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“So,” the Doctor says, sweeping into the TARDIS, flipping switches that do nothing at the console as he spins. He probably does that just for something to do. “Where to next?”
“So,” she replies, following him around and un-flipping each of the switches, because two can play at that game. “We're not going to talk about the fact that you married the Queen of England in 1562?”
He stops abruptly and turns to her, so she just barely avoids a collision.
“No,” he answers.
“Or the fact that you've got, in fact, two wives you never mention?”
He mumbles something and prods at one of the screens without meeting her eye.
“What was that?”
“I said, at least two. And potentially one or more husbands, depending on your interpretation of various interplanetary laws and religious doctrines.”
She files that information away to consider at a later date and switches tacks.
"What about the fact that Gallifrey might still be out there somewhere?"
He narrows his eyes at her. “How do you figure?”
“Well, the painting, right? It's supposed to be called Gallifrey Falls or No More, but I was thinking, what if it's actually called Gallifrey Falls No More?”
The look he gives her is penetrating and impenetrable, she can't even begin to guess what he's thinking. The notion doesn't seem to have surprised him, so perhaps it had occurred to him already. Or maybe she's being silly and idealistic, but the whole plan had sort of been her idea, so she wanted to believe in this hope. Clara Oswald saves the day.
The Doctor cracks a grin, and she is startled to see the wall behind his eyes has cracked, too, and looking at him she can see a difference, a lightness that she has never noticed before. She thinks back to the youth in the War Doctor's craggy face, which she had only been able to name in the context of her own ancient Doctor. In the day's events he has become something else, and she doesn't know quite what.
"Clara," he says, "have I ever told you you're quite clever?"
"Well, you could stand to mention it more often."
"We said cocktails, didn't we?"
"On the moon. And we're not going to talk about the fact that your predecessor hit on me not a quarter-hour past?"
"There's no accounting for taste," he replies with a smirk.
He teases, she thinks, for two reasons. One is because he knows it bothers her, probably the TARDIS let on how big she thinks Clara’s ego is. The other, she isn't sure of yet, but she suspects.
"I suppose not. He did also kiss a Zygon earlier."
"My point exactly." He presses a few buttons on the console, and the engine starts up. Clara tries to watch what he’s doing, but so far she hasn’t been able to discern any pattern to what he presses in order to fly the TARDIS. She’ll figure it out. Someday.
There’s a sort of shuddering noise, not at all like it usually sounds.
“Clara,” the Doctor says, “how married were you to the whole ‘moon’ concept?”
“What’s happened?”
“I think she’s tired.”
“Tired? The TARDIS?”
“We did some rather far-fetched things to the fabric of time and space today. It’s only natural.”
“I don’t suppose those UNIT guys would mind giving me a lift back to my flat?”
“Or, I mean, we could still do cocktails. We could just, you know, stay in tonight. Today?” He checks one of the screens. “Tonight. It’s still Wednesday night, only about 7 p.m., not to worry.”
“Stay in… here? In the TARDIS?”
“Yes, exactly. Drinks, maybe a film, we’ve got loads of those. I think. Somewhere.”
Clara doesn’t want to just leave, but somehow this is feeling less like drinks with a friend and more like a… date.
He’s taken her to some of the most beautiful places in the universe, but he’s also an unknowably ancient alien who flirts ridiculously one moment and then seems to forget she’s a girl in the next, so she tries not to read too much into it. But in among the alien invasions and the world-saving, there was all this business of kissing and marriage that has her wondering if he really is just a bloke after all.
The Doctor continues, “It’ll be like a, what do you call it?”
He seems quite eager, but she doesn’t know what word he’s looking for. Don’t say date, she tells herself.
“A sleepover! That’s the one. What do you say?”
“Sure,” she says, because she’s Clara Oswald, and she doesn’t back down.
“Excellent! What shall we watch?” He fiddles with one of the screens on the console until it shows a list of films including such choice titles as The Mummy Dinosaurs, Spider-Man 11, and The Chronicles of Feet. “The TARDIS has all the classics, and there’s a screening room with a popcorn machine, somewhere, if I can just figure out where—no? What do you mean, no?”
The screen is now displaying an angry red Gallifreyan error message, unchanging as the Doctor hammers on different buttons and keys. “I’m sure I didn’t, I don’t even have a cat. That I’m aware of.” To Clara, “It’s possible I have a cat. We may need to go looking for it later. Also, no screening room.”
