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The trick is, don’t fall in love.
It’s a habit she develops, a practiced, common, every day little ritual, like telling the time or counting out change or brewing her tea.
Don’t fall in love.
Clara does that trick quite a lot. Sometimes two or three times a day.
Because the thing is, he’s got eyes full of secrets and a smile filled with starlight and just a fraction of his mind could set the world on fire. He’s got every story ever told and every star that’s ever shone all wrapped up tight within his soul, and sometimes, when he laces his fingers through hers or pulls her close against his chest, she thinks that this, this is what it’d be like to be held by the universe, and she wonders what it would feel like to be kissed by the universe too.
Clara has a memory of kissing him in Victorian London. The memory is brief, faint and indistinct, like a single firecracker flickering in the dark, but she doesn’t remember him kissing her back.
She wonders if he would now.
Or, she would be wondering, if she wasn’t employing her handy little trick. The not-falling-in-love-trick, the getting-harder-by-the-hour trick.
The trick that’s mostly just her lying to herself, because Clara Oswald, amongst other things, is a very brilliant, talented liar.
Who’s apparently also good at being contradictory.
Because it’s currently three o’clock in the morning and she can’t sleep a wink. She’s in her brand new flat that’s filled with bubble wrap and unpacked boxes (most of them books) and, truth be told, she hasn’t been on her own in a very long time. She’s used to the soft sound of Artie’s fish tank bubbling or of the sputter of the Maitland house‘s midnight front lawn sprinklers. And after recovering in the TARDIS after Trenzalore, she’s used to its metallic whir and the sound of the sonic buzzing somewhere down the hall, with the knowledge that the Doctor was somewhere, tinkering away amongst the cogs and clockwork, goggles on and hair askew.
Which is why she finds herself getting up and getting dressed and dialing an oh-so-familiar number on her phone. That’s the thing about having a best friend that’s a sleepless, ageless time traveler: You never have to worry about calling them in the middle of the night.
(And Clara’s a smart girl, smart enough to know that, technically, she should be worried about calling him in the middle of the night when she’s lonely and listless and would rather be time traveling instead of sleeping because that’s not exactly good for her whole not-falling-in-love thing she’s got going on. But whatever. She’s in the mood for adventure. And she can handle it, she tells herself. She’s the boss, after all.)
He picks up on the eleventh ring.
“You busy?” she asks.
“No,” he answers. “But would you like to be?”
#
He manages to pick up the phone by the eleventh ring.
“You busy?” Clara asks on the other end of the line.
And here’s the thing, he’s currently just slipped back into the TARDIS after dealing with a very angry Slitheen, an even angrier Leonardo da Vinci, and the world’s first flying machine in sixteenth century Italy. But, but, but, this is Clara calling and Clara has a funny habit of twisting his two hearts and making him want to do anything at all just to catch a sliver of her clever smile.
He’s a bit of an idiot about her.
“No,” the Doctor says, as he wipes unidentified space goop and wet paint and a stray grape off his tweed. “But would you like to be?”
“Very much so,” she says. “Got anywhere amazing to go?”
“Clara, please, it’s me. I’ve always got somewhere amazing to go.”
“I wasn’t overly impressed with eighteen-ninety-three Yorkshire,” Clara replies, apparently remembering that time they investigated the Crimson Horror.
“That’s just because they tried to kill you there,” he mutters absently, trying to rub off a new scorch mark on the back of his boot. Blimey, even half-blind Slitheen could aim.
“Doctor,” Clara says, and he can tell she’s rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. “They’ve tried to kill me in at least half the places we’ve gone.”
“Fair point.”
“Wasn’t all bad in Yorkshire, though,” she muses, and then, in a mischievous tone he likes but can’t quite trust, she adds, “Thought you had quite a nice time being married to me, Mr. Smith. Had your arm draped around me the entire time.”
