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Clara’s flat was a tip. She was fully aware it was a tip, and had factored this appraisal into the planning of her evening, but she hadn’t considered the fact that the Doctor might decide that Friday evening was the ideal time to drop by unannounced.
As it was, the TARDIS materialised on top of a mismatched pair of rain-sodden socks she had cast off hours before, the Doctor stepping out onto a thin carpet of leaf mulch that had clung resolutely to her shoes past the doormat, looking around him with an expression of abject horror at the state of her usually-spotless flat.
“Clara?” he enquired, from his spot just outside the TARDIS doors, frozen in consternation as he surveyed the carnage of her lounge. “Are you really… you know, you?”
She groaned from the sofa, rolling over and affixing him with the kind of look she hoped conveyed fuck off, now is not a good time. He blinked at her owlishly, and she groaned more loudly, rolling off the sofa onto the floor, getting to her feet while grimacing at the dull ache in her frontal lobe and cursing Andrea’s idea for Thursday-night drinks. Never again, she vowed. Never, ever again.
“Yep,” she confirmed, closing her eyes against the white light pulsing from the TARDIS windows. Stupid time machine. Stupid hangover. Stupid Doctor. “Still me. For my sins.”
“Are you unwell?”
“If you’re going to follow up my answer to that question with some kind of judgement about the state of my flat, my advice to you is this: don’t, or I will kick your arse to this carpet and use you as a plough through the leaves and the litter. Got it?”
He gave her a confused glance, uncertain how to proceed without invoking her anger. “Your flat is a mess.”
“Is it?” Clara deadpanned. “I can’t say I’d noticed.”
“I mean, there’s leaf mulch and dirty plates and,” he noticed the look on her face and realised his mistake. “That was sarcasm. Right. You look like death.”
“I think death probably wasn’t as wide,” she groaned, too hungover to chastise him for the insensitivity of his comment. “Or short.”
“Indeed.”
“Or hungover.”
“Clara, if you’re doing that thing again where you make statements about your current state until I catch on to what you want and do what you want, we both know it’s going to be a lot quicker if you just tell me. In this case, however, I will note that I’m not taking you to the hospital on Thelonii-13 again, you embarrassed me enough last time,” he gave her an unsympathetic look as he recalled the incident in excruciating detail. “We were lucky to escape with our lives.”
“That was a wine hangover,” Clara retorted sulkily, examining her fingernails as she tried not to remember what had happened. “Wine hangovers are like having little men digging out your skull with pickaxes. Ergo, it’s not my fault that stupid cow-”
“Nun. She was a nun.”
“Whatever. She decided to shine a light in my eyes, and yes, I threw up on her robes,” she scowled at the recollection. “But it was really her own fault. Besides, this is a spirits hangover, so I just need tea and sympathy. Primarily sympathy. Please. Thanks.”
“Spirits?” he asked with a puzzled frown. “I don’t think ghosts cause hangovers.”
“Spirits,” Clara reiterated in the tone she saved for particularly dim students, gesturing to the mostly-empty bottle of gin on her coffee table to clarify her point. “Gin. Vodka. Whiskey. And so on. I’m not listing them all, I’ll be here all night. You can look them up on my phone when you’ve made me a cup of tea, if you’re really all that bothered.”
“I’m making you a cup of tea?” he took in the glare she was giving him and self-corrected: “I mean. Yes, I am making you a cup of tea, Clara.”
“Better,” she muttered, sinking back down on the sofa as he disappeared into the kitchen. She looked around the room through squinted eyes, sweeping the debris from her coffee table onto the floor in a tokenistic attempt to provide a clean, level surface to place imminent mugs of tea upon. “You’re a star,” she called into the kitchen. “You know that?”
“Humans have weird expressions,” he noted, reappearing with two mugs and setting them down beside her. “How can a humanoid life-form be a non-sentient ball of gas?”
“I’m being nice,” she mumbled, nuzzling into him once he had taken a seat beside her and feeling him tense up under her touch. She smacked him in the arm in a way she sincerely hoped was endearing. “Relax,” she scolded. “I can’t use you as a pillow if you’re all tense.”
He relaxed his muscles as much as he was able, suddenly acutely aware of the millimetres of space between them, and he cleared his throat, opting to try and make small talk with her instead. Clara was fond of small talk, that much he knew, and so he would use the opportunity to practice the skills she had been teaching him. “So you were drinking last night?”
“I had assumed that much was apparent by the hangover and the looking-like-death thing.”
“On a school night?”
“What are you, my dad?”
“Who with?”
“Does it matter?” Clara snapped, then caught the expression on his face and softened, feeling guilty for her sour mood. “I’m sorry. You’re trying, I know. With Andrea from work.”
“Andrea?”
