Three Eleven + Clara ficlets
Three Eleven/Clara ficlets that are probably more Eleven/Mystery than Eleven/Clara. All are ~400 words. PG-ish. I don't own anything.
There is also: quasi stream-of-consciousness! Run-on-sentences! Tense changes! Overuse of the words mystery and impossible! Unusually random song lyrics titles! Idk! :3
bull’s eyes and targets.
Run
you
clever
boy
and
remember me.
Remember. Me.
He should forget her because when had he ever, ever done what he was told? But he couldn’t, not her. The impossible girl, the girl he gave up retirement for. Clara Oswin Oswald with her brain and her wit and her frenzied giggle. The girl he has to solve.
He’s not sure if he ought to run to her or from her, so he does the next best thing and spins in circles around her, mostly.
Nah, running from her wasn’t an option, actually. Watching as she skipped around the console, peering at every knob and every lever until she was cross-eyed and frizzy-haired with the static electricity he should really work on getting rid of, he admits he’s been lying even to himself.
He’d fallen like he always did and he wanted to keep her.
They were perfect, weren’t they? Almost everyone kept saying that. He might as well have put in a personal: non-existant madman searching for genius impossibility. That was how perfect they were. Similar in all the most thrilling ways and different in all the best: she was hard where he was soft and soft where he was hard and all brown-eyed and long-haired and heart-shaped and graceful.
On Ampersand, upside down in an airlock and hanging from his ankle, the both of them, he’d felt the air leave her lungs before his last breath was sucked from his. He’d used his, once again, to say I’m sorry. When she’d facilitated their escape she’d dusted off her hands and laughed at him and said, “Those were terrible last words”.
He had run every test he could think of and some he couldn’t and she was human, and so alive. He keeps thinking, when she kisses him, that he can taste that spark in her.
She had changed so much; his entire life, and still she put one boot on before the other and made faces when she swiped on eyeliner in the mornings, just like the rest of them.
At the first anti-grav Olympics, he’s all but sitting in her lap, because strictly speaking they shouldn’t be here and space is an actual issue. She wraps her arms around his waist and rests her head against his side, and the warm air swirls the smell of her deodorant around and it hits him that she fought/will fight the Daleks and won/will win.
He’s seen so, so very many things, but nothing quite like her.
He’d run, and he’d remember.
for which i have to.
He’s draped over a desk looking at maps, each a few dozen years apart. He’d misplaced a village once and it was about time he’d brought it back. He just had to find it first.
He hears her before he sees her, which is… not news. The soft steps, the unintelligible humming. He imagines her jogging down the corridor in her wedges, green dress and red purse, her hair flying, that smile on her face.
He doesn’t turn around even though he can feel her standing in the doorway, close enough to stab him in the back. It’s one of their Things; he pretends he doesn’t know she’s there and she crosses her arms and studies him (he’s not sure about the arms, actually, but that’s what the Clara in his mind’s eye does and he likes it). Sometimes it raises the hairs on his arms and pours ice down his spine, but not today and he might be slightly disappointed. Today it’s something warmer indeed running down his back and up into his cheeks.
She’ll say something pretty soon.
Soon…
Soon
“I’m too old for hide and seek, Doctor.”
He spins, faking surprise. (He knows she catches the smirk on his face before he manages to wipe it off because her own smirk widens.) He considers sitting on the desk but decides on leaning not-at-all awkwardly against it instead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You brought me here and then you disappeared. I’m guessing you wanted me to find you, so I did. Just this once.”
She looks so certain that she’s right he’s getting all confused. “Are you sure? I might have wanted to be alone?”
Clara shrugs and hooks a thumb behind the strap of her purse. “We’re the only two warm bodies here.”
“I… see.”
“Sulking on your own, you might as well drop me off back home.”
“Again, I’m not sulking!”
“You don’t know what ‘again’ means, do you?”
And then, then, she quirks a brow and all the Doctor has to counter with is a well-modulated sigh.
“What’re you working on?” she asks, skipping closer. “I spy… medieval maps. Promising!”
“Not all of them! Some of them are Renaissance.”
“Either you sulk in my company, or you take me there. Or… you do both at the same time.” She touches his elbow and all the warmth in him rushes there, pooling around her fingers. “Your choice.”
He’s not sure it is, actually, but it’s not like he minds.
that breaks the night.
There were days, many days, when he’d stare at the sheen of her hair and the shadows in the creases of her dresses looking for some kind of clue. The mystery shaped like a girl.
Other days (and half-days and mornings and nights) Clara liked to remind him she was a girl shaped like… well, a girl. When she was so alive he had to focus most of his brains on her.
Like… that afternoon they’d managed to catch the Sometimes Fair and he’d been chatting to the fire-breather and when he’d turned around to introduce Clara she was walking the rope, shuddering from toe to head, but walking it and there were eleven feet to the ground and his head had been swimming because all the timelines crossed in the most nauseating ways and she couldn’t die not again and
she didn’t.
She didn’t and then she laughed at him.
Oh, and that time when she was frozen with fear probably and he was still stiff with anger. She’d stepped right past his raised hand and the obligatory victory-slap and into his personal space and she had pressed the tip of her cold nose against his neck, and then she had just stood there, straight-armed and silent until he had squeezed her as tightly as he dared.
She was always going, just like him. And just there… like him. Always staying… (not) like him. A paper doll ready to be clad in a life.
He hadn’t thought protecting her would be so hard. Okay, lie. He hadn’t expected so much brain fog and he really shouldn’t have to stop himself from shouting the wrong name that often. It was getting ridiculous. And Clara protected herself, mostly.
Maybe he’d just forgotten how to do things in the right order.
Then Silence would fall and she was the last piece of the puzzle… he had almost figured it all out. Of all that could get him to Trenzalore… did it have to be her? Would it be her?