His hands - terrible, traitorous things that they are - lose their grip on the phone at that observation, the receiver slipping out of his fingers. He has to fumble around for a second before he can finally get it back up to his ear, and when he does, he can hear her laughing.
Clara Oswald, he decides, will be the death of him.
(He can see it now: She’ll say something insinuative while staring up at him with her big, brown, deceptively innocent eyes and he’ll trip over his own boot laces. And wham. Regeneration.)
That terrible, horrible, funny and pretty Clara Oswald.
Who, by the way, is still laughing at him on the other end of the line.
“Shut up,” he tells her very eloquently. “I could go to the someplace amazing without you, you know.”
“You could, but you wouldn't have any fun.”
He hums, “True, that. Now stand out of the way, Miss Oswald, I’m landing.”
“Please do try to land on the balcony this time,” she reminds him in her I’m-the-Boss tone. “I don’t want any more broken furniture.”
“That was one time.”
“Three times.”
“Two times at the most,” he counters. “But you can’t count an umbrella stand as furniture. It’s just a really fancy bucket for bumbershoots, not a coffee table.”
“Which I no longer have, thanks to someone’s parking skills.”
“Which is why I’m landing the TARDIS on the balcony, I know,” he mutters under his breath a bit peevishly as he pulls on a lever, stretching and curling the phone chord around the console, acting as if he’s somehow surprised he’s showing up on her say-so.
Only he’s not surprised. Not really, not at all. They have a tie between them that belongs to no one else, one that binds them together in an indescribable, undefinable, undying connection. His and Clara’s lives have been aligned, their destinies intertwined, and though he still can’t approve of her jumping into his time-stream, by doing so it guaranteed that wherever the Doctor is, Clara Oswald will be also.
And he finds he quite likes that idea.
#
Clara watches as the TARDIS appears out of nowhere, conjured up out of thin air, and then the Doctor steps out. He smells like the air after a thunderstorm, and there’s an energy that crackles around him, electric and sharp and sparking up the dark.
(And Clara does that trick again. Once, twice, three times in a row.)
He circles, inspecting the placement of the TARDIS, before turning back to her, and she can see the moonlight shimmer over him as he steps out of the shadows, glinting off his grin and his hazel green eyes.
“Parked her perfectly,” he announces with satisfaction. “Have I impressed you yet, Clara Oswald?”
“Nah,” she grins. “You might have a chance to if you tell me where we’re going, though.”
“Ah,” he says pointing a finger at her. “Do you remember that time I said I’d take you for cocktails on the moon?”
(Of course Clara remembers. She remembers how he’d offered her ancient Mesopotamia and drinks on the moon and then held open his arms and she leapt into them. Remembers how he caught her around her waist and spun her around and around, like a princess in a Disney movie, and she’d held onto him as her dress spun out and her hair flew around and they laughed like they knew the world couldn’t get any better than it was in that moment.)
“Never did make it out for that drink,” she says.
They ended up going back to his place instead, which...is not how it sounded. It definitely wasn’t like that.
Clara doesn’t know why her mind phrased it that way.
“Well, today seems like a good day for cashing in rain checks and shenanigans in space and cocktails that can float in midair, so what do you say, Miss Oswald? Care for a trip to the moon?”
He holds his hand out and she takes it without hesitation, smiling as his fingers close around hers and his thumb runs across her hand.
(And she thinks he’s got stardust on his skin, that every time they touch, some rubs off on her.
Or maybe that’s just by being with him.)
“Then what are we waiting for?” she asks, and then he tugs her inside the TARDIS -
And off they go.
#
They’re at the fanciest lounge in lunar history, leaning against an illuminated bar counter lined with glowing moonstone, and he’s just explaining to Clara the science behind the shimmering mint julep and how the anti-gravity margaritas can bob up and down in the air when the alien bartender asks their names.
“The Doctor. Doctor John Smith,” he says, smiling widely before looking down at Clara. “And this...”
