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“Santa was mine, I suppose.” Clara’s curled up on an armchair, wrapped up in blankets, cradling a cup of tea.
“Not necessarily,” the Doctor says. In his own armchair, fewer blankets, holding a glass of apple juice.
Above them, all of time and space, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Nebulae, dust swarming. The inexorable expansion of everything, the pulling-apart.
“But you don’t. I mean, I’m not self-centered enough to think the rest of the universe follows the same religion as me. I can’t imagine you celebrate Christmas. So why would you dream about Santa Claus?”
He looks up from his hands, tracing lines in the condensation of his glass. She’s staring back at him very earnestly.
“It’s-” he starts, then stops immediately. He’d been about to give her a patented Doctor non-answer. Pretty words, no soul to them. She deserves better, especially tonight. The day they’d had.
Above them, the spiral arm of a galaxy. Death and rebirth, the grand beauty and all those local sorrows.
He tries again. “When I was a young man, I was exiled on Earth, in England. UNIT, I’ve told you this story, yes?”
She nods, burrowing deeper into her pile of blankets.
“The first year, the department held a holiday party. The military was a bit homogenous in that era, so it was all Christmas carols and decorations and people taking their children to pantos. It was so alien, all these strange traditions. But they invited me to the party, and they…I made lights, for the tree. Little blinking things, different colors. It was-” He closes his eyes, searching for the right word. On the tip of his tongue, just out of reach. He gives up, opens his eyes, but does not look at her. “It was nice.”
It’s horribly trite and ineffectual, and it doesn’t even answer her question, does it? But when he finally manages to make himself meet her eyes, she’s smiling that painful happy/sad/??? smile. The one that always does him in.
“Yeah,” she says. “I bet it was.”
The paintings in the Black Archive are not paintings. He makes the mistake of mentioning this to Clara. It’s Kate Stewart’s fault, she never should have brought it up. Even if there’s a Venusian art-thief to be apprehended.
“So what, then?” Clara asks. “Because they look like paintings.”
Prisons, possibly. Walls surrounding. A moment in time, held carefully away. But there was a word for that, there had been a name, a noun. He would offer it to her, like he’s offered so much else. He would, he would.
“They’re, uh.” He snaps his fingers. The word, the word, what’s the word. He rifles through his brain. Mnemonics, memory tricks, associations, the keys to unlock compressed pieces of his past. It has to be here somewhere. It can’t just be gone.
He’s taking too long. She’s getting impatient. “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”
“I promise you, I would if I could. I can’t.” His hands curl up into fists by his side, almost involuntarily.
“Let me guess. It’s a terrible secret that would shatter my puny human mind if I heard it.” She’s angry. No, worse: she’s disappointed.
Time was, he’d have let her keep her disappointment in him, her resentment. It would have been safer than the alternative. But now, she’s already wormed her way into his hearts. She’s seen him at his most vulnerable - he’s been his most vulnerable for her. What’s one more admission of weakness?
“I can’t remember,” he says quietly. He shrugs, and smiles crookedly. It’s funny, ha ha ha, the brilliant Doctor forgetting something so simple.
But she doesn’t laugh. Her face falls, her lower lip trembles, there’s a blur and then she’s clinging to him like a limpet. “I’m sorry,” she’s saying. “I didn’t realize. It’s okay. I don’t need to know, please don’t worry about it, it’s okay.”
It’s not okay, but that’s a nice thought, isn’t it?
They’re locked up together, some two-bit cell on a two-bit planet. They’ve got an escape plan, but it involves a lot of waiting. They’re killing time. Playing card games, an old battered deck unearthed from the lower strata of his coat pockets.
But that’s not enough, no, Clara needs to talk. Humans and their endless, needless discussions about nothing important.
“You called yourself a Gallifreyan back there. To the guard.”
“Yes, sometimes I do tell the truth.” He slaps a Queen on her Jack and slides both cards into his pile.
“Ha ha. But. ‘Gallifreyan’, not ‘Time Lord’. Any reason for that?”
The quick answer is no, no reason. He’s a 2,000 year old time traveler and saver-of-worlds, he’s earned the right to be arbitrary about his choice of identifying words. Gallifreyan, so what, your turn, put a card down.
The pause is dragging on. She lays down a Nine of Hearts. He fiddles with his Three of Spades. “The longer I spend away, the less time I have for the politics of a dead culture. Besides, you keep telling me I need to be less egotistical.” He puts his card on top of hers.
She sweeps the cards away. “Don’t suppose you’ll tell me what that means.”
He shrugs. “All Time Lords were Gallifreyan, not all Gallifreyans were Time Lords. It was what it was. If I have to pick one now, I’ll go for the all-encompassing option. The idea that we were better, we were more important, all that’s nonsense. It’s a lot easier to see that so far from home. No sense in keeping the faith, not now. Hah, Ace, beat that.” He slaps his card on the table, grinning triumphantly.
She sighs, and tosses a Five of Clubs down with melodramatic mock-defeat.
