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The Doctor was gone.
Not gone gone. But different. And that was saying something for Clara. She’d seen every face the Doctor had ever had, and earlier that very day, to her at least, the Doctor had been telling her that his youthful chinny face grown old was to be his last. But thanks to the Time Lords’ acceptance of her plea, Trenzalore had been saved, and the Doctor had regenerated again. And the Doctor Clara knew, really knew, was gone. It was like she’d memorised all the chapter titles to a book she loved, but now it had a sequel and she didn’t know anything about it. A sequel where the main character’s English accent had inexplicably become Glaswegian.
“Who invented this room?!” the Doctor exclaimed indignantly as he pulled open the door to the spare bedroom and Clara and Jenny stumbled in, having been leaning on the door to hear what was going on. Madame Vastra had evidently managed to convince the Time Lord to get changed, he was wearing Victorian nightclothes, but he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about actually going to bed.
“Doctor, please,” Clara pleaded, stepping in past him. “You have to lie down,” she urged of him, but the Doctor kept walking around and Clara had to keep out of his way as he strode around her toward the bedside.
“It doesn’t make any sense, look it’s only got a bed in it,” the Doctor continued. “Why is there only a bed in it?!” he demanded.
“Because it’s a bed room, it’s for sleeping in!” Clara exclaimed. She just wanted the day to be over, she just wanted it to stop! The Doctor had been raving incoherently ever since he’d changed, she couldn’t take much more of it! The Doctor turned to look at Vastra confusedly, then back to Clara.
“Okay. What do you do when you’re awake?” the Doctor asked, as if the concept were somehow bewildering.
“You leave the room!” Jenny told him.
“So you’ve got a whole room for not being awake in,” the Doctor continued. Clara and Jenny nodded along. Hopefully he’d get the idea and go to bed. “But what’s the point? You’re just missing the room!” he said, before, scatterbrained, his eyes caught something and he pointed past Jenny and Clara. “And don’t look in that mirror, it’s absolutely furious!” he cried, stumbling over to the mirror in question. Clara chased him over there and took hold of his arm.
“Doctor please! You have to lie down, you keep passing out!” she said.
“Well of course I keep passing out, there’s all these beds- and why do you keep talking like that?!” the Doctor rambled, pointing at her. Clara frowned. What was he on about now?! “What’s gone wrong with your accent, why do you-”
“Nono- nothing’s wrong with her accent!” Jenny insisted. The Doctor’s brows only furrowed more.
“You sound the same!” he exclaimed. “It’s spreading, you all sound all… English! No, you’ve all developed a fault!” the Doctor cried. Jenny exchanged a perplexed look with Clara. Was it because the Doctor’s accent had gone Scottish that he thought they sounded weird?!
“Doctor,” Madame Vastra said, and strode over to the Doctor’s side. “I need your help with something.”
“Finally. Someone who can talk properly,” the Doctor said. Vastra’s accent was almost Scottish, not that Clara had any idea how a lizard woman from the dawn of time could possibly have an almost-Scottish accent.
“I’m having difficulty sleeping,” Vastra told him softly. Finally, it was that that got him to calm down, and eventually Vastra was able to turn his psychic abilities on him and knock him out, feigning an interest in him putting her to sleep. Relief flooded Clara as they tucked the Doctor in to bed. He was finally sleeping, and not just stumbling in and out of consciousness and coherency.
“So what now?” Clara asked, exhausted by the day. Or, whatever counted for a day for a time traveler. When she’d woken up, it had been Christmas Day. Then they’d been on Trenzalore, space church, and the Doctor had lived for about a millennia there. The TARDIS hauling her across time had been exhausting, let alone the entire day followed by crashing about through time and ending up with a dinosaur on the Thames, and now there she was, jetlagged by time travel, in… well, she wasn’t entirely sure what year it was, definitely in the realm of 1893 if Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, recognised her from Yorkshire.
“He needs rest,” Madame Vastra told her. Clara couldn’t help but be a little grumpy at such an answer, that much had been obvious already.
“So what do we do, how do we fix him?” Clara asked more specifically.