He means to give her a quick glance, a conspiring wink, a flash of a smile, but once he looks at her, he can’t look away. She has sharp eyes and a sharper mind and a smile that could liquify the sun, and she currently has her hand in the crook of his arm, fingers curling around him as if to say that he is hers as much as she is his, and it occurs to him that the last time they sat like this, with her arm looped through his, they were in Yorkshire and she was Mrs. Smith.
And the lesson the Doctor learns is: never, ever get distracted when making introductions, or else you might end up thinking about your previous adventures in the Victorian era and then you might say something horribly embarrassing and terribly telling that you’ll regret like:
“...this is Mrs. Smith.”
His eyes go wide once his mind catches up to his mouth and his words register, and as the bartender lets them know the extraterrestrial happy hour special, the Doctor can’t help but wonder what Freud would think of this slip.
(Nice man, Freud. Asked a lot of questions, used a lot of pencils. Had a comfy sofa.)
Then he sees that Clara’s staring at him. And she has on that look, that terribly unfair one where she raises her eyebrows and looks like she’s questioning him, but really she’s just telling him that she already knows the answer and wants to make him squirm and suffer through giving her an explanation.
Luckily, the Doctor’s spent a thousand years facing down countless enemies all across time and space. Surely, he thinks, he can handle five-foot-two Clara Oswald.
(He’s lying to himself.)
“So,” Clara says, once the bartender’s left to refill another patron’s magnetized Mai Tai. “Mrs. Smith? It’s nice to know you still take me out for dates after we’re married.”
He starts to protest, to make up some excuse that sounds completely reasonable and unlike the utterly besotted blighter that he is, but he honestly doesn’t know what to object to first: the fact that Clara called them married or the fact that she called this a date.
And he can’t really think of any good arguments for either of those considering he’s the one who accidentally called her Mrs. Smith and who suggested they go out to a lunar cocktail lounge in the first place.
It’s frustrating, honestly.
“Figured it’d look better if we went by those names here,” he says, making up the sentence as he goes along and hoping it’ll end on something reasonable sounding. “I had a rather flirtatious friend, once, who hung out in these kind of places, and he’d led me to believe that this is where others go to, as I think it’s phrased, ‘pick people up.’”
Ah. There. That sounded logical. Good old Captain Jack and his humany-wumany flirting information and good old Doctor with his ad-libbing.
He glances proudly at Clara to see if she’s sobered up now that she’s received this obviously well-crafted excuse, but instead his stomach does a flip to see that she’s smiling even wider at him now.
“Right. Wouldn’t want some space bloke flirting with me, now would I?” she says, nudging his knee with hers. “Already got you for that.”
He hadn’t been flirting! He didn’t flirt, he...he suddenly recalls several of their past interactions and his habit of always finding an excuse to touch her and the fact that he’s currently touching her now and he nearly groans when he realizes that he really has no ground to stand on.
He’s over a thousand years old. He’s taken down the Daleks. (Repeatedly!) He shouldn’t get so bloody flustered with one girl.
(Oh, but he is, he definitely is.)
#
Clara Oswald is on her second lunar cocktail - one that’s ruby-colored with some sort of sparkling salt around the glass’ rim like ground diamonds - and the little not-falling-in-love trick she’s doing is getting tiresome and tedious, bothersome and boring, and if she’s being honest, she doesn’t think it’s working.
After all, if a trick really works, should you need to repeat it so many times?
It’s certainly not working now.
The Doctor’s telling her about a drink that tastes exactly like a slice of cherry pie and the history behind the first Piña Colada ever made in the sky, and as they sit there, with his head bent down to her, and her leaning forward toward him, awash in the lounge’s moon glow and lost in the sound of his voice, it occurs to her that there isn’t anyplace else in all of time and space that she’d rather be, or anyone else she’d possibly rather be with.
“Good word, swizzle stick,” he’s saying, hands playing with one in the drink in-between them. “Did I ever tell you about the time I accidentally invented the banana daiquiri a couple centuries early?”
