Chapter Text
He was born in a back garden and loved the first girl he saw for a hundred—or was it a thousand? years. He had died running, apologizing, saying a thousand goodbyes, and this new life grew from that ground. Running from what? Wrong question. To where? Nope, try again. For whom…? Losing and hoping and searching and searching and finding, now, the puzzle of all puzzles, a mystery tricky enough to catch his eye, get its hooks in him, pull his ship into its churning waters to drown in her, Clara, Clara, Clara.
She looks at home in the flickering light of the console room, curious and suitably impressed.
“You know,” he says, “the thing about a time machine, you can run away all you like and still be home in time for tea.”
He doesn’t want cozy, he doesn’t want tea and domestic and fish fingers. All that is fine for people living their lives one minute at a time, slowly, in the right order. But he has the power, the opportunity, the duty to take the shortcut to the new and the unknown and the never-before-seen.
And here she is, who’s ever heard of such a girl, young lady, woman, being who died twice yet lives and breathes right here in front of him, a human in a blue jumper. Reincarnation is his thing, who does she think she is? Clara, Clara, Clara.
And he managed it this time, saving her, and in the sight of her breathing anew there is the weightless tragedy of a clever governess falling to her death, the creeping despair of a brilliant engineer realizing she has been turned into a monster. He won’t lose this one, he promises himself. A waste of a perfectly good mind, for one thing, and who knows how long he would have to wait for another one? Monasteries, he has decided, are not cool.
He has so many questions for her. He starts with the first one, the least important of them, or is it the most?
All of time and space, he offers her, fake casual, real smile. Well, mostly real.
Ask me again, she answers, and walks out the door to take the long way to tomorrow.
When did he last want so badly for one of them to say yes? It’s bad business, wanting, and he tries to avoid it as much as possible. But he wants her to say yes. He wants to understand. He wants—
Well, she didn’t say no.