“Yeah, you know,” she gestured vaguely in what she hoped was an explanatory manner. “Taller than me, blonde, slightly murderous look. Teaches physics.”
“Ohhhhh,” the Doctor let out a long sigh of realisation, floundering for a comment to offer. “She seems… nice. Albeit dangerous.”
“She’s not dangerous,” Clara scoffed, rolling her eyes at his misplaced concern. “We’d both just had a bad day, so we came back here and drank gin.”
“What’s the deal with gin?” the Doctor asked, wrinkling his nose at the concept. “Humans in this era seem to adore the stuff. That and beards, and forsaking plates.”
“It’s very…” Clara thought for a moment, wondering if he would understand the notion of being hipster, before opting for an easier explanation. “Trendy, but also useful? Not as useful as vodka. But you can mix it with lots of things, and so it’s easy to drink a lot of it very fast, without realising. And get very pissed very fast.”
“Do you speak from experience?”
“I do,” she concurred, grinning up at him in an attempt to allay his worries. “Don’t you give me that look. I’m a grown up, I was fine at work. Lots of quiet reading for my classes. Huge sunglasses, lots of coffee. Nobody noticed a thing.”
“I suspect that everyone noticed ‘the thing,’” he observed dryly, patting her shoulder in a conciliatory manner. “But they were too polite to comment upon it.”
“Sanctimonious prat,” Clara muttered under her breath, then added more loudly: “Have you ever even had a hangover? Do you get them?”
“Of course I don’t get hangovers,” the Doctor said with derision, appalled by the very suggestion. “My supe-”
“If you use the phrase ‘superior Time Lord physiology,’ I will slap you so hard you’ll regenerate. You look like a human. You have a mostly human body. Shut up.”
“It is superior,” he whined, offended by her lack of belief in him. “It deals with alcohol differently to how your body does. I metabolise it much faster.”
“Are you saying you can’t get drunk?” Clara asked, a wicked glint in her eye that he failed to heed.
“Maybe,” he lied, determined to impress her, then made the poor decision to amend his statement: “Yes. Yes, I can’t get drunk.”
“Excellent,” Clara slithered over the back of her sofa, reaching into her drinks cabinet and extracting a bottle of yellowish liquid that she plonked down between their mugs of tea, a look of glee on her face. “Challenge accepted.”
“Urm,” he began, as she fished a shot glass off the floor and gave it a perfunctory wipe with the edge of her t-shirt. “What challenge?”
“You can’t get drunk, right? So we’re going to see if you can drink an entire bottle of tequila and still stand up.”
“If I can’t get drunk, why wouldn’t I be able to?” he asked, trying to quell his mounting sense of panic at the thought of being drunk around Clara, and the potentially disastrous consequences that could follow such a situation.
“Because rule one is that the Doctor lies,” she said with a smirk, and he frowned at her appraisal. “Besides, don’t you want to prove your superior physiology? Go on. Indulge me. Show me what you can do.”
“I hate you,” he muttered, torn between wounding his own pride by admitting the lie, or wounding his pride by disproving his lie. The second idea seemed like a safer bet, as he reasoned that his physiology was probably more robust than Clara’s, so he threw caution to the wind and decided to give… whatever that liquid was a try. “Fine. What do I drink this with?” He looked hopeful. “Lemonade? Ginger beer?”
“You don’t drink it with anything. I mean, you can drink it with lime, but the closest I have to that is Lemsip, and that has paracetamol in, so maybe we should steer clear of that. This is tequila: you just do shots of it.”
“And will you be doing these shots too?”
“Maybe,” she teased, tipping him a wink and enjoying the sight of him squirming as she poured out the first measure, shifting in his seat with apprehension. “If you’re lucky.” She slid the glass along the table to him and watched as he eyed it warily, sniffing it then holding it arm’s length.
“That looks disgusting.”
“Yup.”
“Honestly, do I really have to drink this?”
“Yup.”
“I hate you,” he told her again, then threw caution to the wind, knocking the glass back and gagging at the taste that filled his mouth. “Gods, that’s vile. My throat is on fire.”
“The second one helps with that,” Clara lied, snatching up the glass and refilling it before handing it back to him with a contented grin. “Go on, I promise.”
He scowled at her blackly and then took the second shot, noting with displeasure that it did not seem to have allayed the burning sensation. “Liar.”
“Learned from the best. How you feeling?”
“Sober.”
“Disappointing,” she poured a third shot out, and watched him scowl at the liquid as it sloshed around the glass. “Stop dithering.”
“I’m not dithering.”
“Are too.”
“Am not,” he downed the shot to shut her up, then held the glass out for a fourth, determined not to show any weakness and prove his own lie. She seemed to be moving a lot more than she had been a minute ago, but he put it down to the lighting. “Fill me up.”
