Pink and that he was distantly related to Danny. Clara had used the TARDIS’ computer to do some research and confirmed that Winnie’s great-grandson would be Orson Pink, the explorer the Doctor and Clara had rescued from the edge of time and who had resembled Danny in so many ways. How Winnie’s family came to be in possession of Danny’s toy soldier — something Clara had given the young Danny when he was in an orphanage — was a mystery, but what was no longer a mystery to her was how Orson seemed to recognize her when they first met, since Winnie was one of the “doppelganger” echoes (as opposed to those with different hair, ages, even ethnicities. She’d seen a photo of one of her echoes who had been born in Zaire and thought she had looked amazing with ebony skin). Even better, it removed one worry Clara had carried with her since Danny sacrificed himself; she knew time could be rewritten and she’d been deathly afraid that with Danny gone before they’d had a chance to have children, dear Orson would never have existed.
After losing the Doctor, Clara considered trying to track down more of her echoes, to see how they had got on. She’d encountered a few, like the Zairian Clara, but made sure not to reveal her identity. Over the course of two weeks she successfully tracked down what she called her “ground zero” echoes — Oswin Oswald of the Starship Alaska, and Clara Oswin Oswald, a barmaid in Victorian London who was trying to rise above her station by impersonating an upper-class nanny. She had a special place for these two women because she knew they were the ones directly responsible for bringing the Doctor to her.
Clara knew the score; she knew that if she interfered in any way with either of these women she likely would have never met the Doctor and all of time and space would have collapsed. Ashildr volunteered to say hello on her behalf, but Clara would have none of it. So she watched from a distance as Oswin boarded the Alaska for the fateful flight that would end with a shipwreck on the Dalek asylum planet and her being converted into a Dalek, enduring madness as she created a fantasy world to deal with the pain. And she and Ashildr watched from around the corner as Clara Oswin examined a bizarre-looking snowman alongside … him. Ashildr had had to hold Clara back from stopping Clara Oswin from chasing after the Doctor’s carriage, knowing full well that in just over a day the vivacious young woman, so full of life and energy — a woman the Doctor would fall in love with at first proper sight — would be dead. When she’d lived with Vastra, Clara had considered retracing the steps of this other Clara, but didn’t have the courage.
It was in Oswin and Clara Oswin’s memory, and that of all the others, that Clara now wore a rose over her left ear.
There was about finger left of the wine and Clara swallowed it down. Wow, she thought, that was some glass of wine. I can’t believe I could taste it.
Impressed to finally find something that could trigger her taste buds, Clara was about to order another (another side benefit of her condition; inebriation was impossible) when her mobile rang. It was the first time in years that she’d heard the retro-style ringer go off. It was the same phone she’d had that day on Trap Street. Like all her phones, the Doctor had “upgraded” it so that it could be used to call him on the TARDIS anywhere in time and space. And anyone wanting to call her back home — her gran, UNIT — could reach her too. She didn’t know why she kept it, as it was torture every time she looked at the speed dial list, which was filled with people she could never contact again: the Doctor (maybe she hoped he’d call), Gran, Dad (Why would they call her? To them she was dead.) … she even still had Danny’s mobile number programmed in. She didn’t have the heart to delete it. For several weeks after Danny died, she’d occasionally call it and let it ring through to his Cloud-stored voicemail greeting, just to hear his voice again. And then one day she called and a little kid answered the phone. The number had been reassigned. That was a bad day.
There had been a lot of bad days after she lost Danny, especially after she’d let the Doctor leave her with a terrible lie that Danny had returned from whatever afterlife Missy had trapped him in, and had come back. And then there was that Christmas when Danny — or her subconscious pretending to be Danny, at any rate — gave her permission to move on. She still took the requisite five minutes each day to think about Danny, and then she got on with life. And for a long time, that life had included the Doctor. She’d long since added another five minutes for him, too, though as long as she knew he was out there, somewhere, it wasn’t quite as sad. But he was doing things without her — adventures, exploring, maybe even falling in love … that made her sad. And jealous as hell. Whatever the Doctor did to her phone, it no longer needed charging and continued to work perfectly five decades later. Having the Doctor on speed dial, even though she could never bring herself to dial it, felt like she still had a connection to him. One day, she’d call that number again.
The call display said: “Blocked number.” Clara froze at the sight. That was never a good sign. Especially since the Doctor said that it was impossible for that to happen on her phone. Cautiously, as if the mobile might blow up in her face, she answered. “Hello?”
“They’re coming for you.” It was a woman’s voice, Scottish-accented.
Of all people Clara never wanted to hear from again, Missy was top of the list.