“Fix him?” Jenny asked.
“How do we change him back?!” Clara snapped at her. Jenny just paused and looked up at Vastra. Clara regretted her choice of words the moment it had left her lips, but she didn’t think she could exactly be blamed for it. How many hours had it been for her since she’d woken up on Christmas? Her watch thought it was a quarter to seven in the morning. She was frazzled and at the end of her rope and she just wanted to know what more needed doing to take care of the Doctor before she could even consider sleeping herself.
“Jenny?” Vastra said softly. “I will be in my chamber, would you be kind enough to fetch my veil?” she asked. Jenny frowned.
“Why, are we expecting strangers?” Jenny asked.
“It would seem… there’s already one here,” Vastra replied, before she took her leave of the spare room. She’d been looking at Clara.
“What’ve I done wrong?” Clara mumbled sheepishly, and her face hung slack from how tired she was. Jenny almost went to reply, before a sound came from the distance and she went to the window.
“The dinosaur doesn’t seem very happy,” Jenny noted, as Clara looked over the Doctor.
“What’s wrong with it?” she asked idly.
“I don’t know. Doctor’s the one who speaks dinosaur,” Jenny replied, while Clara watched the Doctor’s still face, the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Jenny made a soft coughing noise. “‘Scuse me ma’am, the wife doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” she said. But Clara was still staring at the Doctor.
“Where did he get that face?” Clara asked. It was rhetorical, of course. But she’d seen the Doctor. All of him, until then. As a rule, regeneration meant that he got young again. The little black-haired one that had followed the elderly man in a junkyard, the one with the long scarf that had followed the older face the Time Lords had forced upon him. Even the old warrior she’d met had been a grave, dour young man once. “Why has it got lines on it, it’s brand new? How can his hair be all grey, he only just got it?”
“It’s still ‘im, ma’am,” Jenny assured her. “You saw him change.”
“I know, I do, I know that,” Clara replied, run ragged and rambling. If anyone knew that it was still the Doctor, it was her. But just knowing that the Doctor had had different faces, even meeting some of them, hadn’t prepared her for the experience of watching him change. “It’s just…”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Jenny went to leave, before Clara’s tired mind eventually found the words. “If… if Vastra changed, if- if she was different, if she wasn’t the person that.. you liked,” Clara stammered. Okay, maybe she hadn’t found the words. Jenny smiled cheekily and her cheeks glowed a little.
“I don’t ‘like’ her, ma’am. I love her,” Jenny pointed out. “And as to different, well… she’s a lizard,” she said, with a delighted little turn to her eyebrows. Clara watched her go, before she turned her eyes to the Doctor again. Maybe it was just that they weren’t jetlagged, that they could be so calm about it. Vastra had, after all, said here we go again. Maybe she’d seen it before. Was Clara just overreacting, maybe? Uncertain of herself and of how to move forward with this new Doctor, Clara gently tucked him in a little more before she went to the window with a yawn. London stretched out before her. In the distance, she could see the dinosaur on the Thames. Below was Paternoster Row-
How did she know the name of the street?
Well there’s a sign in’t there, stupid? some rough-spoken part of her pointed out.
Where? She hadn’t seen a sign.
But yet, Clara knew as clear as anything that the house she stood in was Number 13, Paternoster Row.
“I am alone,” a quiet voice behind her said, breaking her from her reverie. She turned, and saw that the Doctor was talking in his sleep. “The world which shook at my feet… and the trees and the sky, have gone,” he murmured. The dinosaur, Clara realised. He was talking about the dinosaur’s experience of that day. “And I am alone now. Alone.”
“Are you translating?” Clara asked, even though she knew he wouldn’t answer.
“The wind bites now, and the world is grey,” the Doctor continued to mutter, “and I am alone here. Can’t see me, doesn’t see me, can’t see me,” he whispered. That bit, Clara didn’t get.
“Who can’t see it? Think all of London can see it,” she remarked.
