#Chameleons and Bowties chapters

[sheliesshattered]

With AO3 currently down, I thought I’d go through my tags and reblog all the fanfics I’ve posted to Tumblr over the years. Enjoy!

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 1

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 1 is 2600 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

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Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 1

Adrian Smith’s life had never felt so strange as it did the first week after his concussion.

His physician, Dr Jones, explained that he might have some disorientation following his accident, that things that ought to feel familiar might feel new and odd, but that it was to be expected. He merely had to wait it out. And then she’d given him her mobile number, “in case anything comes up,” which he was almost certain doctors didn’t usually do, and which he was fairly sure he couldn’t blame on post-concussion confusion. But Clara Oswald, fellow Coal Hill English teacher and perhaps the most brilliant person he knew, had simply nodded sagely, so Adrian had been left with no choice but to accept it as normal.

Only, the strangeness hadn’t ended there. His flat, when Clara took him home after they left Dr Jones’s clinic, looked as though the world’s most organized person lived there, and that felt like the last descriptor he could possibly apply to himself. It also smelled of fresh paint, none of the food in the cupboards or refrigerator had been opened, and there was no post in his name anywhere to be found. All of which Clara found utterly unremarkable, so Adrian let it go.

But his pyjamas didn’t fit right. His toothbrush was still in its plastic packaging. He couldn’t remember where any of the lightswitches were located. The television wasn’t plugged into the electrical outlet.

Keep reading

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - chapter 10

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 10 is 2700 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

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Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 10

“Clara, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” his older self demanded over the TARDIS’s staticky radio as soon as the Doctor and Clara brought their TARDIS out of the Vortex, materialising practically right on top of the other TARDIS. “I told you not to follow me!”

“Yes, well,” the Doctor replied, most of his attention on the controls as he tried to match the erratic path the older TARDIS was cutting through real space, “it’s not Clara’s fault, I overruled you. And of the two of us, I’m the one who actually has a plan to save the day, so shut up and listen.”

“I think I liked you better as a mild-mannered English teacher,” Eyebrows grumbled.

“You didn’t like me then, either,” he shot back. “But for once we can actually use that to our advantage. The Tu’kavari are a telepathic conglomerate, many minds but all thinking in unison. We establish contact between the two of us, and then we let the Tu’kavari in—”

“Willingly let them share our minds?” came the sharp reply over the radio. “Did something go wrong with the Chameleon Arch? I know I wasn’t this much of an idiot before!”

“Are you getting forgetful in your old age,” the Doctor demanded of his other self, “or do you not remember what you said to me barely half an hour ago: they don’t know there’s two of us. We can use that to confuse the hivemind, push them past the point of endurance.”

The radio was silent for a moment, and when the older Doctor spoke next, it was more thoughtful. “They’ll perceive us as one person, with wildly divergent thoughts. The Tu’kavari won’t be able to keep up without shattering.”

“Precisely. Clara and I will keep our TARDIS in sync with yours, continue drawing them away from Earth just in case. But their attention should be completely fixated on us.”

The radio made a harsh sound of his disapproving scoff. “You’re going to juggle two levels of telepathic connection and try to match your flight path to mine? I can’t imagine how that could go wrong!”

“I’ll be doing the flying,” Clara spoke up, her tone leaving no room for argument. “Stay focused on the Tu’kavari, Doctor, don’t worry too much about your trajectory. Just fly erratically and I’ll match your movements,” she went on, addressing her words to the radio. She paused, then added, “Wherever you go, I’ll follow.”

The Doctor caught her gaze when she looked up at him across the console, her expression grave. He offered her a little nod of reassurance, knowing she meant what she said, not just in this moment, but always.

“For the record, I think this is a truly spectacularly bad idea,” his older self informed them, “but as it’s the best plan we’ve got, I don’t see that we have much of a choice.”

“Noted,” the Doctor huffed. “Ready?”

Clara stepped over to him, pressing herself in between him and the console, her fingers brushing his as she took over the navigation controls. “Ready,” she confirmed, her attention already focused on mimicking the other TARDIS’s chaotic movements.

“Ready,” the radio crackled.

“Okay, then.” The Doctor looked to Clara, and when she glanced back at him, he grinned and said, “Geronimo.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” the other Doctor said. “Contact.”

He felt the connection between their minds spring to life instantly and echoed, “Contact.” He'd done this before, countless times, but usually with a Time Lord other than himself. Sharing his mind with an older version of himself was an odd sort of feedback loop, like mirrors facing each other — if the other mirror was cross and Scottish and more anxious than the Doctor had thought to expect.

I assume you know how to open telepathic communications with the Tu’kavari? that Scottish voice demanded in his mind. Get on with it.

Distantly he was still aware of the console room around him, Clara standing near his elbow, and the TARDIS’s monitors flickering with information about their current location in real space. The Tu’kavari ship was close on their trail, and he reached his consciousness out towards them, feeling his older self respond in kind.

Oy, Tu’kavari! he projected at them, repeating his words from earlier — what felt like a lifetime ago but could only have been barely twenty minutes. Looking for me?

The hivemind roared through the psychic connection, furious, covetous of his mind and desperate for revenge against him for evading them so long.

This is what you want, isn’t it? he asked, sending a sharp ripple through the telepathic link in a show of strength. Well then, come and get it!

The Doctor felt the TARDIS shift around him, as Clara completed a particularly abrupt manoeuvre to keep them on top of the other TARDIS. He braced himself against the console and refocused on the Tu’kavari.

Enough of your tricks and illusions, Doctor! came their icy, multilayered collective voice. Surrender!

There is no illusion, the other Doctor put in, smoothly mimicking him, pretentious Scottish accent temporarily hidden away to complete the appearance that they were one mind.

In sync first, and then the split, he reminded himself, keeping his connection to his older self as steady and unobtrusive as possible. Can’t fake a TARDIS, he told them in the same tone. Perhaps you’re just confused.

We are not confused! The Tu’kavari know all, see all. We see YOU, Doctor!

Ah, but what is it that you see? his older self asked.

A madman in a box? the Doctor added.

The Oncoming Storm? The questions were overlapping, one coming half a second after the other, and the Doctor felt the hivemind flinch in confusion.

Do you think you can keep up? he projected at them, listening as the other Doctor asked the same a moment later in a disorienting echo. Catch me if you can!

The TARDIS swooped again, and suddenly his mind flooded with thoughts of Donna Noble as his older self paged through his memories of her. Time for the split. He shifted his focus, letting the recollections of Donna tumble through his mind unimpeded while he called up his memories of Martha Jones. Not just how brilliant she’d been today, giving him the courage to face down the Tu’kavari on that rooftop, but how brilliant she’d always been, clever and resourceful and compassionate, from that very first day, when he was barefoot on the moon.

The hivemind recoiled and then shoved hard against the Doctors’ shared consciousness as though trying to discern reality from illusion. In unison they shoved back, listening as the hivemind reverberated with it. It was working. It would work. They just had to keep one step ahead, keep the Tu’kavari guessing.

He switched his thoughts to Amy. Mad, glorious Pond, oh how he missed her. Amy, who had run away the night before her wedding to go on adventures with her raggedy Doctor. He’d held onto her as long as he could, but in the end she had chosen Rory, as he had known she would. He’d mourned them for years, swearing off forming that kind of bond with anyone again, until Clara had come into his life.

Through their connection the Doctor felt his older self turn his thoughts to Osgood, replaying memories of her that he didn’t yet have — something about Zygons and the Boxes and narrowly avoiding near-certain death. Petronella. ...Let’s just stick with what we had.

For just a moment, the Doctor aligned their thoughts again, adding in his own recent moments with Osgood, bonding over bowties and laughing at late night telly. It was at such odds with the other memories of her, overlapping and rebounding in the Doctors’ shared mental voice, and he could feel the Tu’kavari’s frustration and confusion grow. The hivemind snarled and pressed in on them, but the Doctors held firm.

Enough! the Doctors thought in unison, flinging their thoughts in opposite directions.

When the older Doctor thought of River, he instead called up every memory of Rose, keeping up the discordant harmony that was slowly but surely breaking the Tu’kavari. Each shift Eyebrows made, the Doctor pivoted as well, drowning the hivemind in a flood of contradictory memories at a relentless pace as the minutes ticked by unchecked. He countered thoughts of Peri with thoughts of Sarah Jane, contrasted Romana against Leela, Jo against Jamie, Tegan and Nyssa and Turlough versus Barbara and Ian and Susan. With every dissonant pairing of their shared memories, the Tu’kavari howled and thrashed within the psychic connection, unable to make sense of the Doctors’ mind.

Around him, the TARDIS shifted violently, and he felt his arm knock against Clara’s just as she muttered tensely beneath her breath. How long had they been at this? How long had Clara been flying his TARDIS unassisted, unable to even witness the telepathic struggle the Doctors were engaged in? All without a word of question or complaint, even more self-assured and competent than the younger version of her he travelled with.

She had always been capable, always ready to throw herself straight into the deep end to save him, right from their very first trip off-world together, when she’d commandeered that flying moped to come after him rather than leave him to face the Old God of Akhaten alone. Clara had led soldiers against the Cybermen, faced down an Ice Warrior alone, convinced the TARDIS to enter a collapsing pocket universe to find him. She had jumped into his timestream to reverse the damage done by the Great Intelligence, tearing herself into a million pieces all for him, with no expectation that she would make it out alive.

And that fateful day in that barn on Gallifrey, she had looked at him with tears in her eyes and reminded him to be a Doctor.

The only thing Clara has ever asked of us, his older self had said, after his attempt to give him back some of his lost memories. And of course he had known the magic those words would carry, the way they would wake up the Time Lord hidden within Adrian Smith. For his Clara, he could do anything.

My Clara the other Doctor echoed through their telepathic connection, and with a start the Doctor realised that their thoughts were once again running in tandem, his memories of Clara pulling his older self in.

My Clara, he couldn’t help but think as well. It wasn’t possessive, as he’d thought when Adrian Smith’s jealousy had made him so critical of the Scottish caretaker who seemed to hold Clara’s heart. It was merely a statement of fact — that out of all the many Claras the universe over, out of all the echoes of her strewn across his timeline, this one was his Clara. The one he knew best. The one who had saved him, time and again.

The one he loved.

And he did love her, the Doctor realised. Adrian’s feelings for her hadn’t been an artefact of the Chameleon Arch, or some shallow human approximation of his affection for Clara. He loved her. Like she’d breathed life into the stars and spun the filaments of galaxies that gave the universe its form. Perhaps he simply hadn’t truly realised it until now, until living as Adrian had stripped away all the other endless noise in his mind, allowing him to finally understand his feelings clearly.

Clara’s love for him was what had driven her to jump into his timestream, and his love for her is what had allowed him to pull her out again, whole and unharmed. Her love for him had challenged him to be better than his past choices, to choose another way to end the Time War. His love for her had sent him racing for the safety of her care when the Tu’kavari were bent on destroying him and assimilating him into the hivemind.

It was a love so strong, regeneration had only deepened it, he knew. His older self echoed the sentiment, sharing the memory of the first time he’d seen her face with his new eyes, the way he had both craved her touch and feared it in those first months after his regeneration. He’d gone to hell and back because of his love for Clara — Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference? he had asked her, as Clara stared at him, her eyes overlarge with tears. Because he loved her, he had left her to live a happy human life, and because he loved her, he had come back to her when the universe gifted them another chance.

The Doctor could hardly make sense of the flood of memories from his older self, moments he had not yet lived, emotions that were all too painful in their familiarity. He let them fall through his mind like rain, until everything was Clara, the Doctors’ minds in perfect sync. The Doctor loved Clara Oswald, a truth so simple and profound it might as well have been the organising principle of the universe.

On the other end of the telepathic connection, the hivemind stilled, as if sensing his weakness, poised to strike.

Because I love Clara, the other Doctor thought in their shared telepathic voice, the singular pronoun somehow encompassing both of them, I must leave her.

Ah, and here it was, the moment of truth, the thing that would finally break the Tu’kavari. With a flicker of insight, he knew what his older self planned to do. Clara would not be happy about it, but it was the only way.

Because I love Clara, the Doctor echoed, their words running together as though it was one unbroken thought, I must stay with her.

I must leave her, the older Doctor projected through the psychic link, not a shred of doubt in the certainty of the outcome.

I must stay with her, the Doctor repeated, just as sure.

I must leave her.

I must stay with her.

I must leave her.

I must stay—

He felt the moment the Tu’kavari hivemind shattered, its billions of minds ricocheting into discordant chaos like so many shards of glass. Each had once been its own entity, its own life, before the conglomerate had consumed it. Suddenly every mind could think for itself again, and a cacophony of memories poured through the psychic link, lifetimes full of love and loss and joy and sorrow that had been silenced beneath the weight of the hivemind.

Quickly both Doctors pulled their minds back, breaking their connection as well, and abruptly he was once again standing in the TARDIS, his knuckles white where his fingers gripped the edge of the console.

“What happened?” Clara demanded, glancing away from the controls to find his gaze.

“The Tu’kavari—” the Doctor started, his throat dry.

“We broke the hivemind,” came the terse response from over the radio. “They’re divided, leaderless. Weakened but not defeated.”

“So what do we do now?” she asked. “How do we defeat them?”

I must stay— I must leave— echoed through the Doctor’s mind in the beat of silence that followed. How could he possibly tell her what they planned, what had to happen now?

“Get Clara to safety,” his older self commanded gruffly. “I’ll draw the Tu’kavari away, find a way to contain them, if I can.”

“No!” Clara cried, abandoning the flight controls to speak directly into the radio. “No, you do not leave me!”

For a hushed moment, no one spoke, and then the radio conveyed his last instruction: “Look after each other.”

“No!” Clara yelled again, but the line had already gone dead. “No. We have to go after him, we have to—”

Despite the plea in her voice, the Doctor reached over and pulled the lever that sent the TARDIS into siege mode, cutting them off from any further communication and blocking Clara from the flight controls.

“I’m sorry, my Clara,” he said quietly, unable to meet her gaze, “but I’m taking you home.”

--

Chapter 11

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - chapter 11 of 11

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, 11 chapters and 26,000 words. Chapter 11 is 3200 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username. 

Now complete!

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Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 11

With a wheeze and a quiet thump, the TARDIS landed on the roof of the Tower. The Doctor had timed their arrival for only a few minutes after they’d left, and was grateful to find UNIT’s Landing Pad Protocol still active. He disengaged siege mode and looked over at Clara, who was stood on the far side of the console, her back to him and her arms wrapped around herself. It was his fault she was so distraught, and knowing that made it all the worse.

“Clara—” he said softly, but she cut him off before he could get any further.

“You said we were going to rescue him,” she said, her voice harsh with tears. “You said you had a plan to save him.”

“I did,” he agreed. “I wasn’t lying to you, Clara. It started out just as I’d hoped it would, we were able to create a feedback loop between our minds to confuse the Tu’kavari. They perceived us as one person following two separate lines of thought, completely outside anything they could understand.”

Clara angled her body to look at him, her arms still clasped around herself as though it was the only thing keeping her upright, her eyes large and her face tearstained. “Then why didn’t it work?”

“It did, at first,” the Doctor said, staring down at his hands braced against the console, unable to meet her gaze. “We flooded them with conflicting memories, the duality of it was breaking them, little by little. But then...” He trailed off, thinking of the moment when their divergent thoughts had aligned entirely against their will. “But then we thought of you,” he said, barely a breath in the stillness of the console room.

“Me?”

“It was like— gravity, nothing we could do to stop it. Our thoughts converged, we didn’t mean for it to happen, but once we started, we couldn’t stop. Every memory we have of you, building off each other. The Tu’kavari thought they had us, thought they’d found our weakness, the way to bend us to their will. The only thing, the only thing that could save any of us in that moment was my future self’s decision to leave.”

Clara snorted damply. “How could leaving me be any help?”

He finally looked back up at her, holding her gaze. “What the Tu’kavari thought was a weakness was our greatest strength, and it was the last weapon we had left. Because our feelings for you are so strong, one of us had to stay with you, and one of us had to leave. The hivemind couldn’t comprehend the contradiction, and it broke them.”

“But if it’s done now, why did he— How could he just—”

“Hey, hey,” the Doctor said, quickly crossing to Clara and gathering her in his arms as her tears began to fall again. “He didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t give them a chance to reorganise the hivemind. This is our best shot at defeating the Tu’kavari for good, and Eyebrows knows it as well as I do.”

“If something happens to him...” Clara said, pressing her face to his chest. “I can’t lose him now, I can’t.”

The Doctor hesitated, then said softly, “Because you love him.”

“I—” Clara faltered. “I love you too,” she finally said, her voice muffled against the tweed of his jacket, her arms around his back holding him tighter. “And I did fancy you, when we travelled together. But with him, it’s different. If I lose him now, it’s the end of everything.”

“Brave heart, Clara,” he said, kissing the top of her head in a comforting gesture. “Your Doctor is clever, and wily, and doesn’t want to be separated from you any more than you want to be separated from him, believe me. You’ve got to have faith in him, that he’ll find his way back to you. We always have, haven’t we, he and I? We’ve always found you again, one way or another.” He remembered what Clara had said earlier, the implicit promise she’d made just before their confrontation with the Tu’kavari. “Wherever you go, we’ll follow,” he murmured, repeating her words. “You have to believe that.”

She hiccupped against him, clutching him tighter, and the Doctor held her closer in response. He would offer her whatever solace he could, but a guilty part of him wished this hug had come under better circumstances. As much as she was undeniably the woman he loved, she wasn’t really his Clara anymore. Somewhere out there was the Clara that fancied him, but he couldn’t ignore that the one in his arms was very much in love with his older self.

For just a moment, he felt like Adrian Smith again, heartsick over his best friend falling for someone else. He thought of the hug she’d given him that morning he’d brought her coffee, and how he had resolved not to dwell on the might-have-beens between them. It was all so different now that he could see the full picture of who Clara was to him, but he couldn’t help the way his hearts ached, both for her pain and his.

“He’ll come back to you,” he whispered. “I know he will, because he and I are the same. We both love you, Clara Oswald. Nothing is ever going to change that.”

A sob escaped her, and the Doctor stroked his hand against her hair, soothing her the only way he knew how. He was a poor imitation of the man she loved, but until his older self returned, he would try his best to be what she needed. He could do no less for his Clara.

“I love him,” she breathed, as though speaking the words might bend the universe to her will. “I love him, and I can’t lose him now.”

He held her close, words failing him. He didn’t want to even consider the possibility that the other Doctor might not come back. The Tu’kavari had been weakened, but a wounded animal could be vicious in defence of itself. They were still dangerous, and now Eyebrows was out there facing them alone. He knew the depth of his older self’s feelings for Clara, and knew that nothing besides ensuring her safety would keep him away. Nothing short of death could keep him from returning to her, and even on that point he expected he might well find a loophole.

And after all, the Doctor knew that someday in his future he would have to find a way to escape death, a way to cheat the old rule of thirteen faces and somehow regenerate into Eyebrows. He had no doubt that when that day inevitably arrived, it would be his desire to stay with her that would allow him to accomplish the impossible. Anything for a little more time with Clara.

“If this is going to go on awhile,” a familiar Scottish voice called from the doorway, “I can come back later.”

Clara jolted in his arms and took a startled step away from him. Together they turned to look at the open door of the TARDIS and the figure standing just inside. To the Doctor’s quick eye, there were subtle signs of how much time had passed for his older self — the length of his hair, the lines of fatigue around his eyes, the wrinkles pressed into his clothing. But Clara stared at him like she couldn’t quite believe he was really there, like she didn’t know what to do with herself now that her hopes had been answered.

The older Doctor returned her gaze for a long moment, his expression as anxious and heartsick as hers, then looked over his shoulder, listening to someone outside. “No, they’re alright,” he replied. “Just post-alien-confrontation jitters, you know how it is.” He turned back to them, gaze sliding past the Doctor to land on Clara again. “You are okay, aren’t you?”

She nodded shakily, still unable to tear her eyes away from him.

Osgood appeared at the older Doctor’s shoulder, peering around him to see further into the TARDIS. “Oh good, you had us worried,” she said as she crossed towards the console.

Martha was close behind her, but she hesitated for a fraction of a second between one step and the next, her gaze quickly cutting between Clara and each of the Doctors. She was clearly aware of the tension drawn taut between them, and she quirked one eyebrow at the Doctor in silent question.

“Are the Tu’kavari gone, then?” Osgood went on, seeming not to notice.

When neither Clara nor his older self so much as broke eye contact with each other to acknowledge the question, the Doctor said, “Ought to be. We were really very clever, Eyebrows and me. We used a telepathic feedback loop—”

“What did you do?” Clara demanded of the other Doctor, interrupting as though no one had spoken. “You left. Was that really the only way to defeat them? Really?”

“I led them away,” he replied quietly, utterly focused on her. “When the hivemind split into factions, I managed to trick the more aggressive of them into a pocket universe. Should hold them for a great long while. The rest have sworn off conquering other telepathic races, so I don’t think we’ll encounter any trouble from the Tu’kavari again. Only took me a month or so.”

“A month,” Clara repeated flatly.

He bit his lip as though trying to decide what to say. “I figured that was enough of a win to come back and check on you, make sure you got home safe. And here you are,” he said more briskly, gesturing at her with both hands. “Safe and sound. I don’t know what I was worried about.” He looked away, losing some of his bravado. “If you— if you like, I could clear off for a bit, leave you and Bowtie to travel together for a while. I can always erase his memories later, make sure the timeline stays intact.”

Still standing close beside her, the Doctor watched Clara’s face as she absorbed this offer, the flicker of confusion and the flash of pain she quickly hid away. It was undeniably selfless of the other Doctor, in a way he wasn’t sure he would be able to match if their places were reversed. Anything for a little more time with Clara, he had thought only moments before his older self returned. But could he do this to her, steal her away from her Doctor, claim days and years out of her short life that weren’t rightfully his?

If it was what she wanted, he didn’t think he would have the strength to tell her no. But watching her reaction, he didn’t think it was what she wanted. Perhaps Adrian Smith had been more right about John Smith than he’d known, perhaps his future self was blind to Clara’s feelings for him, despite the depth of his feelings for her.

“You came back,” she said finally, her voice carefully controlled to betray no emotion, “just to tell me you’re leaving again?”

“You’ve missed him, Clara,” he replied, like the rest of them weren’t in the room as well. “That much is obvious. If this will make you happy—”

“Oh, you ridiculous man!” she seethed, bursting into motion and crossing the console room in a few long, quick strides. Without hesitation, she grabbed the older Doctor by his lapels and pulled him into a passionate kiss.

For one long moment the Doctor watched them, too stunned to pull his gaze away. Despite the many hugs and little kisses he’d exchanged with Clara over the years, he’d never really thought anything like that was possible for the two of them. The same jealousy that had so defined his time as Adrian surged within him again, but he pushed it away. Clara had been offered a choice between them, and she’d chosen who she truly wanted. His happiness for her and his future self had to balance out any lingering envy.

“Did we say five quid?” he heard Martha’s voice ask quietly, and he turned to where she and Osgood were still stood on the far side of the console.

“There’s a kiss, it’s definitely ten quid,” Osgood muttered in reply. “Pay up.”

He cast one last look back towards Clara and the older Doctor, completely absorbed in each other and utterly mindless to the conversation on the other side of the room, then forced his feet to move towards Osgood and Martha, rather than continue to stand staring in consternation at the sight of Clara snogging his next face.

“UNIT leadership placing bets on the Doctor-companion relationship?” he demanded of them. “Really?”

“It’d hardly be the first time,” Martha smirked at him.

He laughed at that as he joined them. “Oh, Martha Jones, you are a star,” he told her, just to see her smile widen. “Chief Medical Officer of UNIT, hm? With the two of you and Kate Stewart in charge, it seems that science certainly is leading, these days.”

“We do like bossing those solider-types around,” Osgood said conspiratorially.

“No one better than you to do it,” the Doctor said, grinning at her. “Thank you both, for looking after me,” he said, sobering a bit. “Couldn’t have made it through this without you.”

“No hard feelings about the whole ‘drugging and kidnapping you’ bit, then?” Martha asked.

“Well, don’t make a habit of it. But exceptions can be made for a situation like this. And if anyone’s entitled to a bit of leeway, it’s you, the only human to survive a Chameleon Arch’ed Time Lord twice now.”

“Three times, if you count Professor Yana,” Martha pointed out.

“Oh, the Master,” he groaned. “I suppose we do have to count that.”

Osgood opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off. “I don’t even want to know,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “If the Master has come back again, whatever he’s up to in the future is Eyebrow’s problem, not mine. Let me live my peaceful Master-free existence a little while longer, will you?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Fair enough.”

“So what do you say, Martha Jones?” the Doctor said, turning back to her. “Fancy a spin around the universe, for old times’ sake? You’ve certainly earned it.”

“Well, if you can promise to get me back on time. I have missed it,” she said with a sly smile.

“Osgood, how ‘bout it?” he went on. “We could hit up a few planets, find a few historical figures to prank. All of time and space, anything you like.”

She smiled and dropped her gaze. “I’d love to. But I can’t leave Earth. I’m needed here.”

“Ah,” he said, putting the pieces together. “The Osgood Boxes are working as intended, then?”

“Yes,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.

“Good,” he replied. “Well, not good, but better than not working, I suppose.” He considered her a moment, thinking about the weight on Osgood’s shoulders, and the grace with which she carried it. “You are saving the world right here at home, aren’t you?”

Osgood smiled at him ruefully. “All in a day’s work.”

“I’m glad I got to know you,” he told her, “over popcorn and pizza and bad late night telly. Thank you for that. And here,” he added, untying his bowtie as soon as the thought occurred to him. He pulled it from his collar and held it out to her. “To add to your impressive collection.”

She accepted it with an awed look, carefully coiling it up in her hand like a precious object. “It’s been my honour, Doctor,” she said sincerely. “If you need anything— from your flat, or help from UNIT, or anything, really— well, you have my number.”

“Indeed I do,” he laughed, pulling her into a quick hug. “And keep an eye on the two of them for me, would you?” he added when they parted, tilting his head towards Clara and the older Doctor. “I hate to think what trouble they might get into from here.”

“On it,” Osgood replied with a nod. With one last smile and a wave at the Doctor, she turned and made her way outside.

He watched her go, his gaze inexorably landing on Clara and his future self, still wrapped up in each other near the entrance to the TARDIS.

“Honestly, I thought they’d be finished by now,” he muttered, shooting Martha a pained look.

She laughed quietly. “Wanna bet on how long they can go before they realise we’re still here?” she suggested. “I’m out ten pounds, might be nice to recoup my loses.”

“Yes, yes, very funny, but I know better than to bet against you, Martha Jones. And I am in no way convinced that they’ll come to their senses without a bit of nudging, so I suppose I’ll just have to—” He grimaced at the task ahead of him, but made himself move. “Oy, lovebirds!” he called as he crossed towards them. “How am I meant to leave with the two of you perched in my doorway?”

They finally stepped away from each other and turned to him, though they continued to stand so close their arms were nearly brushing. “Ah yes, I’d almost forgotten we were still in your TARDIS,” the older Doctor said. “Can’t imagine why we’d want to stay,” he added, curling his lip in distaste. “There’s a reason I redecorated.”

“Oh, ha ha,” he shot back. “You’re awfully opinionated for someone who shouldn’t exist! Twelve regenerations, thirteen faces — I’ve spent the last few hundred years clinging to this face, knowing it’ll be my last. And yet there you stand, in violation of all the rules.”

“Yes, well,” his older self replied, shrugging self-consciously. “We ought to have died, but then Clara did a clever thing.”

“She often does,” the Doctor allowed, directing his smile towards her. “It’s good to know my future is in safe hands. Keep a tight hold on it, Clara.”

She grinned back at him, clearly catching his reference to the comment his last face had made, that day they saved Gallifrey. But as he watched, her smile faltered and fell. “It must be nearly Christmas, for your Clara, back in your proper time,” she said carefully.

“I suppose it is,” he said, frowning at the shift in her tone. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Clara nodded shakily, blinking back tears.

“Hey, what’s this then?” he asked, taking a step closer to her. “Christmas ought to make you happy, not... whatever that face is.”

“It’s a rough one, that year,” she said, managing a fragile smile. “We get through it, but...” She swallowed down her tears and then found his gaze. “She loves you, your Clara does. I know you’re going to forget all of this, timelines out of sync and all of that, but try to remember that much, at least.”

He looked away, smiling though it was tinged with melancholy. “I think I already knew. And even if I won’t remember, it’s good to see that we’ll get there eventually. The long way ‘round.”

“Yeah,” Clara said, gazing up at her Doctor with a soft expression and reaching over to clasp his hand in hers. “The long way ‘round.”

--

Thank you for reading! Comments and reblogs are always appreciated.

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - chapter 9

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 9 is 2000 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

–

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 9

“Clara!” Adrian cried, turning away from the doors of the TARDIS and towards the centre console. Distantly he registered that the room was slightly different from the one he’d left minutes ago, the upper gallery of bookshelves gone, the lighting more blue and less inviting. But his gaze was drawn to Clara, standing at the console expertly manipulating the flight controls. “Are you alright?” he asked, rushing across the room to her.

She glanced up at him as he approached, her eyes red-rimmed and her mouth pressed into an unhappy line. “I’m fine,” she bit out. “Did he tell you what he’s planning?”

Adrian hesitated, knowing instinctively which ‘he’ Clara meant. “He said he was going to switch places with you,” he said carefully.

“That bit seems to have worked, at least,” she allowed, her tone grudging and her attention back on the knobs and switches of the console. “Both TARDISes in the same place at the same time. But now he’s determined to lead them away — told me to take you into the Vortex so the Tu’kavari would follow his TARDIS and not ours. He’s going to get himself killed if we don’t do something.”