He pushes the screen away, irritated. “Sleepover. Sleep… over.” He holds his hand out, palm up, level with his face, and flips it over and back again. He seems to have forgotten that Clara is standing there.
“Doctor, are you… alright?”
He drops his hand to his side abruptly. “No matter! We still have cocktails. To the drinks robot!” He turns on his heel and takes the stairs two at a time.
“The what?” She follows him out the door, barely keeping sight of him through the twisting corridors. She still doesn’t much care for the maze of the TARDIS, even when the ship isn’t actively trying to kill her.
He slides to a stop (and she nearly crashes into him again) and presses a switch to open a hatch, revealing… a storage cupboard.
“Is that a Roomba?”
“It’s an MD-1104 Model bomber drone from Sierli IX, repurposed.”
“Did you just say bomber drone?”
“I said repurposed. Watch, here it comes.”
The robot unfolds, not unlike a Transformer, to about knee-height. Clara steps back a couple inches.
“Clara,” the Doctor says sternly, “it doesn’t bite. I wired it into the food-and-drink system, and reprogrammed the voice commands. Order anything you like.”
“Well, then… I’ll have a mai tai?” She eyes the machine uncertainly as it starts to whir. The Doctor claps his hands together excitedly and bounces on the balls of his feet. After a moment or two, the robot chimes and a shiny metal claw-arm emerges, holding a glass with a little umbrella in it and everything. Clara reaches for the glass.
The drink goes flying, and hits the opposite wall with a crash. The Doctor pulls Clara back from the flying shards of glass, but they both get spattered with orange goo.
“I don’t think it likes Earth cocktails,” the Doctor says, extricating himself from her personal space.
“Your ‘drinks robot’ just tried to murder me with a mai tai.”
“You’ve got a little—” He gestures to her face, and then to the rest of her.
“I’m aware. Maybe I should just go—”
“Pajamas!” he exclaims, smacking his forehead. “Of course, how are we to have a sleepover if we’re not even dressed for it. Come on, wardrobe, now!”
“Doctor—!”
But he’s off again, so she follows, casting one last suspicious glance at the killer bartender-bot.
She really is starting to think that this whole night was a bad idea, and the wardrobe is just the icing on the cake. She used to like the impressive selection of clothes from all sorts of times and places, but ever since Trenzalore it has come with extra baggage for her. As she steps inside she tries to keep her eyes off the racks and shelves strewn with outfits she recalls from lives she never lived, dredging up names and faces of people she never met.
“Doctor?” she calls, and is startled when his head pops out from around a corner—head, and extremely naked torso. She turns her head instead to see a scorched powder-blue jumpsuit that she’s pretty sure somebody died in. “This place is a mess.”
“Yes, somebody keeps moving things about when I’m not looking. Is it you?”
“It most definitely isn’t.”
“Hm. Well, go on, get out of those clothes.”
Does he even, she wonders, think about the words that come out of his mouth? She finds a bin labeled CLARA (in her own hand, though she doesn’t remember writing it) and selects a plain black vest top and drawstring trousers. Decidedly un-sexy, which is the goal, not that he’s likely to notice one way or the other.
She goes back to find him, thankfully, dressed, but in bright purple, with red and yellow question marks all over.
“You look ridiculous,” she tells him, because he does. “Those don’t even fit you.”
“I might have been a slightly different shape when I last wore these.” He flexes his fingers in the vicinity of where his bow-tie would usually sit. “Anyway, what about you, you call those pajamas?”
“Yes, these are my pajamas. This is what I sleep in.”
“You’ve not got any sleeves. What if your shoulders get cold?” He reaches toward her, then draws back, and the motion causes his shirt to slide sideways, revealing one pasty white shoulder.
“Then I suppose they’ll get cold,” Clara replies, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, never mind that. What do we do now? We’ve got no screening room and no cocktails.”
“You’re asking me? This whole scheme was your idea.”
“Yes, but you’re, you know, human. What do humans usually do at these sorts of things?”
“At sleepovers?”
“Yes, yes, at sleepovers.”
Clara hasn’t had a sleepover in years, not this kind, anyway. She thinks of when she was in school, gossiping with friends into the early hours of the morning. Or Angie, playing truth-or-dare at her birthday party and waking Clara in the middle of the night on a dare.
“Games?” Clara suggests, and turns to go back out into the hallway. The memories in the wardrobe are making her head fuzzy.