“BOY!” Strax’s voice called from the hall. “Madame Vastra is waiting!” the little Sontaran told her sternly as he stepped into the doorway. His suit looked very funny, seeing as he had the physique of a thumb, but Clara didn’t have the energy to think of that. Clara hauled herself up and over toward the door.
“Okay, whatever,” Clara mumbled. Whatever had to happen before she could go to bed.
“I will convey you to her chamber,” Strax said officiously. “May I take your coat?” he asked, holding up his arm.
“Not wearing a coat,” she pointed out. Strax frowned at her.
“What’s all that?” he asked.
“Clothes.”
“May I take your clothes?” Strax asked, and Clara pushed his hand down.
“Probably not,” she told him, and headed from the room to go downstairs to Vastra’s chamber. It was on her way there that that funny feeling of knowing the house in ways she never could have returned. Déjà vu crawled down her back as she stepped through the ground floor hallway to the conservatory and wide chamber that Vastra was waiting within. But Clara couldn’t have been there before. Right?
“That’s not right.”
“You were in Victorian London.”
“No, I was in Victorian Yorkshire!”
A woman in an expensive dress photographed on Angie’s laptop filled Clara’s mind. And then she walked into Vastra’s chamber and couldn’t help but swallow her tongue. A fountain trickled off to the side, marble statues lined the space, and Vastra sat on a wicker armchair with Jenny standing at her side, surrounded by verdant plants. Vastra was wearing her veil, a curtain of semitransparent black lace over her face. The room was hot, hotter than the rest of the house, thanks to a burning fireplace in the wall. And it was at the sight of this room that something in Clara’s chest tightened, and her heart hammered harder. She’d been in that room before. There was no mistaking it, she’d seen those chairs before. And there, beside Vastra, was an antique telephone. How had Clara known there to be a telephone there? Jenny motioned for Clara to sit down in the chair opposite Vastra, in a chair she’d sat in before somehow.
“Now. Miss Clara. Start from the beginning.”
Clara forced her mind back to the events of the day. And yet, a single word kept popping into her head, like a song stuck in her head. Pond. But she didn’t know why.
--
“Miss Clara!” Jenny said urgently, and Clara snuffled awake. She wasn’t supposed to be asleep, she had work to do!
“Mm- sorry Mister Chilcott, it’ll not happen again!” Clara cried in an accent decidedly more Cockney than normal, hurriedly sitting up before she even realised where and when she was. It was a good thing she hadn’t clobbered herself on the ceiling. Cobblestones rocked them and the entire carriage rattled beneath them. The dinosaur was burning, and they thundered for the Thames as fast as Strax could coax the horse to gallop. If she hadn’t been so tired it would have been impossible for her to sleep. Jenny and Vastra exchanged a confused look at what she’d said. “Sorry-” she spluttered, and blinked sleep out of her eyes. “I haven’t slept since Christmas morning,” Clara apologised.
“Who’s Mister Chilcott?” Jenny asked confusedly. She’d said it almost identically to how Clara had, enunciating neither the L nor the Ts.
“Hm?” Clara hummed. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she breathed. Jenny and Vastra exchanged a frown.
“Are you all right, Miss Oswald?” Vastra eventually asked, as quietly as one could in a horse-drawn carriage crashing along through London and still be heard.
“I’m fine, I’m just tired,” Clara assured them, letting her gaze linger out the rattling windows. A quick nap hadn’t undone her feeling of déjà vu. No, in fact, it seemed to have intensified it. The gas lanterns along the streets of Victorian London going by seemed so familiar. And not in the sense that she’d seen similar in York. Clara knew London, of course, but the London of the 21st Century. So why was it that Victorian London had that same echo, like she had a map of its cobbled streets in her head? Why did she know that, down a side street they’d just passed, was an inn called the Rose and Crown?