“He said not to let you follow him,” Adrian told her, wondering if he had any hope at all of stopping her, when she clearly knew how to fly the TARDIS and he currently did not.

Clara snorted damply. “Self-sacrificing idiot,” she muttered, throwing a lever on the console with more force than necessary. “As if I’d leave him to face this alone. He ought to know better by now.” She raised her eyes to Adrian’s and held his gaze through her gathering tears. “I’m sorry it’s happened this way, Adrian. This isn’t how I wanted any of this to go for you. But we’re out of time, and I need the Doctor back.”

“But I’m— I am the Doctor,” he said uncertainly. “Aren’t I?”

That seemed to be the wrong thing to say, because Clara flinched and closed her eyes, a tear slipping from beneath her lashes as he watched. “And you always will be,” she told him, her voice tight. “But he’s the Doctor too,” she went on, looking up at him again, “and I refuse to lose either of you. I need your help to save him, I can’t do this on my own.”

She reached into the pocket of her skirt and withdrew a silver fob watch, balancing it in her open palm to hold it out to him. The cover was engraved with the same sort of intricate lines and circles as the siege mode TARDIS had been, and somehow Adrian knew that if he were to open it, he would be able to read the markings on both. A chill ran through him, a sharp desire to be as far away from the fob watch as he could get.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he said, looking from Clara to the watch and back again. “That’s the death of Adrian Smith. Of this whole... life that’s been mine, teaching at Coal Hill, and going to the pub with you and Osgood, and, and forgetting where I put my laundry detergent. That’s all over now, if I open that watch.”

“I wish there was another way,” she said sincerely. “We didn’t do this to trick you, we didn’t have any other choice—”

“No, I know,” he assured her, his voice soft and detached as he stared down at the watch in her hand. “John — older-me,” he amended, shaking his head, “he tried to give me some of my memories back. I understand, a little. But I think I liked being Adrian Smith,” he said, finding her gaze again. “I liked being your friend.”

With her free hand, Clara reached out and took his, curling her fingers around his as though they’d done it thousands of times before. “That’s not going to change,” she told him, her voice fierce. “You’re not going to lose me. Not today, not ever. I promise.” She pressed the fob watch into his hand as she stared up at him with wide, pleading eyes. “Please, for me, just this once, don’t even argue.”

Adrian gazed at her for a long moment, then nodded reluctantly. “For you, my Clara,” he murmured. “For you.”

Before he could lose his nerve, Adrian took a deep breath and thumbed open the latch, feeling Clara’s fingers slip away from his. Golden flight flowed out of the fob watch, and he was suddenly lightheaded, like he’d stood up too quickly, though he hadn’t moved. The light reached out to him, encompassing him until it was all he could see, all he could feel, tingling across his skin and crackling inside his brain.

Adrian Smith was no more, there was only the golden light and the warm metal of the fob watch, still clutched in his hand. All that he was, all that he had ever been, lived there in that light. He could feel his mind rapidly expanding, the memories John had given him rearranging themselves and slotting back into their proper places with an odd kind of relief.

With a surge of vertigo, he realised abruptly how few memories John had given him, how much more there was to be remembered, summoned back into his mind through the light pouring out of the fob watch. Not just Clara, but Amy and Donna and Martha and Rose, back and back through all the long years of his life — to the first time he’d seen the TARDIS, the first time he’d met Clara, there at the TARDIS doors, and before that the vibrant orange sky of Gallifrey, calling him away into time and space. Millions and millions of memories stacked neatly into place, well worn and well remembered, twelve faces and more than a thousand years since he had first taken up the title of the Doctor.

And then the last memory before the Chameleon Arch, crisp in its newness, abruptly urgent in its importance to the current moment:

With the Tu’kavari close on his trail, he had jumped forward in Clara’s timestream, keying in on a recent spike in artron energy and landing the TARDIS in her flat some two years after he’d last seen her. The artron energy could only mean one thing, and he would need the cooperation of another version of himself, if his plan was to have any chance of working. And until then, who better to trust his safekeeping to than Clara Oswald.

Thank you for being my safe place to fall, he had told her, holding her close in a hug he’d refused to think of as desperate. Clara, my Clara. I surrender myself into your care.

And then the Chameleon Arch, the supposed ‘accident’, and the weeks living as Adrian, all leading to this specific point in space-time, standing in his TARDIS once again, staring down at the open fob watch in his hand as the golden light receded, dimmed, then faded.

He clicked the cover closed and read the phrase engraved in Circular Gallifreyan on the case: the infinite cosmos within us. It was a fragment of an old poem, far too sentimental for something as practical as the Chameleon Arch, but he had chosen it because of the comfort it always brought him, in this first moment after returning to himself. For the space of two heartbeats, he stared at the words written in a language all but gone from the universe, and felt that infinite cosmos within him unfurl and settle comfortably back into place.

“Doctor?” a voice asked hesitantly, and he looked up to find Clara watching him, her brown eyes large and worried. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Clara,” he breathed. It wasn’t quite like the sensation of the First Face, seeing her all over again for the first time, but it was as close as he would get without regenerating. “My Clara.”

“Your Clara,” she agreed, nodding and blinking away tears. “I missed you, Doctor.”

He pulled her into a tight hug, revelling in the familiar feel of it. “Thank you for looking after me,” he murmured into her hair.

Clutching at the tweed of his jacket, she nodded again. “I had help,” she laughed, though he could hear her tears in it.

“Yes, of course. Remind me to thank Osgood and Martha, too. I couldn’t have made it through this without the three of you on the job.” He gently pulled back and dropped a quick kiss on her forehead, spinning away towards the console before he could spot her reaction. It wasn’t really his place anymore, to go around kissing Clara Oswald, not with the way he’d seen her look at his older self.

And really, that other version of him was entirely the point of all this. As much as Adrian Smith had hated John Smith, none of that mattered now. He was the Doctor again, and whatever jealousy and spite he might still harbour for his older self, this new Scottish face was the Doctor too. If there was one place in the universe he ought to be, it was at Clara’s side.

“Now then,” he said, his hands already finding the familiar patterns of the TARDIS’s controls, “I hear we have a certain rogue Time Lord to rescue.”

“We’re going to go after him,” Clara said as she joined him at the console, anticipation clear on her face. “Even though he told us not to do.”

“Clara Oswald, when have you and I ever done as we’re told?” he asked, shooting her a conspiratorial look.

She watched him knowingly for a long moment, her eyes still red-rimmed but a smile beginning to curl the corner of her mouth. “You have a plan, don’t you? I can tell by the way you’re practically radiating smugness.”

“I do have a plan,” he agreed, “and a good one. Save Eyebrows, keep you safe, and take down the Tu’kavari all in one go. But I might need you to fly the TARDIS for part of it. Think you’re up for it?”

“Just tell me what you need me to do,” Clara replied with a confident smirk. “I’ve learned a few things in the last few years.”

“Ah, yes, and now who’s radiating smugness?” the Doctor laughed, circling the console to find the control panel he needed. “First things first, we need to find the other TARDIS,” he said as he punched in the commands to do just that. “Ah ha, gotcha.”

Clara had followed him around the console, and he angled the monitor towards her so she could see the tracking information. This required more than just locking in on the TARDIS at any point in her timeline, he specifically needed to find Eyebrows just as he’d begun to lead the Tu’kavari away. Once they came out of the Vortex, they’d be part of the forward flow of events again. They couldn’t risk getting this wrong.

“The time-space coordinates look right,” Clara said, nodding. “Today’s date, moving out of Earth’s orbit. And that bit there,” she added, pointing to a cluster of Gallifreyan that referenced relative time from the perspective of the TARDIS, “that means that it’s a future version of the TARDIS, right?”

“More or less,” he allowed, not wanting to let his surprise show. She certainly had picked up a few things. “So that’s Eyebrows,” he went on, “flying erratically to keep the Tu’kavari guessing. We’re going to materialise right on top of him, and then try to match his course as best we can — two TARDISes occupying the same space, just like earlier, right?”

“And then what?” she asked, her forehead creasing in confusion.

“And then...” He winced, already dreading the inevitable. “And then I make contact.”

“With the Tu’kavari?”

“With Eyebrows, first,” he explained. “Telepathically — it’s a Time Lord thing, messy but effective. Especially for our purposes: two TARDISes, two Doctors, the same but different. We open up our minds to the Tu’kavari...”

“And confuse the hell out of them,” Clara finished for him.

“Exactly,” he said, grinning back at her.

–

Chapter 10

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - chapter 7

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 7 is 2300 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

–

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 7

“Is it safe to take Adrian into the __?” Dr Jones asked, once they’d left the Black Archive and entered a long narrow hallway.

“Probably,” John replied, not breaking his stride. “Won’t jog his memory, at any rate. I can’t make any promises about existential crises, but everyone reacts differently. Frankly, I’ve always been curious how I would take it, if the shoe were on the other foot.”

“What’s this now?” Adrian asked, trying to keep up in more ways than one. Whatever strangeness was going on, he supposed he was all in now. Anything to save Clara.

“The, uh, word you can’t hear,” Osgood said, meeting his gaze. “It’s his spaceship.”

“And timeship,” Dr Jones added as they entered the lift at the end of the hallway.

“You’re having me on,” Adrian said, disbelief colouring his tone. Around them, the lift began to move upwards. “Just when I thought today couldn’t possibly get any weirder, now you’re telling me he's an alien, too?”

John shot him an acidic look. “Stop expecting things to get less weird. Your ‘normal’ life was the anomaly, not this.”

Unsure what to make of that, Adrian snarked back, “Courtney Woods warned me against going to see your spaceship, you know.”

“Taking her to the moon was a bad idea on my part, admittedly,” John said grudgingly.

“Think this is weird for you,” Dr Jones murmured as the lift came to a stop, “imagine how the rest of us feel.”

The doors opened to reveal an ancient-looking stone roof ringed with parapets. The sun was setting in the distance, and a chill wind whistled in from the nearby Thames. In the far corner from the lift stood an old fashioned police box, blue-painted wood and white-framed windows, exactly like the image that had been planted in Adrian’s mind by the supposed aliens the others all called the Tu’kavari.

“How did that get up here?” Adrian asked in confusion as they crossed the roof towards the police box.

“It’s a spaceship!” John cried, exasperated. He turned to Dr Jones. “Was I this bad, back when it was you and me hiding out?”

“Worse, somehow,” she answered dryly.

“I saw this, in that vision or whatever it was,” Adrian said, ignoring John’s insult. “Is this what they meant, then, when they said we have your machine?”

“Yes,” John said, lengthening his strides to reach it faster. “T-A-R-D-I-S, Time And Relative Dimension In Space. That’s the word you can’t hear.”

“But they don’t have it, if it’s here. Were they bluffing about that, too?”

John sent him a scathing look over his shoulder. “It’s a time machine. There are two versions of it in the local area, currently. This one and an older version that we left hidden in Clara’s flat. That’s the one they have.” He paused at the door of the police box, pulling a key from his pocket and fitting it into the lock. The door opened and he stepped inside in one fluid motion, as though he had done it a thousand times before.

Dr Jones followed after him without a backward glance, and Adrian hesitated, wondering how they were all expected to fit into such a small wooden box, supposed spaceship or no.

“It’s, uh—” Osgood started, then shook her head. “Nevermind. You’ll have to see it to believe it.” She offered him a reassuring smile and stepped through the door as well, leaving Adrian alone on the rooftop in the rapidly dimming light.

For half a moment, he considered making a run for it, getting as far away from the entire situation as he could. But the vision from the Tu’kavari was still sharp in his memory — the feeling of Clara lying lifeless in his arms, the inhuman voice telling him, We have the woman you love. He still wasn’t completely convinced that he could trust Osgood and Dr Jones, much less John Smith, but as much as it might be easier to believe this was all some elaborate hoax, he couldn’t deny the alien feeling of the Tu’kavari forcing their way into his mind, couldn’t dismiss the first-hand experience of something so impossible.

Which meant that Clara was actually in danger. The others all seemed to believe that the threat against her life was real, and John was— Well, Adrian could hardly continue to think that the abrasive Scotsman was indifferent to Clara, when his frantic worry about her was so blatantly obvious. He loved her as much as Adrian did, and had declared that he would stop at nothing to get her back safe.

How could Adrian do any less? How could he possibly walk away now and leave Clara to her fate? No. He would do whatever it took to get her back, no matter how bizarre all of this seemed, no matter how unlikely. Clara was in danger, and he would go to hell and back to save her.

His mind made up, Adrian gathered his courage and pushed his way past the blue wooden door, trying to ready himself for whatever lay beyond.

But nothing could have prepared him for the room on the other side of the door. It wasn’t just bigger than the footprint of the police box, it was cavernous, dimly lit and seeming to stretch on impossibly in every direction. A sort of circular computer station occupied the centre of the room directly ahead of him, at which John was already standing, tapping away at a keyboard, ostensibly ignoring him while Osgood and Dr Jones lingered nearby. Adrian’s gaze followed the central pillar upwards to a large set of rotors that disappeared into the low light overhead.

“Oh, this is...” he started, words failing him as he nearly stumbled over his feet, trying to simultaneously walk towards the centre console and look around the room, unable to pull his eyes away from the inconceivable sight around him. “This is proper— proper alien, isn’t it?”

“I’ll give the Chameleon Arch this much: its impression of a pudding brain is spot-on,” John said sourly, not looking up from the monitor in front of him.

“Don’t pretend this isn’t your favourite part of introducing someone to the __,” Dr Jones chided him gently.

Adrian paid them no mind, too engrossed by the interior of the police box. A second level ringed the entire space, filled with bookshelves and chalkboards and well-worn armchairs, accessible from the several staircases placed at intervals around the room. It was somehow both ancient and brand new, cosy and homey and yet like something brought to life directly out of science fiction. Osgood was right: no description, no warning could possibly have prepared him for the reality of seeing it in person.

An external awareness touched his mind, and Adrian flinched, bracing himself for another assault from the Tu’kavari, another round of pain and horror and threats against Clara. But to his amazement, this time the foreign presence in his head was gentle and calming, speaking to him not with the terrifying collective voice like knives dragged over ice, but rather in abstract concepts the size of galaxies, wordless and profound.

“Is this ship... alive??” he asked, trying to grasp what it was he was being told, and by whom.

John shot him a brief surprised look, barely pausing in whatever it was he was occupied with at the computer console. “Now that is a first.”

“It is alive, isn’t it?” Adrian went on, more sure of it with each passing second. “It— she, she knows me. She’s always known me,” he added in an awed whisper.

He pulled his gaze down from the rotors to find Osgood watching him with that same longing, wistful look he’d seen her direct at John and Clara, though he couldn’t imagine why. “She stole you and ran away, a very long time ago,” she said. “It’s always you and her, in the end.”

“Ah ha, gotcha!” John said triumphantly, before Adrian could ask Osgood what on Earth that meant.

“You found Clara?” she said, turning towards him.

John shook his head. “Not Clara, the signature of the other __. Oh, she’s clever,” he murmured, his gaze still on the monitor on the central console. “She put the __ into siege mode. That’s why the line went dead: no communication in or out, except from Gallifrey High Command or another __ in siege mode.” He tapped a few keys, frowning at the display. “But it also would have locked her out of all the major systems, since she’s not a Time Lord — flight controls and navigation and just about everything else.”

“So wherever Clara is, she’s stuck,” Dr Jones said, grimacing. “No way to fly the __ or call for help or anything.”

“Would she be able to take the __ out of siege mode?” Osgood asked.

“She ought to be able to,” John said, finally looking away from the monitor to meet Osgood’s gaze. “Unless it’s not safe,” he added ominously. “Unless she needs to stay in siege mode.”

“Unless they have her, you mean,” Adrian said, too sure he was right to quite manage to phrase it as a question. “Unless it wasn’t a bluff.”

John looked at him sidelong, his face serious. “Given the evidence at hand, in all likelihood the Tu’kavari do technically have the __, with Clara inside,” he said. “But they can’t do anything to either of them, so long as Clara stays in siege mode. It’s all hollow threats. For now, at least.”

“Then how do we save her?” Adrian demanded.

“I’m working on it,” John muttered, turning his attention back on the computer monitor. “It doesn’t help that we’re going into this blind. I miscalculated the Tu’kavari once already, and it got Clara captured. We can’t risk doing that again.”

“Well, what do we know about the Tu’kavari?” Dr Jones asked, looking from John to Osgood.

“Clara’s report said that they’re a telepathic hivemind conglomerate,” she replied, “travelling around the universe subjugating and absorbing other telepathic beings. They want the Doctor, for obvious reasons, but Earth’s population should be fairly safe from them.”

Dr Jones’s brow wrinkled in concern. “That’s all we have?”

“UNIT has never had contact with the Tu’kavari before, so nearly everything we know comes through Clara. She didn’t get much of a chance to talk with Bowtie,” Osgood said, catching herself with a wince halfway through a gesture towards Adrian, “before he used the Chameleon Arch, but she wrote down what little he was able to tell her.”

“No, hang on, what have I got to do with any of this?” Adrian demanded. “My memory’s been a bit fuzzy since my accident, but I’m sure I’ve never said anything like that to Clara.”

“Your ‘accident’ wasn’t actually an accident, or an injury of any sort,” Dr Jones said, turning to him. “You had to forget all of this, so you could hide from the Tu’kavari. Your name isn’t really Adrian Smith—”

“What the hell are you talking about? Of course it is!”

“We don’t have time for this,” John growled, crossing towards Adrian with a few long strides, his heavy boots ringing loudly against the metal floor. “We can’t truly end this without the fob watch, but until then, this will have to do.”

Without warning, John seized him by the shoulders and knocked his forehead into Adrian’s with enough force to send Adrian staggering back a few steps.

“Ow! Why would you—” he started, but he was quickly overwhelmed by a flood of images in his mind, flickering rapidly, each one overflowing with information, with history, with memory. There were too many to count, too much all at once to try to make any sense of it, but amongst all of it a few moments jumped out, seared onto his heart as if he’d always known and was only just now remembering:

Clara smiling at him, framed in the doorway of the TARDIS as he leaned against the console, watching her fondly.

A field of shimmering deep space filling his entire vision, stars and galaxies whose names he knew, planets and moons he had walked, the whole wide scattered universe peppered with his fingerprints.

His hands digging through a pile of old clothes, discarding some sort of monk’s habit in favour of a familiar tweed jacket and bowtie, as his pulse thrummed in his chest, excited and relieved.

Clara saying to him, “She said you were the savior of worlds, once. Are you going to save this one?” and his own voice replying, “If I do, will you come away with me?”

It was all too much, disjointed and yet intensely personal, intensely his. Defeat and triumph, adventure and heroism, love and loss so painful he thought he would never recover. But then Clara, always Clara, her hand in his and her eyes watching him as though he’d hung the moon and the stars.

“How—” he managed to gasp out as the flashes of memory continued unabated. “How is any of this possible??”

And the TARDIS, his TARDIS, how could he have ever forgotten? The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away. Oh, that box. You’ll dream about that box. It’ll never leave you. Big and little at the same time. Brand new and ancient, and the bluest blue ever.

The most beautiful thing he had ever known.

“Telepathic transference,” John was saying, as the images in Adrian’s mind continued to ripple outwards, like a stone dropped in water, disrupting everything he thought he knew about himself. “Martha and Osgood are right,” he went on, “you had to forget everything, so that you could hide from the Tu’kavari. Only it hasn’t worked. They found us anyway. And now Clara’s in danger, so I need you to step up, memories or no, and do the only thing Clara has ever asked of us: be a Doctor.”

--

Chapter 8

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 2

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 2 is 2200 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

--

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 2

They didn’t stay at the pub much longer after Clara left, and when Osgood walked him all the way to his front door, Adrian invited her in for tea or popcorn or whatever he could coax his kitchen into producing without burning. She happily accepted, seeming in no hurry to leave, and they ended up spending the evening on his sofa, watching Netflix and bad late night telly, throwing the worst of the scorched popcorn kernels at the screen and laughing until their sides hurt.

Osgood was good company, Adrian could see why she and Clara were friends. But it didn’t make him miss Clara any less, or keep him from wondering what she might be doing tonight without him, wherever John Smith had dragged her off to.

When Clara showed up on his doorstep shortly before noon the next day, take-away lunch in hand, dark circles under her eyes, and wearing the same clothes as the day before, Adrian’s hatred of the Scottish caretaker climbed to new heights.

She brushed off his concerns about the ‘minor emergency’ with vague answers, far more interested in hearing about the rest of his evening with Osgood than in talking about what she’d been up to with John.

“I’m glad you two had fun,” she said, smiling in a way that almost disguised the sadness in her eyes. “Osgood needs more of that in her life. She spends far too much time focused on work.”

“What is it that she does for work, anyway?” he asked.

“Boring government stuff,” she shrugged, the repetition of the phrase catching at Adrian’s memory. “Besides me, most the people she knows are people she works with, boring on top of boring, so it’s good for her to break out of that routine for a bit. She texted me last night, couldn’t stop gushing about how much she enjoyed meeting you.”

“Well, I enjoyed meeting her, too. And you were right, she does have excellent taste in bowties.”

“She’ll be thrilled to hear you said so,” Clara said, a sparkle in her eye that worried Adrian.

“Clara,” he started delicately, but she must have read what he meant to say in his tone, because she waved him into silence as she finished her bite of food.

“Don’t worry, I’m not trying to set the two of you up!”

“No?” he said, doublechecking.

She shook her head. “No, I can’t see that working out, certainly not in the long run. And anyway, the last thing I want is to be third wheel to my two bowtie-wearing best friends.” She smiled at him, and Adrian felt his pulse pick up. “I’m just happy to see the two of you get along so well is all. Oh! She mentioned something about some show you were watching, said she laughed so hard she could hardly breathe.”

When his description of what exactly had been so funny failed to paint an adequate picture, he pulled up the programme again on Netflix so Clara could enjoy it too. She laughed at all the same jokes, but Adrian found himself watching her more than the television screen, content in a way he hadn’t been the night before. When it ended she claimed the remote from him, insistent on sharing one of her favourites with him in return. She fell asleep with her head on his shoulder barely fifteen minutes in, and Adrian pulled the throw blanket from the back of the sofa to drape over her, careful not to wake her with his movements.

He stole glances at her while she slept, the television’s volume turned down and his attention only nominally on the show that he was sure she’d want to hear his opinion on later. Whatever she’d been up to the night before, it had clearly left her exhausted. He tried not to think about it. No matter what was going on between her and John Smith, she was here with him now, curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the world, and Adrian resolved not to give the aggravating Scotsman another thought.

--

That resolve lasted right up until he walked in on the two of them bickering in the supply closet at Coal Hill on Monday morning, standing so close to each other that Adrian was surprised there was still room for their excited gesticulations. Their conversation instantly ground to a halt as they registered his presence, their heads swiveling to look at him in tandem.

“Really, Mr Smith,” Adrian said crossly, drawing himself up to his full height. It had to be the other man’s untamed curls that made him seem so much taller, that had to be it. “Miss Oswald has classes to teach, and I’m quite certain the school’s landscaping is suffering from your inattention!”

“Now see here, Mr Smith,” the caretaker shot back, but Clara stepped in between them, her hands raised.

“That’s enough out of both of you Smiths. Adrian is right, I have class starting in five minutes. John, you and I can pick this up again later.”

“Clara—” John Smith started, but she cut him off with a look.

“Later,” she said again, then looped her arm through Adrian’s and all but dragged him away in the direction of the English department.

“What the hell were you thinking, going into a supply closet with him?” he demanded before his brain could catch up to his mouth.

She let out a frustrated noise between her teeth. “You ridiculous man,” she said, making the familiar endearment sound more like an epithet. She waited until they’d rounded a corner then pulled him to a stop, glaring up at him. “There are parts of my life that are unnecessarily complicated as it is. Please don’t make it worse by picking a fight with John Smith.”

“I don’t like the way he speaks to you,” he growled.

“And I don’t like how much you’re letting him get under your skin!” She held his gaze fiercely for a moment, then sighed. “John is my friend,” she explained patiently. “I know that can be hard to read from the outside, but he is. He has my best interests at heart, and he cares greatly for— for this school. Please, just, give each other a little space, would you?”

“Don’t you deserve some space too?” Adrian grumbled, unable to let it go, the image of the two of them standing so close together seared into his brain.

Clara closed her eyes and clenched her jaw in a way that made him think she was reaching for calm, perhaps counting to ten in her head. “If I wanted distance from either of you, I would say so,” she told him evenly, finding his gaze again. “Could you, please, for me, just keep the peace?”

“Oh, alright,” he said, deflating. “For you, not for him.”

She shook her head. “You really are ridiculous, you know,” she said, then turned and continued on towards her classroom, leaving Adrian to watch her go.

--

It was his turn to supervise the students during their lunch break, and Adrian strode around the schoolyard, doing his best to keep his attention on the students and off the situation with Clara. He hadn’t seen her since that morning, which wasn’t nearly long enough to conclude that she was avoiding him, but the thought nagged at him all the same. He’d behaved badly, and his hatred of John Smith was a poor excuse for talking to Clara the way he had. He still wanted to be her friend, even if her heart inexplicably belonged to the infuriating caretaker.

Not that she had said as much, even when given the chance. John is my friend, she’d said, rather than any other descriptor that could have made the situation crystal clear for Adrian. He knew he didn’t have any right to dictate who she chose as a friend or a paramour, but it was not knowing the details of the situation that was eating at him. Maybe he should just tell her how he felt about her after all, let the chips fall where they may. If I wanted distance from either of you, I would say so, she had said as well.

Or maybe John Smith didn’t have any idea of Clara’s regard for him. He seemed like the sort who would be flippantly blind to something like that. Or worse, maybe he knew and was using that to string Clara along, manipulate her into standing toe to toe with him in tiny closets, and convince her to drop her plans on a Friday night and rush off who knows where with him. Adrian sighed and leaned against one of the school buildings at the edge of the yard. Or maybe he just had an overactive imagination and a jealous nature, and didn’t deserve Clara’s affection anymore than John Smith did.

“This is like Danny all over again!” Adrian heard in the unmistakable Scottish brogue of the man in question, and he poked his head around the corner to see John and Clara once again facing off, this time just outside the caretaker’s shed.

He quickly leaned back out of sight as Clara let out a frustrated noise he was only too familiar with. “Don’t you dare,” she snapped, and he was perversely pleased to hear her giving as good as she got, at least. “You promised you wouldn’t do this, you promised!”

The caretaker sighed, loudly enough to be heard over the noise of the students. “Clara, I—”

“Don’t you think this is hard enough on me as it is?” she demanded. “Having to pretend like this?”

“It hasn’t exactly been a picnic for me, either,” John Smith groused coldly, and Adrian had to force his hands not to curl into fists. He shouldn’t be listening in on their private conversation, he knew he shouldn't. But he didn’t trust the Scotsman when it came to Clara, and found himself unwilling to move away from his hiding spot as the conversation around the corner barrelled on like a car wreck in slow motion.

“We can both deal with the emotional fallout when the rest of this is done,” Clara said, sounding weary.

“Did I ever look at you like that? With that horrible soppy puppy-love?” he snarked. Adrian scowled at that, wondering if John was referring to him, wondering if he’d been that transparent.

Well, so what if he had? Clara deserved someone who really loved her. She deserved someone who looked at her the way she looked at John.

“I don’t know, you tell me,” she sighed.

“Maybe it’s an effect of the Arch, part of the cover,” John said obliquely.

“Can we not do this? I thought we’d gotten past all this last Christmas, honestly.” She sighed again, and Adrian was back to wanting to punch whoever could make her sound so unhappy. “Two years, he said he had jumped forward two years. You may not remember any of this, but you have to remember how you were feeling two years ago.”

“Two years for you, doesn’t necessarily narrow it down for me,” he returned snidely.

“Why are you being so difficult about this?” Clara asked, some of the fight returning to her voice.

“Because I don’t know where I stand with you!” John all but yelled, and Adrian blinked in confusion at the depth of emotion clearly hidden behind the caretaker’s apparent anger. Perhaps he wasn’t as indifferent to Clara as Adrian had thought.

“Will you keep your voice down!” she hissed back at him. “Of course you know where you stand with me! Why would this make any difference?”

“Because it’s him. He’s the one you really want. Always has been.”

“No. He isn’t,” Clara said evenly, words carefully enunciated. “I want you. I don’t know how much more clear I can make that.”

Adrian flinched, his heart turning over in his chest. She was right, it couldn’t be much clearer than that. He really should go, give them privacy in what was obviously a lover’s spat.

“But ‘Adrian’ is perfect for you,” John said before he could move, freezing him to the spot. “Especially like this.”

“He isn’t even really—” Clara started, but John cut her off before Adrian could find out where that sentence might have gone.

“You said he told you it might take months or even years for them to stop looking for him. Well, maybe we ought to let it. Maybe I should go off and try to solve the mystery, and leave you here to live a normal life for a few years. Leave you to be happy with him.”

“If you leave me now I will never forgive you,” she shot back, tears in her voice, dashing any fragile hope Adrian might have held. “You think that’s what I want, to prolong this? I am trying to protect you! You, and no one else. So, yes: go, solve it. Quick as you can, so we can move past this mess. But if you think leaving me is going to fix anything, you are an even bigger idiot than I thought.”

Adrian could hear her stomped footsteps coming his direction, and he quickly moved himself to the other end of the schoolyard before he could be caught eavesdropping, his heart heavy and his head overfull.

-- 

Chapter 3

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 4

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 4 is 1900 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

–

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 4

John Smith seemed to be absent from Coal Hill on Friday, though Adrian kept a look out for him, determined not to repeat the fiascos of either Monday or Thursday. He could no longer avoid the fact that John knew of his feelings for Clara, but at least he could avoid the man himself.