“Games! What sort of games? We’ve got cards, Trivial Pursuit Moon Edition, checkers, chess, no, not chess, I hate chess, billiards, I think there’s a cricket green lying around somewhere, or there’s always knife karaoke…”
He goes on to list several more games she's never heard of as the door closes behind them, shutting out the echoes from Clara’s mind. She’s still stuck with her own memories, though. Talk of games and sleepovers reminds her of daring Lucy Newton to kiss her when they were in college. Not helpful, she thinks to herself. Not. Helpful!
“Clara,” the Doctor says abruptly, “what sort of games are you supposed to play at a sleepover? I’m fairly certain it’s not cricket.”
“Spin the bottle,” she says, without thinking much beyond don’t say kissing. Honestly, it’s not much of an improvement.
He blinks at her. “How do you play that one? Do we need a bottle? I’m sure the drinks robot has at least one intact.”
She thinks, he is so full of it right now, twelve hundred years old and he doesn’t know what spin-the-bottle is, but she tells him, uncomfortably.
He steps back from her. “That,” he says, his face scrunched up like that time someone offered him beans, “is what humans do at sleepovers?”
“No need to be quite so disgusted. I wasn’t suggesting it.”
He opens his mouth, closes it again, then says, “It’s not you, personally, that I was object to, just—”
“So it’s really not a snog box, then,” she comments, mostly to herself, but also a little bit to change the subject, so he doesn’t have to dig himself any deeper into this particular hole. It’s not that she wanted to kiss him, probably, maybe, possibly, but she’s allowed to be offended, right?
“I mean, hypothetically, snogging has, in fact, occurred. In the box. But that’s not. What it’s for.”
He crosses his arms over his chest and looks anywhere but at Clara.
Maybe he doesn’t want help digging himself out, she thinks.
“I suppose you snogged River in here, then.” It’s probably a slightly unforgivable thing to say, and he looks so deeply uncomfortable with this entire conversation, and she really shouldn’t care who he’s kissed or where or when, but she’s tired of turning over rocks to find his exes and tired of catching him looking at her and not knowing what it means because he’s from another planet and also her best friend and she does, in fact, know a thing or two about having inconvenient feelings for one’s own best friend.
“Humans,” he says. “Don’t you ever think about anything else?”
“Sorry, which one of us has been married multiple times?”
“And which one of us devises games that require you to kiss random people?”
“Okay, first of all, I didn’t devise it. Second, I wasn’t even suggesting it. Third, you can’t play spin-the-bottle with just two people. And finally, I am not ‘random people’!”
“Well, of course you’re not, you’re Clara!”
At some point they both started shouting, and she doesn’t exactly remember when, and his face is inches from hers and only that far away because he has several inches on her height. Decidedly un-sexy, really she’s just angry. She turns away before she says another awful thing.
“I may,” he says, “have forgotten what point I was trying to make.”
“No kissing?” Clara suggests. “Because I got that one, loud and clear.”
“No.” She glances over her shoulder and he’s backed away again, leaning against the wall of the corridor. All the tension has gone out of him; he clasps his hands in front of him and stares at his feet, which are of course shod in fuzzy pink slippers that clash horribly with his pajamas. “I don’t think that was it.”
Clara steps towards him and echoes his posture, just not too close. This space between them feels terribly necessary, though in the normal way of things, they’re always in each other’s space—high fives, hugs, his arm around his shoulders or his hand in hers as he shouts at her to run. A kiss on his cheek, she thought nothing of it, out there in the world. Why don’t we stay in tonight! She doesn’t have the slightest idea how to do that.
So she stands three feet away from him and keeps her voice light as she says, “Well, never mind. This is as good a sleepover tradition as any.”
“What is?”
“Having a shouting match with my best friend?”
“Oh. Yes. Very good.”
“Should I go?”
“No,” he says. He casts a quick glance in her direction, but she catches his gaze and holds it.
“Doctor, why did you ask me to stay tonight?”
Asking the Doctor a direct question is tricky because he’s got such a knack for slithering out if you try to pin him down. He has all these tricks for answering questions without really properly answering them, and you’re better off just waiting and letting the truth work itself out.
But they’re doing tonight together at normal speed in the correct order, so it seems prudent to ask why.
“Perhaps I just wanted to spend some time with—with my friend.”
He’s lying again. She could point out to him that they don’t spend time, they borrow it, they tear through it, they jump in and out of it and swim around in it. She could observe that he’s her closest friend yet she still knows so little about him, or she could comment that once again his shirt has fallen off his shoulder.