She raised a single eyebrow as she poured out the fourth measure and watched him down it without hesitation, his eyes taking on an odd look as he gazed at her with a distant smile. “How you feeling?”
“Fine,” he mumbled, blinking blearily before sliding from the sofa to the floor. The floor seemed much more comfortable than the lumpy, narrow sofa anyway, and he ran his hands over the lightly sticky carpet as the walls danced around him, refusing to stay still no matter how hard he willed them to. Perhaps not the lighting, he realised. “Fineeeeeeee.”
“You know what they say about tequila?” Clara asked, ignoring his overly-exuberant response and instead refilling his glass as she watched his eyes go in and out of focus. “Hmm?”
“Nope,” he said, downing the shot and then focusing on her with a concerted effort, willing his vision to steady. “What?” Oh dear. His words seemed to be slurring when he spoke. He cleared his throat, then tried again, the words almost strangled by a sudden, unbidden Scottish accent that he hadn’t previously been aware of possessing. “Wha’ they say?”
“They say,” Clara bit back a laugh at his discombobulation, knowing it only wounded his pride when she laughed at him. “’One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.’”
“Floor’s good,” he argued, still slurring and – to his chagrin – still aggressively Glaswegian. He got to his feet, determined to stride around the room with his usual pomp and regain the advantage of controlling the situation, but instead he took a step forwards, tripped over the coffee table, and landed back on his arse on Clara’s rug. Bollocks. “Floor comfy,” he said haughtily, ignoring Clara’s peals of laughter in favour of attempting to maintain the illusion of intentionality, bum-scooting back around the table to lean against the sofa. “Nice floor.”
“Would you like another shot?” she asked him pityingly, holding out the bottle as she spoke. “Five isn’t very many, is it? And with tequila, the thing is that the more you drink, the better it gets. You’ll feel better.”
“You’re lyin’ ‘gain,” he accused, jabbing a finger in the general direction of her chest. Lord, her chest. That t-shirt was extremely thin, and her bra seemed even thinner and lacier, and oh gods, he was staring at her chest. That was probably rude, although he didn’t recall her warning him about it. Nevertheless, he dragged his attention back up to her face with difficulty, forcing himself to look her in the eyes – or their general area, at least. Nice eyes. Upturned nose. Soft-looking lips he definitely hadn’t thought about kissing. “Lyin’, aren’t ya?”
“Might be,” she poured him another shot anyway. “Might not be. There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
“Hate you,” he assured her in a fond tone, then knocked back the shot with an easy grin, spilling half down his shirt as he did so. “A lot.”
“No you don’t,” she patted his hair in a conciliatory manner, watching it fluff up under her hands and continuing to stroke it before he could object. “Not really.”
“No, I don’,” he clarified, scowling at his impeded speech and the impact it was having on his uncharacteristically warm-hearted words. “Not a bit. You the best. Bestest Clara. Bestest and so very pretty.”
“Pretty?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow before sliding off the edge of the sofa to join him on the floor. This seemed like the kind of alcohol-influenced conversation that should occur on the floor, that much she was certain of. “You think I’m pretty?”
He nodded emphatically, glad she had grasped the concept he was seeking to convey. “Very very pretty.”
“You’ve had too much to drink.”
“Nope,” he disputed, shaking his head for emphasis, dishevelling his hair as he did so. “Not had enough.”
“Enough for what?”
He attempted to look coy and fell only slightly short. “Stuff an’ things.”
“You’re an idiot,” she told him fondly, pouring him out his seventh shot and beginning to feel a touch guilty about having challenged him to do this. “I suppose I’ve got a duty to find out what they may be, don’t I?”
He all but snatched the glass from her, tossing the amber liquid back like water and then beaming adoringly across at her. “Like me!” he enthused, jabbing his own chest with a finger. “An’ my duty of care.”
“Why do you get more Glaswegian as you get drunker?” Clara wrinkled her nose, finally deciding to ask the question that had been bothering her. “I mean, I don’t mind as long as you don’t start calling me ‘hen.’”
“Why?” he drawled, tipping her an untidy wink. “Ye are ma hen.”
“Really,” she made a face, trying to look stern and not giggle. “Don’t. Urm, I don’t know how to say that in Scottish. Dinnae call me that? Is that right?”
“Yer accent is crap,” he told her, a wide smile on his face as he reached for the tequila bottle and took a long dram, deciding to skip the unnecessary stage of using a glass. “Yer tongue is in the wrong place when ye speak.”
“Oh is it?” she asked, raising an eyebrow in a silent challenge. “And I suppose you’d be the expert on tongues?”
“Ya know,” he squinted at her and took another gulp of tequila, unsure whether she was getting at what he thought she was getting at. “I’m a bit pissed, tha’s why I’m flirting with ye. Wha’s yer excuse?”