Adrian’s students were reading the ending of Romeo and Juliet aloud in each of his classes, a perfect match for his morose, heartsick mood. Arms, take your last embrace, indeed. The hug Clara had bestowed on him dimmed in comparison to what he had witnessed in the caretaker’s shed. He needed to respect Clara’s choices, and stop putting himself in situations that only further crushed his already broken heart.

His classes finally dragged to a close, and he had never been more grateful that the last hour of the school day was his prep period. He had marking to do, but perhaps he could slip off just as soon as the dismissal bell rang, head home before Clara could ask him about his weekend plans. A few days by himself to get his head right would be for the best.

“Don’t be sad, Mr Smith,” a voice called conversationally, after most of his students had filed out, and he paused in the act of erasing the whiteboard to find Courtney Woods lingering at her desk. She was ostensibly still packing up her bookbag, but had the kind of sharp gleam in her eyes that usually meant trouble from her. She was an excellent student, but frequently a disruptive influence, and more perceptive than any teenager ought to be. “Just because Ozzy loves the Scottie, I mean,” she went on with deliberate casualness, only proving his point.

He turned back to the board and summoned up some level of authoritative composure before replying. “If you’re referring to Coal Hill staff, Miss Woods, please use their correct forms of address.”

Courtney sighed loudly, then in a mock-formal tone said, “Do not be dismayed that Miss Oswald loves Mr Smith the caretaker.”

His back still towards her, Adrian took the opportunity to close his eyes for a moment. “Thank you for the advice, Miss Woods. Now, you ought to get a shift on, don’t want to be late for your next class.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, her shrug nearly audible. “But trust me, it’s not worth trying to get between them. Mr Pink tried that, and look what happened to him!”

“Mr Pink?” he asked before he could stop himself, turning towards her again.

She gave him a look like he’d lost his mind. “Yeah, you remember Mr Pink. Died in that car accident last year. Used to teach maths, and oversee the Cadets in whatever the hell it is the Cadets do.”

“Language,” he chided her without any force behind it, but she barrelled on as if he hadn’t spoken.

“He was dating Miss Oswald, and the Doc— um, the caretaker, he hated it.” She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head to one side, considering him. “You really don’t remember Mr Pink?” she asked. “It was all anyone could talk about for months!”

He really didn’t remember Mr Pink, though he wasn’t about to admit that to Courtney. “Is that what the students of this school do for fun?” he said instead. “Gossip about the staff?”

She shrugged. “Nah, just when the caretaker’s involved. He’s a weird one.”

“Well, thank you for your opinions, Miss Woods, but you really should be getting to class.”

“I’m only saying,” she added as a parting shot, shouldering her bookbag and heading for the door, “if he offers to show you his spaceship, just say no.”

Adrian blinked after her in confusion, before deciding he had quite enough on his plate without trying to decode the riddles of Courtney Woods. The final bell of the day could not possibly come soon enough. He threw himself into his marking, more for the distraction than any desire to be finished with it. He would probably need plenty of distractions over the weekend, too. Anything to keep his mind off Clara.

He worked through his stack of marking until the last twenty minutes of the school day, then got up to stretch his legs and check his mailbox in the teachers’ lounge, fully intent on making himself scarce just as soon as the students were released for the afternoon. He was quite nearly back to his classroom when murmured voices from around the corner ahead slowed him in his tracks.

“Where’s Bowtie?” he caught, in a hushed, serious tone, and he blinked in surprise as he recognised Osgood’s voice. What was she doing here, particularly during school hours?

“It’s his free period,” Clara said, also rushed and quiet. “Probably in the teacher’s lounge, if he’s not in his classroom. Do you have an update? I’ve not heard anything since Kate’s message.”

With a start, Adrian realised ‘Bowtie’ must be in reference to him, and touched the deep maroon accessory at his collar self-consciously before leaning around the corner to catch a quick look. Clara and Osgood were standing outside the closed door of Clara’s classroom in the otherwise empty hallway, angled towards each other, looking tense. He darted back around the corner before they spotted him, feeling only marginally guilty about eavesdropping yet again. Especially if they were talking about him.

“They broke atmo’ fifteen minutes ago,” Osgood was saying to Clara, the phrase so strange that for a moment Adrian wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. “Kate has Torchwood keeping tabs on them, but she’s ready to mobilise our forces too, if it comes to that. She wants you to come in just as quick as you can. Have you phoned Eyebrows yet?”

“He’s not answering his mobile,” Clara replied. “Which, with him, could mean anything, good, bad, or otherwise. I wish I knew—” She cut herself off with a frustrated sigh. “He called them a telepathic hivemind conglomerate. Other him, Bowtie, I mean, in the all of three minutes I got to talk to him before he used the Arch.”

He had said what? When?? Adrian couldn’t remember that particular combination of words ever leaving his mouth. Things had been strange since his concussion, certainly, but that didn’t sound like the sort of thing he would throw into conversation under any circumstances.

“I wish I knew which him they’re more likely to key in on,” Clara continued, her words only adding to Adrian’s confusion, “the one with the face or the one with the hearts.”

“And Eyebrows still hasn’t remembered anything about this?” Osgood asked obliquely.

“Not a bit. He said he’s not surprised, between the Chameleon Arch and crossing his own timeline. And maybe that’s a good thing, in case they’re searching for the right memory signature, like he thought they might do. But this is exactly what Bowtie didn’t want, us facing this blind.”

“Could be worse,” Osgood said. “Could be stuck alone with him in an archaic point in history, without any support or resources, and a heaping load of racism and sexism besides.”

Clara groaned. “Martha so deserves a raise.”

“I’ll make sure to include that recommendation in my report to Kate when this is all over. Assuming we survive.”

“Right,” Clara said, voice gone business-like again, and Adrian could visualise her squaring her shoulders. “The ‘telepathic’ bit still worries me.” It worried him, too, frankly, as much as any other other part of this bizarre, nonsensical conversation that inexplicably involved him. “But in terms of surviving this, there’s a much bigger issue at stake.”

“In that if something happens to Bowtie,” Osgood said, “it could cause a massive paradox that might tear a hole in the universe?”

Wait, what??

“Exactly,” Clara sighed, evidently completely serious.

“We should try to avoid that,” Osgood agreed mildly.

“Priority has to be protecting Bowtie, then. Oh, answer your phone, you ridiculous man,” Clara added in an emphatic undertone, making Adrian’s heart twist. He’d never heard her call anyone but him that, and he pulled his own mobile from his pocket, just to doublecheck that he hadn’t missed any messages from Clara.

“The Tower’s the safest place,” Osgood said, drawing Adrian’s attention away from his utterly unhelpful phone and back to the strange conversation happening around the corner. “The whole building is shielded, the Archive doubly so. They shouldn’t be able to scan it or land there, but...”

“But then there’s loads of questions from Bowtie, and Eyebrows can’t land there either,” Clara finished for her.

She was right about one thing at least: he certainly did have loads of questions about all of this.

“Questions seem preferable to destroying the web of time. And there’s always the new landing pad protocol, don’t forget.”

“Bad choices but you still have to choose,” Clara said, sounding almost like she was quoting something. “Alright. I ought to get back to my students for the last few minutes of class, but then I’ll see if I can find Bowtie. Can you scan for him?”

“Not in his current state. It’d only turn up Eyebrows, if he’s around.”

“Well, scan for him, too. If he’s not going to answer his mobile at a time like this, I’m not above using whatever resources we have at hand to find him.”

“What about the __?” Osgood asked, and Adrian blinked in surprise as his brain evidently jumped right over whatever the last word in that sentence had been.

“Bowtie’s __ you mean?” Clara said, and his mind again skipped like a badly scratched record. Two syllables, heavy on the consonants, but when he tried it hear it it was like there was just nothing there. “Not a bad idea, should be able to lock onto the other version of itself, at least. The cloaking device is still on, you remember where it’s parked in my flat?”

“Maybe you should do that bit. It likes you better, and you can actually fly it, if things come to that.”

“Oh, the __ likes you fine. But you’re right, today might not be the best time to learn to fly it. That does mean you’re on Bowtie duty, though. You alright with that?”

Adrian winced at the phrase. Bowtie duty. Like he was a burden, a loose end, someone they needed to coddle and watch over.

“Of course,” Osgood said. “Good job you introduced us. He trusts me, I’m pretty sure. I’ll text him and get him to meet me for a drink or something, that should make it easy to have our people pick him up and take him to the Tower.”

“Perfect. Five minutes of class left, then I’ll dash home for the __ and text you as soon as I hear anything from Eyebrows,” Clara said, but Adrian had stopped listening.

He had understood less than half of their conversation, and it had still somehow managed to be the strangest part of what was already the weirdest month of his life. But that was a bridge too far, hearing Clara and Osgood talk about him like that, more than his wounded heart and ego could take. Without pausing to think about it, he straightened up and turned away from them, walking swiftly and silently down the hall, continuing on past the doors that led outside.

--

Chapter 5

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - chapter 5

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 5 is 2900 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

–

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 5

Adrian reached the turn off for his flat and kept on walking past, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his trousers, his gaze fixed on the toes of his boots, and his mind a blur. No matter how he turned it over in his head, nothing he’d overheard from Clara and Osgood’s conversation made any sense. There was the obvious strangeness, like their codename for him, and Osgood’s presence at Coal Hill in the first place. But that was nothing compared to the terms they’d thrown around so easily. Telepathy. Web of time. Hole in the universe.

He tried to fit it all into some sort of innocent explanation. Play-acting for the students? No, the classroom door had been closed, and they’d kept their voices hushed, as if afraid to be overheard. A game, perhaps? Role playing or augmented reality or whatever it was that people with active imaginations got up to in their freetime? That couldn’t be it either, Clara was too much of a professional, she would never step away from her students for something like that.

Adrian felt like Amelia Pond, the girl from the fairy tale whose life didn’t make any sense. Nothing fit. There were no logical explanations.

His mobile buzzed in his pocket, and he withdrew it to find a text from Osgood. Drinks at the pub tonight? My treat. :)

It was at such odds with what he’d heard in the hallway at Coal Hill, in tone and content both, that Adrian stuffed his phone back into his pocket without a reply and continued walking. The way Osgood and Clara had talked about him, like he was a child in need of minding, still stung. But far more alarming was their casual decision to abduct him in service of whatever it was they were mixed up in.

No matter how he looked at it, there was only one conclusion, as much as he hated to even think it: his friends had been lying to him. There was something sinister going on that they had intentionally hidden from him. Worse than that, even, they had been managing him. ‘Bowtie duty’, Clara had called it. Was that what had happened last Friday as well? Clara called off on a ‘minor emergency’ that had apparently taken all night, and Osgood volunteering to make sure he got home safe, then staying with him the rest of the evening?

His phone buzzed again. He staunchly ignored it.

Did Osgood even like bowties? Or had it all been part of a plan to gain his trust and keep tabs on him? And if that was what had happened last Friday, that meant John Smith had to be mixed up in all this as well.

He stopped in his tracks, glaring off into the distance. John Smith. If their codename for Adrian was ‘Bowtie’, then who else could they possibly mean when they referred to ‘Eyebrows’. Of course John was part of this. In all likelihood he had pulled Clara into the whole mess. He probably wasn’t even a real caretaker. That would explain why he was so terrible at his job.

Adrian resumed walking, shoulders hunched and head bowed, no destination in mind other than just away.

What else had he missed? What other odd moments had he shrugged off in the last weeks, too focused on his infatuation with Clara to see the forest for the trees? What other lies had they made him believe? And why? What reason could they possibly have for behaving so bizarrely?

The buzzing of his mobile hadn’t stopped, he realised, and he pulled it from his pocket in exasperation, half a mind to tell Osgood to leave him out of whatever it was she was playing at.

Dr Martha Jones calling the display read, to his surprise, and he quickly answered it.

“Adrian, hi, I’m glad I caught you!” Dr Jones’s voice came down the line, sounding harried.

He frowned at that. “Everything alright?”

“We got your blood test results back, and there’s something I’d like to discuss with you in person, if you’re free this afternoon. It’s somewhat urgent, I’m afraid,” she replied.

“I can swing by your clinic now, if you like,” he said, his worry only increasing. “Shouldn’t take me more than fifteen minutes or so to get there.”

“Perfect,” Dr Jones said, relieved. “The staff has already gone home for the day, so I’ll meet you at the front. See you soon.”

The call ended and Adrian was left staring at the screen in bewilderment. Yet another strange thing to add to the pile of today’s inexplicable weirdness. Dr Jones couldn’t be caught up in this, could she? No, he was being paranoid. She’d been his physician for years, and only met Clara because she’d taken him to the clinic after his accident.

Which meant that there actually was something wrong with his bloodwork, something so dire that Dr Jones didn’t feel it could wait until Monday. He looked around to try to get his bearings, quickly gave up on that pointless endeavour, and instead thumbed over to the cab app on his phone.

Clara and Osgood could keep their games about telepathy and punching holes in the universe. Adrian had more important things on his mind now.

--

Dr Jones met him at the front of the clinic, holding the door open for him to enter, then led him through the empty lobby to an exam room. It had an almost haunted atmosphere to it, this place he was so used to seeing filled with staff and patients, similar to how Coal Hill could seem late in the evening after everyone else had gone home. He tried to shake the feeling that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, telling himself again that he was just being paranoid.

“Wait here while I grab your chart, I’ll only be a moment,” Dr Jones told him as she slipped out of the room.

Adrian perched on the edge of the exam table, then got up again and sat in one of the chairs instead, feeling antsy. Whatever this was must be important, but he couldn’t quite get Clara and Osgood’s conversation out of his mind. That combination, along with the oppressive silence of the clinic, only served to ratchet up his anxiety. He tried to calm his racing pulse and failed at that miserably.

“Thanks for coming in so quickly,” Dr Jones said, re-entering the exam room with a folder in hand and pulling up a chair next to his. “I can imagine you had other plans for your Friday afternoon.”

“Not good news then, I take it?” he asked.

Dr Jones gave him a sympathetic look, holding his gaze for a long moment. “I’m afraid not.”

Before he could reply, a familiar voice drew his attention, and Adrian spun quickly to find Osgood framed in the doorway. “Oh, thank god,” she said, sounding relieved.

“Osgood? What are you doing here? What the hell is going on?” he demanded. As he said it, he felt a sharp pinch in his neck, and turned to find Dr Jones holding an empty hypodermic needle.

“I’m am so, so sorry,” she told him sincerely, as the world went abruptly dark.

--

Adrian came back to himself slowly, the memory of what had happened in Dr Jones’s clinic filtering back in before his body had fully recovered from the drugs he’d been given. Whatever was going on with Clara and Osgood, evidently his physician was tied up in it as well. And whatever it was, it had quickly escalated from a strange conversation in the Coal Hill hallway to drugging and abducting him. He held still, kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady, all too aware of the danger he was likely in.

Even without looking around, he could tell he’d been moved, the room around him colder and larger-sounding than the exam room at the clinic. He could hear an air filtration system high overhead, and footsteps pacing in the middle distance, crisp and echoey on what he guessed was probably a cement floor.

He should have trusted his instincts about Dr Jones being mixed up in this weirdness, rather than dismissing it as paranoia. He should have trusted that feeling that told him to get as far away from all of this as possible. Wherever they’d taken him, he was completely at their mercy. No one knew that he’d gone to see Dr Jones, no one would even think to look for him until Monday at the earliest. His limbs felt heavy and sluggish, so making a run for it didn’t seem to be an option, either.

It was chilling to think that people he trusted, those he considered friends could do this to him so easily. And the knowledge that Clara of all people— his Clara — could be part of this made Adrian’s heart twist. He loved her. Against his better instincts for self-preservation, he loved her enough that a little thing like betraying him couldn’t possibly change his feelings for her. Whatever happened next, whatever nefarious situation she’d dragged him into, he couldn’t help but love her still.

The pacing footsteps stopped a few feet away. “Is it just me,” Osgood’s familiar voice asked, “or is this taking too long?”

“For him to wake up, you mean?” Dr Jones replied, and only the drugs still in his system kept Adrian from flinching, her voice was so close by. “Could be any time now,” she went on, apparently unperturbed by their current circumstances. “His physiology is only mostly human, so it’s anyone’s guess.”

“It’s not just that,” Osgood said, far more worry in her tone than in Dr Jones’s. “We ought to have heard from Clara by now. It’s been more than an hour.”

“Which means exactly nothing if she had to take the __ somewhere,” Dr Jones pointed out, evidently using the same word Adrian had overheard Clara and Osgood say at Coal Hill, the strange two syllable word his mind couldn’t seem to hold onto. “You know how it is. Wibbly-wobbly. Honestly, it might be a good sign: if Clara hadn’t been able to get in touch with Eyebrows, we’d certainly have heard from her by now.”

“You’re right,” Osgood sighed, and Adrian heard a chair scrape briefly against the hard floor as she presumably came to sit near Dr Jones, close to the cot they’d laid him out on. “Do you ever miss it?” she asked a moment later, her voice softer, almost wistful. “Travelling with him?”

“All the time,” Dr Jones said. “The things you see out there... nothing compares. But I also like sleeping in my own bed, and not nearly dying on a regular basis.”

“To be fair, that still happens fairly often in this job, too.”

“True, but at least now I get a salary, and hazard pay for the really bad days,” Dr Jones replied, laughing. “What about you? Do you ever wish...?”

“Only on days ending with ‘y’,” Osgood said levelly. “I mean, of course I do. I’ve read every file we have on him at least twice, daydreamed about it for years. But I know I’m needed here, given the political situation of late. And if I’ve learned anything from reading about the Doctor’s companions, I know the best days are when you manage to save someone, or many someones. When you’re able to make a difference.”

“Yeah,” Dr Jones said, sounding thoughtful. All of that made about as much sense to Adrian as the conversation he’d overheard at Coal Hill, but he kept still and listened intently, hoping they might say something that would shed some light on the situation, or help him find a way to escape.

“I’m doing that here,” Osgood said. “The work we do, it makes a difference. And that’s enough for me.”

“Save the world, save the universe,” Dr Jones replied ruefully. “All in a day’s work.”

“Or: hastily paint and furnish a flat, fabricate student records, drug and kidnap the Doctor...”

A chill ran through him at Osgood’s offhanded, almost joking tone. Whoever this Doctor person was, it sounded as though Adrian wasn’t the only one taken against his will. How many other people had they stolen out of their lives? And why?

But Dr Jones laughed in response. “Is it terrible of me that I wish we got to do that last one a bit more often?”

“I won’t tell him if you don’t,” Osgood said with an amused snort.

“He really ought to have woken up by now,” Dr Jones said, her tone turning serious again. “I didn’t give him all that much.” She touched Adrian’s wrist, perhaps intending to take his pulse, and he jumped in spite of himself.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” she said. “I was actually starting to worry.”

He squinted one eye open at her. “Worry about the man you abducted?” he asked sourly.

“Sorry about that,” she replied, sounding not at all sorry. “Bit of an emergency. Needs must. How are you feeling?”

Adrian decided against answering that and instead pushed himself up to sitting, bracing his hands behind him as a wave of vertigo overtook him for a moment. “Where are we? Where have you taken me?” he asked as his vision cleared, revealing an odd sort of warehouse room, lines of metal shelves marching away into the distance, each covered with a nonsensical collection of objects, some strange looking and others utterly mundane.

“This is the Black Archive,” Osgood said, leaning in and angling her chair to better see him from the other side of Dr Jones. “The deepest and safest level of UNIT Headquarters.”

“UNIT?” Adrian asked, glancing at her before returning his gaze to his surroundings. He hadn’t actually expected them to tell him where they were, but if Osgood was willing to offer up answers, he might as well keep her talking.

“Unified Intelligence Taskforce,” she supplied. “We handle alien incursions of Earth so that the rest of humanity doesn’t have to worry about it. The Archive is where we store all the extraterrestrial bits and bobs we can’t risk falling into the wrong hands,” she added, perhaps noticing his scrutiny of the room. “You’ve been here before, you just can’t remember it at the moment.”

He scoffed at that. “I think I would remember a place like this. And remember dealing with alien incursions. Assuming any of what you just said is actually true.”

“You’d be surprised how much you can forget,” Dr Jones said, “and how easily.”

Adrian fixed her with a cold look. “And I suppose you aren’t truly my physician, are you, Dr Jones? If that even is your real name.”

“It is, and I am,” she replied, less defensively than he might have expected. “Dr Martha Jones,” she went on, offering him her hand to shake. “Chief Medical Officer of UNIT. We’ve met before — many times, actually — but I’ve only officially been your physician the last two weeks or so.”

“Since my accident, you mean?” he asked, squinting at her in confusion. But before Dr Jones could answer, an old machine on one of the shelves nearby crackled suddenly to life, drawing everyone’s attention.

“UNIT, come in, this is the Doctor!” the tinny speakers blared out, John Smith’s voice distinctive even through the static. “Kate, are you there?”

Frowning slightly, Osgood crossed to the machine and picked up the attached radio handset. “She’s with our forces in the field, Doctor,” she said into the handset. “HQ is under my command. Where are you?”

“In the Vortex. I can’t risk landing anywhere I might be spotted. I need the landing pad protocols activated. Now.”

Osgood straightened up at his brisk tone, pulling her mobile from her pocket and opening an app that Adrian couldn’t quite see. “I need your authorisation code first.”

“We don’t have time—”

“Doctor, we are dealing with a telepathic hostile force whose skillset is unknown,” she replied firmly, cutting him off. “There will be no landing pad protocol until I’m certain it’s really you.”

John muttered something unintelligible then bit out, “Fine, let me find the correct setting.”

The machine emitted a series of buzzing, whistling noises that made Adrian wince, but Osgood barely reacted, keeping her eyes on her phone.

“Happy?” John’s disembodied voice demanded when the noises stopped.

“Sonic code verified,” Osgood said, nodding. “Tower roof landing pad protocols activated. You will be met and escorted down to the Archive. We have—” she stumbled slightly over her words but quickly recovered, “—Adrian secure here. Is Clara with you?”

“No,” John snarled, and then the lights on the machine went dark.

“You know this face better than I do,” Dr Jones said into the silence that followed, as Osgood replaced the handset. “But that sounded ominous, even for him.”

“Very,” Osgood agreed, attention on her mobile again. “And still no word from Clara.” She pocketed her mobile, turning her gaze back towards Adrian and Dr Jones. “Whatever’s happened, it’s not good.”

And despite the utter bizarreness of his current circumstances, drugged and kidnapped and held in a warehouse full of supposed alien artefacts, Adrian felt his heart lurch painfully at the idea that something terrible might have happened to Clara.

--

Chapter 6

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - chapter 8

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 8 is 2300 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

–

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 8

“Are you okay?” Dr Jones asked, pulling Adrian from his fractured thoughts.

He blinked up at her from the armchair he’d retreated to in the wake of John Smith’s ‘telepathic transference’, or whatever sci-fi term he wanted to invoke to describe using a violent headbutt to fill Adrian’s mind with memories he could barely make sense of.

“I brought you tea,” she went on, holding a steaming mug out to him. “Thought it might help.”

“Thank you,” he said, after just a beat too long. He accepted the tea from her and took a cautious sip, surprised to find it’d been made exactly to his liking. “This place has a kitchen?” he asked, the words seeming to bypass his conscious brain on the way out of his mouth.

Dr Jones sat down in the mismatched armchair beside his. “It does. Though it’s been renovated since I was last here.”

“I’m still trying to get my head around all this,” Adrian admitted. “Whatever John did, these feel like my memories. But they can’t possibly be. I’m just a school teacher. An ordinary, everyday, human school teacher!”

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Dr Jones said sympathetically, “especially with the day you’ve had. But I can promise you, it’s all true. I knew you, a long time ago, and as hard as all of this is to believe, I know it’s true.”

“It’s just so ridiculous, the idea that I’m this ‘Doctor’ person— alien,” Adrian amended, scowling and taking another drink of tea. “That John and I are, are...” He couldn’t make himself say it. The same person. “None of it makes any sense,” he said instead. “And I don’t see how it helps us rescue Clara, which is what we should be focusing on.”

“This is a blind spot for him,” Dr Jones said, looking down towards the console room below them, where John and Osgood were clustered around the monitor, talking in urgent, hushed tones. “The way time travel works, when two versions of you are in the same place at the same time, only the elder one remembers it. So he has no memory of living this as you, and I think it’s putting him on edge.”

“I feel completely blind, too,” Adrian said. “And the memories he gave me don’t help. It’s like I should know what to do, but I have no idea. Clara’s in danger and I’ve forgotten every useful bit of myself, and I just—” he cut himself off, swallowing thickly. “We have to save her. Whatever it takes. I just wish I knew what that was.”

“Even when you’re feeling like yourself, I think it’s really just that you’re better at pretending you know how to save the day. You go off with nothing more than half a plan and that same determination that you must fix things. And somehow you always do.”

“Don’t mythologise me, Martha Jones,” he said, staring down into the last of his tea. “I’m not the hero you think I am.”

“Yes, you are. I know you are,” she said, catching and holding his gaze. “And Clara knows it, too. So does Osgood, even Eyebrows down there knows it, better than anyone. That’s what it means, to be the Doctor. I know that’s still in you, even without all your memories.”

“We might have a plan,” John called up to them before Adrian could formulate a reply. “It’s a fairly terrible plan, but I think it will work.”

--

“You want me to act as bait?” Adrian demanded, glowering at John. They hadn’t gotten past the first step of his so-called plan and already it was living up to the ‘fairly terrible’ descriptor.

“Not bait,” John insisted. “A distraction, a decoy. The Tu’kavari know your face, not mine. They don’t know there’s two of us. We can use that against them.”

“What about the risk to Adrian?” Dr Jones asked. She shifted her gaze between John and Osgood, standing on the far side of the console room with her mobile held to her ear, but turned back to John to press her point. “If something happens to him, it would cause a paradox, do damage to the Web of Time.”

“The risk is minimal,” John said, shaking his head. “I only need them distracted for a few minutes. Besides, everything about him that guarantees the future is currently locked up in that fob watch. If we don’t get Clara back... There’s your paradox,” he said bleakly.

“But if they use their— their telepathy on me?” Adrian said. “Won’t they be able to tell that I’m not who they think I am?”

John levelled a flat glare at him. “You are who they think you are. It’s just that your memories are in a jumble right now. Which will likely be to our advantage: they’ll be too busy puzzling out the inside of your head to notice what I’m doing.”

“And what, exactly, will you be doing, while I’m stood in front of the aliens having my brains picked?”

“Swapping places with Clara. If I put my TARDIS into siege mode too, I’ll be able to talk to her, and we’ll coordinate from there. She’ll make her escape and I’ll stay in her place.”

“And then what?” Dr Jones asked, folding her arms in clear displeasure. “You do as they ask, surrender yourself to them so that they don’t go after Clara again?”

Adrian felt his blood run cold, knowing with absolute certainty that if he were in John’s place, that’s exactly what he would do. Whatever it took to keep Clara safe, even if it meant sacrificing himself.

“It won’t come to that,” John replied, dismissing the idea. “I’ll lead them away from Earth, away from Clara and all of you.”

“And then what?” Dr Jones repeated.

“And then I’ll figure out the rest of the plan once Clara’s safe!” he snapped. “We don’t have time to come up with a perfect plan, just one that will work, and this will!”

“We have no time at all,” Osgood interjected, lowering her mobile from her ear. “That was Kate. The Tu’kavari ship is on the move, they’ll be here any minute. This plan is the best we’ve got, and it has to happen now.”

--

“Just keep talking,” John told him, hurrying Adrian, Osgood, and Dr Jones towards the door. “Keep the Tu’kavari focused on you. I only need a little window of time, as much as you can give me.” He all but shoved them out of the TARDIS and into the cold night air, then paused in the doorway, holding Adrian’s gaze. “Clara will want to follow me,” he said in a fierce, low tone. “Don’t let her.”

Adrian stared in bewildered silence as John slammed the door closed, and watched as the blue police box faded in and out of reality, with a sound that felt like it had been imprinted on his bones at the beginning of the universe, until abruptly it was gone.

“How long have we got?” Dr Jones asked, turning to Osgood.

“Ninety seconds, maybe,” she replied, not looking up from some sort of tracking app on her mobile. “If we’re lucky.”

“Ninety seconds until I face down an alien race none of us know anything about?” Adrian demanded, distantly aware of the alarm in his own voice. “How am I— what am I supposed to do??”

Dr Jones turned to him and placed her hands on his shoulders in a comforting gesture. “You just have to bluff,” she said in a level tone, holding his gaze. “That impossible hero in all those memories in your head? Pretend to be him. Just for a few minutes, just until Clara is safe.”

Clara’s name seemed to cut through the panic clouding his mind, and Adrian took a steadying breath. He would go to hell and back to get her home safe, and he had known that even before the reality of his identity had been forced into his head. He couldn’t lose his nerve here at the moment of truth. To save Clara, he could do anything.

He nodded shakily. “Nothing more than half a plan and the determination to fix things, right?”

“I’ve seen you pull off wilder odds,” Dr Jones reassured him. “Many times. Once when you were barefoot, on the moon. You can do this.”

“Thirty seconds,” Osgood called to them.

“Thank you, Martha Jones,” Adrian told her sincerely. “I wish I remembered you, but I am so glad you remember me.”

She pulled him into a quick hug, then stepped back, joining Osgood next to the stone parapets and leaving the open centre of the roof to Adrian. His wide stage from which to bluff the Tu’kavari. Pretend. Lie.

Rule one: the Doctor lies.

He batted away the blurry pseudo-memory, and instead went looking for another, a flash of a moment that had caught his attention while his head had still been aching from John’s ‘telepathic transference’. Clara looking up at him, tears in her eyes as she said, Do what you’ve always done: be a Doctor.

She’d believed in him that day, in the midst of whatever disaster they’d been facing down. She had reminded him what it meant to be the Doctor, that the name he chose was a promise. Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in.

