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The universe is smaller than it used to be.
Beyond the occasional remark about how dark the sky seems these days, most people don’t notice the change. They go about their lives the same way they always have — breathing and learning and loving and prevailing and dying. To them, it does not matter that a thousand stars have been snuffed out. They have never known a life outside their town, or their planet, their solar system. There is little for them to miss and far less for them to mourn.
For the travelers, however — those who drift aimlessly through time and space with no real place to call home — the change is all-consuming. How quickly one grows weary of the same handful of planets and the same dull millennia played on repeat.
The Doctor feels the loss of the universe profoundly.
If her history has taught her anything, it is that she can fix things. She can accomplish the impossible. She can climb insurmountable mountains. She ended the Time War and saved Gallifrey when no one else could. However, she cannot bring the universe back.
Of course, she has tried.
She has toiled over the TARDIS controls. She has connected and disconnected the drives. She has created a paradox so large that she thought the universe might reset just to correct it, but nothing has changed. The universe is still a shadow of what it once was, and she is horribly, desperately tired.
She floats back and forth through the centuries like a ghost, haunting bonfires and operas and football games with dark circles under her eyes and two sharp pains in her chest. For a while, she thinks that she might find the energy of humanity invigorating — that her admiration for the human condition might provide the inspiration that she so desperately needs — but it only serves to deepen the hurt.
She does, however, quickly learn one thing about this new existence: The smaller the universe is, the easier it is to accidentally cross paths with people that she has spent a lifetime avoiding. The Doctor is not her best self in these encounters. The Flux has not only ravaged the universe, it has stolen a part of her, too. It has worn her nerves thin and her temper thinner. It has ripped away the false veneer of carefree ease that so long protected this particular face.
The Doctor sees the Master no less than three times. The first time, they avoid eye contact. The second, they try to shove each other of a cliff. The third, they burn down an entire city in their rage.
In a bar overlooking the ruins of Moscow, she gets into a screaming match with Captain Jack Harkness that ends in tears and ragged apologies.
Perhaps most destructively of all, she encounters Clara Oswald on the fringes of a house party in the heart of Georgetown in 1982.
The house party is the sort of event that seems vaguely unimportant from the outside, but incredibly important from the inside. There are three future U.S. Presidents and a future bestselling author crowded into that room, chugging cheap beer from a keg and bobbing their heads to the music. There is a woman who would have helped to pioneer an innovation in space travel present as well, but that will no longer happen. She will do something else. Her future has been changed, truncated, ruined by the compression of the universe into a single point.
That wasted potential is all the Doctor can think about until she catches sight of the familiar dark bob, the knowing smirk, the big, glittering eyes watching her from the shadows.
She should be surprised to see Clara. She should be happy. She should be angry. She should be anything at all. Instead, she feels nothing. She is disturbingly unfazed. In want of a meaningful emotion, she digs into the pockets of her coat, frees a sticky, ginger candy from a bit of wax paper, and pops it into her mouth, feeling the familiar sharpness dissolve on her tongue as she weighs two possible futures.
She can tell the truth. She can admit that she has her memories back. She can start a conversation that will almost certainly end in another brutal fight with another old friend.
Or she can pretend that Clara won all those years ago, that the mind wipe is still active, that they are, in essence, a pair of strangers meeting for the first time in a hazy room crowded with college students and new graduates.
Their eyes lock.
Recognition flickers in the depths of Clara’s gaze.
And in the space of an instant, with the warm flush of ginger buzzing in her veins, the Doctor picks her fate.
She decides to lie.
The Doctor does not move from her chosen spot on the floor, but she narrows her eyes slightly, a deep wrinkle situating itself between her brows as she pretends to dig through her mental archives and struggle to pair a face with a name. For a pair of heartbeats, she thinks about the other things that her mind has lost — the centuries and centuries of memories that Tecteun and the Time Lords stole from her — and a brief surge of anger flares in her belly, but she tamps it out.
That crime is not Clara’s fault.
On the other side of the room, Clara smiles. She detaches herself from her conversation partner with practiced ease and a familiar tap on the arm before circling the room like a shark. She picks up two Jell-O shots from their neatly situated rows on a bookshelf before slipping into the empty space at the Doctor’s side.
“You look older than most of the people here,” she says. It is a careful comment, meant to test the waters. She holds out one of the tiny plastic cups, waiting to see if the Doctor takes it.
After a moment of consideration, the Doctor accepts, though she doesn’t drink its contents. “So do you.”
Clara downs her own Jell-O shot in a fluid motion, as if the act proves youth by association. “Are you a professor or someone’s girlfriend?” There’s a pause and a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “Or both?”