“You didn’t,” Clara says, but his words trigger something deep in her memory, in the far back corner of her mind, and she remembers Paris and a pinstripe suit and the Palace of Versailles. “I think I was there, though.”
The Doctor’s hands suddenly still, their usual flurry of motion coming to a halt as the swizzle stick slips through his fingers and falls. He still finds it hard to talk aloud about Trenzalore, she knows. There’s too many emotions there, too much guilt, and sometimes Clara wonders if he has nightmares about it as much as she does.
“Do you remember anything else?” he asks finally, quietly, his gaze not quite meeting her eyes.
She remembers bits and pieces from her other selves. Snatches of sentences and the briefest of glimpses. It’s like she has pieces of different puzzles that don’t go together, and she’ll never see the full picture.
Except for him. His face is always startlingly, brilliantly clear. The focus of the photograph while everything else is blurred.
“I remember snowfall in London,” Clara says. She’s silent for a moment after that, watching as he picks up his cocktail glass, and she thinks it’s just so that he has something to do with his hands. He’d ordered a Screwdriver - simply because he liked the name, she guessed - and he hadn’t touched the drink at all until now.
And then, as he raises the glass to his lips and takes an experimental sip, she can’t help but eye him slyly and add, “I also remember you kissing me.”
He nearly chokes on his drink.
“You kissed me,” he protests.
“You liked it.”
“Who says I liked it?”
Clara’s lips curve up, “You’re smiling.”
And she thinks that maybe it’s about time she give in and officially retire her trick.
#
He hasn’t come to terms with Trenzalore.
He thinks he may never come to terms with Trenzalore.
The memory of it is still fresh in his mind, the wound too new to heal over, and he suspects that even when it does heal, it’ll still leave a scar. The idea that she’s lived and died thousands upon thousands of times (for him) makes his two hearts twist and constrict.
The fact taunts him, haunts him, hangs there in the air between them, and he can’t think about it too much or else he’ll go mad. Mad with grief and mad with guilt and mad with love because how in the world could he possibly not love her? He loved her long before they ever landed on Trenzalore, and it’s only grown since then.
He shakes his head, pulls himself back.
“Is that all you can remember about Victorian London?” he asks.
Clara’s smile grows wider, even slyer, and she takes a sip of her drink, looking up at him over the rim of her glass and apparently enjoying making him suffer, because she says, “You mean besides snogging you?”
He clears his throat, “Yes, besides that.”
“Because I remember it quite clearly.”
(And the thing he’s never going to admit out loud is: he does too.)
Instead, he repeats, “Yes, besides that, Clara.”
She drops her gaze to her sparkling, deep red drink, the glow from the counter casting both light and shadow across her face for a second, and then she says, “I remember you.”
“What?” he hadn’t quite expected that, and he’s both mesmerized and horrified that it’s him her mind holds on to.
“You showed up with the snow and it was like...” she laughs, shakes her head. “It was like somehow, somewhere in the back of my mind, I recognized that you were my Doctor. Seeing you and stepping into that TARDIS was like coming home, and it was like somehow I knew I’d been waiting to get back to you the long way around.”
And the thing is, he understands, understands because that’s how he feels when he looks at her now. She has seen every one of his faces, and he’s been with every one of her echoes. There’s been so many versions of him and so many versions of her, and he’s had to lose her again and again throughout his lives, had to stand there and watch her die.
But this one, he thinks, this Clara is the one he finally gets to keep. He has waited a millennia to find her, and this Clara is his.
And he’s never letting her go again.
#
They’re outside. Well, they’re not outside on the moon, exactly, but it certainly looks like it in the lounge’s translucent green house with its invisible oxygen shield and it’s blooming night garden. There are winding vines and wandering paths, innumerable herbs and indoor groves, and the air is fresh and cool and tinged with the scent of citrus, like someone bottled up how a summer night smells and released it onto the moon.