Whatever series of events had led him to this strange half-life masquerading as Adrian Smith, he was still the Doctor, underneath it all. Clara needed him to reclaim that title, to make that promise all over again, and he wasn’t about to let her down.

“Ten seconds— less,” Osgood said, and Adrian tried not to focus on the tension in her voice. “They ought to be directly above us.”

“Well then,” he said, straightening his bowtie and reaching for a confidence he didn’t feel, “I suppose this is where I come in.”

Overhead, the stars seemed to shimmer. Adrian could feel the oppressive weight of the Tu’kavari ship shifting the atmosphere, and sense their presence lurking at the edge of his mind. He strolled to the centre of the roof, took a deep breath and hollered out the first thing that came to mind:

“Oy! Tu’kavari! Are you looking for me?”

Abruptly the stars were replaced by a dark mist that blocked all light. As Adrian watched, transfixed by the alien horror of it, thousands of eyes emerged from the darkness, seeming to be formed from the black mist itself. In one quick snap, they all focused on him, staring down at him, lidless and unblinking.

He swallowed roughly, clinging to the memory of Clara telling him to be a Doctor. “Well here I am,” he said, voice low to keep it from cracking in terror.

“Surrender, Doctor,” the Tu’kavari said in their collective voice, raspy and cold. The sound of it seemed to come from all around him, bouncing off the stone parapets and resonating inside his mind simultaneously.

For Clara, he reminded himself. Anything to get her back safely, no matter what it took. He steeled himself with the thought, and uttered one syllable, low and menacing: “No.”

“Surrender,” the Tu’kavari insisted. He could sense them inside his head, trying to bend his will to theirs, and he resolutely shoved back.

“You said you have Clara,” Adrian said, and felt a deep instinctual anger bubble up out of him at the idea that anyone would try to harm her to get to him. And when people come to you and ask if trying to get to me through the people I love is in any way a good idea— “You said you have my TARDIS,” he went on, letting that anger strengthen his voice. “I want them back, now.”

“If you do not surrender, we will destroy them both!”

“No, that’s not how this works,” he barked out with more authority than he had ever felt standing in front of a classroom of teenagers. “I want Clara Oswald, here, unharmed. I want the TARDIS back, undamaged. Do that, and then we’ll talk.” He stared back at the many-eyed inhuman mass above him, and remembered his certainty earlier that what he’d been shown in the vision hadn’t been real. “Or maybe... Maybe you don’t have them at all,” he said. “Maybe you’re lying, maybe it’s all a bluff.”

“We do not lie!” the Tu’kavari snarled back.

Adrian shook his head. “You say you have Clara, you say you have my machine, well...” He spread his hands apart, all mocking drama fit for Shakespearian tragedy. “Show me.”

The cloud of eyes shook with fury, and then seemed to flow like a liquid into a dense black column that touched down on the roof a few feet ahead of Adrian. Before he could react with fear or anger or anything else, it was gone, retreating back into the oppressive presence overhead, and in its place sat a small gray cube, maybe three inches tall, with intricate circles and lines engraved on every surface.

For just a moment, there seemed to be two identical cubes occupying the space only slightly offset from one another, like a glitch in a 3D projection. But then the cube was gone, abruptly replaced by the blue police box. The double doors flew open, and from within Adrian heard Clara’s familiar voice call, “Get in!”

Without pausing to think, he leapt across the intervening distance in a few long strides, skidding through the doorway and into the bigger-on-the-inside room within. He spun and shoved the doors closed behind him and felt the groaning, seething whoosh of the TARDIS dematerialising.

--

Chapter 9

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - chapter 6

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 6 is 2000 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

–

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 6

“They have Clara!”

John Smith’s agitated declaration the moment he entered the Archive caught Adrian off-guard, and he was instantly on his feet, Osgood and Dr Jones quickly following suit.

“What?” Adrian demanded in disbelief, his heart in his throat. In the minutes since the radio had gone dark, he had held out hope that his instinctual worry about Clara had been misplaced. But he felt the last of that hope slip away after one look at the frantic expression on the Scottish caretaker’s face.

With a quick nod of her head, Osgood dismissed the uniformed soldiers that had escorted John in. “You’re certain?” she asked him once they’d gone.

“Deadly certain,” he bit out. “It’s my fault, I came at this totally wrong, anticipated all the wrong moves. The Tu’kavari weren’t scanning for idiot boy here,” John went on, gesturing flippantly at Adrian. “They were scanning for the __, for his __! Clara brought it back online to contact me, only took them moments to find her. I didn’t even have time to—” He cut himself off with a strangled noise, spinning away, emotions chasing across his face.

“I don’t understand,” Adrian said, watching as Osgood and Dr Jones exchanged a worried look. “Who has Clara? What the hell is going on?”

Ignoring Adrian’s question, John turned back to them, his eyes wild. “I need the fob watch,” he said, the term as inexplicable as any other Adrian had heard so far. “Every bit of anything I ever knew about the Tu’kavari is locked up in the Arch. He needs his memories back if we’re to have any hope of saving Clara.”

“Doctor—” Osgood started, but John cut her off.

“I haven’t the time to argue with you about this!” he snapped. “They have Clara! We have to assume this is a hostage situation, that they intend to use her as leverage against me. We need to devise a plan to rescue her, and to do that we have to know what we’re up against. I need the fob watch. Now.”

“UNIT doesn’t have the fob watch, Doctor,” Osgood said carefully. “Clara does. She’s kept it on her person, to make sure nothing happens to it.”

John stared at her for a moment, aghast, then closed his eyes, his shoulders drooping, all the bluster gone out of him. “Of course she has,” he murmured.

“Do you know if the Tu’kavari have the __ too?” Dr Jones asked, repeating that same strange word Adrian seemed unable to hear. “If they have it, we may have a whole new category of disaster to worry about.”

“I went to Clara’s flat,” John said, his voice low and gravelly. “There’s no sign of— We have to assume they have them both.”

“And no chance Clara made a run for it?” Osgood said hopefully. “Took the __ into the Vortex or to hide someplace in history?”

But John shook his head. “I would be able to contact her if she had. Her mobile would still be working. They have her, I’m certain of it.”

“Who, exactly?” Adrian demanded, worried and irritated and tired of listening to them babble in jargon he could barely follow. “Who has Clara? The, what did you call them, the ‘Tu’kavari’? How am I supposed to accept any of this when you all keep throwing around ridiculous words—”

“The Tu’kavari are an alien race,” Osgood quickly supplied. “Earth hasn’t had contact with them before, but you have. The two of you,” she added, indicating Adrian and John.

Of all the nonsensical things he had heard today, that somehow took the prize, the idea that he and John Smith might have some forgotten history of collaboration. “Right, right, aliens,” Adrian said derisively. “You want me to believe that you and Clara and my physician and Coal Hill’s bloody caretaker are all some sort of alien experts, protecting the planet from interstellar threats??”

“Yes,” John snarled, finally turning towards him. “What you believe or don’t believe has absolutely no impact on the reality of the situation, which is that they have Clara!”

But before Adrian could respond, a sudden sharp stabbing pain in his temples drove him to his knees on the concrete floor. As horrible as the pain was, the images and sounds that took over his brain were far, far worse. Someone was in his mind, a foreign entity pushing its way in, no matter how he tried to block it out.

We have your machine, the presence in his head said, with a voice like thousands of knives scraping over ice, layered and inhuman. Inexplicably the image of an old fashioned police box flashed to the front of Adrian’s mind, blue-painted wood and white-framed windows. But before he could wonder at it, the image shifted, chilling him to the bone. We have the woman you love, the voice went on, over a glimpse of Clara looking terrified. Surrender yourself to us, Doctor, or you will bear witness to the destruction of both.

Abruptly Adrian was cradling Clara’s limp body, her head lolling lifelessly against his shoulder. The image was so viscerally real that he could feel her slight weight in his arms, her hair brushing against his face, the fabric of her dress catching on the tweed of his jacket. He cried out, recoiling, and yet he was held in that endless moment, unable to escape the horror, unable to escape the knowledge that Clara was dead and it was his fault.

It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and he was back in the Archive with its collection of oddities, the cold of the floor seeping into the bones of his knees and the pain in his head slowly fading. Osgood had moved closer to him and when he glanced at her, she offered him a hand as he shakily stood up.

His heart was thundering, breath catching in his throat. They have Clara! John’s voice rang in his memory, and here was the proof of it, however unexplainable. The images were burned into his brain along with the unearthly rasp declaring, We have the woman you love.

“Do you believe me now?” John demanded, also climbing to his feet, looking pale.

“You saw that, too?” Adrian asked, bewildered. “Did everyone...?”

“No,” Osgood replied before John could. “I think it was meant just for you. The two of you. What was it?”

“Message from the Tu’kavari,” John said. “It’s as bad as I thought. They have Clara. And the __.”

“The what?” Adrian said, his mind skipping over the two syllable word yet again.

“The __,” Osgood repeated, unhelpfully. “Then it’s like you said, Doctor, they must have been tracking the older version of the __, taken both it and Clara.”

“Seriously, what the hell is that word??” Adrian demanded, his nerves frayed past any endurance.

Osgood opened her mouth to reply, but John cut her off. “Perception filter,” he said obliquely. “He can’t hear it. Move on, we don’t have time to explain it to him. That was the ransom message I’d been expecting. The Tu’kavari have the __ and they have Clara.”

Adrian flinched, remembering the feeling of Clara, lifeless in his arms. It had seemed so real, so horribly, undeniably real.

Except—

“And they’ll destroy both,” John went on, “unless we surrender ourselves to them, Bowtie and me. Or one of us, at least. I’d vote him, but that doesn’t do me much good.”

“When this is all over, we are going to sit down and have an intervention about your self-destructive tendencies of late, Doctor,” Dr Jones said, sounding weary, though Adrian was only peripherally aware of their conversation, his mind spinning as he tried to think his way through what he’d been shown.

“What does it matter?” John snapped, earning himself a glare from Dr Jones. “They have Clara. What do you think it is, exactly, that I would be unwilling to do to get her back? Perhaps you ought to ask the Daleks of New Skaro how that worked out for them! Only, you can’t, because there aren’t any left!”

“No, hang on—” Adrian started, the thing that had been nagging at his mind starting to come into focus.

“So the Oncoming Storm is our only option, then?” Dr Jones said, her voice laced with scorn and sarcasm. “Pity I don’t have an Osterhagen Key to give you, we could skip right to the end.”

John recoiled as though she’d slapped him, but snarled back at her, “Martha Jones, don’t you dare!”

“Listen to me—” Adrian tried again, only more certain of his conclusion the more he thought about it.

“Martha is right,” Osgood said, her voice placating. “We have resources, we should at least explore other options.”

“How long do you think the Tu’kavari will give us to formulate a plan?” John demanded. “We’re gambling with Clara’s life with every minute we waste!”

“It wasn’t Clara!” Adrian cried, raising his voice to be heard.

“What?” John snapped, rounding on him.

“Or not— not recent Clara, anyway,” Adrian amended. “I don’t think they really have her. I think they’re bluffing.”

“Of course they have her! I was speaking to her when they arrived!” John replied. “Try to keep up, pudding brain.”

But Osgood held up a hand for silence, then turned to Adrian. “How do you know?”

He shook his head, trying to gather together all the details that had snagged in his mind. “The vision or whatever it was, that’s not what she was wearing today, that plaid dress. She’d never wear that dress to work. And her hair was all wrong, much longer than she’s had it recently. It’s like they’re using an old photo of her. Not Clara as she is today.”

John was glaring at him still, but his gaze had taken on a calculating look. After a moment he turned away, putting one hand to his face. “I hate it when you’re right,” he muttered.

“Is he, Doctor?” Osgood asked, hope covered over with pragmatism. “I have to admit, I didn’t take any notice of what Clara was wearing today. Though Adrian makes a good point, she did cut her hair fairly recently. If those details don’t match...”

John turned back towards them, that agitated energy still evident in his motions, though his voice was calmer. “What they showed us, that’s what she looked like when we went to Trenzalore, the first time around.”

“‘Trenzalore’?” Adrian repeated. “Now you’re just making up words!”

“It’s a planet,” John replied impatiently. “It’s— Nevermind, this will all make much more sense to you later, I haven’t the time to walk you through it now.”

“Are you sure about this, Doctor?” Osgood asked him.

John nodded. “They’re using a memory of her, must have pulled it from his mind when we first tangled with them. Which means there’s at least a good chance that they don’t actually have her.”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Adrian said. “If they really had her prisoner, why wouldn’t they show us an image of her now?”

“You’re right, they’re bluffing,” John allowed grudgingly.

“But you heard them take her,” Osgood said.

John shook his head. “I heard a commotion and then Clara said ‘they’re here’ and the line went dead.” He pondered it a moment, chewing on one knuckle. “I think I might know what Clara’s done, and if I’m right...”

“Then we can save her?” Adrian asked.

The Scotsman shot him a look but didn’t reply. “I need to get back to my __. You three, with me, try to keep up. And keep the soldiers out of my way, if you can.” He turned and strode quickly from the room, leaving Adrian, Osgood, and Dr Jones hurrying to follow.

--

Chapter 7

[sheliesshattered]

Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 3

In the weeks after his concussion, Adrian Smith of the Coal Hill English department becomes certain of two things: First, he has been in love with his colleague Clara Oswald for as long as he can remember. And second, Clara is most definitely having a secret affair with John Smith, Coal Hill’s Scottish caretaker.

Souffez and Whouffaldi canon-divergent AU set in roughly s9. Rated T, will be 11 chapters and ~25,000 words when finished. Chapter 3 is 2000 words. Posted for the #EmbraceTheRaven event week three prompt ‘genre shift’. New chapters will be posted every Saturday. Also available on AO3 under the same title and username.

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Chameleons and Bowties - Chapter 3

They entered some sort of stalemate after that, as Clara spent the next few days seeming to avoid both him and John, so far as Adrian could tell. He knew her well enough to spot her misery even from a distance, though the rest of their colleagues were evidently blind to it. He wished there was anything at all he could do to help, but given that Clara and John had apparently been arguing about him — and given that he only knew that because he’d been eavesdropping on their conversation — he hadn’t the first idea how to broach the topic with her.

There was also the small matter of his own broken heart to contend with. Clara was in love with John, as inexplicable as that was to Adrian. She had been quite clear on that point. What she needed now was a friend, not someone who, as John had put it, looked at her with ‘horrible soppy puppy-love.’ And, if Adrian was being honest with himself, he needed a friend right now, too. Someone he could talk this out with, someone besides the object of his one-sided affections.

He didn’t have class the last period of the day, so Wednesday while the school was quiet with the students all engaged in their studies elsewhere, he pulled his mobile from his jacket pocket and scrolled to Osgood’s number.

Feel like another round of Netflix and burnt popcorn? he texted her. I might have a bit of info that’ll help you in that office pool, too, he added after a moment of thought.

His phone buzzed a few minutes later, drawing him out of his marking. Pizza instead of popcorn? Osgood had responded. I know a great place with take-away. I can be at yours by 7.

Sounds perfect, he wrote back, and followed it up with a cool looking emoji wearing a bowtie.

--

Osgood was true to her word, appearing on his doorstep with dinner just before seven o’clock. Her bowtie was a deep, saturated blue today, and Adrian complimented it as they unboxed the pizza onto plates in his kitchen.

“Such a lovely blue,” he said, smiling for what felt like the first time in days. “What colour blue would you call that?”

She started to answer, then apparently thought better of it, snapping her mouth shut. “You’re the English teacher,” she said instead, always so quick to recover, “what would you call it?”

“Hmm,” he mused as they moved to his sitting room. “Azure. Cerulean. Sapphire. The bluest blue to ever blue.”

Osgood smiled in reply. “Keep that up and you’re going to have to invent an acronym just to describe this particular shade of blue.”

He laughed a little at that, definitely a first since his ill-advised eavesdropping.

“So,” Osgood said between bites of pizza, “what’s this news? Am I about to win the office bet?”

Adrian sighed morosely and let the whole sordid tale spill out of him — his feelings, Clara’s, and John’s, all one complicated mess.

“Poor Clara,” she said when he’d finished, genuine and kind as ever.

“I know,” he groaned. “And I want to be a good friend to her, but how do I even talk to her about this? I shouldn’t have been listening in the first place. If she finds out she’ll hate me.”

“She could never hate you,” Osgood assured him. “But I think you did the right thing, telling me. I’ll talk to her, bring it up in a round-about way, and see if there’s anything either of us can do to make this easier for her.”

“Do you think there might be?”

“That’s entirely up to Clara. Couples argue sometimes, Adrian, that’s just a fact of life. We might have to let Clara and John work this out on their own.” She watched him for a long moment, gaze sympathetic, then asked, “How are you doing with all this?”

“Oh, I’ll survive.”

“I mean it. I know what that kind of unrequited love can do to a person.”

He sighed and raked his free hand through his hair. “I just want her to be happy, you know? And if that’s not with me, that’s fine, truly. Even if it’s with him of all people. But she doesn’t seem happy. And not just that row. There’s this sadness to her that I can’t figure out. I see it sometimes even when she’s smiling. I just wish there was something I could do about it.”

“Like she told you, her life is complicated,” Osgood said gently. “Clara doesn’t have many close friends, and I know she ranks you at the top of that very short list. So be her friend. She’ll tell you what she needs, eventually.”

“What if I can’t be what she needs?”

“You already are, just by being you. She’ll find her way through this, just give her time.” She smiled at him kindly when Adrian met her gaze, and he took a deep breath and nodded.

“For now, what do you say to drowning our sorrows in Netflix?” she asked, tilting her head towards the dark television, and he agreed with a shaky smile, feeling better for having talked things out with Osgood.

--

Adrian woke the next morning clear-headed and ready to face the reality of his situation. Clara didn’t love him, and that was fine. He was enough of an adult to compartmentalise his feelings, rather than pining after her like a lovesick teenager. She was his friend, and he was hers, and he wasn’t about to ruin that over her feelings for John Smith.

Easier said than done, of course, but it would be a process, he suspected. A process he couldn’t start until he patched up whatever rift had formed between him and Clara, and got on with the business of being her friend and nothing more. Two weeks on from his concussion, his life still felt strange and foreign, but Clara was the one thing he felt certain about. Dwelling on might-have-beens couldn’t possibly make anything better.

He stopped at a local coffee shop on the way to Coal Hill, leaving with two take-away cups, one made to his preferences and the other to Clara’s. The school was still quiet when he arrived, too early yet for many students to be on campus, but he found Clara in her classroom, bent over a pile of marking, dark circles under her eyes again.

She looked up at his knock on the open door, smiling when she saw him, much to his relief. “Adrian, good morning,” she said, standing up to stretch.

“Good morning,” he replied. He couldn’t help but smile at her in return, and banished John Smith’s voice saying horrible soppy puppy-love from his mind. “I come bearing coffee.”

“Oh, you are a life-saver,” Clara said sincerely, and crossed towards him to accept the cup he held out to her.

“Late night?” he asked carefully.

She nodded and waved it away, savouring her coffee for a moment. “Trying to fit too much into twenty-four hours,” she confirmed obliquely.

Adrian bit down on the question on the tip of his tongue, refusing to ask if she’d been out somewhere with John Smith. It wasn’t any of his business, and he was determined not to repeat his poor behavior from Monday.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead, the words tumbling out of him without his permission. At Clara’s raised eyebrows, he forged ahead, chasing a bravery he didn’t feel. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable with my behaviour, Monday morning. It’s hardly fair of me to complain about how John speaks to you, when I’m just as bad. It was wrong of me and I apologise.”

He only had a fraction of a second to note the sadness in her eyes before Clara had pulled him into a tight hug, her arms around his neck and the warmth of her coffee cup seeping through the tweed at his shoulderblade. He hugged her back, trying valiantly not to think of how right this felt, how familiar, how perfect.

“Thank you,” she said after a long moment, tears evident in her voice.

“Clara,” was all he managed to say into her shoulder, too overwhelmed to form a more coherent sentence.

My Clara, his mind echoed, though he kept the thought firmly contained.

She squeezed him tighter then stepped away, blinking rapidly as she turned back to her desk. “I know things have been difficult, these last weeks since your accident,” she said, letting her short hair fall forward to obscure her face for a moment. “But I’m glad you’re here,” she went on, turning to look at him again. “I’m glad you’re my friend.” Her voice broke on the last word, and he watched her swallow hard, that sadness all too obvious in her eyes.

“And I always will be,” he assured her, sounding choked to his own ears. This was it, then, the acknowledgement of everything they couldn’t be, the future they would never have. He was her friend, and she was in love with John, and the world would have to keep on spinning, no matter how much it broke his heart. He offered her the best smile he could summon, then left before her almost-tears could become his own.

--

At lunch Adrian took himself for a walk around the perimeter of Coal Hill, needing to clear his head. He’d hardly been able to think of anything except that hug all morning. He knew he shouldn’t dwell on it. They were still friends, and that’s what mattered. Her heart might belong to John Smith, and Adrian’s heart might be breaking, but so long as they were still friends...

It was a process, he reminded himself. He hadn’t fallen in love with Clara in a single day, and he wouldn’t get over her that quickly, either. If he was honest with himself, he knew he might never be properly over her. But this would get easier. It had to get easier.

Unthinkingly, his path had taken him by the caretaker’s shed, and Adrian glanced into the windows as he walked past. Though it was dim inside, he could clearly see two figures within, and he let his gaze linger before he even realised what it was he was seeing.

Clara and John were standing close together once again, but that was where the similarities to Monday ended. She was curled in on herself, her face pressed to John’s chest and half-hidden in his jumper, and John had his arms tight around her, one hand soothingly stroking her hair. It was obvious even from a distance that she was crying, and Adrian swallowed down his own emotional response to it, willing himself to look away, to keep moving, to leave them to their private moment.

But before he could accomplish it, John seemed to sense his gaze, and turned his head slightly to meet it through the window, his face impassive. Their eyes locked and held, and Adrian slowed to a stop, feeling as though the other man could see right through him. John Smith knew everything there was to know about Adrian Smith: his love for Clara and his hatred of wine, his taste in bowties and his dreams of travel, his scatterbrained nature and every last strange thing stashed in his pockets.

Well, there you are, that gaze seemed to say, neither hard nor forgiving, neither angry nor friendly. Get on with it already.

And then John turned his face away, pressing a kiss to the top of Clara’s head and speaking to her softly. Released from the other man’s hold on him, Adrian shook himself and continued on, nearly tripping over his feet to get back to his classroom more quickly.

--

Chapter 4

[sheliesshattered]

Chapter 1

Adrian Smith’s life had never felt so strange as it did the first week after his concussion.

His physician, Dr Jones, explained that he might have some disorientation following his accident, that things that ought to feel familiar might feel new and odd, but that it was to be expected. He merely had to wait it out. And then she’d given him her mobile number, “in case anything comes up,” which he was almost certain doctors didn’t usually do, and which he was fairly sure he couldn’t blame on post-concussion confusion. But Clara Oswald, fellow Coal Hill English teacher and perhaps the most brilliant person he knew, had simply nodded sagely, so Adrian had been left with no choice but to accept it as normal.

Only, the strangeness hadn’t ended there. His flat, when Clara took him home after they left Dr Jones’s clinic, looked as though the world’s most organized person lived there, and that felt like the last descriptor he could possibly apply to himself. It also smelled of fresh paint, none of the food in the cupboards or refrigerator had been opened, and there was no post in his name anywhere to be found. All of which Clara found utterly unremarkable, so Adrian let it go.

But his pyjamas didn’t fit right. His toothbrush was still in its plastic packaging. He couldn’t remember where any of the lightswitches were located. The television wasn’t plugged into the electrical outlet.

Clara had, thankfully, offered to accompany him to school the next day. To ensure he didn’t get lost on the way, she said, but Adrian wondered privately if it might not be more than that. She was his friend, certainly, and his work colleague, undoubtedly. But when he looked at her, he couldn’t help but feel that there was something more. Something important he had forgotten. There was something about the way she watched him when she thought he wasn’t looking, how close she stood to him, the sadness that crept into her eyes when they talked...

But perhaps it was just wishful thinking, he told himself, given that she’d left him alone for the evening with nothing more than a jaunty wave and a cheerful, “See you tomorrow!” Perhaps he was reading too much into it. Perhaps this was the disorientation Dr Jones had warned him about.

Or maybe— maybe he was the Darcy to Clara’s Elizabeth, the Gatsby to her Daisy, the Cyrano to her Roxanne. Maybe it was all on his end, and she was just trying to be a good friend. Maybe he’d been hit on the head harder than he thought.

And more than maybe, he ought to keep his mouth shut about it. At least until he was sure he had his head on straight.

The clothing he found hanging in the wardrobe the next morning felt familiar, at least, and the one thing his hands seemed to remember all on their own was how to tie a bowtie, so by the time Clara arrived to collect him for school, Adrian felt marginally more like himself. And Clara’s presence was reassuring in a way not even bowties managed to be.

The disorientation crept back in throughout the day in small ways that he tried to ignore, jarring though they were. He attempted to focus instead on the places it didn’t exist: His students knew him, and knew the reading they’d been assigned as homework, the day he’d had his accident. Mr Armitage, the headteacher, seemed relieved that Adrian had returned to work so soon, and the other teachers were similarly kind to him. Something about the school felt exactly right, like there was nowhere else on Earth he could possibly be.

But none of the doors opened in the direction he expected them to. He got lost frequently. He couldn’t remember how he liked his coffee. He spent a good portion of his prep period at the end of the day searching his classroom for his lesson plans and student files, only to have them all turn up in his flat inexplicably that evening, as though they’d always been there, perfectly organised and neatly stacked.

Clara laughed it off, when she came over to his place on Saturday on his insistence that he cook her dinner in thanks for all the help she’d been since his accident two days prior.

“You say it like it’s some big conspiracy,” she said, shaking her head, laughter still in her voice and that tinge of sadness in her eyes. “But I know you too well for that. You’d hardly be you if you hadn’t misplaced half a dozen things in any given day.”

Adrian glanced around his too-clean flat and forced a laugh as well. Yes, that must be it.

“Which is also how I knew that you were destined to burn whatever it is you’ve forgotten on the stove,” she added with a nod towards the smoke starting to emerge from his kitchen. As he scrambled to try to save their dinner, she called after him, “Not to worry, you ridiculous man, I ordered us delivery before I even left home.”

His laughter then was as genuine as hers, though his cooking was indeed ruined, and Adrian wondered all over again about the exact nature of their friendship. He didn’t wonder at all about the nature of his feelings for her, far more obvious to him than whatever arcane organisational scheme was at work in his kitchen.

By the end of the school day on Monday, he had decided that it was pointless to try to pretend to himself that he wasn’t in love with her. The disorientation of his concussion had mostly faded, though his memories still felt foggy — totally normal, Dr Jones had assured him, when she phoned to check on him on Sunday — so he couldn’t say for sure exactly how long he’d been in love with Clara. Months, perhaps, maybe years. When he tried to nail it down, it felt like he’d always loved her, like it had always been an intrinsic part of his soul. And really, it didn’t matter how long it had been going on, because there it was every time he thought about her, utterly undeniable, more certain than anything else in his life: Adrian Smith was in love with Clara Oswald.

When Tuesday afternoon rolled around, he’d nearly convinced himself that he ought to tell her. She had been so sweet to him since his accident, always there when he needed her, always happy to see him, always able to lift his spirits, absolutely perfect for him in every way. His feelings could hardly come as a surprise to her. And maybe, just maybe, she might feel the same. Maybe his accident had been the push they needed to try being something more than friends. Maybe this was the beginning of something grand, a love story for the ages.

Maybe, he thought that night, unable to sleep. Just maybe.

On Wednesday, Coal Hill’s absentee caretaker John Smith finally showed up for work, and everything Adrian thought he knew went right out the window.

--

He hated the man, Adrian was ashamed to admit, even to himself. He hated everything about John Smith. He hated his arrogance, the way he strode around Coal Hill as though it was his personal kingdom. He hated how his lip would curl when he caught sight of Adrian, the way he rolled his eyes at nearly everything Adrian said. He hated his accent, and his jumper full of holes, and his overly-pronounced eyebrows.

But mostly Adrian hated how he talked to Clara. How he always seemed to be lurking about, whispering in her ear, sending her significant looks that Adrian couldn’t hope to decipher. He hated how John Smith said her name, the possessiveness in his tone that only Adrian seemed to be able to hear. And most of all, he loathed how Clara turned towards the abrasive Scottish caretaker, like a flower seeking the warmth of the sun.

Adrian had managed to convince himself, in that magical window of time when he’d somehow forgotten the existence of John Smith, that Clara was, at the very least, not indifferent to him. But he was forced to admit that he had not truly known what love looked like on her face until he saw her with Coal Hill’s caretaker. She looked at him like he’d hung the moon and stars. Adrian lost count of how many times he caught her watching John, the emotion plain to see. She stood too close to him, smiled at him too broadly, listened to his every word.

And Adrian was sure he’d never been so miserable in his entire life.

Which meant, naturally, that Clara could never know a thing about it.

--

“Heya,” Clara greeted him, leaning in the doorway to his classroom at the end of Friday, “I’m meeting a friend for drinks after work, feel like coming along?”

Adrian fiddled with the red marking pen in his hands rather than meet her gaze. “Is John Smith going?” he asked, trying to keep his tone casual.

He could tell without looking at her, just by the shape of her silence, that she’d raised her eyebrows in confusion. He hated that he knew that, when he still hadn’t found where pre-concussion-him had stashed his laundry detergent.

“No,” she said finally, voice upturned like it might be a question. “No, John wasn’t planning on joining us. Just you and me and my friend Osgood. You’ll like her, she’s a bowtie aficionado, like you.”