--
The newspaper Strax had managed to hit Clara in the face quite hard with through the window declared it to be the fifteenth of June of 1898. Five years since Sweetville and the tomb, to Vastra and Jenny and Strax, if Clara remembered correctly. But it was quite late in the morning of the fifteenth, Clara had slept in accidentally. But with the Doctor still missing, that wasn’t a bad idea. It had done her a world of good. The morning air of London, while not exactly country air, was still a pleasant breeze as she washed her face and glanced around the spare room she’d been given, and at her clothes. If they were to be taking up the case of the spontaneously combusted dinosaur, it wouldn’t do for her to start a riot by dressing like a 21st Century woman. So she turned to the cupboards in the room and soon cobbled together quite a fashionable outfit, Clara thought. The outer dress was of a luxurious dark green velvet with pretty, almost floral pale green trims, and she’d even found some suitable jewellery. But it was as she was admiring herself in the mirror that she frowned.
She’d put on a corset. Clara had never done that once in her life, not even when they’d been investigating Sweetville. And yet, underneath the dress and over a chemise, entirely properly, she was wearing one. How had she even done that, or known to put on linens first so that the corset was protected? She was even wearing a bustle beneath her skirts, a word she wasn’t even sure she’d heard before, let alone worn one. And hell, how on earth had she done her hair?! She’d been on bloody autopilot and yet she’d somehow produced an elaborate curled updo behind her head with fluffy bangs.
A visage of Clara’s absolute confusion filled the mirror, and her lips pursed into the beginning of the word what?
Clara looked down at herself. She didn’t have the faintest idea or memory of how she’d put half of it on, or how she’d take it off later. Something was going on. London, the clothes, the house. There was something deeper than just her brief time in Yorkshire telling her how to do all of this. For the second time, the photo Angie had found of her bloomed into her mind. At the time, Clara had assumed that it was a time travel thing. She had gone back in time to see that time, but just hadn’t done it yet from her own perspective.
But what if it wasn’t that? Clara frowned and made her way out of the spare room, fiddling with the rolled up newspaper. For a moment, she recalled the perplexed looks on Vastra and Jenny’s faces in Yorkshire. Perhaps one of the trio would have answers for her.
“Jenny!” she called quickly, when she spotted the smartly-dressed maid on the stairs. Clara hurried down to meet her halfway, as Jenny smiled up at her.
“Ah! Good morning Clara!” Jenny replied brightly.
“Morning! Erm, so, what are we going to do, are we going to go looking for the Doctor?” Clara asked. Obviously, she had her own questions, but there was also the priority question of the Doctor’s whereabouts.
“We’ve got the Paternoster Irregulars out in force, if anyone can find him, they can,” Jenny assured her. A conspiratorial expression took over Jenny’s face. “Meanwhile, Madame Vastra is slightly occupied by the Conk-Singleton forgery case, and is having the Camberwell child poisoner for dinner,” she said. Clara’s eyes widened.
“For dinner?” she asked. A child poisoner seemed an odd candidate for a dinner guest.
“After she’s finished interrogating him,” Jenny added, as if that clarified anything. “Probably best to stay out of the larder. It’ll get a bit noisy in there later.” At that, Clara froze a little. The larder was where you put meat, fridges hadn’t been invented yet so it was the best option available. Was Vastra having him for dinner in a more literal sense? But again, she blinked. How did she know what a larder was?! Clara hopped up to follow Jenny as she continued up the stairs.
“Um- Jenny!” Clara called quickly. She still needed to talk to the woman, after all. Jenny turned back to her.
“Yes ma’am?” Jenny asked. Clara bit her lip, and hesitated.
“I erm. I don’t really know how to ask this,” Clara began, and Jenny raised her eyebrows curiously. “You remember how we went to Trenzalore, right? The first time, not yesterday,” she asked.
“Don’t think I’m likely to forget it. Few years ago now, but you don’t easily forget dying even if it was only for a few minutes,” Jenny replied wryly. “Why do you ask?” she mused.
“Well… when I was… broken up in the Doctor’s timeline,” Clara began, before she frowned softly. Had that even happened, any more? Trenzalore’s final battle had been averted, the very wound in time she’d stepped into had never existed. She supposed that such questions were probably to be asked of the Doctor, when they found him. Jenny nodded. Clara paused, breathing. “Did you…” she trailed off. Jenny’s eyes shifted perceptively.
