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“What?”
Clara’s voice cut through the Doctor’s ramblings abruptly. He paused his circuit around the console to stare at her and raise an eyebrow. Her own were pinched and she was frowning in that way she did when something abstract and human was bothering her. He suppressed a shiver.
“What?” he echoed back.
“What did you say?”
“What did I say when Clara?” confusion and exasperation blending. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I tend to say a lot of things in rather quick succession.”
“You don’t like your eyebrows?”
He paused and blinked at her, surprised that out of all of the scientific explanations, all the descriptions of the alien landscape he was taking her to, and all the little quips he’d tossed at her (the ones that either landed light or cut too deep without him knowing the difference), that THAT was what she was fixated on. Actual interesting information was put to the side because for some reason an offhanded comment about local etiquette, and how his eyebrows were not conducive to being perceived as friendly was what was important to Clara Oswald.
“I never said that—” he started, about to correct her.
“You didn’t have to,” she argued, not giving him an inch.
They stared each other down, daring the other to take the next move, whether that be admission, deflection, or a swift exit. The hum of the TARDIS filled the tense space before Clara tilted her head at him. Her eyes were wide and pleading, her smile soft and sad. He turned away.
“They make me look angry,” he confessed.
“They make you look more grumpy than anything,” she tried to amend, like that was any better.
He heard her taking steps towards him. “They can also make you look like a disgruntled owl when you’re caught off guard.”
Not by choice, his brows pressed and raised, and his frown took on a perplexed, offended quality. Clara was biting back amusement.
“They can also make you look very, very kind,” she said, reaching up to cup the sides of his face.
He tensed but made no move to pull away. Reaching further still she ran her thumbs over each of his bushy brows, sending his eyes fluttering shut. His body slowly relaxed, soothed by the strange ministrations. When she moved her hands back down to his cheeks he saw her looking at him expectantly, and when their gazes met, she broke into a bright self-assured grin.
“It makes me sad that you don’t like them. They’re one of my favorite things about your face.”
His jaw was slack with shock, eyes wide with surprise. He looked to her silently, waiting for an amendment, or for her to take it back. He waited for the ‘but’, the ‘although’, the ‘on second thought’ and when none came he hardly knew what to do with himself.
She was smiling, staring at him like she’d just said the simplest fact in the world. She was holding his gaze like she hadn’t ripped a foundational belief from under him. In his world, the world of his mind, Clara Oswald settled for wrinkles and grays because she couldn’t have floppy hair and bowties. She settled for angry lines and brows because she couldn’t have young smooth skin and shaven heads. If he looked in the mirror, emotions muddled and cluttered in the presence of his own reflection, he expected far worse from her.
Yet here she stood, running her thumbs over his high cheekbones, cradling his face with such a gentleness reserved for precious objects. The kind of hold you had on a glass sculpture: light, adoring, careful, and admiring.
He swallowed, unsure what to do with the conflicting emotions in his chest. The instinct was to run, to ask her if he could talk about the planets because he knew she’d see the hints of terror swirling within him and would say yes.
But he didn’t.
He reached up, and squeezed her hand, because gratitude was a funny thing and sometimes, when it was too deep and vast the proper words evaded him. Her smile grew a little and he closed his eyes, assured that she already knew.
“Okay?” she asked, gently softly, asking thousands of little, tiny questions in one single word.
He didn’t see all she saw in him. He couldn’t look in the mirror and see the man that Clara Oswald smiled at, praised when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. He couldn’t see the man with a kind face, when he looked at himself, even before he’d been gray and brash.
He couldn’t believe that she was right about him, but he could believe she saw something. Something in him caught Clara’s eye and it was distinctly important to her, if no one else.
Maybe that was enough.
“Okay.”