He cracked a smile at that in spite of himself. “Hard to say no to a fellow bowtie enthusiast.”

When he didn’t continue, her silence shifted to the eyes-narrowed sort. “Did John say something to you?” she asked.

Adrian glanced up at her, and found he was right about her expression. “No, it’s just... You seem close,” he said delicately.

She dropped her gaze to the floor and folded her arms, shrugging. “No point denying it, I suppose.”

He cringed inwardly but found his resolve to end this rather than prolong his heartache. “Clara,” he said gently. “You’ve been so kind to me this last week since the accident, but you don’t have to keep doing this. You don’t have to keep an eye on me. I can get on fine on my own.”

When she looked back up at him he was startled to see tears in her eyes. “You ridiculous man,” she said, a waver in her voice. “I asked because I want you to come along. Because I like spending time with you. And don’t be afraid of John Smith, he’s not nearly as prickly as he seems.”

“I am not afraid of John Smith!” he sputtered, offended.

“You know what I mean. You don’t have anything to worry about from him.”

And just like that, Clara Oswald turned his world upside down again.

--

The pub was dim and comfortable, and felt utterly unfamiliar to Adrian, despite being so close to Coal Hill. When he stared in confused silence at the bartender, Clara ordered him something with more sugar than alcohol, and reminded him of his long-established hatred of wine. That, at least, rang true, and he did enjoy the drink she’d chosen for him.

Her friend Osgood arrived shortly after, her paisley bowtie set off by embroidered question marks on the tips of her shirt collar, both of which he complimented. She thanked him profusely, smile wide and eyes bright, and Clara hid her own smile behind her wine glass.

They were lingering over their second round, debating the pros and cons of waistcoats versus jumpers, when the pub’s door slammed open with enough force to draw their attention from across the room. Like a storm blowing in, John Smith strode through, all gruff arrogance and bushy eyebrows, his gaze landing on Clara without giving the rest of the pub so much as a passing glance. He beckoned her over with an urgent, imperious hand gesture that set Adrian’s teeth on edge, but he made no move to come towards their table.

Clara winced and set down her wine glass. “I’ll just be a mo’. Talk amongst yourselves,” she added, waving at Adrian and Osgood as she got up from the table and crossed the room.

That hatred was back, roiling in his gut. Adrian forced his gaze away from Clara and John, only to find that Osgood was watching them as well, her expression contemplative and wistful in a way he couldn’t quite understand. Well, she and Clara were friends, maybe she was more aware than he was about the exact nature of Clara’s love life.

“Do you know,” he asked, his voice carefully neutral, “are the two of them...?”

“Wish I knew,” Osgood said ruefully, still watching them. “I’d win the office pool, if I knew that.”

“Your office bet on if Clara is secretly dating Coal Hill’s caretaker?” he replied, confused.

She snapped her gaze to his as though only just realising what she’d said. “Anyone who sees them together has to wonder,” she said, quick to recover. “Clara knows a lot of the people I work with. We try not to gossip, but, well,” she nodded in the direction of where they were still speaking quietly, bodies inclined towards each other, heads bent close.

“It does make one wonder,” Adrian agreed, trying valiantly to keep any bitterness out of his tone. So he wasn’t the only person who saw it — but it also wasn’t an open secret he alone had been unaware of. “What is it you do for work?” he asked, dragging his gaze off of Clara and John and flailing for a change of topic.

“Boring government stuff,” Osgood replied, waving it away. “How about you? Clara said you teach English at her school?”

He smiled and puffed up a bit at the thought of Clara telling her friend about him. “Yes, going on five years now. Inflicting literature on young minds.”

“What are you covering in your classes right now?”

“Shakespeare! Not nearly as exciting as seeing it performed live, but there is something painfully authentic about teenagers reading Romeo and Juliet aloud.”

Clara returned before Osgood could reply, her motions quick in a way that made Adrian’s heart sink.

“There’s a— thing, a minor emergency, nothing to worry about,” she said, scooping up her coat and purse. “But I have to dash. Will you be alright?” she asked, gaze skittering over him to land on Osgood.

“Yes, of course, I know how this goes,” Osgood replied after half a second of apparent surprise. “I’ll make sure Adrian gets home alright,” she added, flashing a smile in his direction.

“Thank you,” Clara said, perhaps a bit too emphatically for Adrian’s taste, but then she was looking at him again and the thought was crowded out of his head. “You,” she said, pinning him with her gaze, “don’t get into any trouble. I’ll phone you tomorrow.”

“Anything I can help with?” he asked. “Minor emergencies are sort of my speciality.” He resolutely did not look behind her, where John Smith was still waiting by the pub’s door, shifting his weight restlessly.

“Nah, no reason to ruin all our evenings,” Clara said easily, but with enough force behind it that Adrian knew she wouldn’t be moved. “You two bond over bowties and your shared hatred of wine, I want to hear all about it later.”

She left with a parting kiss on the cheek for each of them, the glow of which lasted only until Adrian saw her take John Smith’s hand on their way out the door.

“Are you sure they aren’t...?” he asked Osgood again.

“No idea,” she sighed, with an emotion uncomfortably close to his own.

--

Chapter 2

They didn’t stay at the pub much longer after Clara left, and when Osgood walked him all the way to his front door, Adrian invited her in for tea or popcorn or whatever he could coax his kitchen into producing without burning. She happily accepted, seeming in no hurry to leave, and they ended up spending the evening on his sofa, watching Netflix and bad late night telly, throwing the worst of the scorched popcorn kernels at the screen and laughing until their sides hurt.

Osgood was good company, Adrian could see why she and Clara were friends. But it didn’t make him miss Clara any less, or keep him from wondering what she might be doing tonight without him, wherever John Smith had dragged her off to.

When Clara showed up on his doorstep shortly before noon the next day, take-away lunch in hand, dark circles under her eyes, and wearing the same clothes as the day before, Adrian’s hatred of the Scottish caretaker climbed to new heights.

She brushed off his concerns about the ‘minor emergency’ with vague answers, far more interested in hearing about the rest of his evening with Osgood than in talking about what she’d been up to with John.

“I’m glad you two had fun,” she said, smiling in a way that almost disguised the sadness in her eyes. “Osgood needs more of that in her life. She spends far too much time focused on work.”

“What is it that she does for work, anyway?” he asked.

“Boring government stuff,” she shrugged, the repetition of the phrase catching at Adrian’s memory. “Besides me, most the people she knows are people she works with, boring on top of boring, so it’s good for her to break out of that routine for a bit. She texted me last night, couldn’t stop gushing about how much she enjoyed meeting you.”

“Well, I enjoyed meeting her, too. And you were right, she does have excellent taste in bowties.”

“She’ll be thrilled to hear you said so,” Clara said, a sparkle in her eye that worried Adrian.

“Clara,” he started delicately, but she must have read what he meant to say in his tone, because she waved him into silence as she finished her bite of food.

“Don’t worry, I’m not trying to set the two of you up!”

“No?” he said, doublechecking.

She shook her head. “No, I can’t see that working out, certainly not in the long run. And anyway, the last thing I want is to be third wheel to my two bowtie-wearing best friends.” She smiled at him, and Adrian felt his pulse pick up. “I’m just happy to see the two of you get along so well is all. Oh! She mentioned something about some show you were watching, said she laughed so hard she could hardly breathe.”

When his description of what exactly had been so funny failed to paint an adequate picture, he pulled up the programme again on Netflix so Clara could enjoy it too. She laughed at all the same jokes, but Adrian found himself watching her more than the television screen, content in a way he hadn’t been the night before. When it ended she claimed the remote from him, insistent on sharing one of her favourites with him in return. She fell asleep with her head on his shoulder barely fifteen minutes in, and Adrian pulled the throw blanket from the back of the sofa to drape over her, careful not to wake her with his movements.

He stole glances at her while she slept, the television’s volume turned down and his attention only nominally on the show that he was sure she’d want to hear his opinion on later. Whatever she’d been up to the night before, it had clearly left her exhausted. He tried not to think about it. No matter what was going on between her and John Smith, she was here with him now, curled into his side like it was the most natural thing in the world, and Adrian resolved not to give the aggravating Scotsman another thought.

--

That resolve lasted right up until he walked in on the two of them bickering in the supply closet at Coal Hill on Monday morning, standing so close to each other that Adrian was surprised there was still room for their excited gesticulations. Their conversation instantly ground to a halt as they registered his presence, their heads swiveling to look at him in tandem.

“Really, Mr Smith,” Adrian said crossly, drawing himself up to his full height. It had to be the other man’s untamed curls that made him seem so much taller, that had to be it. “Miss Oswald has classes to teach, and I’m quite certain the school’s landscaping is suffering from your inattention!”

“Now see here, Mr Smith,” the caretaker shot back, but Clara stepped in between them, her hands raised.

“That’s enough out of both of you Smiths. Adrian is right, I have class starting in five minutes. John, you and I can pick this up again later.”

“Clara—” John Smith started, but she cut him off with a look.

“Later,” she said again, then looped her arm through Adrian’s and all but dragged him away in the direction of the English department.

“What the hell were you thinking, going into a supply closet with him?” he demanded before his brain could catch up to his mouth.

She let out a frustrated noise between her teeth. “You ridiculous man,” she said, making the familiar endearment sound more like an epithet. She waited until they’d rounded a corner then pulled him to a stop, glaring up at him. “There are parts of my life that are unnecessarily complicated as it is. Please don’t make it worse by picking a fight with John Smith.”

“I don’t like the way he speaks to you,” he growled.

“And I don’t like how much you’re letting him get under your skin!” She held his gaze fiercely for a moment, then sighed. “John is my friend,” she explained patiently. “I know that can be hard to read from the outside, but he is. He has my best interests at heart, and he cares greatly for— for this school. Please, just, give each other a little space, would you?”

“Don’t you deserve some space too?” Adrian grumbled, unable to let it go, the image of the two of them standing so close together seared into his brain.

Clara closed her eyes and clenched her jaw in a way that made him think she was reaching for calm, perhaps counting to ten in her head. “If I wanted distance from either of you, I would say so,” she told him evenly, finding his gaze again. “Could you, please, for me, just keep the peace?”

“Oh, alright,” he said, deflating. “For you, not for him.”

She shook her head. “You really are ridiculous, you know,” she said, then turned and continued on towards her classroom, leaving Adrian to watch her go.

--

It was his turn to supervise the students during their lunch break, and Adrian strode around the schoolyard, doing his best to keep his attention on the students and off the situation with Clara. He hadn’t seen her since that morning, which wasn’t nearly long enough to conclude that she was avoiding him, but the thought nagged at him all the same. He’d behaved badly, and his hatred of John Smith was a poor excuse for talking to Clara the way he had. He still wanted to be her friend, even if her heart inexplicably belonged to the infuriating caretaker.

Not that she had said as much, even when given the chance. John is my friend, she’d said, rather than any other descriptor that could have made the situation crystal clear for Adrian. He knew he didn’t have any right to dictate who she chose as a friend or a paramour, but it was not knowing the details of the situation that was eating at him. Maybe he should just tell her how he felt about her after all, let the chips fall where they may. If I wanted distance from either of you, I would say so, she had said as well.

Or maybe John Smith didn’t have any idea of Clara’s regard for him. He seemed like the sort who would be flippantly blind to something like that. Or worse, maybe he knew and was using that to string Clara along, manipulate her into standing toe to toe with him in tiny closets, and convince her to drop her plans on a Friday night and rush off who knows where with him. Adrian sighed and leaned against one of the school buildings at the edge of the yard. Or maybe he just had an overactive imagination and a jealous nature, and didn’t deserve Clara’s affection anymore than John Smith did.

“This is like Danny all over again!” Adrian heard in the unmistakable Scottish brogue of the man in question, and he poked his head around the corner to see John and Clara once again facing off, this time just outside the caretaker’s shed.

He quickly leaned back out of sight as Clara let out a frustrated noise he was only too familiar with. “Don’t you dare,” she snapped, and he was perversely pleased to hear her giving as good as she got, at least. “You promised you wouldn’t do this, you promised!”

The caretaker sighed, loudly enough to be heard over the noise of the students. “Clara, I—”

“Don’t you think this is hard enough on me as it is?” she demanded. “Having to pretend like this?”

“It hasn’t exactly been a picnic for me, either,” John Smith groused coldly, and Adrian had to force his hands not to curl into fists. He shouldn’t be listening in on their private conversation, he knew he shouldn't. But he didn’t trust the Scotsman when it came to Clara, and found himself unwilling to move away from his hiding spot as the conversation around the corner barrelled on like a car wreck in slow motion.

“We can both deal with the emotional fallout when the rest of this is done,” Clara said, sounding weary.

“Did I ever look at you like that? With that horrible soppy puppy-love?” he snarked. Adrian scowled at that, wondering if John was referring to him, wondering if he’d been that transparent.

Well, so what if he had? Clara deserved someone who really loved her. She deserved someone who looked at her the way she looked at John.

“I don’t know, you tell me,” she sighed.

“Maybe it’s an effect of the Arch, part of the cover,” John said obliquely.

“Can we not do this? I thought we’d gotten past all this last Christmas, honestly.” She sighed again, and Adrian was back to wanting to punch whoever could make her sound so unhappy. “Two years, he said he had jumped forward two years. You may not remember any of this, but you have to remember how you were feeling two years ago.”

“Two years for you, doesn’t necessarily narrow it down for me,” he returned snidely.

“Why are you being so difficult about this?” Clara asked, some of the fight returning to her voice.

“Because I don’t know where I stand with you!” John all but yelled, and Adrian blinked in confusion at the depth of emotion clearly hidden behind the caretaker’s apparent anger. Perhaps he wasn’t as indifferent to Clara as Adrian had thought.

“Will you keep your voice down!” she hissed back at him. “Of course you know where you stand with me! Why would this make any difference?”

“Because it’s him. He’s the one you really want. Always has been.”

“No. He isn’t,” Clara said evenly, words carefully enunciated. “I want you. I don’t know how much more clear I can make that.”

Adrian flinched, his heart turning over in his chest. She was right, it couldn’t be much clearer than that. He really should go, give them privacy in what was obviously a lover’s spat.

“But ‘Adrian’ is perfect for you,” John said before he could move, freezing him to the spot. “Especially like this.”

“He isn’t even really—” Clara started, but John cut her off before Adrian could find out where that sentence might have gone.

“You said he told you it might take months or even years for them to stop looking for him. Well, maybe we ought to let it. Maybe I should go off and try to solve the mystery, and leave you here to live a normal life for a few years. Leave you to be happy with him.”

“If you leave me now I will never forgive you,” she shot back, tears in her voice, dashing any fragile hope Adrian might have held. “You think that’s what I want, to prolong this? I am trying to protect you! You, and no one else. So, yes: go, solve it. Quick as you can, so we can move past this mess. But if you think leaving me is going to fix anything, you are an even bigger idiot than I thought.”

Adrian could hear her stomped footsteps coming his direction, and he quickly moved himself to the other end of the schoolyard before he could be caught eavesdropping, his heart heavy and his head overfull.

--

Chapter 3

They entered some sort of stalemate after that, as Clara spent the next few days seeming to avoid both him and John, so far as Adrian could tell. He knew her well enough to spot her misery even from a distance, though the rest of their colleagues were evidently blind to it. He wished there was anything at all he could do to help, but given that Clara and John had apparently been arguing about him — and given that he only knew that because he’d been eavesdropping on their conversation — he hadn’t the first idea how to broach the topic with her.

There was also the small matter of his own broken heart to contend with. Clara was in love with John, as inexplicable as that was to Adrian. She had been quite clear on that point. What she needed now was a friend, not someone who, as John had put it, looked at her with ‘horrible soppy puppy-love.’ And, if Adrian was being honest with himself, he needed a friend right now, too. Someone he could talk this out with, someone besides the object of his one-sided affections.

He didn’t have class the last period of the day, so Wednesday while the school was quiet with the students all engaged in their studies elsewhere, he pulled his mobile from his jacket pocket and scrolled to Osgood’s number.

Feel like another round of Netflix and burnt popcorn? he texted her. I might have a bit of info that’ll help you in that office pool, too, he added after a moment of thought.

His phone buzzed a few minutes later, drawing him out of his marking. Pizza instead of popcorn? Osgood had responded. I know a great place with take-away. I can be at yours by 7.

Sounds perfect, he wrote back, and followed it up with a cool looking emoji wearing a bowtie.

--

Osgood was true to her word, appearing on his doorstep with dinner just before seven o’clock. Her bowtie was a deep, saturated blue today, and Adrian complimented it as they unboxed the pizza onto plates in his kitchen.

“Such a lovely blue,” he said, smiling for what felt like the first time in days. “What colour blue would you call that?”

She started to answer, then apparently thought better of it, snapping her mouth shut. “You’re the English teacher,” she said instead, always so quick to recover, “what would you call it?”

“Hmm,” he mused as they moved to his sitting room. “Azure. Cerulean. Sapphire. The bluest blue to ever blue.”

Osgood smiled in reply. “Keep that up and you’re going to have to invent an acronym just to describe this particular shade of blue.”

He laughed a little at that, definitely a first since his ill-advised eavesdropping.

“So,” Osgood said between bites of pizza, “what’s this news? Am I about to win the office bet?”

Adrian sighed morosely and let the whole sordid tale spill out of him — his feelings, Clara’s, and John’s, all one complicated mess.

“Poor Clara,” she said when he’d finished, genuine and kind as ever.

“I know,” he groaned. “And I want to be a good friend to her, but how do I even talk to her about this? I shouldn’t have been listening in the first place. If she finds out she’ll hate me.”

“She could never hate you,” Osgood assured him. “But I think you did the right thing, telling me. I’ll talk to her, bring it up in a round-about way, and see if there’s anything either of us can do to make this easier for her.”

“Do you think there might be?”

“That’s entirely up to Clara. Couples argue sometimes, Adrian, that’s just a fact of life. We might have to let Clara and John work this out on their own.” She watched him for a long moment, gaze sympathetic, then asked, “How are you doing with all this?”

“Oh, I’ll survive.”

“I mean it. I know what that kind of unrequited love can do to a person.”

He sighed and raked his free hand through his hair. “I just want her to be happy, you know? And if that’s not with me, that’s fine, truly. Even if it’s with him of all people. But she doesn’t seem happy. And not just that row. There’s this sadness to her that I can’t figure out. I see it sometimes even when she’s smiling. I just wish there was something I could do about it.”

“Like she told you, her life is complicated,” Osgood said gently. “Clara doesn’t have many close friends, and I know she ranks you at the top of that very short list. So be her friend. She’ll tell you what she needs, eventually.”

“What if I can’t be what she needs?”

“You already are, just by being you. She’ll find her way through this, just give her time.” She smiled at him kindly when Adrian met her gaze, and he took a deep breath and nodded.

“For now, what do you say to drowning our sorrows in Netflix?” she asked, tilting her head towards the dark television, and he agreed with a shaky smile, feeling better for having talked things out with Osgood.

--

Adrian woke the next morning clear-headed and ready to face the reality of his situation. Clara didn’t love him, and that was fine. He was enough of an adult to compartmentalise his feelings, rather than pining after her like a lovesick teenager. She was his friend, and he was hers, and he wasn’t about to ruin that over her feelings for John Smith.

Easier said than done, of course, but it would be a process, he suspected. A process he couldn’t start until he patched up whatever rift had formed between him and Clara, and got on with the business of being her friend and nothing more. Two weeks on from his concussion, his life still felt strange and foreign, but Clara was the one thing he felt certain about. Dwelling on might-have-beens couldn’t possibly make anything better.

He stopped at a local coffee shop on the way to Coal Hill, leaving with two take-away cups, one made to his preferences and the other to Clara’s. The school was still quiet when he arrived, too early yet for many students to be on campus, but he found Clara in her classroom, bent over a pile of marking, dark circles under her eyes again.

She looked up at his knock on the open door, smiling when she saw him, much to his relief. “Adrian, good morning,” she said, standing up to stretch.

“Good morning,” he replied. He couldn’t help but smile at her in return, and banished John Smith’s voice saying horrible soppy puppy-love from his mind. “I come bearing coffee.”

“Oh, you are a life-saver,” Clara said sincerely, and crossed towards him to accept the cup he held out to her.

“Late night?” he asked carefully.

She nodded and waved it away, savouring her coffee for a moment. “Trying to fit too much into twenty-four hours,” she confirmed obliquely.

Adrian bit down on the question on the tip of his tongue, refusing to ask if she’d been out somewhere with John Smith. It wasn’t any of his business, and he was determined not to repeat his poor behaviour from Monday.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead, the words tumbling out of him without his permission. At Clara’s raised eyebrows, he forged ahead, chasing a bravery he didn’t feel. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable with my behaviour, Monday morning. It’s hardly fair of me to complain about how John speaks to you, when I’m just as bad. It was wrong of me and I apologise.”

He only had a fraction of a second to note the sadness in her eyes before Clara had pulled him into a tight hug, her arms around his neck and the warmth of her coffee cup seeping through the tweed at his shoulderblade. He hugged her back, trying valiantly not to think of how right this felt, how familiar, how perfect.

“Thank you,” she said after a long moment, tears evident in her voice.

“Clara,” was all he managed to say into her shoulder, too overwhelmed to form a more coherent sentence.

My Clara, his mind echoed, though he kept the thought firmly contained.

She squeezed him tighter then stepped away, blinking rapidly as she turned back to her desk. “I know things have been difficult, these last weeks since your accident,” she said, letting her short hair fall forward to obscure her face for a moment. “But I’m glad you’re here,” she went on, turning to look at him again. “I’m glad you’re my friend.�� Her voice broke on the last word, and he watched her swallow hard, that sadness all too obvious in her eyes.

“And I always will be,” he assured her, sounding choked to his own ears. This was it, then, the acknowledgement of everything they couldn’t be, the future they would never have. He was her friend, and she was in love with John, and the world would have to keep on spinning, no matter how much it broke his heart. He offered her the best smile he could summon, then left before her almost-tears could become his own.

--

At lunch Adrian took himself for a walk around the perimeter of Coal Hill, needing to clear his head. He’d hardly been able to think of anything except that hug all morning. He knew he shouldn’t dwell on it. They were still friends, and that’s what mattered. Her heart might belong to John Smith, and Adrian’s heart might be breaking, but so long as they were still friends...

It was a process, he reminded himself. He hadn’t fallen in love with Clara in a single day, and he wouldn’t get over her that quickly, either. If he was honest with himself, he knew he might never be properly over her. But this would get easier. It had to get easier.

Unthinkingly, his path had taken him by the caretaker’s shed, and Adrian glanced into the windows as he walked past. Though it was dim inside, he could clearly see two figures within, and he let his gaze linger before he even realised what it was he was seeing.

Clara and John were standing close together once again, but that was where the similarities to Monday ended. She was curled in on herself, her face pressed to John’s chest and half-hidden in his jumper, and John had his arms tight around her, one hand soothingly stroking her hair. It was obvious even from a distance that she was crying, and Adrian swallowed down his own emotional response to it, willing himself to look away, to keep moving, to leave them to their private moment.

But before he could accomplish it, John seemed to sense his gaze, and turned his head slightly to meet it through the window, his face impassive. Their eyes locked and held, and Adrian slowed to a stop, feeling as though the other man could see right through him. John Smith knew everything there was to know about Adrian Smith: his love for Clara and his hatred of wine, his taste in bowties and his dreams of travel, his scatterbrained nature and every last strange thing stashed in his pockets.

Well, there you are, that gaze seemed to say, neither hard nor forgiving, neither angry nor friendly. Get on with it already.

And then John turned his face away, pressing a kiss to the top of Clara’s head and speaking to her softly. Released from the other man’s hold on him, Adrian shook himself and continued on, nearly tripping over his feet to get back to his classroom more quickly.

--

Chapter 4

John Smith seemed to be absent from Coal Hill on Friday, though Adrian kept a look out for him, determined not to repeat the fiascos of either Monday or Thursday. He could no longer avoid the fact that John knew of his feelings for Clara, but at least he could avoid the man himself.

Adrian’s students were reading the ending of Romeo and Juliet aloud in each of his classes, a perfect match for his morose, heartsick mood. Arms, take your last embrace, indeed. The hug Clara had bestowed on him dimmed in comparison to what he had witnessed in the caretaker’s shed. He needed to respect Clara’s choices, and stop putting himself in situations that only further crushed his already broken heart.

His classes finally dragged to a close, and he had never been more grateful that the last hour of the school day was his prep period. He had marking to do, but perhaps he could slip off just as soon as the dismissal bell rang, head home before Clara could ask him about his weekend plans. A few days by himself to get his head right would be for the best.

“Don’t be sad, Mr Smith,” a voice called conversationally, after most of his students had filed out, and he paused in the act of erasing the whiteboard to find Courtney Woods lingering at her desk. She was ostensibly still packing up her bookbag, but had the kind of sharp gleam in her eyes that usually meant trouble from her. She was an excellent student, but frequently a disruptive influence, and more perceptive than any teenager ought to be. “Just because Ozzy loves the Scottie, I mean,” she went on with deliberate casualness, only proving his point.

He turned back to the board and summoned up some level of authoritative composure before replying. “If you’re referring to Coal Hill staff, Miss Woods, please use their correct forms of address.”

Courtney sighed loudly, then in a mock-formal tone said, “Do not be dismayed that Miss Oswald loves Mr Smith the caretaker.”

His back still towards her, Adrian took the opportunity to close his eyes for a moment. “Thank you for the advice, Miss Woods. Now, you ought to get a shift on, don’t want to be late for your next class.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, her shrug nearly audible. “But trust me, it’s not worth trying to get between them. Mr Pink tried that, and look what happened to him!”

“Mr Pink?” he asked before he could stop himself, turning towards her again.

She gave him a look like he’d lost his mind. “Yeah, you remember Mr Pink. Died in that car accident last year. Used to teach maths, and oversee the Cadets in whatever the hell it is the Cadets do.”

“Language,” he chided her without any force behind it, but she barrelled on as if he hadn’t spoken.

“He was dating Miss Oswald, and the Doc— um, the caretaker, he hated it.” She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head to one side, considering him. “You really don’t remember Mr Pink?” she asked. “It was all anyone could talk about for months!”

He really didn’t remember Mr Pink, though he wasn’t about to admit that to Courtney. “Is that what the students of this school do for fun?” he said instead. “Gossip about the staff?”

She shrugged. “Nah, just when the caretaker’s involved. He’s a weird one.”

“Well, thank you for your opinions, Miss Woods, but you really should be getting to class.”

“I’m only saying,” she added as a parting shot, shouldering her bookbag and heading for the door, “if he offers to show you his spaceship, just say no.”

Adrian blinked after her in confusion, before deciding he had quite enough on his plate without trying to decode the riddles of Courtney Woods. The final bell of the day could not possibly come soon enough. He threw himself into his marking, more for the distraction than any desire to be finished with it. He would probably need plenty of distractions over the weekend, too. Anything to keep his mind off Clara.

He worked through his stack of marking until the last twenty minutes of the school day, then got up to stretch his legs and check his mailbox in the teachers’ lounge, fully intent on making himself scarce just as soon as the students were released for the afternoon. He was quite nearly back to his classroom when murmured voices from around the corner ahead slowed him in his tracks.

“Where’s Bowtie?” he caught, in a hushed, serious tone, and he blinked in surprise as he recognised Osgood’s voice. What was she doing here, particularly during school hours?

“It’s his free period,” Clara said, also rushed and quiet. “Probably in the teacher’s lounge, if he’s not in his classroom. Do you have an update? I’ve not heard anything since Kate’s message.”

With a start, Adrian realised ‘Bowtie’ must be in reference to him, and touched the deep maroon accessory at his collar self-consciously before leaning around the corner to catch a quick look. Clara and Osgood were standing outside the closed door of Clara’s classroom in the otherwise empty hallway, angled towards each other, looking tense. He darted back around the corner before they spotted him, feeling only marginally guilty about eavesdropping yet again. Especially if they were talking about him.

“They broke atmo’ fifteen minutes ago,” Osgood was saying to Clara, the phrase so strange that for a moment Adrian wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. “Kate has Torchwood keeping tabs on them, but she’s ready to mobilise our forces too, if it comes to that. She wants you to come in just as quick as you can. Have you phoned Eyebrows yet?”

“He’s not answering his mobile,” Clara replied. “Which, with him, could mean anything, good, bad, or otherwise. I wish I knew—” She cut herself off with a frustrated sigh. “He called them a telepathic hivemind conglomerate. Other him, Bowtie, I mean, in the all of three minutes I got to talk to him before he used the Arch.”

He had said what? When?? Adrian couldn’t remember that particular combination of words ever leaving his mouth. Things had been strange since his concussion, certainly, but that didn’t sound like the sort of thing he would throw into conversation under any circumstances.

“I wish I knew which him they’re more likely to key in on,” Clara continued, her words only adding to Adrian’s confusion, “the one with the face or the one with the hearts.”

“And Eyebrows still hasn’t remembered anything about this?” Osgood asked obliquely.

“Not a bit. He said he’s not surprised, between the Chameleon Arch and crossing his own timeline. And maybe that’s a good thing, in case they’re searching for the right memory signature, like he thought they might do. But this is exactly what Bowtie didn’t want, us facing this blind.”

“Could be worse,” Osgood said. “Could be stuck alone with him in an archaic point in history, without any support or resources, and a heaping load of racism and sexism besides.”

Clara groaned. “Martha so deserves a raise.”

“I’ll make sure to include that recommendation in my report to Kate when this is all over. Assuming we survive.”

“Right,” Clara said, voice gone business-like again, and Adrian could visualise her squaring her shoulders. “The ‘telepathic’ bit still worries me.” It worried him, too, frankly, as much as any other other part of this bizarre, nonsensical conversation that inexplicably involved him. “But in terms of surviving this, there’s a much bigger issue at stake.”