Or she could leave. She’s never spent the night on the ship (for given definitions of ‘night’); the prospect has always kind of frightened her, for reasons unrelated to kissing, reasons that have more to do with not wanting to get burned alive by the Eye of Harmony. But that’s pretty unlikely, right? …Right?
She holds out her hand. She doesn’t look over, just waits. When she feels his palm press against hers, she stands up straight and tugs him away from the wall. “Come on, Doctor. It’s time for our sleepover.”
In her room, which she only ever uses to nap in after particularly long adventures, the Doctor eyes the bed warily.
“Go on, sit,” she says. “It doesn’t bite.”
He sits gingerly on the edge of the bed.
“No, all the way on.” She shoos him forward and climbs up next to him, sitting with her legs crossed.
“Oh!” He kicks off his slippers and copies her pose. “I see, this is a sleepover thing, we’re ‘hanging out.’”
She grabs his wrists mid-air-quote. “Doctor. Tell me what’s going on.”
“‘Gallifrey Falls No More.’”
“The painting? …Or just, the general concept?”
He opens his hands in acknowledgment. Clara realizes she’s still holding his wrists, and lets go.
“But Gallifrey still being out there somewhere, that’s good, right? We could go and find it.”
“Clara, my people… they have done some not-very-nice things. They even tried to end the Time War themselves, nearly at the cost of the entire universe.”
“I know,” she says. “I think.”
Since their visit to Trenzalore she has done her best to do as he asked, to not think about all the moments of his life that she witnessed, stepped into, interfered with, saved. Even the idea of it is overwhelming; Clara Oswald is a shattered mirror with a piece of the Doctor’s life crystallized in each shard. One piece is the day the Time Lords almost came back. Broken friendships and the sound of drums. She can’t follow her mind down that path, she mustn’t.
“I suppose you do,” he says. “I keep forgetting.”
“So do I. I don’t you dare tell me it’s for the best,” she adds sharply. “I hate not knowing what I know. Wandering around in my own head like it’s a maze.”
“It could be worse.”
“Thank you, that is a truly unhelpful thing to say.”
“It could, though. I mean, your head hasn’t exploded. Or melted. That’s a good thing.”
“You keep saying that, Doctor. Is it likely?”
“Likely? I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know if anything like you has ever existed before. I’ve heard of beings getting split across time and having a sort of psychic link with the other pieces, but you’re not a piece. You’re the original. I think.”
“You think.”
“I mean, I’m sure! You’re clearly the original. Obviously. But you’re also all the pieces, somehow. You lived what they lived, saw what they saw.”
“Died like they died.”
“Oh, do lighten up!” says the man who was just talking about the possibility of Clara’s brain exploding.
“You buried me,” she says. “Twice. I’ve seen the grave.”
“Well, if you want to get technical about it, there wasn’t a body the first time…”
“Twice! And did you know one of your, your exes went and wrote a book about it!”
“One of my what?”
“Amelia Williams. The writer? Don’t go claiming you didn’t know her.”
He doesn’t tell her that, to his credit, but he does change the subject. “The grave. You said that before, when?”
“The one from the 1800s—”
“But when did you see it?”
“After the cybermen. I… went looking.”
“And you got back in the TARDIS. After seeing a hundred-year-old grave with your name on it.”
“Well, I had to.”
“You really didn’t.”
“You would have died if I hadn’t been there. Not just you, but entire planets and solar systems, all the good you’ve done and the people you’ve helped. Vastra and Jenny and Strax. And me. Professor Song, even,” she adds, as if referring to her in this context might undo her angry words from earlier.
“And why should that be your responsibility?”
“Why not me?” He said those very words to her a few weeks ago, when she was angry and terrified and thinking it was all over and done forever, and he was the one who convinced her that it wasn’t, so he doesn’t get to turn around and tell her otherwise.
He narrows his eyes. “We’re arguing again.”
“Yes.”
“What about?”
“Not to get overly analytical, but I think this might still be about spin-the-bottle somehow.”
“Funny, I thought maybe it was about me not wanting you to go about dying on my behalf.”
“To-may-to, to-mah-to.” She drops herself back against the pillows with a sigh and closes her eyes.
“Hm.”
She looks up to see him craning his neck to peer at her. “What?”
“Nothing.” He sits back. “You’ll just yell at me again.”
“What, Doctor.”
