The Hybrid - Doctor Who Fanfiction

9

It's been a week since the discovery, a week since their argument, and a week since the Doctor decided to keep his promise. Seven whole days since their mutual commitment to 'try', and the countdown to save Clara Oswald's life has officially begun. It's as if a life size hourglass has just been flipped while the Doctor stares, paralyzed, at the rate at which the sand trickles down, stealing Clara's precious seconds with it.

Time--time is a finicky thing. It's a construct, not a reality, a means of measuring the immeasurable. A tick or a tally to indicate the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries. But that unit of measurement for time follows the misleading assumption that time is linear--that is, that time can only go in one direction: forwards. And only idiots think that. In fact, that misconception couldn't be further from the truth.

The Doctor has seen it all from end to beginning, front to back; sideways, longways and slant ways, and any other ways you can think of. He's watched entire empires fall to powerful and merciless regimes, whole galaxies and races be forgotten and erased from history, and he's witnessed worlds be consumed by flames while stars grew cold after millenniums pasted.

There are very few who know this truth, that the past, present and future are always happening, all at once, each moment reliving itself in a loop for eternity. It's why going back into the past and changing the smallest of details could result in an endless range of disasters that could rip a hole in the fabric of the universe.

But for the Doctor, time is the one thing worth fighting for and the only thing worth fighting against.

He's put together a theory, an explanation for Clara's unexpected pregnancy that he thinks will clarify what exactly happened that night they were invited to the ball the Fish People of Kysterillous gave. It hadn't taken him very long to deduce that the party had been the date of Clara's conception. Though he himself hadn't seen her in a week, the Doctor had actually been away for months Clara's time, and they hadn't seen each other since then. So whatever happened had to have taken place on Kysterillous.

"I don't like this plan, Doctor," Clara's floating voice indicated she wasn't very far from those funny little snoring noises she made when she slept. The Doctor absently pulled the duvet further onto her body, only half-listening to his fretful companion.

"Tell me about our memories again," Clara frowns, her forehead wrinkling at him as she tries to fight off her impending doom. "Tell me what you think they did."

"You can sleep, Clara," he softens his voice and leans towards her, his wise, old eyes seeing straight through into her fearful ones. "You've had a long day, you need to rest now. We can talk in the morning."

"I'm not tired." And that's all she says, her tight lipped response enough to silence his efforts to reassure her that nothing and no one will ever lay a hand her as long as he's here. But, of course, he can't rescue her from the horrors in her dreams.

So he obeys.

"Could be a lot of things," the Doctor muses, "but I've narrowed it down a bit based on the circumstances and the tiny bit of contextual information we do have.

"There's a drug," the Doctor starts to explain once more, "that they use at Torchwood when things get... delicate and civilians are involved--sometimes U.N.I.T. used it, too, but mostly Torchwood. They'd douse your brain in a jelly-like fluid that makes short term memory retention nearly impossible. Unless the memories you've lost are somehow subconsciously triggered by your immediate surroundings. Retconned was what they called it."