“In that if something happens to Bowtie,” Osgood said, “it could cause a massive paradox that might tear a hole in the universe?”

Wait, what??

“Exactly,” Clara sighed, evidently completely serious.

“We should try to avoid that,” Osgood agreed mildly.

“Priority has to be protecting Bowtie, then. Oh, answer your phone, you ridiculous man,” Clara added in an emphatic undertone, making Adrian’s heart twist. He’d never heard her call anyone but him that, and he pulled his own mobile from his pocket, just to doublecheck that he hadn’t missed any messages from Clara.

“The Tower’s the safest place,” Osgood said, drawing Adrian’s attention away from his utterly unhelpful phone and back to the strange conversation happening around the corner. “The whole building is shielded, the Archive doubly so. They shouldn’t be able to scan it or land there, but...”

“But then there’s loads of questions from Bowtie, and Eyebrows can’t land there either,” Clara finished for her.

She was right about one thing at least: he certainly did have loads of questions about all of this.

“Questions seem preferable to destroying the web of time. And there’s always the new landing pad protocol, don’t forget.”

“Bad choices but you still have to choose,” Clara said, sounding almost like she was quoting something. “Alright. I ought to get back to my students for the last few minutes of class, but then I’ll see if I can find Bowtie. Can you scan for him?”

“Not in his current state. It’d only turn up Eyebrows, if he’s around.”

“Well, scan for him, too. If he’s not going to answer his mobile at a time like this, I’m not above using whatever resources we have at hand to find him.”

“What about the __?” Osgood asked, and Adrian blinked in surprise as his brain evidently jumped right over whatever the last word in that sentence had been.

“Bowtie’s __ you mean?” Clara said, and his mind again skipped like a badly scratched record. Two syllables, heavy on the consonants, but when he tried it hear it it was like there was just nothing there. “Not a bad idea, should be able to lock onto the other version of itself, at least. The cloaking device is still on, you remember where it’s parked in my flat?”

“Maybe you should do that bit. It likes you better, and you can actually fly it, if things come to that.”

“Oh, the __ likes you fine. But you’re right, today might not be the best time to learn to fly it. That does mean you’re on Bowtie duty, though. You alright with that?”

Adrian winced at the phrase. Bowtie duty. Like he was a burden, a loose end, someone they needed to coddle and watch over.

“Of course,” Osgood said. “Good job you introduced us. He trusts me, I’m pretty sure. I’ll text him and get him to meet me for a drink or something, that should make it easy to have our people pick him up and take him to the Tower.”

“Perfect. Five minutes of class left, then I’ll dash home for the __ and text you as soon as I hear anything from Eyebrows,” Clara said, but Adrian had stopped listening.

He had understood less than half of their conversation, and it had still somehow managed to be the strangest part of what was already the weirdest month of his life. But that was a bridge too far, hearing Clara and Osgood talk about him like that, more than his wounded heart and ego could take. Without pausing to think about it, he straightened up and turned away from them, walking swiftly and silently down the hall, continuing on past the doors that led outside.

--

Chapter 5

Adrian reached the turn off for his flat and kept on walking past, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his trousers, his gaze fixed on the toes of his boots, and his mind a blur. No matter how he turned it over in his head, nothing he’d overheard from Clara and Osgood’s conversation made any sense. There was the obvious strangeness, like their codename for him, and Osgood’s presence at Coal Hill in the first place. But that was nothing compared to the terms they’d thrown around so easily. Telepathy. Web of time. Hole in the universe.

He tried to fit it all into some sort of innocent explanation. Play-acting for the students? No, the classroom door had been closed, and they’d kept their voices hushed, as if afraid to be overheard. A game, perhaps? Role playing or augmented reality or whatever it was that people with active imaginations got up to in their freetime? That couldn’t be it either, Clara was too much of a professional, she would never step away from her students for something like that.

Adrian felt like Amelia Pond, the girl from the fairy tale whose life didn’t make any sense. Nothing fit. There were no logical explanations.

His mobile buzzed in his pocket, and he withdrew it to find a text from Osgood. Drinks at the pub tonight? My treat. :)

It was at such odds with what he’d heard in the hallway at Coal Hill, in tone and content both, that Adrian stuffed his phone back into his pocket without a reply and continued walking. The way Osgood and Clara had talked about him, like he was a child in need of minding, still stung. But far more alarming was their casual decision to abduct him in service of whatever it was they were mixed up in.

No matter how he looked at it, there was only one conclusion, as much as he hated to even think it: his friends had been lying to him. There was something sinister going on that they had intentionally hidden from him. Worse than that, even, they had been managing him. ‘Bowtie duty’, Clara had called it. Was that what had happened last Friday as well? Clara called off on a ‘minor emergency’ that had apparently taken all night, and Osgood volunteering to make sure he got home safe, then staying with him the rest of the evening?

His phone buzzed again. He staunchly ignored it.

Did Osgood even like bowties? Or had it all been part of a plan to gain his trust and keep tabs on him? And if that was what had happened last Friday, that meant John Smith had to be mixed up in all this as well.

He stopped in his tracks, glaring off into the distance. John Smith. If their codename for Adrian was ‘Bowtie’, then who else could they possibly mean when they referred to ‘Eyebrows’. Of course John was part of this. In all likelihood he had pulled Clara into the whole mess. He probably wasn’t even a real caretaker. That would explain why he was so terrible at his job.

Adrian resumed walking, shoulders hunched and head bowed, no destination in mind other than just away.

What else had he missed? What other odd moments had he shrugged off in the last weeks, too focused on his infatuation with Clara to see the forest for the trees? What other lies had they made him believe? And why? What reason could they possibly have for behaving so bizarrely?

The buzzing of his mobile hadn’t stopped, he realised, and he pulled it from his pocket in exasperation, half a mind to tell Osgood to leave him out of whatever it was she was playing at.

Dr Martha Jones calling the display read, to his surprise, and he quickly answered it.

“Adrian, hi, I’m glad I caught you!” Dr Jones’s voice came down the line, sounding harried.

He frowned at that. “Everything alright?”

“We got your blood test results back, and there’s something I’d like to discuss with you in person, if you’re free this afternoon. It’s somewhat urgent, I’m afraid,” she replied.

“I can swing by your clinic now, if you like,” he said, his worry only increasing. “Shouldn’t take me more than fifteen minutes or so to get there.”

“Perfect,” Dr Jones said, relieved. “The staff has already gone home for the day, so I’ll meet you at the front. See you soon.”

The call ended and Adrian was left staring at the screen in bewilderment. Yet another strange thing to add to the pile of today’s inexplicable weirdness. Dr Jones couldn’t be caught up in this, could she? No, he was being paranoid. She’d been his physician for years, and only met Clara because she’d taken him to the clinic after his accident.

Which meant that there actually was something wrong with his bloodwork, something so dire that Dr Jones didn’t feel it could wait until Monday. He looked around to try to get his bearings, quickly gave up on that pointless endeavour, and instead thumbed over to the cab app on his phone.

Clara and Osgood could keep their games about telepathy and punching holes in the universe. Adrian had more important things on his mind now.

--

Dr Jones met him at the front of the clinic, holding the door open for him to enter, then led him through the empty lobby to an exam room. It had an almost haunted atmosphere to it, this place he was so used to seeing filled with staff and patients, similar to how Coal Hill could seem late in the evening after everyone else had gone home. He tried to shake the feeling that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, telling himself again that he was just being paranoid.

“Wait here while I grab your chart, I’ll only be a moment,” Dr Jones told him as she slipped out of the room.

Adrian perched on the edge of the exam table, then got up again and sat in one of the chairs instead, feeling antsy. Whatever this was must be important, but he couldn’t quite get Clara and Osgood’s conversation out of his mind. That combination, along with the oppressive silence of the clinic, only served to ratchet up his anxiety. He tried to calm his racing pulse and failed at that miserably.

“Thanks for coming in so quickly,” Dr Jones said, re-entering the exam room with a folder in hand and pulling up a chair next to his. “I can imagine you had other plans for your Friday afternoon.”

“Not good news then, I take it?” he asked.

Dr Jones gave him a sympathetic look, holding his gaze for a long moment. “I’m afraid not.”

Before he could reply, a familiar voice drew his attention, and Adrian spun quickly to find Osgood framed in the doorway. “Oh, thank god,” she said, sounding relieved.

“Osgood? What are you doing here? What the hell is going on?” he demanded. As he said it, he felt a sharp pinch in his neck, and turned to find Dr Jones holding an empty hypodermic needle.

“I’m am so, so sorry,” she told him sincerely, as the world went abruptly dark.

--

Adrian came back to himself slowly, the memory of what had happened in Dr Jones’s clinic filtering back in before his body had fully recovered from the drugs he’d been given. Whatever was going on with Clara and Osgood, evidently his physician was tied up in it as well. And whatever it was, it had quickly escalated from a strange conversation in the Coal Hill hallway to drugging and abducting him. He held still, kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady, all too aware of the danger he was likely in.

Even without looking around, he could tell he’d been moved, the room around him colder and larger-sounding than the exam room at the clinic. He could hear an air filtration system high overhead, and footsteps pacing in the middle distance, crisp and echoey on what he guessed was probably a cement floor.

He should have trusted his instincts about Dr Jones being mixed up in this weirdness, rather than dismissing it as paranoia. He should have trusted that feeling that told him to get as far away from all of this as possible. Wherever they’d taken him, he was completely at their mercy. No one knew that he’d gone to see Dr Jones, no one would even think to look for him until Monday at the earliest. His limbs felt heavy and sluggish, so making a run for it didn’t seem to be an option, either.

It was chilling to think that people he trusted, those he considered friends could do this to him so easily. And the knowledge that Clara of all people— his Clara — could be part of this made Adrian’s heart twist. He loved her. Against his better instincts for self-preservation, he loved her enough that a little thing like betraying him couldn’t possibly change his feelings for her. Whatever happened next, whatever nefarious situation she’d dragged him into, he couldn’t help but love her still.

The pacing footsteps stopped a few feet away. “Is it just me,” Osgood’s familiar voice asked, “or is this taking too long?”

“For him to wake up, you mean?” Dr Jones replied, and only the drugs still in his system kept Adrian from flinching, her voice was so close by. “Could be any time now,” she went on, apparently unperturbed by their current circumstances. “His physiology is only mostly human, so it’s anyone’s guess.”

“It’s not just that,” Osgood said, far more worry in her tone than in Dr Jones’s. “We ought to have heard from Clara by now. It’s been more than an hour.”

“Which means exactly nothing if she had to take the __ somewhere,” Dr Jones pointed out, evidently using the same word Adrian had overheard Clara and Osgood say at Coal Hill, the strange two syllable word his mind couldn’t seem to hold onto. “You know how it is. Wibbly-wobbly. Honestly, it might be a good sign: if Clara hadn’t been able to get in touch with Eyebrows, we’d certainly have heard from her by now.”

“You’re right,” Osgood sighed, and Adrian heard a chair scrape briefly against the hard floor as she presumably came to sit near Dr Jones, close to the cot they’d laid him out on. “Do you ever miss it?” she asked a moment later, her voice softer, almost wistful. “Travelling with him?”

“All the time,” Dr Jones said. “The things you see out there... nothing compares. But I also like sleeping in my own bed, and not nearly dying on a regular basis.”

“To be fair, that still happens fairly often in this job, too.”

“True, but at least now I get a salary, and hazard pay for the really bad days,” Dr Jones replied, laughing. “What about you? Do you ever wish...?”

“Only on days ending with ‘y’,” Osgood said levelly. “I mean, of course I do. I’ve read every file we have on him at least twice, daydreamed about it for years. But I know I’m needed here, given the political situation of late. And if I’ve learned anything from reading about the Doctor’s companions, I know the best days are when you manage to save someone, or many someones. When you’re able to make a difference.”

“Yeah,” Dr Jones said, sounding thoughtful. All of that made about as much sense to Adrian as the conversation he’d overheard at Coal Hill, but he kept still and listened intently, hoping they might say something that would shed some light on the situation, or help him find a way to escape.

“I’m doing that here,” Osgood said. “The work we do, it makes a difference. And that’s enough for me.”

“Save the world, save the universe,” Dr Jones replied ruefully. “All in a day’s work.”

“Or: hastily paint and furnish a flat, fabricate student records, drug and kidnap the Doctor...”

A chill ran through him at Osgood’s offhanded, almost joking tone. Whoever this Doctor person was, it sounded as though Adrian wasn’t the only one taken against his will. How many other people had they stolen out of their lives? And why?

But Dr Jones laughed in response. “Is it terrible of me that I wish we got to do that last one a bit more often?”

“I won’t tell him if you don’t,” Osgood said with an amused snort.

“He really ought to have woken up by now,” Dr Jones said, her tone turning serious again. “I didn’t give him all that much.” She touched Adrian’s wrist, perhaps intending to take his pulse, and he jumped in spite of himself.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” she said. “I was actually starting to worry.”

He squinted one eye open at her. “Worry about the man you abducted?” he asked sourly.

“Sorry about that,” she replied, sounding not at all sorry. “Bit of an emergency. Needs must. How are you feeling?”

Adrian decided against answering that and instead pushed himself up to sitting, bracing his hands behind him as a wave of vertigo overtook him for a moment. “Where are we? Where have you taken me?” he asked as his vision cleared, revealing an odd sort of warehouse room, lines of metal shelves marching away into the distance, each covered with a nonsensical collection of objects, some strange looking and others utterly mundane.

“This is the Black Archive,” Osgood said, leaning in and angling her chair to better see him from the other side of Dr Jones. “The deepest and safest level of UNIT Headquarters.”

“UNIT?” Adrian asked, glancing at her before returning his gaze to his surroundings. He hadn’t actually expected them to tell him where they were, but if Osgood was willing to offer up answers, he might as well keep her talking.

“Unified Intelligence Taskforce,” she supplied. “We handle alien incursions of Earth so that the rest of humanity doesn’t have to worry about it. The Archive is where we store all the extraterrestrial bits and bobs we can’t risk falling into the wrong hands,” she added, perhaps noticing his scrutiny of the room. “You’ve been here before, you just can’t remember it at the moment.”

He scoffed at that. “I think I would remember a place like this. And remember dealing with alien incursions. Assuming any of what you just said is actually true.”

“You’d be surprised how much you can forget,” Dr Jones said, “and how easily.”

Adrian fixed her with a cold look. “And I suppose you aren’t truly my physician, are you, Dr Jones? If that even is your real name.”

“It is, and I am,” she replied, less defensively than he might have expected. “Dr Martha Jones,” she went on, offering him her hand to shake. “Chief Medical Officer of UNIT. We’ve met before — many times, actually — but I’ve only officially been your physician the last two weeks or so.”

“Since my accident, you mean?” he asked, squinting at her in confusion. But before Dr Jones could answer, an old machine on one of the shelves nearby crackled suddenly to life, drawing everyone’s attention.

“UNIT, come in, this is the Doctor!” the tinny speakers blared out, John Smith’s voice distinctive even through the static. “Kate, are you there?”

Frowning slightly, Osgood crossed to the machine and picked up the attached radio handset. “She’s with our forces in the field, Doctor,” she said into the handset. “HQ is under my command. Where are you?”

“In the Vortex. I can’t risk landing anywhere I might be spotted. I need the landing pad protocols activated. Now.”

Osgood straightened up at his brisk tone, pulling her mobile from her pocket and opening an app that Adrian couldn’t quite see. “I need your authorisation code first.”

“We don’t have time—”

“Doctor, we are dealing with a telepathic hostile force whose skillset is unknown,” she replied firmly, cutting him off. “There will be no landing pad protocol until I’m certain it’s really you.”

John muttered something unintelligible then bit out, “Fine, let me find the correct setting.”

The machine emitted a series of buzzing, whistling noises that made Adrian wince, but Osgood barely reacted, keeping her eyes on her phone.

“Happy?” John’s disembodied voice demanded when the noises stopped.

“Sonic code verified,” Osgood said, nodding. “Tower roof landing pad protocols activated. You will be met and escorted down to the Archive. We have—” she stumbled slightly over her words but quickly recovered, “—Adrian secure here. Is Clara with you?”

“No,” John snarled, and then the lights on the machine went dark.

“You know this face better than I do,” Dr Jones said into the silence that followed, as Osgood replaced the handset. “But that sounded ominous, even for him.”

“Very,” Osgood agreed, attention on her mobile again. “And still no word from Clara.” She pocketed her mobile, turning her gaze back towards Adrian and Dr Jones. “Whatever’s happened, it’s not good.”

And despite the utter bizarreness of his current circumstances, drugged and kidnapped and held in a warehouse full of supposed alien artefacts, Adrian felt his heart lurch painfully at the idea that something terrible might have happened to Clara.

--

Chapter 6

“They have Clara!”

John Smith’s agitated declaration the moment he entered the Archive caught Adrian off-guard, and he was instantly on his feet, Osgood and Dr Jones quickly following suit.

“What?” Adrian demanded in disbelief, his heart in his throat. In the minutes since the radio had gone dark, he had held out hope that his instinctual worry about Clara had been misplaced. But he felt the last of that hope slip away after one look at the frantic expression on the Scottish caretaker’s face.

With a quick nod of her head, Osgood dismissed the uniformed soldiers that had escorted John in. “You’re certain?” she asked him once they’d gone.

“Deadly certain,” he bit out. “It’s my fault, I came at this totally wrong, anticipated all the wrong moves. The Tu’kavari weren’t scanning for idiot boy here,” John went on, gesturing flippantly at Adrian. “They were scanning for the __, for his __! Clara brought it back online to contact me, only took them moments to find her. I didn’t even have time to—” He cut himself off with a strangled noise, spinning away, emotions chasing across his face.

“I don’t understand,” Adrian said, watching as Osgood and Dr Jones exchanged a worried look. “Who has Clara? What the hell is going on?”

Ignoring Adrian’s question, John turned back to them, his eyes wild. “I need the fob watch,” he said, the term as inexplicable as any other Adrian had heard so far. “Every bit of anything I ever knew about the Tu’kavari is locked up in the Arch. He needs his memories back if we’re to have any hope of saving Clara.”

“Doctor—” Osgood started, but John cut her off.

“I haven’t the time to argue with you about this!” he snapped. “They have Clara! We have to assume this is a hostage situation, that they intend to use her as leverage against me. We need to devise a plan to rescue her, and to do that we have to know what we’re up against. I need the fob watch. Now.”

“UNIT doesn’t have the fob watch, Doctor,” Osgood said carefully. “Clara does. She’s kept it on her person, to make sure nothing happens to it.”

John stared at her for a moment, aghast, then closed his eyes, his shoulders drooping, all the bluster gone out of him. “Of course she has,” he murmured.

“Do you know if the Tu’kavari have the __ too?” Dr Jones asked, repeating that same strange word Adrian seemed unable to hear. “If they have it, we may have a whole new category of disaster to worry about.”

“I went to Clara’s flat,” John said, his voice low and gravelly. “There’s no sign of— We have to assume they have them both.”

“And no chance Clara made a run for it?” Osgood said hopefully. “Took the __ into the Vortex or to hide someplace in history?”

But John shook his head. “I would be able to contact her if she had. Her mobile would still be working. They have her, I’m certain of it.”

“Who, exactly?” Adrian demanded, worried and irritated and tired of listening to them babble in jargon he could barely follow. “Who has Clara? The, what did you call them, the ‘Tu’kavari’? How am I supposed to accept any of this when you all keep throwing around ridiculous words—”

“The Tu’kavari are an alien race,” Osgood quickly supplied. “Earth hasn’t had contact with them before, but you have. The two of you,” she added, indicating Adrian and John.

Of all the nonsensical things he had heard today, that somehow took the prize, the idea that he and John Smith might have some forgotten history of collaboration. “Right, right, aliens,” Adrian said derisively. “You want me to believe that you and Clara and my physician and Coal Hill’s bloody caretaker are all some sort of alien experts, protecting the planet from interstellar threats??”

“Yes,” John snarled, finally turning towards him. “What you believe or don’t believe has absolutely no impact on the reality of the situation, which is that they have Clara!”

But before Adrian could respond, a sudden sharp stabbing pain in his temples drove him to his knees on the concrete floor. As horrible as the pain was, the images and sounds that took over his brain were far, far worse. Someone was in his mind, a foreign entity pushing its way in, no matter how he tried to block it out.

We have your machine, the presence in his head said, with a voice like thousands of knives scraping over ice, layered and inhuman. Inexplicably the image of an old fashioned police box flashed to the front of Adrian’s mind, blue-painted wood and white-framed windows. But before he could wonder at it, the image shifted, chilling him to the bone. We have the woman you love, the voice went on, over a glimpse of Clara looking terrified. Surrender yourself to us, Doctor, or you will bear witness to the destruction of both.

Abruptly Adrian was cradling Clara’s limp body, her head lolling lifelessly against his shoulder. The image was so viscerally real that he could feel her slight weight in his arms, her hair brushing against his face, the fabric of her dress catching on the tweed of his jacket. He cried out, recoiling, and yet he was held in that endless moment, unable to escape the horror, unable to escape the knowledge that Clara was dead and it was his fault.

It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and he was back in the Archive with its collection of oddities, the cold of the floor seeping into the bones of his knees and the pain in his head slowly fading. Osgood had moved closer to him and when he glanced at her, she offered him a hand as he shakily stood up.

His heart was thundering, breath catching in his throat. They have Clara! John’s voice rang in his memory, and here was the proof of it, however unexplainable. The images were burned into his brain along with the unearthly rasp declaring, We have the woman you love.

“Do you believe me now?” John demanded, also climbing to his feet, looking pale.

“You saw that, too?” Adrian asked, bewildered. “Did everyone...?”

“No,” Osgood replied before John could. “I think it was meant just for you. The two of you. What was it?”

“Message from the Tu’kavari,” John said. “It’s as bad as I thought. They have Clara. And the __.”

“The what?” Adrian said, his mind skipping over the two syllable word yet again.

“The __,” Osgood repeated, unhelpfully. “Then it’s like you said, Doctor, they must have been tracking the older version of the __, taken both it and Clara.”

“Seriously, what the hell is that word??” Adrian demanded, his nerves frayed past any endurance.

Osgood opened her mouth to reply, but John cut her off. “Perception filter,” he said obliquely. “He can’t hear it. Move on, we don’t have time to explain it to him. That was the ransom message I’d been expecting. The Tu’kavari have the __ and they have Clara.”

Adrian flinched, remembering the feeling of Clara, lifeless in his arms. It had seemed so real, so horribly, undeniably real.

Except—

“And they’ll destroy both,” John went on, “unless we surrender ourselves to them, Bowtie and me. Or one of us, at least. I’d vote him, but that doesn’t do me much good.”

“When this is all over, we are going to sit down and have an intervention about your self-destructive tendencies of late, Doctor,” Dr Jones said, sounding weary, though Adrian was only peripherally aware of their conversation, his mind spinning as he tried to think his way through what he’d been shown.

“What does it matter?” John snapped, earning himself a glare from Dr Jones. “They have Clara. What do you think it is, exactly, that I would be unwilling to do to get her back? Perhaps you ought to ask the Daleks of New Skaro how that worked out for them! Only, you can’t, because there aren’t any left!”

“No, hang on—” Adrian started, the thing that had been nagging at his mind starting to come into focus.

“So the Oncoming Storm is our only option, then?” Dr Jones said, her voice laced with scorn and sarcasm. “Pity I don’t have an Osterhagen Key to give you, we could skip right to the end.”

John recoiled as though she’d slapped him, but snarled back at her, “Martha Jones, don’t you dare!”

“Listen to me—” Adrian tried again, only more certain of his conclusion the more he thought about it.

“Martha is right,” Osgood said, her voice placating. “We have resources, we should at least explore other options.”

“How long do you think the Tu’kavari will give us to formulate a plan?” John demanded. “We’re gambling with Clara’s life with every minute we waste!”

“It wasn’t Clara!” Adrian cried, raising his voice to be heard.

“What?” John snapped, rounding on him.

“Or not— not recent Clara, anyway,” Adrian amended. “I don’t think they really have her. I think they’re bluffing.”

“Of course they have her! I was speaking to her when they arrived!” John replied. “Try to keep up, pudding brain.”

But Osgood held up a hand for silence, then turned to Adrian. “How do you know?”

He shook his head, trying to gather together all the details that had snagged in his mind. “The vision or whatever it was, that’s not what she was wearing today, that plaid dress. She’d never wear that dress to work. And her hair was all wrong, much longer than she’s had it recently. It’s like they’re using an old photo of her. Not Clara as she is today.”

John was glaring at him still, but his gaze had taken on a calculating look. After a moment he turned away, putting one hand to his face. “I hate it when you’re right,” he muttered.

“Is he, Doctor?” Osgood asked, hope covered over with pragmatism. “I have to admit, I didn’t take any notice of what Clara was wearing today. Though Adrian makes a good point, she did cut her hair fairly recently. If those details don’t match...”

John turned back towards them, that agitated energy still evident in his motions, though his voice was calmer. “What they showed us, that’s what she looked like when we went to Trenzalore, the first time around.”

“‘Trenzalore’?” Adrian repeated. “Now you’re just making up words!”

“It’s a planet,” John replied impatiently. “It’s— Nevermind, this will all make much more sense to you later, I haven’t the time to walk you through it now.”

“Are you sure about this, Doctor?” Osgood asked him.

John nodded. “They’re using a memory of her, must have pulled it from his mind when we first tangled with them. Which means there’s at least a good chance that they don’t actually have her.”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Adrian said. “If they really had her prisoner, why wouldn’t they show us an image of her now?”

“You’re right, they’re bluffing,” John allowed grudgingly.

“But you heard them take her,” Osgood said.

John shook his head. “I heard a commotion and then Clara said ‘they’re here’ and the line went dead.” He pondered it a moment, chewing on one knuckle. “I think I might know what Clara’s done, and if I’m right...”

“Then we can save her?” Adrian asked.

The Scotsman shot him a look but didn’t reply. “I need to get back to my __. You three, with me, try to keep up. And keep the soldiers out of my way, if you can.” He turned and strode quickly from the room, leaving Adrian, Osgood, and Dr Jones hurrying to follow.

--

Chapter 7

“Is it safe to take Adrian into the __?” Dr Jones asked, once they’d left the Black Archive and entered a long narrow hallway.

“Probably,” John replied, not breaking his stride. “Won’t jog his memory, at any rate. I can’t make any promises about existential crises, but everyone reacts differently. Frankly, I’ve always been curious how I would take it, if the shoe were on the other foot.”

“What’s this now?” Adrian asked, trying to keep up in more ways than one. Whatever strangeness was going on, he supposed he was all in now. Anything to save Clara.

“The, uh, word you can’t hear,” Osgood said, meeting his gaze. “It’s his spaceship.”

“And timeship,” Dr Jones added as they entered the lift at the end of the hallway.

“You’re having me on,” Adrian said, disbelief colouring his tone. Around them, the lift began to move upwards. “Just when I thought today couldn’t possibly get any weirder, now you’re telling me he's an alien, too?”

John shot him an acidic look. “Stop expecting things to get less weird. Your ‘normal’ life was the anomaly, not this.”

Unsure what to make of that, Adrian snarked back, “Courtney Woods warned me against going to see your spaceship, you know.”

“Taking her to the moon was a bad idea on my part, admittedly,” John said grudgingly.

“Think this is weird for you,” Dr Jones murmured as the lift came to a stop, “imagine how the rest of us feel.”

The doors opened to reveal an ancient-looking stone roof ringed with parapets. The sun was setting in the distance, and a chill wind whistled in from the nearby Thames. In the far corner from the lift stood an old fashioned police box, blue-painted wood and white-framed windows, exactly like the image that had been planted in Adrian’s mind by the supposed aliens the others all called the Tu’kavari.

“How did that get up here?” Adrian asked in confusion as they crossed the roof towards the police box.

“It’s a spaceship!” John cried, exasperated. He turned to Dr Jones. “Was I this bad, back when it was you and me hiding out?”

“Worse, somehow,” she answered dryly.

“I saw this, in that vision or whatever it was,” Adrian said, ignoring John’s insult. “Is this what they meant, then, when they said we have your machine?”

“Yes,” John said, lengthening his strides to reach it faster. “T-A-R-D-I-S, Time And Relative Dimension In Space. That’s the word you can’t hear.”

“But they don’t have it, if it’s here. Were they bluffing about that, too?”

John sent him a scathing look over his shoulder. “It’s a time machine. There are two versions of it in the local area, currently. This one and an older version that we left hidden in Clara’s flat. That’s the one they have.” He paused at the door of the police box, pulling a key from his pocket and fitting it into the lock. The door opened and he stepped inside in one fluid motion, as though he had done it a thousand times before.

Dr Jones followed after him without a backward glance, and Adrian hesitated, wondering how they were all expected to fit into such a small wooden box, supposed spaceship or no.

“It’s, uh—” Osgood started, then shook her head. “Nevermind. You’ll have to see it to believe it.” She offered him a reassuring smile and stepped through the door as well, leaving Adrian alone on the rooftop in the rapidly dimming light.

For half a moment, he considered making a run for it, getting as far away from the entire situation as he could. But the vision from the Tu’kavari was still sharp in his memory — the feeling of Clara lying lifeless in his arms, the inhuman voice telling him, We have the woman you love. He still wasn’t completely convinced that he could trust Osgood and Dr Jones, much less John Smith, but as much as it might be easier to believe this was all some elaborate hoax, he couldn’t deny the alien feeling of the Tu’kavari forcing their way into his mind, couldn’t dismiss the first-hand experience of something so impossible.

Which meant that Clara was actually in danger. The others all seemed to believe that the threat against her life was real, and John was— Well, Adrian could hardly continue to think that the abrasive Scotsman was indifferent to Clara, when his frantic worry about her was so blatantly obvious. He loved her as much as Adrian did, and had declared that he would stop at nothing to get her back safe.