“Did we meet one of ya?” she finished the sentence for Clara. Clara just nodded. Jenny smiled pensively at her. “Yes ma’am, we did. Miss Clara Oswin Oswald, this would have been… six years ago now?” she said, before she sniffed with laughter. “You look the spittin’ image of her dressed like that, if you don’t mind me saying. Suits you nicely,” Jenny said.
“Well, she was me. Guess I’d better avoid her family, or I’ll give someone a heart attack,” Clara supposed. Jenny nodded. “She died, didn’t she? The Doctor said something about that, I don’t really remember,” she said. It had been a memory she had only half recalled, deep in the bowels of the dying TARDIS. A governess who was really a barmaid. Worked at the Rose and Crown?
“I’m afraid she did, ma’am. She was the first of your copies the Doctor met face-to-face, so I’m told, it’s what got him looking for ya,” Jenny replied. “Really very nice, we liked her very much in the brief time we knew ‘er. She was a governess, took right good care of little Francesca and Digby with their mother gone,” she said. At that, Clara gasped involuntarily as an image flashed in her mind. A young girl with red hair, and her little brother. Francesca and Digby. No wonder the Doctor had at first been curious about Angie and Artie. The splinter he’d met had been a governess. Jenny gave her a curious look. “Are you all right Clara?” she asked. Clara caught her breath, and pushed against that image in her mind, tried to look through its window.
“Captain Latimer’s children,” Clara murmured. Jenny blinked.
“Can you remember her?” Jenny asked incredulously. Clara wasn’t sure how to respond.
“I don’t know. Only if I try, otherwise it’s just… flashes. Things that ring a bell, Pooja was teaching something about the Queen’s coronation recently and I had the strangest feeling I’d been there,” Clara replied after a moment. Pooja Shah was Coal Hill’s History teacher. For Clara, the jump into the Doctor’s timeline had been more recent than it had been for Jenny, and she still hadn’t really reckoned with it. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of copies of her all across space and time. A million Claras. And she certainly hadn’t crossed paths with one of her own duplicates. She supposed that wouldn’t happen anyway any more - the timeline she’d jumped into hadn’t included this new Doctor and his travels. Victorian London was the closest she’d get. “But that one came here didn’t she? Not London, the house?” Clara asked. Jenny nodded again. “I thought so. I could have sworn I’ve been in Vastra’s chamber before.” Clara hung her head in her hands. “I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit funny. Being here, it’s like she’s in the corner of my eye. That’s never happened before, I’ve never been so close to one of them and the last time I saw you lot it was before that all happened,” she told Jenny.
“It’s all right ma’am,” Jenny assured her, with a quick smile. “It’s right bizarre for us too! We went to her funeral and all, Strax spent a good half an hour trying to save her life!” she exclaimed, and Clara scoffed half a laugh. If anything, she wondered how fun it could have been to meet her copy, if she’d survived.
“The Doctor said the one place a time traveler should never go is their own grave. Half the world’s probably a minefield for me,” Clara supposed wryly. Jenny went to speak, but Clara stopped her, holding up a hand. “Don’t tell me where she’s buried. Last thing I need to know, for all I know I’ve been there before,” she said quickly. “It’s bad enough to be walking on my own ghost’s footsteps.”
“Of course not ma’am. I wouldn’t want to visit my own grave either if I were in your shoes,” Jenny assured her. “In actual fact, I was about to ask if you were wantin’ some breakfast. Don’t believe you’ve had anything to eat this morning, you must be hungry,” she said. As if on cue, Clara’s stomach grumbled. When had she last eaten, the toasted marshmallows at the top of the clock tower? No, that wasn’t the right order, she’d reluctantly nibbled at Christmas dinner if that counted as eating.
“Starving,” Clara replied, and gladly followed Jenny toward the kitchen. Maybe she’d know her way around a Victorian kitchen and recipe book, having half a Victorian barmaid rattling around in her brain. “Might come in handy looking for the Doctor. I managed to put all this on without thinking about it, If I don’t think about it too hard I already know my way around town!”
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