Fic: Time To Live/Time To Sleep
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Clara, Eleven, River
Summary: His brave, impossible girl, for one moment, smiles for him. And then she's gone.
A/N: this fic would be languishing in my docs for eternity if it wasn't for the fabulousness that is themuslimbarbie Big hugs and thanks to her! Angst Ahead. Doctor Who is not mine.
To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. - William Blake
Clara:
She lives a thousand lives in the same moment - being born and growing old and dying in the space between heartbeats. And every life leads her to the same point: to him. It’s always him. Always the Doctor. She’s running to save him from a fate that hasn’t happened and is happening right now and has already happened over and over.
In that moment, when her lives flash behind her eyes and she’s suddenly reborn again in another time, she sees all the times he’s had, and all the lives he’s saved. All the lives he’s touched with faintest brush, going onwards, and becoming brighter for having known him.
And she thinks that maybe - just maybe - this time it won’t end the way it always does.
Even though she knows it’s useless, because if she can save him now then she won’t have to keep falling onwards through the mists of his long long life, and she has to keep going, so really it’s inevitable. All her saving and running will always lead her back to this moment. This brilliant shining moment where she takes that step forward into the light (how cliché, she thinks) and hits the ground running towards the next adventure.
(It was always going to end this way.)
She thought it would be like waking up, suddenly living as someone else, like stepping into a new pair of shoes, but it’s not like that at all. Every time she has to be born and grow up and find a job and live her life first. It takes time and patience (which she never learnt,) and there is always heartbreak, and family and laughter, before the whirlwind adventure crashes through her domesticity and drags her onwards again. She remembers being a barmaid and a governess is Victorian London, being a computer technician in the 22nd and 51st century, working in a shop in the 1960’s. She remembers living in a universe without stars, knowing that this time it wasn’t her job to save him, but somehow knowing that he would be saved all the same. She remembers her mother, always dying before it was her time; and her father, always the quiet man who loved his late wife until the day he died. She remembers infinite boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, houses and children. Countless weddings and funerals she never attended are vibrant memories that stand out in her head-full of dreary day to day adventures. She remembers taking up running - and being grateful when her hobby meant she had trainers ready and waiting when she saw her madman - this time clad in the loudest coat shaped quilt she has ever seen - dash past her office window on a cloudy afternoon.
It’s always in the instant she sees him that she knows what she has to do. It’s not always clear, often she finds herself following the mysterious man on instinct, until the moment she’s needed. Then it breaks like dawn on the horizon and she doesn’t have time to consider her actions, she simply does what she has to.
She takes his life in her hands and gently shepherds him past danger, sometimes delaying him for a few vital moments, sometimes stepping in front of him and taking the blow meant for him instead. She’s never thanked or fawned over. People, especially the Doctor, barely even notice her enough to walk around her in the street. And yet, when she stands proudly between him and the danger he doesn’t realise is there, she doesn’t mind his ignorance. Praise would only give her an overly large head anyway. It’s better, really, just to keep falling and waiting for the right moment to save the man who has saved (is saving, will save) so many lives, even at the cost of his own.
So she falls, she runs and she lives.
Always for Him.
.......................................
To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time.. - Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Doctor:
He feels too much.
Every sight hurts his eyes, his ears ache at the mere whisper of a sound, and every touch causes lines of fire across the surface of his skin. His hearts never stop beating a rhythm agony in his chest, reminding him of everything he has done that he regrets. Every time he wasn’t there to save someone (arriving minutes, seconds too late and stumbling into the aftermath, thinking ‘if only’), every time he couldn’t do anything for the huddled masses and solitary people who just wanted to live (walking amongst the survivors later, unable to meet their eyes for fear of what judgement he will see reflected in them), every time he was the enemy (hatred echoing across burning skies and ‘save us!’, ‘help us!’, ‘what have you done?’ calling up at him from the bloodied bodies at his feet as he steps over the shells of people he once called ‘friend’ and ‘brother’). He deserves that pain, or at least he thinks he does.
(No, that isn’t right. Not right at all. He knows he does. He deserves it all. Every last drop. How can he not, after all he’s done?)
He watches her scatter along his timeline, as Rose once scattered the words Bad Wolf across the universe. The others only see her fade in a glorious burst of light, but not him. No, never him. To his eyes, she breaks apart into a billion atoms - agonisingly slowly and painfully, infinitely fast in the same moment. For what he’s done, what he’s doing, what he will do. But she doesn’t show it - not her, not his Clara. Because every time he sees her, she’s smiling. Smiling. His brave, impossible girl, for one moment, smiles for him. And then she’s gone.