How could Adrian do any less? How could he possibly walk away now and leave Clara to her fate? No. He would do whatever it took to get her back, no matter how bizarre all of this seemed, no matter how unlikely. Clara was in danger, and he would go to hell and back to save her.

His mind made up, Adrian gathered his courage and pushed his way past the blue wooden door, trying to ready himself for whatever lay beyond.

But nothing could have prepared him for the room on the other side of the door. It wasn’t just bigger than the footprint of the police box, it was cavernous, dimly lit and seeming to stretch on impossibly in every direction. A sort of circular computer station occupied the centre of the room directly ahead of him, at which John was already standing, tapping away at a keyboard, ostensibly ignoring him while Osgood and Dr Jones lingered nearby. Adrian’s gaze followed the central pillar upwards to a large set of rotors that disappeared into the low light overhead.

“Oh, this is...” he started, words failing him as he nearly stumbled over his feet, trying to simultaneously walk towards the centre console and look around the room, unable to pull his eyes away from the inconceivable sight around him. “This is proper— proper alien, isn’t it?”

“I’ll give the Chameleon Arch this much: its impression of a pudding brain is spot-on,” John said sourly, not looking up from the monitor in front of him.

“Don’t pretend this isn’t your favourite part of introducing someone to the __,” Dr Jones chided him gently.

Adrian paid them no mind, too engrossed by the interior of the police box. A second level ringed the entire space, filled with bookshelves and chalkboards and well-worn armchairs, accessible from the several staircases placed at intervals around the room. It was somehow both ancient and brand new, cosy and homey and yet like something brought to life directly out of science fiction. Osgood was right: no description, no warning could possibly have prepared him for the reality of seeing it in person.

An external awareness touched his mind, and Adrian flinched, bracing himself for another assault from the Tu’kavari, another round of pain and horror and threats against Clara. But to his amazement, this time the foreign presence in his head was gentle and calming, speaking to him not with the terrifying collective voice like knives dragged over ice, but rather in abstract concepts the size of galaxies, wordless and profound.

“Is this ship... alive??” he asked, trying to grasp what it was he was being told, and by whom.

John shot him a brief surprised look, barely pausing in whatever it was he was occupied with at the computer console. “Now that is a first.”

“It is alive, isn’t it?” Adrian went on, more sure of it with each passing second. “It— she, she knows me. She’s always known me,” he added in an awed whisper.

He pulled his gaze down from the rotors to find Osgood watching him with that same longing, wistful look he’d seen her direct at John and Clara, though he couldn’t imagine why. “She stole you and ran away, a very long time ago,” she said. “It’s always you and her, in the end.”

“Ah ha, gotcha!” John said triumphantly, before Adrian could ask Osgood what on Earth that meant.

“You found Clara?” she said, turning towards him.

John shook his head. “Not Clara, the signature of the other __. Oh, she’s clever,” he murmured, his gaze still on the monitor on the central console. “She put the __ into siege mode. That’s why the line went dead: no communication in or out, except from Gallifrey High Command or another __ in siege mode.” He tapped a few keys, frowning at the display. “But it also would have locked her out of all the major systems, since she’s not a Time Lord — flight controls and navigation and just about everything else.”

“So wherever Clara is, she’s stuck,” Dr Jones said, grimacing. “No way to fly the __ or call for help or anything.”

“Would she be able to take the __ out of siege mode?” Osgood asked.

“She ought to be able to,” John said, finally looking away from the monitor to meet Osgood’s gaze. “Unless it’s not safe,” he added ominously. “Unless she needs to stay in siege mode.”

“Unless they have her, you mean,” Adrian said, too sure he was right to quite manage to phrase it as a question. “Unless it wasn’t a bluff.”

John looked at him sidelong, his face serious. “Given the evidence at hand, in all likelihood the Tu’kavari do technically have the __, with Clara inside,” he said. “But they can’t do anything to either of them, so long as Clara stays in siege mode. It’s all hollow threats. For now, at least.”

“Then how do we save her?” Adrian demanded.

“I’m working on it,” John muttered, turning his attention back on the computer monitor. “It doesn’t help that we’re going into this blind. I miscalculated the Tu’kavari once already, and it got Clara captured. We can’t risk doing that again.”

“Well, what do we know about the Tu’kavari?” Dr Jones asked, looking from John to Osgood.

“Clara’s report said that they’re a telepathic hivemind conglomerate,” she replied, “travelling around the universe subjugating and absorbing other telepathic beings. They want the Doctor, for obvious reasons, but Earth’s population should be fairly safe from them.”

Dr Jones’s brow wrinkled in concern. “That’s all we have?”

“UNIT has never had contact with the Tu’kavari before, so nearly everything we know comes through Clara. She didn’t get much of a chance to talk with Bowtie,” Osgood said, catching herself with a wince halfway through a gesture towards Adrian, “before he used the Chameleon Arch, but she wrote down what little he was able to tell her.”

“No, hang on, what have I got to do with any of this?” Adrian demanded. “My memory’s been a bit fuzzy since my accident, but I’m sure I’ve never said anything like that to Clara.”

“Your ‘accident’ wasn’t actually an accident, or an injury of any sort,” Dr Jones said, turning to him. “You had to forget all of this, so you could hide from the Tu’kavari. Your name isn’t really Adrian Smith—”

“What the hell are you talking about? Of course it is!”

“We don’t have time for this,” John growled, crossing towards Adrian with a few long strides, his heavy boots ringing loudly against the metal floor. “We can’t truly end this without the fob watch, but until then, this will have to do.”

Without warning, John seized him by the shoulders and knocked his forehead into Adrian’s with enough force to send Adrian staggering back a few steps.

“Ow! Why would you—” he started, but he was quickly overwhelmed by a flood of images in his mind, flickering rapidly, each one overflowing with information, with history, with memory. There were too many to count, too much all at once to try to make any sense of it, but amongst all of it a few moments jumped out, seared onto his heart as if he’d always known and was only just now remembering:

Clara smiling at him, framed in the doorway of the TARDIS as he leaned against the console, watching her fondly.

A field of shimmering deep space filling his entire vision, stars and galaxies whose names he knew, planets and moons he had walked, the whole wide scattered universe peppered with his fingerprints.

His hands digging through a pile of old clothes, discarding some sort of monk’s habit in favour of a familiar tweed jacket and bowtie, as his pulse thrummed in his chest, excited and relieved.

Clara saying to him, “She said you were the saviour of worlds, once. Are you going to save this one?” and his own voice replying, “If I do, will you come away with me?”

It was all too much, disjointed and yet intensely personal, intensely his. Defeat and triumph, adventure and heroism, love and loss so painful he thought he would never recover. But then Clara, always Clara, her hand in his and her eyes watching him as though he’d hung the moon and the stars.

“How—” he managed to gasp out as the flashes of memory continued unabated. “How is any of this possible??”

And the TARDIS, his TARDIS, how could he have ever forgotten? The daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away. Oh, that box. You’ll dream about that box. It’ll never leave you. Big and little at the same time. Brand new and ancient, and the bluest blue ever.

The most beautiful thing he had ever known.

“Telepathic transference,” John was saying, as the images in Adrian’s mind continued to ripple outwards, like a stone dropped in water, disrupting everything he thought he knew about himself. “Martha and Osgood are right,” he went on, “you had to forget everything, so that you could hide from the Tu’kavari. Only it hasn’t worked. They found us anyway. And now Clara’s in danger, so I need you to step up, memories or no, and do the only thing Clara has ever asked of us: be a Doctor.”

--

Chapter 8

“Are you okay?” Dr Jones asked, pulling Adrian from his fractured thoughts.

He blinked up at her from the armchair he’d retreated to in the wake of John Smith’s ‘telepathic transference’, or whatever sci-fi term he wanted to invoke to describe using a violent headbutt to fill Adrian’s mind with memories he could barely make sense of.

“I brought you tea,” she went on, holding a steaming mug out to him. “Thought it might help.”

“Thank you,” he said, after just a beat too long. He accepted the tea from her and took a cautious sip, surprised to find it’d been made exactly to his liking. “This place has a kitchen?” he asked, the words seeming to bypass his conscious brain on the way out of his mouth.

Dr Jones sat down in the mismatched armchair beside his. “It does. Though it’s been renovated since I was last here.”

“I’m still trying to get my head around all this,” Adrian admitted. “Whatever John did, these feel like my memories. But they can’t possibly be. I’m just a school teacher. An ordinary, everyday, human school teacher!”

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Dr Jones said sympathetically, “especially with the day you’ve had. But I can promise you, it’s all true. I knew you, a long time ago, and as hard as all of this is to believe, I know it’s true.”

“It’s just so ridiculous, the idea that I’m this ‘Doctor’ person— alien,” Adrian amended, scowling and taking another drink of tea. “That John and I are, are...” He couldn’t make himself say it. The same person. “None of it makes any sense,” he said instead. “And I don’t see how it helps us rescue Clara, which is what we should be focusing on.”

“This is a blind spot for him,” Dr Jones said, looking down towards the console room below them, where John and Osgood were clustered around the monitor, talking in urgent, hushed tones. “The way time travel works, when two versions of you are in the same place at the same time, only the elder one remembers it. So he has no memory of living this as you, and I think it’s putting him on edge.”

“I feel completely blind, too,” Adrian said. “And the memories he gave me don’t help. It’s like I should know what to do, but I have no idea. Clara’s in danger and I’ve forgotten every useful bit of myself, and I just—” he cut himself off, swallowing thickly. “We have to save her. Whatever it takes. I just wish I knew what that was.”

“Even when you’re feeling like yourself, I think it’s really just that you’re better at pretending you know how to save the day. You go off with nothing more than half a plan and that same determination that you must fix things. And somehow you always do.”

“Don’t mythologise me, Martha Jones,” he said, staring down into the last of his tea. “I’m not the hero you think I am.”

“Yes, you are. I know you are,” she said, catching and holding his gaze. “And Clara knows it, too. So does Osgood, even Eyebrows down there knows it, better than anyone. That’s what it means, to be the Doctor. I know that’s still in you, even without all your memories.”

“We might have a plan,” John called up to them before Adrian could formulate a reply. “It’s a fairly terrible plan, but I think it will work.”

--

“You want me to act as bait?” Adrian demanded, glowering at John. They hadn’t gotten past the first step of his so-called plan and already it was living up to the ‘fairly terrible’ descriptor.

“Not bait,” John insisted. “A distraction, a decoy. The Tu’kavari know your face, not mine. They don’t know there’s two of us. We can use that against them.”

“What about the risk to Adrian?” Dr Jones asked. She shifted her gaze between John and Osgood, standing on the far side of the console room with her mobile held to her ear, but turned back to John to press her point. “If something happens to him, it would cause a paradox, do damage to the Web of Time.”

“The risk is minimal,” John said, shaking his head. “I only need them distracted for a few minutes. Besides, everything about him that guarantees the future is currently locked up in that fob watch. If we don’t get Clara back... There’s your paradox,” he said bleakly.

“But if they use their— their telepathy on me?” Adrian said. “Won’t they be able to tell that I’m not who they think I am?”

John levelled a flat glare at him. “You are who they think you are. It’s just that your memories are in a jumble right now. Which will likely be to our advantage: they’ll be too busy puzzling out the inside of your head to notice what I’m doing.”

“And what, exactly, will you be doing, while I’m stood in front of the aliens having my brains picked?”

“Swapping places with Clara. If I put my TARDIS into siege mode too, I’ll be able to talk to her, and we’ll coordinate from there. She’ll make her escape and I’ll stay in her place.”

“And then what?” Dr Jones asked, folding her arms in clear displeasure. “You do as they ask, surrender yourself to them so that they don’t go after Clara again?”

Adrian felt his blood run cold, knowing with absolute certainty that if he were in John’s place, that’s exactly what he would do. Whatever it took to keep Clara safe, even if it meant sacrificing himself.

“It won’t come to that,” John replied, dismissing the idea. “I’ll lead them away from Earth, away from Clara and all of you.”

“And then what?” Dr Jones repeated.

“And then I’ll figure out the rest of the plan once Clara’s safe!” he snapped. “We don’t have time to come up with a perfect plan, just one that will work, and this will!”

“We have no time at all,” Osgood interjected, lowering her mobile from her ear. “That was Kate. The Tu’kavari ship is on the move, they’ll be here any minute. This plan is the best we’ve got, and it has to happen now.”

--

“Just keep talking,” John told him, hurrying Adrian, Osgood, and Dr Jones towards the door. “Keep the Tu’kavari focused on you. I only need a little window of time, as much as you can give me.” He all but shoved them out of the TARDIS and into the cold night air, then paused in the doorway, holding Adrian’s gaze. “Clara will want to follow me,” he said in a fierce, low tone. “Don’t let her.”

Adrian stared in bewildered silence as John slammed the door closed, and watched as the blue police box faded in and out of reality, with a sound that felt like it had been imprinted on his bones at the beginning of the universe, until abruptly it was gone.

“How long have we got?” Dr Jones asked, turning to Osgood.

“Ninety seconds, maybe,” she replied, not looking up from some sort of tracking app on her mobile. “If we’re lucky.”

“Ninety seconds until I face down an alien race none of us know anything about?” Adrian demanded, distantly aware of the alarm in his own voice. “How am I— what am I supposed to do??”

Dr Jones turned to him and placed her hands on his shoulders in a comforting gesture. “You just have to bluff,” she said in a level tone, holding his gaze. “That impossible hero in all those memories in your head? Pretend to be him. Just for a few minutes, just until Clara is safe.”

Clara’s name seemed to cut through the panic clouding his mind, and Adrian took a steadying breath. He would go to hell and back to get her home safe, and he had known that even before the reality of his identity had been forced into his head. He couldn’t lose his nerve here at the moment of truth. To save Clara, he could do anything.

He nodded shakily. “Nothing more than half a plan and the determination to fix things, right?”

“I’ve seen you pull off wildier odds,” Dr Jones reassured him. “Many times. Once when you were barefoot, on the moon. You can do this.”

“Thirty seconds,” Osgood called to them.

“Thank you, Martha Jones,” Adrian told her sincerely. “I wish I remembered you, but I am so glad you remember me.”

She pulled him into a quick hug, then stepped back, joining Osgood next to the stone parapets and leaving the open centre of the roof to Adrian. His wide stage from which to bluff the Tu’kavari. Pretend. Lie.

Rule one: the Doctor lies.

He batted away the blurry pseudo-memory, and instead went looking for another, a flash of a moment that had caught his attention while his head had still been aching from John’s ‘telepathic transference’. Clara looking up at him, tears in her eyes as she said, Do what you’ve always done: be a Doctor.

She’d believed in him that day, in the midst of whatever disaster they’d been facing down. She had reminded him what it meant to be the Doctor, that the name he chose was a promise. Never cruel or cowardly. Never give up, never give in.

Whatever series of events had led him to this strange half-life masquerading as Adrian Smith, he was still the Doctor, underneath it all. Clara needed him to reclaim that title, to make that promise all over again, and he wasn’t about to let her down.

“Ten seconds— less,” Osgood said, and Adrian tried not to focus on the tension in her voice. “They ought to be directly above us.”

“Well then,” he said, straightening his bowtie and reaching for a confidence he didn’t feel, “I suppose this is where I come in.”

Overhead, the stars seemed to shimmer. Adrian could feel the oppressive weight of the Tu’kavari ship shifting the atmosphere, and sense their presence lurking at the edge of his mind. He strolled to the centre of the roof, took a deep breath and hollered out the first thing that came to mind:

“Oy! Tu’kavari! Are you looking for me?”

Abruptly the stars were replaced by a dark mist that blocked all light. As Adrian watched, transfixed by the alien horror of it, thousands of eyes emerged from the darkness, seeming to be formed from the black mist itself. In one quick snap, they all focused on him, staring down at him, lidless and unblinking.

He swallowed roughly, clinging to the memory of Clara telling him to be a Doctor. “Well here I am,” he said, voice low to keep it from cracking in terror.

“Surrender, Doctor,” the Tu’kavari said in their collective voice, raspy and cold. The sound of it seemed to come from all around him, bouncing off the stone parapets and resonating inside his mind simultaneously.

For Clara, he reminded himself. Anything to get her back safely, no matter what it took. He steeled himself with the thought, and uttered one syllable, low and menacing: “No.”

“Surrender,” the Tu’kavari insisted. He could sense them inside his head, trying to bend his will to theirs, and he resolutely shoved back.

“You said you have Clara,” Adrian said, and felt a deep instinctual anger bubble up out of him at the idea that anyone would try to harm her to get to him. And when people come to you and ask if trying to get to me through the people I love is in any way a good idea— “You said you have my TARDIS,” he went on, letting that anger strengthen his voice. “I want them back, now.”

“If you do not surrender, we will destroy them both!”

“No, that’s not how this works,” he barked out with more authority than he had ever felt standing in front of a classroom of teenagers. “I want Clara Oswald, here, unharmed. I want the TARDIS back, undamaged. Do that, and then we’ll talk.” He stared back at the many-eyed inhuman mass above him, and remembered his certainty earlier that what he’d been shown in the vision hadn’t been real. “Or maybe... Maybe you don’t have them at all,” he said. “Maybe you’re lying, maybe it’s all a bluff.”

“We do not lie!” the Tu’kavari snarled back.

Adrian shook his head. “You say you have Clara, you say you have my machine, well...” He spread his hands apart, all mocking drama fit for Shakespearian tragedy. “Show me.”

The cloud of eyes shook with fury, and then seemed to flow like a liquid into a dense black column that touched down on the roof a few feet ahead of Adrian. Before he could react with fear or anger or anything else, it was gone, retreating back into the oppressive presence overhead, and in its place sat a small grey cube, maybe three inches tall, with intricate circles and lines engraved on every surface.

For just a moment, there seemed to be two identical cubes occupying the space only slightly offset from one another, like a glitch in a 3D projection. But then the cube was gone, abruptly replaced by the blue police box. The double doors flew open, and from within Adrian heard Clara’s familiar voice call, “Get in!”

Without pausing to think, he leapt across the intervening distance in a few long strides, skidding through the doorway and into the bigger-on-the-inside room within. He spun and shoved the doors closed behind him and felt the groaning, seething whoosh of the TARDIS dematerialising.

--

Chapter 9

“Clara!” Adrian cried, turning away from the doors of the TARDIS and towards the centre console. Distantly he registered that the room was slightly different from the one he’d left minutes ago, the upper gallery of bookshelves gone, the lighting more blue and less inviting. But his gaze was drawn to Clara, standing at the console expertly manipulating the flight controls. “Are you alright?” he asked, rushing across the room to her.

She glanced up at him as he approached, her eyes red-rimmed and her mouth pressed into an unhappy line. “I’m fine,” she bit out. “Did he tell you what he’s planning?”

Adrian hesitated, knowing instinctively which ‘he’ Clara meant. “He said he was going to switch places with you,” he said carefully.

“That bit seems to have worked, at least,” she allowed, her tone grudging and her attention back on the knobs and switches of the console. “Both TARDISes in the same place at the same time. But now he’s determined to lead them away — told me to take you into the Vortex so the Tu’kavari would follow his TARDIS and not ours. He’s going to get himself killed if we don’t do something.”

“He said not to let you follow him,” Adrian told her, wondering if he had any hope at all of stopping her, when she clearly knew how to fly the TARDIS and he currently did not.

Clara snorted damply. “Self-sacrificing idiot,” she muttered, throwing a lever on the console with more force than necessary. “As if I’d leave him to face this alone. He ought to know better by now.” She raised her eyes to Adrian’s and held his gaze through her gathering tears. “I’m sorry it’s happened this way, Adrian. This isn’t how I wanted any of this to go for you. But we’re out of time, and I need the Doctor back.”

“But I’m— I am the Doctor,” he said uncertainly. “Aren’t I?”

That seemed to be the wrong thing to say, because Clara flinched and closed her eyes, a tear slipping from beneath her lashes as he watched. “And you always will be,” she told him, her voice tight. “But he’s the Doctor too,” she went on, looking up at him again, “and I refuse to lose either of you. I need your help to save him, I can’t do this on my own.”

She reached into the pocket of her skirt and withdrew a silver fob watch, balancing it in her open palm to hold it out to him. The cover was engraved with the same sort of intricate lines and circles as the siege mode TARDIS had been, and somehow Adrian knew that if he were to open it, he would be able to read the markings on both. A chill ran through him, a sharp desire to be as far away from the fob watch as he could get.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” he said, looking from Clara to the watch and back again. “That’s the death of Adrian Smith. Of this whole... life that’s been mine, teaching at Coal Hill, and going to the pub with you and Osgood, and, and forgetting where I put my laundry detergent. That’s all over now, if I open that watch.”

“I wish there was another way,” she said sincerely. “We didn’t do this to trick you, we didn’t have any other choice—”

“No, I know,” he assured her, his voice soft and detached as he stared down at the watch in her hand. “John — older-me,” he amended, shaking his head, “he tried to give me some of my memories back. I understand, a little. But I think I liked being Adrian Smith,” he said, finding her gaze again. “I liked being your friend.”

With her free hand, Clara reached out and took his, curling her fingers around his as though they’d done it thousands of times before. “That’s not going to change,” she told him, her voice fierce. “You are not going to lose me. Not today, not ever. I promise.” She pressed the fob watch into his hand as she stared up at him with wide, pleading eyes. “Please, for me, just this once, don’t even argue.”

Adrian gazed at her for a long moment, then nodded reluctantly. “For you, my Clara,” he murmured. “For you.”

Before he could lose his nerve, Adrian took a deep breath and thumbed open the latch, feeling Clara’s fingers slip away from his. Golden flight flowed out of the fob watch, and he was suddenly lightheaded, like he’d stood up too quickly, though he hadn’t moved. The light reached out to him, encompassing him until it was all he could see, all he could feel, tingling across his skin and crackling inside his brain.

Adrian Smith was no more, there was only the golden light and the warm metal of the fob watch, still clutched in his hand. All that he was, all that he had ever been, lived there in that light. He could feel his mind rapidly expanding, the memories John had given him rearranging themselves and slotting back into their proper places with an odd kind of relief.

With a surge of vertigo, he realised abruptly how few memories John had given him, how much more there was to be remembered, summoned back into his mind through the light pouring out of the fob watch. Not just Clara, but Amy and Donna and Martha and Rose, back and back through all the long years of his life — to the first time he’d seen the TARDIS, the first time he’d met Clara, there at the TARDIS doors, and before that the vibrant orange sky of Gallifrey, calling him away into time and space. Millions and millions of memories stacked neatly into place, well worn and well remembered, twelve faces and more than a thousand years since he had first taken up the title of the Doctor.

And then the last memory before the Chameleon Arch, crisp in its newness, abruptly urgent in its importance to the current moment:

With the Tu’kavari close on his trail, he had jumped forward in Clara’s timestream, keying in on a recent spike in artron energy and landing the TARDIS in her flat some two years after he’d last seen her. The artron energy could only mean one thing, and he would need the cooperation of another version of himself, if his plan was to have any chance of working. And until then, who better to trust his safekeeping to than Clara Oswald.

Thank you for being my safe place to fall, he had told her, holding her close in a hug he’d refused to think of as desperate. Clara, my Clara. I surrender myself into your care.

And then the Chameleon Arch, the supposed ‘accident’, and the weeks living as Adrian, all leading to this specific point in space-time, standing in his TARDIS once again, staring down at the open fob watch in his hand as the golden light receded, dimmed, then faded.

He clicked the cover closed and read the phrase engraved in Circular Gallifreyan on the case: the infinite cosmos within us. It was a fragment of an old poem, far too sentimental for something as practical as the Chameleon Arch, but he had chosen it because of the comfort it always brought him, in this first moment after returning to himself. For the space of a double heartbeat, he stared at the words written in a language all but gone from the universe, and felt that infinite cosmos within him unfurl and settle comfortably back into place.

“Doctor?” a voice asked hesitantly, and he looked up to find Clara watching him, her brown eyes large and worried. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Clara,” he breathed. It wasn’t quite like the sensation of the First Face, seeing her all over again for the first time, but it was as close as he would get without regenerating. “My Clara.”

“Your Clara,” she agreed, nodding and blinking away tears. “I missed you, Doctor.”

He pulled her into a tight hug, revelling in the familiar feel of it. “Thank you for looking after me,” he murmured into her hair.

Clutching at the tweed of his jacket, she nodded again. “I had help,” she laughed, though he could hear her tears in it.

“Yes, of course. Remind me to thank Osgood and Martha, too. I couldn’t have made it through this without the three of you on the job.” He gently pulled back and dropped a quick kiss on her forehead, spinning away towards the console before he could spot her reaction. It wasn’t really his place anymore, to go around kissing Clara Oswald, not with the way he’d seen her look at his older self.

And really, that other version of him was entirely the point of all this. As much as Adrian Smith had hated John Smith, none of that mattered now. He was the Doctor again, and whatever jealousy and spite he might still harbour for his older self, this new Scottish face was the Doctor too. If there was one place in the universe he ought to be, it was at Clara’s side.

“Now then,” he said, his hands already finding the familiar patterns of the TARDIS’s controls, “I hear we have a certain rogue Time Lord to rescue.”

“We’re going to go after him,” Clara said as she joined him at the console, anticipation clear on her face. “Even though he told us not to do.”

“Clara Oswald, when have you and I ever done as we’re told?” he asked, shooting her a conspiratorial look.

She watched him knowingly for a long moment, her eyes still red-rimmed but a smile beginning to curl the corner of her mouth. “You have a plan, don’t you? I can tell by the way you’re practically radiating smugness.”

“I do have a plan,” he agreed, “and a good one. Save Eyebrows, keep you safe, and take down the Tu’kavari all in one go. But I might need you to fly the TARDIS for part of it. Think you’re up for it?”

“Just tell me what you need me to do,” Clara replied with a confident smirk. “I’ve learned a few things in the last few years.”

“Ah, yes, and now who’s radiating smugness?” the Doctor laughed, circling the console to find the control panel he needed. “First things first, we need to find the other TARDIS,” he said as he punched in the commands to do just that. “Ah ha, gotcha.”

Clara had followed him around the console, and he angled the monitor towards her so she could see the tracking information. This required more than just locking in on the TARDIS at any point in her timeline, he specifically needed to find Eyebrows just as he’d begun to lead the Tu’kavari away. Once they came out of the Vortex, they’d be part of the forward flow of events again. They couldn’t risk getting this wrong.

“The time-space coordinates look right,” Clara said, nodding. “Today’s date, moving out of Earth’s orbit. And that bit there,” she added, pointing to a cluster of Gallifreyan that referenced relative time from the perspective of the TARDIS, “that means that it’s a future version of the TARDIS, right?”

“More or less,” he allowed, not wanting to let his surprise show. She certainly had picked up a few things. “So that’s Eyebrows,” he went on, “flying erratically to keep the Tu’kavari guessing. We’re going to materialise right on top of him, and then try to match his course as best we can — two TARDISes occupying the same space, just like earlier, right?”

“And then what?” she asked, her forehead creasing in confusion.

“And then...” He winced, already dreading the inevitable. “And then I make contact.”

“With the Tu’kavari?”

“With Eyebrows, first,” he explained. “Telepathically — it’s a Time Lord thing, messy but effective. Especially for our purposes: two TARDISes, two Doctors, the same but different. We open up our minds to the Tu’kavari...”

“And confuse the hell out of them,” Clara finished for him.

“Exactly,” he said, grinning back at her.

--

Chapter 10

“Clara, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” his older self demanded over the TARDIS’s staticky radio as soon as the Doctor and Clara brought their TARDIS out of the Vortex, materialising practically right on top of the other TARDIS. “I told you not to follow me!”

“Yes, well,” the Doctor replied, most of his attention on the controls as he tried to match the erratic path the older TARDIS was cutting through real space, “it’s not Clara’s fault, I overruled you. And of the two of us, I’m the one who actually has a plan to save the day, so shut up and listen.”

“I think I liked you better as a mild-mannered English teacher,” Eyebrows grumbled.

“You didn’t like me then, either,” he shot back. “But for once we can actually use that to our advantage. The Tu’kavari are a telepathic conglomerate, many minds but all thinking in unison. We establish contact between the two of us, and then we let the Tu’kavari in—”

“Willingly let them share our minds?” came the sharp reply over the radio. “Did something go wrong with the Chameleon Arch? I know I wasn’t this much of an idiot before!”

“Are you getting forgetful in your old age,” the Doctor demanded of his other self, “or do you not remember what you said to me barely half an hour ago: they don’t know there’s two of us. We can use that to confuse the hivemind, push them past the point of endurance.”

The radio was silent for a moment, and when the older Doctor spoke next, it was more thoughtful. “They’ll perceive us as one person, with wildly divergent thoughts. The Tu’kavari won’t be able to keep up without shattering.”

“Precisely. Clara and I will keep our TARDIS in sync with yours, continue drawing them away from Earth just in case. But their attention should be completely fixated on us.”

The radio made a harsh sound of his disapproving scoff. “You’re going to juggle two levels of telepathic connection and try to match your flight path to mine? I can’t imagine how that could go wrong!”

“I’ll be doing the flying,” Clara spoke up, her tone leaving no room for argument. “Stay focused on the Tu’kavari, Doctor, don’t worry too much about your trajectory. Just fly erratically and I’ll match your movements,” she went on, addressing her words to the radio. She paused, then added, “Wherever you go, I’ll follow.”

The Doctor caught her gaze when she looked up at him across the console, her expression grave. He offered her a little nod of reassurance, knowing she meant what she said, not just in this moment, but always.

“For the record, I think this is a truly spectacularly bad idea,” his older self informed them, “but as it’s the best plan we’ve got, I don’t see that we have much of a choice.”