“If we find Gallifrey, what happens to me?” Clara’s voice is even but her body is tense, held just far enough away from him for the distance to be deliberate.
Funny how your perspective changes. Time was, just holding her hand was almost too much. An intimacy like this would have been unthinkable. Now, lying together in the bed they’ve been sharing, the inches between them might as well be miles.
He could reach out for her, distract her. She’s willing to be distracted, usually, even if there’s a bittersweet resignation about her afterwards. He doesn’t reach out. He wraps his arms around his chest, fixes his gaze on her earlobe. The faint indentation from earrings; beauty rituals, scarification rituals.
“Whatever you want to happen, I suppose.” It’s the wrong answer, he knows it as soon as he says it.
She sighs, and turns away. Her back to him now. He could reach out to her. He waits until her breathing evens. Humans and their endless need for sleep.
“If it’s any consolation, I don’t know what happens to me, either,” he whispers, then carefully gets out of bed. He watches her for a while, then tip-toes out of the room, closing the door gently behind him.
“I’m teaching Beowulf to the sixth-forms,” Clara says.
The Doctor brightens. This, he knows. “I like it when he fights the dragon. Ripping stuff. Did you want to go meet Beowulf? Not sure if he’s real, but I’m sure we can come up with something.”
“I’m teaching Beowulf,” she says again, studiedly ignoring him. “Two translations at once, Heaney and Klaeber. It’s hard to get at something when you don’t speak the language, I think. Relying on a single translation, it’s easy to assume that its interpretations are fact, you know? Two versions, it’s not perfect, but at least it’ll help instill a sort of wariness in them. About the, the biases, the cultural influences.” That tone of voice, the one that means she’s saying something without actually coming out and saying it.
“Heaney’s better,” he proclaims. Fact. “Not to say he’s more accurate. But closer to the spirit of the thing. The original Old English is best, of course, though I suppose you can’t expect your idiot miniature humans to be multilingual.”
Again ignoring the insult. She’s gotten good at that, hasn’t she. Deflecting him when he’s like this. “And that’s the interesting thing, isn’t it? Sometimes literal isn’t best. Sometimes, getting across the…the feel of something, that’s more important than being faithful to every word.”
She’s getting closer to him, now. That tone of voice, the look on her face. She steps close and squares her shoulders. Clara Oswald as a form of potential energy, coiled and ready to unleash. He tries not to be afraid.
“So what are you?” she asks. “What does the TARDIS translation do to you? What I hear, what you - how much of this is us, and how much is a construct? When I say that I love you. What do you hear?”
There it is. The crux of it. They could have saved so much time if she had led with that, instead of running circles around it. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have been able to prepare the answer. Not that he has much of an answer anyway, but he’s close enough. He opens his mouth, closes it again. Considers.
“It depends,” he hedges.
“Uh-huh.”
“How you say it, the context.”
“Doctor.”
He’s floundering. He tries not to look to the TARDIS for help. Not now, not now. “I understand,” he says.
She closes the gap, physically at least. Leaning against him, arms loose around his waist. “You said it yourself, the original’s always best. I wanna hear it in your language.”
“So do I,” he whispers. An unaccountable tightness in his chest, a thickness in his throat. He gestures at his head. “It’s been a while, turn the translator off and you’re likely to get gibberish. I stopped speaking proper Gallifreyan even before I ran out of people who would know how to respond. Now, I. Well.” He means for it to be humourous, something approximating a joke. Ha ha ha, the brilliant Doctor can’t even string a coherent sentence together.
It doesn’t work. Her sharp intake of breath, how compact she seems to get. The tentative hands on the small of his back. Offering comfort, maybe. Expressing inadequacies. An apology pressed into his lips; a resignation, a hope. Maybe none of the above. She stands on tip-toes and pulls his head down, and kisses him like the answer to a question.
“[____],” the Doctor says.
Clara looks up from her crossword puzzle, brows furrowed. “Sorry?”
“[____],” he says again. “I remembered that this morning while you were burning waffles.”
She puts her pen down, graciously brushing aside the burnt-breakfast comment. “What’s it mean?”
“Different things in different contexts.” He holds up a hand, fending off her inevitable retort. “It was a ceremony. A…” He pauses, works his jaw, playing for time. The translation matrix is off, surely she can tell. How unwieldy the words are in his mouth. English, that mongrel tongue. “A commitment,” he finishes.
“Commitment,” she echoes.
“Between two people, who, uh.” He grimaces, gestures between them. “Uh, wanted - I’m turning the translator back on now.”
He moves to the console, already planning the key combinations and dial turns in his head, but she stops him. A hand on his, and he stills.
“We’re committed,” she says. Inquisitive, half a statement.
“If you’d like.” He stares down at their hands, her nail polish, her thumb tucking itself around his palm.
“I would, yeah. I do.” Her fingers threading through his. “Just to clarify. You did just propose marriage to me, right?”
“Don’t push it, Oswald.” He turns his hand over slowly, palm on hers. Her warmth, her pulse. All the things he no longer remembers how to say.
They stand there like that for a while, quiet in the glow of the time rotor.