Every breath he takes is another death relived. He is burning and falling and bleeding all at once and it’s too much to even think about doing anything except cling as hard as he can to the here and now. He breathes in pain, he breathes out agony. There is no relief. His throat feels like it’s full of broken glass, and its only after a while he realises it’s because he hasn’t stopped screaming.
His skull feels like it’s trapped in a vice, even as he feels his brain trying to escape through his eyes. His memories are changing, becoming twisted even as he recalls them. For a moment he can see both versions - the truth and the lie, the before and after, until they merge and only the painful lie remains. (it never happened, it has already happened, it is happening right now). His tomb is most certainly a scar in the world, but now it isn’t old and healed over, but instead carved open without care until it is bleeding and infected and wrong. The scar hurts to look at, the strangeness of seeing past and present and future all lined up as dominoes waiting to fall, feeling dizzying and uncomfortable - paradoxes always were tricky, after all. It’s only when they tipped prematurely and scattered in the wrong order did he realise exactly why his grave is the one place he never should have come.
But then, when his brave, impossible Clara steps fearlessly into the light, it feels as though someone is stitching him up and pouring cool water onto his burning flesh. It is a physical and mental relief, even as his hearts break as yet another companion dies in front of him, adding to the endless lists of those he was not capable of saving. It takes only a few moments for him to decide that this - letting this poor girl die for all he has done - is not acceptable and, just this once - he is going to save her. The impossible girl, who has been slowly rescuing him over and over, one journey at a time; has already given her life for him one time too many. He takes one last look at the scar of his grave, and leaps.
He smiles. Then he is gone.
Just this once, for Her.
…………….
We are ghosts amongst these hills
From the trees of velvet green
To the ground beneath our feet
We are ghosts
We are ghosts amongst these hills
Pressing out along the shore - James Vincent McMorrow
River:
She watches him carefully, as one would keep an eye on a predator.
She speaks quiet words into the girl’s ear, half-truths and misdirection with a silver tongue he would be proud of.
She follows them along the labyrinthine hallways, higher and higher, towards his grave.
She listens as they talk, him never saying what she wants to hear, and her refusing to listen to the words he offers.
She is a ghost, travelling wherever the impossible girl goes. She’s inside her head, like a tumour. (Or a god, she thinks cheekily.)
But she’s not there - not really - and no one can see her, except for the one who she travels in. She doesn’t like it, but those are the rules and she has to follow them, no matter how much it kills her.
Except he was never one for rules, was he?
He always knows, and he always hurts. Goodbyes are the thing that neither of them has ever mastered, for all their practice. Hello’s come easily, hers always dramatic entrances, his ungraceful stumbles (on a good day). Those they can do. Those they are good at. Conversations they can manage, because it is always held under the cloud of ‘spoilers!’ and secrets the other cannot know. They will continue (have continued, are continuing) coping with their diaries and the endless ‘have we done?’
Their lives are two different roads - his and hers, travelling in opposite directions, only intersecting at crucial moments for but a fleeting second, before they diverge and travel alone once more.
Or maybe they are more like separate universes, living side by side and sometimes occupying the same space, but never quite meeting. Like two pieces of time not meant to touch. Their encounters are nothing but echoes of a sound, or ripples on the surface of calm water, or a desert mirage that you can never run towards fast enough.
Time is always running out for them, and she will not let him rewrite the fabric of the universe, even though she knows he would for her. Just for one more fleeting, impossible moment of joy.
So she knows she must remain mysterious and unreachable, even as he unpicks her most knotted secrets. She must find another mystery to keep him in suspense until the next time. But she knows she can never say the obvious words she wants to and so those words echo in between her heartbeats, staying silent and unspoken.
But he hears them anyway. She should have known, because he always does, after all.
She lingers after the impossible girl steps bravely to her death.
She watches as those that comforted him when she could not return from their non-existence.
She sees his devastation at the sight of the girl who saved him so many times choosing to do so again and again, because no one else - not even her - can.
(She knows he thinks it is a failure on his part. (He always does, after all.) He tries so hard to protect everyone, even those who can protect themselves. He always forgets that it begins with a choice. Because each and every person - all those bright and shining companions - that step onto his TARDIS are there because they choose to be. Because they want to be.
Free will, the one thing he can never protect humans from.)
She speaks to him. And when he hears her and speaks back, she is surprised, even though she shouldn’t be. Surprises are, after all, half the reason she loves him.
She is unravelling at the edges, but she clings on frantically, effortlessly, and gives him the one thing he can never find himself.
The instant before she vanishes, she speaks another secret to the air for him to chase. She watches as he catches her words, and immediately begins to puzzle over them and figure her out once more. Really, she thinks, he must find out soon, there is no more mystery. There is no secret she could ever hide from him no matter how hard she tries.
But mostly, she gives hope. For her madman, for his impossible girl, for herself - if only she believes enough.
And for a time, it will be Theirs.