“Noted,” the Doctor huffed. “Ready?”

Clara stepped over to him, pressing herself in between him and the console, her fingers brushing his as she took over the navigation controls. “Ready,” she confirmed, her attention already focused on mimicking the other TARDIS’s chaotic movements.

“Ready,” the radio crackled.

“Okay, then.” The Doctor looked to Clara, and when she glanced back at him, he grinned and said, “Geronimo.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” the other Doctor said. “Contact.”

He felt the connection between their minds spring to life instantly and echoed, “Contact.” He'd done this before, countless times, but usually with a Time Lord other than himself. Sharing his mind with an older version of himself was an odd sort of feedback loop, like mirrors facing each other — if the other mirror was cross and Scottish and more anxious than the Doctor had thought to expect.

I assume you know how to open telepathic communications with the Tu’kavari? that Scottish voice demanded in his mind. Get on with it.

Distantly he was still aware of the console room around him, Clara standing near his elbow, and the TARDIS’s monitors flickering with information about their current location in real space. The Tu’kavari ship was close on their trail, and he reached his consciousness out towards them, feeling his older self respond in kind.

Oy, Tu’kavari! he projected at them, repeating his words from earlier — what felt like a lifetime ago but could only have been barely twenty minutes. Looking for me?

The hivemind roared through the psychic connection, furious, covetous of his mind and desperate for revenge against him for evading them so long.

This is what you want, isn’t it? he asked, sending a sharp ripple through the telepathic link in a show of strength. Well then, come and get it!

The Doctor felt the TARDIS shift around him, as Clara completed a particularly abrupt manoeuvre to keep them on top of the other TARDIS. He braced himself against the console and refocused on the Tu’kavari.

Enough of your tricks and illusions, Doctor! came their icy, multilayered collective voice. Surrender!

There is no illusion, the other Doctor put in, smoothly mimicking him, pretentious Scottish accent temporarily hidden away to complete the appearance that they were one mind.

In sync first, and then the split, he reminded himself, keeping his connection to his older self as steady and unobtrusive as possible. Can’t fake a TARDIS, he told them in the same tone. Perhaps you’re just confused.

We are not confused! The Tu’kavari know all, see all. We see YOU, Doctor!

Ah, but what is it that you see? his older self asked.

A madman in a box? the Doctor added.

The Oncoming Storm? The questions were overlapping, one coming half a second after the other, and the Doctor felt the hivemind flinch in confusion.

Do you think you can keep up? he projected at them, listening as the other Doctor asked the same a moment later in a disorienting echo. Catch me if you can!

The TARDIS swooped again, and suddenly his mind flooded with thoughts of Donna Noble as his older self paged through his memories of her. Time for the split. He shifted his focus, letting the recollections of Donna tumble through his mind unimpeded while he called up his memories of Martha Jones. Not just how brilliant she’d been today, giving him the courage to face down the Tu’kavari on that rooftop, but how brilliant she’d always been, clever and resourceful and compassionate, from that very first day, when he was barefoot on the moon.

The hivemind recoiled and then shoved hard against the Doctors’ shared consciousness as though trying to discern reality from illusion. In unison they shoved back, listening as the hivemind reverberated with it. It was working. It would work. They just had to keep one step ahead, keep the Tu’kavari guessing.

He switched his thoughts to Amy. Mad, glorious Pond, oh how he missed her. Amy, who had run away the night before her wedding to go on adventures with her raggedy Doctor. He’d held onto her as long as he could, but in the end she had chosen Rory, as he had known she would. He’d mourned them for years, swearing off forming that kind of bond with anyone again, until Clara had come into his life.

Through their connection the Doctor felt his older self turn his thoughts to Osgood, replaying memories of her that he didn’t yet have — something about Zygons and the Boxes and narrowly avoiding near-certain death. Petronella. ...Let’s just stick with what we had.

For just a moment, the Doctor aligned their thoughts again, adding in his own recent moments with Osgood, bonding over bowties and laughing at late night telly. It was at such odds with the other memories of her, overlapping and rebounding in the Doctors’ shared mental voice, and he could feel the Tu’kavari’s frustration and confusion grow. The hivemind snarled and pressed in on them, but the Doctors held firm.

Enough! the Doctors thought in unison, flinging their thoughts in opposite directions.

When the older Doctor thought of River, he instead called up every memory of Rose, keeping up the discordant harmony that was slowly but surely breaking the Tu’kavari. Each shift Eyebrows made, the Doctor pivoted as well, drowning the hivemind in a flood of contradictory memories at a relentless pace as the minutes ticked by unchecked. He countered thoughts of Peri with thoughts of Sarah Jane, contrasted Romana against Leela, Jo against Jamie, Tegan and Nyssa and Turlough versus Barbara and Ian and Susan. With every dissonant pairing of their shared memories, the Tu’kavari howled and thrashed within the psychic connection, unable to make sense of the Doctors’ mind.

Around him, the TARDIS shifted violently, and he felt his arm knock against Clara’s just as she muttered tensely beneath her breath. How long had they been at this? How long had Clara been flying his TARDIS unassisted, unable to even witness the telepathic struggle the Doctors were engaged in? All without a word of question or complaint, even more self-assured and competent than the younger version of her he travelled with.

She had always been capable, always ready to throw herself straight into the deep end to save him, right from their very first trip off-world together, when she’d commandeered that flying moped to come after him rather than leave him to face the Old God of Akhaten alone. Clara had led soldiers against the Cybermen, faced down an Ice Warrior alone, convinced the TARDIS to enter a collapsing pocket universe to find him. She had jumped into his timestream to reverse the damage done by the Great Intelligence, tearing herself into a million pieces all for him, with no expectation that she would make it out alive.

And that fateful day in that barn on Gallifrey, she had looked at him with tears in her eyes and reminded him to be a Doctor.

The only thing Clara has ever asked of us, his older self had said, after his attempt to give him back some of his lost memories. And of course he had known the magic those words would carry, the way they would wake up the Time Lord hidden within Adrian Smith. For his Clara, he could do anything.

My Clara the other Doctor echoed through their telepathic connection, and with a start the Doctor realised that their thoughts were once again running in tandem, his memories of Clara pulling his older self in.

My Clara, he couldn’t help but think as well. It wasn’t possessive, as he’d thought when Adrian Smith’s jealousy had made him so critical of the Scottish caretaker who seemed to hold Clara’s heart. It was merely a statement of fact — that out of all the many Claras the universe over, out of all the echoes of her strewn across his timeline, this one was his Clara. The one he knew best. The one who had saved him, time and again.

The one he loved.

And he did love her, the Doctor realised. Adrian’s feelings for her hadn’t been an artefact of the Chameleon Arch, or some shallow human approximation of his affection for Clara. He loved her. Like she’d breathed life into the stars and spun the filaments of galaxies that gave the universe its form. Perhaps he simply hadn’t truly realised it until now, until living as Adrian had stripped away all the other endless noise in his mind, allowing him to finally understand his feelings clearly.

Clara’s love for him was what had driven her to jump into his timestream, and his love for her is what had allowed him to pull her out again, whole and unharmed. Her love for him had challenged him to be better than his past choices, to choose another way to end the Time War. His love for her had sent him racing for the safety of her care when the Tu’kavari were bent on destroying him and assimilating him into the hivemind.

It was a love so strong, regeneration had only deepened it, he knew. His older self echoed the sentiment, sharing the memory of the first time he’d seen her face with his new eyes, the way he had both craved her touch and feared it in those first months after his regeneration. He’d gone to hell and back because of his love for Clara — Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference? he had asked her, as Clara stared at him, her eyes overlarge with tears. Because he loved her, he had left her to live a happy human life, and because he loved her, he had come back to her when the universe gifted them another chance.

The Doctor could hardly make sense of the flood of memories from his older self, moments he had not yet lived, emotions that were all too painful in their familiarity. He let them fall through his mind like rain, until everything was Clara, the Doctors’ minds in perfect sync. The Doctor loved Clara Oswald, a truth so simple and profound it might as well have been the organising principle of the universe.

On the other end of the telepathic connection, the hivemind stilled, as if sensing his weakness, poised to strike.

Because I love Clara, the other Doctor thought in their shared telepathic voice, the singular pronoun somehow encompassing both of them, I must leave her.

Ah, and here it was, the moment of truth, the thing that would finally break the Tu’kavari. With a flicker of insight, he knew what his older self planned to do. Clara would not be happy about it, but it was the only way.

Because I love Clara, the Doctor echoed, their words running together as though it was one unbroken thought, I must stay with her.

I must leave her, the older Doctor projected through the psychic link, not a shred of doubt in the certainty of the outcome.

I must stay with her, the Doctor repeated, just as sure.

I must leave her.

I must stay with her.

I must leave her.

I must stay—

He felt the moment the Tu’kavari hivemind shattered, its billions of minds ricocheting into discordant chaos like so many shards of glass. Each had once been its own entity, its own life, before the conglomerate had consumed it. Suddenly every mind could think for itself again, and a cacophony of memories poured through the psychic link, lifetimes full of love and loss and joy and sorrow that had been silenced beneath the weight of the hivemind.

Quickly both Doctors pulled their minds back, breaking their connection as well, and abruptly he was once again standing in the TARDIS, his knuckles white where his fingers gripped the edge of the console.

“What happened?” Clara demanded, glancing away from the controls to find his gaze.

“The Tu’kavari—” the Doctor started, his throat dry.

“We broke the hivemind,” came the terse response from over the radio. “They’re divided, leaderless. Weakened but not defeated.”

“So what do we do now?” she asked. “How do we defeat them?”

I must stay— I must leave— echoed through the Doctor’s mind in the beat of silence that followed. How could he possibly tell her what they planned, what had to happen now?

“Get Clara to safety,” his older self commanded gruffly. “I’ll draw the Tu’kavari away, find a way to contain them, if I can.”

“No!” Clara cried, abandoning the flight controls to speak directly into the radio. “No, you do not leave me!”

For a hushed moment, no one spoke, and then the radio conveyed his last instruction: “Look after each other.”

“No!” Clara yelled again, but the line had already gone dead. “No. We have to go after him, we have to—”

Despite the plea in her voice, the Doctor reached over and pulled the lever that sent the TARDIS into siege mode, cutting them off from any further communication and blocking Clara from the flight controls.

“I’m sorry, my Clara,” he said quietly, unable to meet her gaze, “but I’m taking you home.”

--

Chapter 11

With a wheeze and a quiet thump, the TARDIS landed on the roof of the Tower. The Doctor had timed their arrival for only a few minutes after they’d left, and was grateful to find UNIT’s Landing Pad Protocol still active. He disengaged siege mode and looked over at Clara, who was stood on the far side of the console, her back to him and her arms wrapped around herself. It was his fault she was so distraught, and knowing that made it all the worse.

“Clara—” he said softly, but she cut him off before he could get any further.

“You said we were going to rescue him,” she said, her voice harsh with tears. “You said you had a plan to save him.”

“I did,” he agreed. “I wasn’t lying to you, Clara. It started out just as I’d hoped it would, we were able to create a feedback loop between our minds to confuse the Tu’kavari. They perceived us as one person following two separate lines of thought, completely outside anything they could understand.”

Clara angled her body to look at him, her arms still clasped around herself as though it was the only thing keeping her upright, her eyes large and her face tearstained. “Then why didn’t it work?”

“It did, at first,” the Doctor said, staring down at his hands braced against the console, unable to meet her gaze. “We flooded them with conflicting memories, the duality of it was breaking them, little by little. But then...” He trailed off, thinking of the moment when their divergent thoughts had aligned entirely against their will. “But then we thought of you,” he said, barely a breath in the stillness of the console room.

“Me?”

“It was like— gravity, nothing we could do to stop it. Our thoughts converged, we didn’t mean for it to happen, but once we started, we couldn’t stop. Every memory we have of you, building off each other. The Tu’kavari thought they had us, thought they’d found our weakness, the way to bend us to their will. The only thing, the only thing that could save any of us in that moment was my future self’s decision to leave.”

Clara snorted damply. “How could leaving me be any help?”

He finally looked back up at her, holding her gaze. “What the Tu’kavari thought was a weakness was our greatest strength, and it was the last weapon we had left. Because our feelings for you are so strong, one of us had to stay with you, and one of us had to leave. The hivemind couldn’t comprehend the contradiction, and it broke them.”

“But if it’s done now, why did he— How could he just—”

“Hey, hey,” the Doctor said, quickly crossing to Clara and gathering her in his arms as her tears began to fall again. “He didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t give them a chance to reorganise the hivemind. This is our best shot at defeating the Tu’kavari for good, and Eyebrows knows it as well as I do.”

“If something happens to him...” Clara said, pressing her face to his chest. “I can’t lose him now, I can’t.”

The Doctor hesitated, then said softly, “Because you love him.”

“I—” Clara faltered. “I love you too,” she finally said, her voice muffled against the tweed of his jacket, her arms around his back holding him tighter. “And I did fancy you, when we travelled together. But with him, it’s different. If I lose him now, it’s the end of everything.”

“Brave heart, Clara,” he said, kissing the top of her head in a comforting gesture. “Your Doctor is clever, and wily, and doesn’t want to be separated from you any more than you want to be separated from him, believe me. You’ve got to have faith in him, that he’ll find his way back to you. We always have, haven’t we, he and I? We’ve always found you again, one way or another.” He remembered what Clara had said earlier, the implicit promise she’d made just before their confrontation with the Tu’kavari. “Wherever you go, we’ll follow,” he murmured, repeating her words. “You have to believe that.”

She hiccupped against him, clutching him tighter, and the Doctor held her closer in response. He would offer her whatever solace he could, but a guilty part of him wished this hug had come under better circumstances. As much as she was undeniably the woman he loved, she wasn’t really his Clara anymore. Somewhere out there was the Clara that fancied him, but he couldn’t ignore that the one in his arms was very much in love with his older self.

For just a moment, he felt like Adrian Smith again, heartsick over his best friend falling for someone else. He thought of the hug she’d given him that morning he’d brought her coffee, and how he had resolved not to dwell on the might-have-beens between them. It was all so different now that he could see the full picture of who Clara was to him, but he couldn’t help the way his hearts ached, both for her pain and his.

“He’ll come back to you,” he whispered. “I know he will, because he and I are the same. We both love you, Clara Oswald. Nothing is ever going to change that.”

A sob escaped her, and the Doctor stroked his hand against her hair, soothing her the only way he knew how. He was a poor imitation of the man she loved, but until his older self returned, he would try his best to be what she needed. He could do no less for his Clara.

“I love him,” she breathed, as though speaking the words might bend the universe to her will. “I love him, and I can’t lose him now.”

He held her close, words failing him. He didn’t want to even consider the possibility that the other Doctor might not come back. The Tu’kavari had been weakened, but a wounded animal could be vicious in defence of itself. They were still dangerous, and now Eyebrows was out there facing them alone. He knew the depth of his older self’s feelings for Clara, and knew that nothing besides ensuring her safety would keep him away. Nothing short of death could keep him from returning to her, and even on that point he expected he might well find a loophole.

And after all, the Doctor knew that someday in his future he would have to find a way to escape death, a way to cheat the old rule of thirteen faces and somehow regenerate into Eyebrows. He had no doubt that when that day inevitably arrived, it would be his desire to stay with her that would allow him to accomplish the impossible. Anything for a little more time with Clara.

“If this is going to go on awhile,” a familiar Scottish voice called from the doorway, “I can come back later.”

Clara jolted in his arms and took a startled step away from him. Together they turned to look at the open door of the TARDIS and the figure standing just inside. To the Doctor’s quick eye, there were subtle signs of how much time had passed for his older self — the length of his hair, the lines of fatigue around his eyes, the wrinkles pressed into his clothing. But Clara stared at him like she couldn’t quite believe he was really there, like she didn’t know what to do with herself now that her hopes had been answered.

The older Doctor returned her gaze for a long moment, his expression as anxious and heartsick as hers, then looked over his shoulder, listening to someone outside. “No, they’re alright,” he replied. “Just post-alien-confrontation jitters, you know how it is.” He turned back to them, gaze sliding past the Doctor to land on Clara again. “You are okay, aren’t you?”

She nodded shakily, still unable to tear her eyes away from him.

Osgood appeared at the older Doctor’s shoulder, peering around him to see further into the TARDIS. “Oh good, you had us worried,” she said as she crossed towards the console.

Martha was close behind her, but she hesitated for a fraction of a second between one step and the next, her gaze quickly cutting between Clara and each of the Doctors. She was clearly aware of the tension drawn taut between them, and she quirked one eyebrow at the Doctor in silent question.

“Are the Tu’kavari gone, then?” Osgood went on, seeming not to notice.

When neither Clara nor his older self so much as broke eye contact with each other to acknowledge the question, the Doctor said, “Ought to be. We were really very clever, Eyebrows and me. We used a telepathic feedback loop—”

“What did you do?” Clara demanded of the other Doctor, interrupting as though no one had spoken. “You left. Was that really the only way to defeat them? Really?”

“I led them away,” he replied quietly, utterly focused on her. “When the hivemind split into factions, I managed to trick the more aggressive of them into a pocket universe. Should hold them for a great long while. The rest have sworn off conquering other telepathic races, so I don’t think we’ll encounter any trouble from the Tu’kavari again. Only took me a month or so.”

“A month,” Clara repeated flatly.

He bit his lip as though trying to decide what to say. “I figured that was enough of a win to come back and check on you, make sure you got home safe. And here you are,” he said more briskly, gesturing at her with both hands. “Safe and sound. I don’t know what I was worried about.” He looked away, losing some of his bravado. “If you— if you like, I could clear off for a bit, leave you and Bowtie to travel together for a while. I can always erase his memories later, make sure the timeline stays intact.”

Still standing close beside her, the Doctor watched Clara’s face as she absorbed this offer, the flicker of confusion and the flash of pain she quickly hid away. It was undeniably selfless of the other Doctor, in a way he wasn’t sure he would be able to match if their places were reversed. Anything for a little more time with Clara, he had thought only moments before his older self returned. But could he do this to her, steal her away from her Doctor, claim days and years out of her short life that weren’t rightfully his?

If it was what she wanted, he didn’t think he would have the strength to tell her no. But watching her reaction, he didn’t think it was what she wanted. Perhaps Adrian Smith had been more right about John Smith than he’d known, perhaps his future self was blind to Clara’s feelings for him, despite the depth of his feelings for her.

“You came back,” she said finally, her voice carefully controlled to betray no emotion, “just to tell me you’re leaving again?”

“You’ve missed him, Clara,” he replied, like the rest of them weren’t in the room as well. “That much is obvious. If this will make you happy—”

“Oh, you ridiculous man!” she seethed, bursting into motion and crossing the console room in a few long, quick strides. Without hesitation, she grabbed the older Doctor by his lapels and pulled him into a passionate kiss.

For one long moment the Doctor watched them, too stunned to pull his gaze away. Despite the many hugs and little kisses he’d exchanged with Clara over the years, he’d never really thought anything like that was possible for the two of them. The same jealousy that had so defined his time as Adrian surged within him again, but he pushed it away. Clara had been offered a choice between them, and she’d chosen who she truly wanted. His happiness for her and his future self had to balance out any lingering envy.

“Did we say five quid?” he heard Martha’s voice ask quietly, and he turned to where she and Osgood were still stood on the far side of the console.

“There’s a kiss, it’s definitely ten quid,” Osgood muttered in reply. “Pay up.”

He cast one last look back towards Clara and the older Doctor, completely absorbed in each other and utterly mindless to the conversation on the other side of the room, then forced his feet to move towards Osgood and Martha, rather than continue to stand staring in consternation at the sight of Clara snogging his next face.

“UNIT leadership placing bets on the Doctor-companion relationship?” he demanded of them. “Really?”

“It’d hardly be the first time,” Martha smirked at him.

He laughed at that as he joined them. “Oh, Martha Jones, you are a star,” he told her, just to see her smile widen. “Chief Medical Officer of UNIT, hm? With the two of you and Kate Stewart in charge, it seems that science certainly is leading, these days.”

“We do like bossing those solider-types around,” Osgood said conspiratorially.

“No one better than you to do it,” the Doctor said, grinning at her. “Thank you both, for looking after me,” he said, sobering a bit. “Couldn’t have made it through this without you.”

“No hard feelings about the whole ‘drugging and kidnapping you’ bit, then?” Martha asked.

“Well, don’t make a habit of it. But exceptions can be made for a situation like this. And if anyone’s entitled to a bit of leeway, it’s you, the only human to survive a Chameleon Arch’ed Time Lord twice now.”

“Three times, if you count Professor Yana,” Martha pointed out.

“Oh, the Master,” he groaned. “I suppose we do have to count that.”

Osgood opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off. “I don’t even want to know,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “If the Master has come back again, whatever he’s up to in the future is Eyebrow’s problem, not mine. Let me live my peaceful Master-free existence a little while longer, will you?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Fair enough.”

“So what do you say, Martha Jones?” the Doctor said, turning back to her. “Fancy a spin around the universe, for old times’ sake? You’ve certainly earned it.”

“Well, if you can promise to get me back on time. I have missed it,” she said with a sly smile.

“Osgood, how ‘bout it?” he went on. “We could hit up a few planets, find a few historical figures to prank. All of time and space, anything you like.”

She smiled and dropped her gaze. “I’d love to. But I can’t leave Earth. I’m needed here.”

“Ah,” he said, putting the pieces together. “The Osgood Boxes are working as intended, then?”

“Yes,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.

“Good,” he replied. “Well, not good, but better than not working, I suppose.” He considered her a moment, thinking about the weight on Osgood’s shoulders, and the grace with which she carried it. “You are saving the world right here at home, aren’t you?”

Osgood smiled at him ruefully. “All in a day’s work.”

“I’m glad I got to know you,” he told her, “over popcorn and pizza and bad late night telly. Thank you for that. And here,” he added, untying his bowtie as soon as the thought occurred to him. He pulled it from his collar and held it out to her. “To add to your impressive collection.”

She accepted it with an awed look, carefully coiling it up in her hand like a precious object. “It’s been my honour, Doctor,” she said sincerely. “If you need anything— from your flat, or help from UNIT, or anything, really— well, you have my number.”

“Indeed I do,” he laughed, pulling her into a quick hug. “And keep an eye on the two of them for me, would you?” he added when they parted, tilting his head towards Clara and the older Doctor. “I hate to think what trouble they might get into from here.”

“On it,” Osgood replied with a nod. With one last smile and a wave at the Doctor, she turned and made her way outside.

He watched her go, his gaze inexorably landing on Clara and his future self, still wrapped up in each other near the entrance to the TARDIS.

“Honestly, I thought they’d be finished by now,” he muttered, shooting Martha a pained look.

She laughed quietly. “Wanna bet on how long they can go before they realise we’re still here?” she suggested. “I’m out ten pounds, might be nice to recoup my loses.”

“Yes, yes, very funny, but I know better than to bet against you, Martha Jones. And I am in no way convinced that they’ll come to their senses without a bit of nudging, so I suppose I’ll just have to—” He grimaced at the task ahead of him, but made himself move. “Oy, lovebirds!” he called as he crossed towards them. “How am I meant to leave with the two of you perched in my doorway?”

They finally stepped away from each other and turned to him, though they continued to stand so close their arms were nearly brushing. “Ah yes, I’d almost forgotten we were still in your TARDIS,” the older Doctor said. “Can’t imagine why we’d want to stay,” he added, curling his lip in distaste. “There’s a reason I redecorated.”

“Oh, ha ha,” he shot back. “You’re awfully opinionated for someone who shouldn’t exist! Twelve regenerations, thirteen faces — I’ve spent the last few hundred years clinging to this face, knowing it’ll be my last. And yet there you stand, in violation of all the rules.”

“Yes, well,” his older self replied, shrugging self-consciously. “We ought to have died, but then Clara did a clever thing.”

“She often does,” the Doctor allowed, directing his smile towards her. “It’s good to know my future is in safe hands. Keep a tight hold on it, Clara.”

She grinned back at him, clearly catching his reference to the comment his last face had made, that day they saved Gallifrey. But as he watched, her smile faltered and fell. “It must be nearly Christmas, for your Clara, back in your proper time,” she said carefully.

“I suppose it is,” he said, frowning at the shift in her tone. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Clara nodded shakily, blinking back tears.

“Hey, what’s this then?” he asked, taking a step closer to her. “Christmas ought to make you happy, not... whatever that face is.”

“It’s a rough one, that year,” she said, managing a fragile smile. “We get through it, but...” She swallowed down her tears and then found his gaze. “She loves you, your Clara does. I know you’re going to forget all of this, timelines out of sync and all of that, but try to remember that much, at least.”

He looked away, smiling though it was tinged with melancholy. “I think I already knew. And even if I won’t remember, it’s good to see that we’ll get there eventually. The long way ‘round.”

“Yeah,” Clara said, gazing up at her Doctor with a soft expression and reaching over to clasp his hand in hers. “The long way ‘round.”

[sheliesshattered]

I haven’t wanted to say anything for fear of freaking anyone out, but I’m actually still working on chapter 6 of This Isn’t A Ghost Story. I wouldn’t have started posting chapters if I wasn’t absolutely certain I could finish this in time, and I’m feeling really good about it right now, even though it’s not quite done.

Chapter 4 will go up in less than 12 hours from now, so I’ve got two weeks to put the finishing touches on chapter 6 before it needs to be ready to post. Chapters 7 and 8 have been done for ages, down to just little edits on re-reads, but I’ve still been writing the last couple of scenes for ch6 over the last couple of weeks.

As of right this moment, what I’ve got is 4775 words from the beginning of chapter 6 that are done and largely edited, and then 974 words leading to the end of the chapter, that sets up ch7 and again, are fairly well edited and finished. What I’m missing is a tiny bit of stage direction and maybe a couple of lines of dialogue, no more than 100 words at the most, to stitch those two parts together, right in the middle of this scene. Could be as few as ~30 words, but I’m guessing it’s in the 60-70 word range once all is said and done. Ch6 might break 5800 words total, but I would be surprised if it breaks 6000 words.

I have been hacking away at it little by little all this week, and I don’t know if it’s the nature of this scene in particular, or because I need to make sure that ch6 wraps up a whole bunch of dangling story threads, or if it’s just that this is the very last thing I have to write for this story, but it’s been pulling teeth to get the words to line up in the right order. Today has actually been pretty productive, after I finished editing ch4, so if I can get the words to cooperate I might actually be able to finish this tonight, but if not I think tomorrow or over the weekend are pretty solid bets. Less than 100 words. I can do this.

On the one hand it feels so odd for this journey to be almost over, but on the other hand I am really ready to check this one off as complete and get back to some of my other more canon-based AUs -- For As Long As We Get has been calling to me, as have Chameleons and Bowties, The Woman Who Died, and Feral Circle, just to pick a couple off of my ever-growing WIP list. And it’ll be another month before I post chapter 8 of This Isn’t A Ghost Story and mark the whole thing as complete, and I’ll be editing and writing the extras posts right up until the end, so it’s not like I’ll be completely done once this scene is finished, anyway.

But man, I would really love to get those final few sentences in place. Almost there. Almost, almost. Wish me luck.

[sheliesshattered]

I’ve reached the point in writing this fic where I would just really love to know how it ends...

[sheliesshattered]

Warm shout out and many thanks to @megsann13, @chipsandcoffee, @sacrificethemtothesquid, @someillplanetreigns, @different-waters, and my longsuffering in-house stunt reader/soulmate Jack for your well wishes yesterday when I expressed frustration at not knowing the ending of this fic I’ve been working on the last few weeks, Chameleons and Bowties. I ended up having a little zap of inspiration shortly before bed and wrote a little more than 1500 words in the direction of an ending. I still don’t quite know how the whole thing is going to wrap up, but I have a few more building blocks in place than I did before last night, and some dialogue and plotpoints that I’m really happy with. The story broke the 12k words mark during that writing session, and it’s looking like I should be able to finish at between 15k and 20k words, which isn’t a fic length I’ve done in the past.

Writing can be such a solitary hobby, it’s so wonderful to feel that people are cheering you on, even when they haven’t seen any of the story in question. Wish me luck on this last 3k-8k words, I’m going to need it. <3

[sheliesshattered]

My word count for yesterday ended up being -30. But despite all appearances of actually going backwards, that net loss of 30 words was progress in the right direction. 

Chapter 6 of Chameleons and Bowties has been fighting me the last several days -- I finished a first draft that did all the things I need the chapter to do, hit all the plotpoints, but when I read back over it I hated it. The emotional pacing was all wrong, I was over-emphasizing a small point that’s going to be immediately contradicted in ch7 anyway, and the dialogue just didn’t flow the way I wanted it to, especially for a chapter that is nearly all dialogue. 

So a few days ago I went through and chopped up the bits that weren’t working, de-emphasized that point that really just needs to be a passing concern in ch6, and rewrote a ton of the dialogue. The second draft of the chapter was better, but I still hated it. Last night I took a long hot shower and just sort of let the dialogue bounce around my head, more daydreaming about the scene than trying to find things to write down. And afterwards I took yet another pass, completely re-writing some seconds and chopping up and re-purposing other sections. 

I moved one chunk of ~200 words to my ‘Cut Text’ section at the end of the gdoc, but even counting that in my current total word count (17,424 currently, including cut text that may get re-purposed or may end up cut completely from the final version of the story), I still ended up 30 words less than where I’d started the day.

I’m letting chapter 6 sit for a bit before I go back and re-read, just so it isn’t quite so fresh in my mind, but I think this was all for the best. And if the third draft still isn’t working for me, I’ll do a fourth and a fifth until it’s where it needs to be. And it’s good to remind myself that writing is just like that sometimes, you have to build up a big pile of not-quite-right so you can carve it down to what you actually want. I can get too focused on moving my total word count up that I forget that sometimes the way forward is with fewer words.