And up above, the sky is the deepest black, the stars the brightest white, their light scattered across the sky, encircling the lounge’s garden on all sides. There is no horizon, no sign the starlight ever stops. I am infinite, the sky seems to say, and up here you are infinite too.
Clara glances up at the Doctor. He’s twirling a bit of mint between his fingers, silently studying it, but Clara knows his mind is elsewhere.
She always knows.
“You don’t have to feel guilty about Trenzalore, you know,” she says plainly, leaning forward to sniff the fresh, sharp scent of mint herself. “You did tell me to stop, after all.”
“You didn’t listen.”
“I didn’t particularly care to,” she says flippantly, trying to coax a smile out of him, though if she’s honest, there’s truth in there too. She’s never been the type of person to let someone else tell her what to do.
“I’d do it again,” she says, looking up at him. And she steps right in front of his path, stopping him. She doesn’t let him avoid her gaze this time, doesn’t allow him to sidestep the issue. “I’d do it all again, by choice. It was my decision, not yours, and I don’t regret it, so I won’t have you sulk about it, understood?”
Her tone is light, but her words are weighted, and they stand there in the star-dusted darkness, his eyes searching hers, orange blossom petals floating down around them. For a few minutes it’s so silent that Clara can count each of their inhales and every one of their exhales, and she’s standing close enough to him that she can nearly count his heartbeats too. He takes a breath, and then, for the first time since they brought up Trenzalore, she sees him smile.
And it’s brilliant and bright, soft as starlight, and it tells her that everything’s going to be alright.
“You’re the boss,” he says.
She grins, “Am I?”
He laughs, lets his hand come up to cradle her cheek, like he’s done a thousand times before, the warmth of his hand and the caress of his fingers feeling unbearably, indescribably nice against the cool night air.
“My impossible girl,” he whispers, and there is something in his expression that is soft, something in his eyes and in his smile, like he’s looking at something magical, something magnificent and marvelous, like he’s found the eighth wonder of the world.
Except he’s looking at her.
And he is close, so achingly close, just a breath and a brush and a heartbeat away.
(And here’s the thing: she’s jumped into his time stream and lived a thousand lives and spent a thousand years waiting to get back to him.)
Screw it, she thinks. Screw the trick and the trying to resist, the fact that it’d eventually fail was inevitable, unavoidable and inescapable, so she closes the small distance between them, crosses that invisible line, and kisses him.
Clara feels him go completely still, motionless and breathless, like he’s forgotten to inhale, and she thinks she’s shocked him so much that he’s even forgotten to wave his hands or flail his arms.
And then he kisses her back.
She really didn’t think he would.
But his lips are moving over hers, and slowly, tentatively, gently, his hand on her cheek slides further, fingers lacing lightly in her hair. And it feels like he’s not sure what’s happening, not sure it’s a good idea, but he can’t bring himself to stop now that he’s started, and then he’s falling into her like he’s a satellite and she’s the sky.
His other hand skims her side, and Clara feels a galaxy roaring in her ribcage beneath it, the cosmos under her collarbone, and behind her closed eyes she sees universes, glittering and gold. And he - he is starlight incarnate, the embodiment of space and time, a galaxy trapped in a single person. He’s pressing constellations into her skin with the pressure of his fingertips, leaving the breath of burning stars on her lips, and there’s a galaxy unwinding in her mind as he murmurs the secrets of the universe against her mouth. Their kiss is something celestial, something achingly, breathtakingly ethereal, and she curls her hands around the curve of his shoulders, holding onto him as she’s falling through space in her mind.
And the thing about outer space is, you want to stay there forever, but eventually you run out of breath, and so Clara pulls away and says:
“I’ve been waiting hundreds of years to do that.”
He laughs, ducks his head, eyes alight with amusement, “Sorry for the wait.”
“Don’t apologize,” she suggests, shifting her shoulders, stepping closer, staring up at him. “Make it up to me.”
And so he does.