“Being around drunk people tends to rub off on me,” she confessed, not proud of the admission, before realising she should dispute his assertion: “Besides, I’m not flirting.”
“You’re flirting.”
“I’m sat on my rug with a pissed Time Lord, asking him questions about things.”
“You’re sat alluringly.”
“And that would be… how?” she asked, confused by his accusation. “Do explain.”
“You’re doing that thing with your eyes,” he explained, gesticulating to her face as he spoke. “And pouting with those lips. And then there’s your t-shirt.”
“My t-shirt?” she asked, throwing caution to the wind and going fully wide-eyed and innocent, determined to see how far she could push him. “Is there something wrong with my t-shirt?”
“Ye,” he decided after a moment’s rumination, before attempting to elucidate his concerns: “Ye, it’s not… it’s too… it’s just not suitable.”
Fuck it. She peeled it off over her head, watching his eyes widen, and felt a small stab of pride at having rendered him speechless. “I’ll have to go and find something more suitable then,” she purred, getting up and taking half a step away from him in a silent invitation, curious to see whether he would follow her. “Won’t I?”
“No,” he pouted, reaching for her leg and tugging insistently until she toppled over onto him, squealing as she landed in his lap with her arms and legs akimbo. “Don’ go.”
“You are,” she huffed, irritated that her plan had failed. Pissed Time Lords apparently still couldn’t take hints. “A titanic prat. I was trying to be-”
“Shu’ up and have some tequila,” he held the bottle out to her and she shrugged, taking a long swallow and wincing at the taste. Fuck it. “See? Tequila. Fuuuuuuun.”
“Sat on your lap in my braaaaaaa,” she copied his style of speech, poking her tongue out at him before continuing: “Less fuuuuuuun.”
He giggled, pressing his lips to her shoulder tenderly. “Fun for me,” he cast his gaze downwards, snickering as he did so. “Nice view.”
She smacked his shoulder, the tequila taking the edge off her inhibitions, and she found she didn’t mind his eyes roving over her. “Perv.”
“M’not a perv for looking at a pretty girl.”
“Doctor,” she said, without real conviction, too amused by the drunk Time Lord whose arms were encircling her. “My face is up here.”
“Don’ care.”
“You told me,” she reminded him, tilting his chin up so she could look him in the eye and hammer her point home. “That you couldn’t get drunk.”
“I lied,” he confessed, cheeks turning pink as he wriggled away from her hand and looked back down at her chest. “Wanted to impress ye. An’…”
“And?”
“Maybe get up some courage.”
“Courage to do what?”
He kissed her without warning, the taste of tequila on his lips, and she was too surprised to do anything other than kiss him back. When he pulled away, she was panting heavily, unsure how to proceed with the conversation in the terse silence that followed.
“Well,” she said after a moment, as pragmatically as she was able under the circumstances. “That was. Unexpected.”
“Liar.”
“Excuse me?” she frowned, not understanding what he meant by his accusation. “What do you mean?”
“Like you don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“How I feel. About you.”
“How do you feel about me?” she asked in bafflement, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, wanting nothing more than to kiss him again but needing clarification from him about his intentions before she did so.
“Ach, Clara,” he cursed, sighing in frustration. “I’m drunk, I cannae have this conversation with you when I’m drunk.”
“What conversation?”
“The one where I tell ye I like ye. In tha’ way.”
“Oh,” she squeaked, taken aback by the revelation but still turning pink with pleasure. “That conversation. Yes, I can see why you might be… reticent.”
“Are ye gonna kiss me again?” he asked, then frowned, holding up one hand in warning. “Wait.”
“What?” Clara asked, feeling a sudden sense of horror. “You’re not about to throw up, are you?”
“No,” he rolled his eyes at the stupidity of her question. “I have superior Time Lor’ physiology. I wanna dance.”
“Dance?” she asked with incredulity. “Really?”
“Yes, dance. Really.”
Clara’s bedroom was a tip. Somewhere in her consciousness, she registered that it had not been a tip prior to twelve hours ago, but it was now strewn with her and the Doctor’s clothing, alongside a discarded bottle of tequila that was dripping steadily onto her carpet. She groaned and pulled the covers over her head, blocking out the sunlight that was filtering through the curtains.
“Dance,” the Doctor hummed in her ear, pressing a kiss to her neck as she curled into the warmth of his body and tried to recall some of the finer details from the night before. “Has always been my favourite metaphor.”
“I hate you,” she mumbled without conviction, smiling then groaning again. “So hungover. Wanna die.”
“Well you know,” he mused, slipping one hand down past her hip. “Hair of the dog and all that… I’m sure I could work up enough courage for a second round.”