“Just, you know, humans, sex, mortality. Further generalizations which you are really impressively living up to.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
He manages it for about fifty seconds. “No movie night, no drinks, no kissing games, and I sincerely hope no more fighting. I’m afraid, Clara, we’ve rather made a hash of our sleepover.”
“Is it too early to just go to sleep?”
“Define early.”
“Do you even sleep?”
“Do I—everybody sleeps, Clara.”
“It’s just, I’ve never seen you sleep.”
“Well, you won’t see it tonight either, since you will, presumably, also be asleep.”
Clara pushes herself up on her elbows. “You changed the subject. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
“Did I?”
“Gallifrey. You think we made a mistake today?”
“Just because it was the right thing to do doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences.”
His expression is far away, and at the word consequences Clara’s head is full of possibilities, things the Time Lords have done to the Doctor and to others throughout the history of the universe.
“Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. Together.”
That brings him back to here and now, and for a moment she thinks he might scold her for being reckless again. Somewhere out there is a grave for her, in the future or the past or on a distant planet, and it’s a relief to know it’s not the cobwebby one in the field behind Artie and Angie’s school, but death is out there waiting for her and while she’s in no hurry to meet it, she doesn’t intend to hide from it either.
Then he’s hugging her, and she’s not thinking about death anymore.
The position is awkward and alarmingly horizontal, but it feels nice to rest her head against his chest, listening to the one-two-three-four of his hearts.
“Your shoulders are freezing,” he tells her, drawing back to level her pajamas another disapproving glare.
“Well,” she says, “you’d better keep me warm, then.”
He gapes at her, scandalized, then thoughtful, then annoyed.
“If you like,” she adds.
“The cheek.” He half-stands, half-falls from the bed and pulls the covers loose. “Bedtime. Sleep. Now.”
She gets under the blankets agreeably enough, then watches, bemused, as he climbs in beside her and lies perfectly parallel, not touching her. He tentatively extends his arm to rest around her shoulders. His cool fingers brush against her skin. The Doctor continues to trample all over the lines between friend and boyfriend, although maybe those lines have never been as clear-cut as Clara would like. Boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers to kiss, friends to take to bed.
“Are you sure I can’t kiss you?” She looks over, and his lips are right there. “I’d kind of really like to.”
He rolls his eyes, leans forward and gently kisses her forehead. “Go to sleep, Clara Oswald.”
She wakes up sprawled across the bed, hair in her face and drool on the pillow, blinking away dreams of running through shadowy corridors.
She wakes up alone.
She finds him back in the console room, fiddling with the engine.
“Ha! Perfect timing, sleepyhead.” He opens a compartment underneath the control panel, and produces a cup of tea, piping hot.
“How long have you been up? Scratch that, how long have I been asleep?”
“Does it matter? The TARDIS is working again, happy to deposit you anytime, anyplace you’d like to go.”
He watches her drink, smiling expectantly like he does when he really, really wants something. Wants her to say something, compliment him, tell him how clever he is or something.
She’s not sure what her line is.
“About last night—” That must not be it, because he grimaces a little, but she presses on. “Are you OK?”
“Me? I’m fine. Wonderful. Splendid, actually.”
“Sure, I totally believe that. Just, Gallifrey…”
“Is out there somewhere. Isn’t that exciting! But you know what else is out there? Everything. Stars and planets and space whales and children singing and a galaxy named Alison—my fault, that one—and wars and custard and people I’ve married by accident and, I don’t know, flying giraffes? Possibly. I haven’t found any yet, but I’m looking. Gallifrey can wait. Where shall we start?”
“I should start by going to work.”
“Work can wait—”
“And next week, you can take me to future Mars like you said yesterday, or whenever that was. Deal?”
He’s pouting a little as she hands back her empty teacup, but he says, “Deal.”
She has him drop her off on her block, an hour before she needs to be at the school. She’s just outside the door when he calls to her.
“Yeah?”
He leans out of the open door. “About the… kissing.”
Couldn’t we have had this conversation inside? “Right. I know I gave you a hard time about it last night, you were uncomfortable, I’m sorry. I was in a weird place. Won’t happen again.” She gives a little salute, then feels ridiculous and stuffs her hands into her pockets.
“Well, if that’s how you feel…”
“Sorry, what?”
“I was just going to say, you should ask me again sometime.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I might say yes. Until next week, Clara!” The door shuts in her face.
“That’s my line,” she calls after him as the TARDIS fades from view.