The Doctor winces. “I’m just passing through. Took a wrong turn. Ended up here. No one’s kicked me out yet.”
Growing increasingly bold, Clara sidles closer. Their shoulders brush. A shiver of memory echoes up the Doctor’s arm. “Sounds like something a serial killer might say. It is 1982, after all. I’ve heard people are panicking.”
“I’ve met serial killers. They’re surprisingly unremarkable. They do tend to be armed, though. I’m not. Never am.”
Someone climbs on the table in the center of the room, and it breaks with a resounding crack. A dozen heads drunkenly swivel to assess the damage, but Clara and the Doctor keep their attention trained on each other.
Theirs is a battle of wills — one person pressing for truth, the other attempting to hide it. There is no room for interruption.
Clara plucks the untouched cup from the Doctor’s fingers and downs its contents, too, before tossing both bits of trash aside. “Not armed, you say? I bet there is a screwdriver in your breast pocket. A sonic one.”
Clara’s trying to be impressive. Even in a universe with billions of creatures missing from it, she still feels the need to prove that she’s the most important thing in it.
The corners of the Doctor’s lips twitch with fond amusement, but she suffocates it with false surprise and a touch of offense. “Not much of a weapon unless you’re a robot in need of disassembly. Or a clockwork squirrel. I don’t think you are, but I’ve been fooled before.”
Before the Doctor knows it, there’s a hand on hers, guiding it to rest on Clara’s sternum and the still heart beneath, frozen between this beat and its last.
Around them, people erupt into cheers. The climber must have survived their bout with the collapsed table.
“I could be a clockwork squirrel,” Clara says smugly. “I don’t have a heartbeat.”
The Doctor wrinkles her nose. “You’d be twitchier, and your nose would be cuter.”
Clara releases her hold, and their hands fall apart.
“My nose is perfectly cute, thank you very much.”
The Doctor raises her eyebrows but does not comment. She doesn’t trust her tongue, and she certainly does not trust the ginger.
Someone — probably one of the future presidents — mounts a spinning disco ball on one of the ruined table legs and hoists it into the air. It illuminates the room in scattered flashes and skates over the planes of Clara’s perfectly adequate nose.
The Doctor tries not to think of meteor showers and fallen stars. Her fingers twitch, itching for the stolen Jell-O shot. In lieu of turning back time and undoing the last few minutes — something that is both impractical and unlikely to help — she busies herself with her pockets again, digging out another bit of ginger. It has a touch of lint stuck to its surface, and she doesn’t bother wiping it clean before popping it in her mouth. The detritus compliments the dusty cobwebs in the emptiness of her body.
The Doctor glances up again a moment later, and her eyes catch the flicker of Clara’s tongue as it flicks across her lips. She freezes beneath the expression on Clara's face.
It’s a look that the Doctor has not seen in a long time, filled with the same interminable, terrible need that brought them to the end of time and threatened to tear the universe apart. Some people might call it love. Others might call it desperation. Still more would call it selfish. However, that look does not seem quite as terrifying as it once did. Why would it? The universe is already gone and a prophesied hybrid no longer hangs over their heads. There is nothing left to fear except each other.
Clara steps closer. She eases herself onto the very tips of her toes. She tilts her head. The soft skin of her cheek brushes against the Doctor's, but they do not kiss.
Instead, Clara inhales, taking in the unmistakable scent of ginger on the Doctor's breath. A thought visibly situates itself on the tip of her tongue as she falls back on her heels. “I didn’t take you for a drinker.”
The Doctor bristles. “I’m not drinking.”
Clara blinks. “I know a Time Lord when I see one.”
“Time Lords look an awful lot like humans.”
Clara wraps both hands around the Doctor’s lapels, dragging the Time Lord down into her airspace. “Something only a Time Lord would say.” There’s a pause and a shrug before she flavors the assertion with a bit of dramatic flair, “And I took your pulse when I had you take mine.”
They’re both lying now.
Granted, they’re remarkably different sized lies, but still, the Doctor finds it oddly comforting.
They stood as equals in the ruins of Gallifrey, and they stand as equals now, in a run-down house in Georgetown.
And perhaps it is a very, very bad idea, but the Doctor leans forward and writes a kiss on Clara’s lips. It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but she pretends like it is. She fumbles. She forgets to breathe. Her hands settle in the wrong places, as if they’ve never touched.
She doesn’t know if Clara believes the lie or if she notices the details and the artistry present in every movement and strips them away one by one until the truth is obvious, but perhaps it doesn’t really matter.
Because for the first time since the universe was destroyed, the Doctor feels the tiniest bit alive.