Maybe not the last last piece.
There is also: quasi stream-of-consciousness! Run-on-sentences! Tense changes! Overuse of the words mystery and impossible! Unusually random song lyrics titles! Idk! :3
bull’s eyes and targets.
Run
you
clever
boy
and
remember me.
Remember. Me.
He should forget her because when had he ever, ever done what he was told? But he couldn’t, not her. The impossible girl, the girl he gave up retirement for. Clara Oswin Oswald with her brain and her wit and her frenzied giggle. The girl he has to solve.
He’s not sure if he ought to run to her or from her, so he does the next best thing and spins in circles around her, mostly.
Nah, running from her wasn’t an option, actually. Watching as she skipped around the console, peering at every knob and every lever until she was cross-eyed and frizzy-haired with the static electricity he should really work on getting rid of, he admits he’s been lying even to himself.
He’d fallen like he always did and he wanted to keep her.
They were perfect, weren’t they? Almost everyone kept saying that. He might as well have put in a personal: non-existant madman searching for genius impossibility. That was how perfect they were. Similar in all the most thrilling ways and different in all the best: she was hard where he was soft and soft where he was hard and all brown-eyed and long-haired and heart-shaped and graceful.
On Ampersand, upside down in an airlock and hanging from his ankle, the both of them, he’d felt the air leave her lungs before his last breath was sucked from his. He’d used his, once again, to say I’m sorry. When she’d facilitated their escape she’d dusted off her hands and laughed at him and said, “Those were terrible last words”.
He had run every test he could think of and some he couldn’t and she was human, and so alive. He keeps thinking, when she kisses him, that he can taste that spark in her.
She had changed so much; his entire life, and still she put one boot on before the other and made faces when she swiped on eyeliner in the mornings, just like the rest of them.
At the first anti-grav Olympics, he’s all but sitting in her lap, because strictly speaking they shouldn’t be here and space is an actual issue. She wraps her arms around his waist and rests her head against his side, and the warm air swirls the smell of her deodorant around and it hits him that she fought/will fight the Daleks and won/will win.
He’s seen so, so very many things, but nothing quite like her.
He’d run, and he’d remember.
for which i have to.
He’s draped over a desk looking at maps, each a few dozen years apart. He’d misplaced a village once and it was about time he’d brought it back. He just had to find it first.
He hears her before he sees her, which is… not news. The soft steps, the unintelligible humming. He imagines her jogging down the corridor in her wedges, green dress and red purse, her hair flying, that smile on her face.
He doesn’t turn around even though he can feel her standing in the doorway, close enough to stab him in the back. It’s one of their Things; he pretends he doesn’t know she’s there and she crosses her arms and studies him (he’s not sure about the arms, actually, but that’s what the Clara in his mind’s eye does and he likes it). Sometimes it raises the hairs on his arms and pours ice down his spine, but not today and he might be slightly disappointed. Today it’s something warmer indeed running down his back and up into his cheeks.
She’ll say something pretty soon.
Soon…
Soon
“I’m too old for hide and seek, Doctor.”
He spins, faking surprise. (He knows she catches the smirk on his face before he manages to wipe it off because her own smirk widens.) He considers sitting on the desk but decides on leaning not-at-all awkwardly against it instead. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You brought me here and then you disappeared. I’m guessing you wanted me to find you, so I did. Just this once.”
She looks so certain that she’s right he’s getting all confused. “Are you sure? I might have wanted to be alone?”
Clara shrugs and hooks a thumb behind the strap of her purse. “We’re the only two warm bodies here.”
“I… see.”
“Sulking on your own, you might as well drop me off back home.”
“Again, I’m not sulking!”
“You don’t know what ‘again’ means, do you?”
And then, then, she quirks a brow and all the Doctor has to counter with is a well-modulated sigh.
“What’re you working on?” she asks, skipping closer. “I spy… medieval maps. Promising!”
“Not all of them! Some of them are Renaissance.”
“Either you sulk in my company, or you take me there. Or… you do both at the same time.” She touches his elbow and all the warmth in him rushes there, pooling around her fingers. “Your choice.”
He’s not sure it is, actually, but it’s not like he minds.
that breaks the night.
There were days, many days, when he’d stare at the sheen of her hair and the shadows in the creases of her dresses looking for some kind of clue. The mystery shaped like a girl.
Other days (and half-days and mornings and nights) Clara liked to remind him she was a girl shaped like… well, a girl. When she was so alive he had to focus most of his brains on her.
Like… that afternoon they’d managed to catch the Sometimes Fair and he’d been chatting to the fire-breather and when he’d turned around to introduce Clara she was walking the rope, shuddering from toe to head, but walking it and there were eleven feet to the ground and his head had been swimming because all the timelines crossed in the most nauseating ways and she couldn’t die not again and
she didn’t.
She didn’t and then she laughed at him.
Oh, and that time when she was frozen with fear probably and he was still stiff with anger. She’d stepped right past his raised hand and the obligatory victory-slap and into his personal space and she had pressed the tip of her cold nose against his neck, and then she had just stood there, straight-armed and silent until he had squeezed her as tightly as he dared.
She was always going, just like him. And just there… like him. Always staying… (not) like him. A paper doll ready to be clad in a life.
He hadn’t thought protecting her would be so hard. Okay, lie. He hadn’t expected so much brain fog and he really shouldn’t have to stop himself from shouting the wrong name that often. It was getting ridiculous. And Clara protected herself, mostly.
Maybe he’d just forgotten how to do things in the right order.
Then Silence would fall and she was the last piece of the puzzle… he had almost figured it all out. Of all that could get him to Trenzalore… did it have to be her? Would it be her?
Maybe not the last last piece.