Nine Months, Twelve Days (Whouffle fanfic)

Suffering

Clara looked up at the Doctor in disbelief before quickly snatching the device out of his hands and inspecting it. She heard the Doctor give a grunt as she held it up to the light to see through the not-quite-opaque communicator. She could see the different colored wires swirling throughout it and saw all of the individual places where the wires connected. She put the device back down to where she could properly inspect it to see that what she had thought were lights upon first view were actually little buttons that had labels underneath them that Clara could not read.

She handed the communicator back to the Doctor before saying, "Doctor, if they were just coming over for dinner, then why the hell did he need his communicator? I mean, if I have something that is that important to me, I don't just bring it everywhere. I don't bring my mum's leaf everywhere."

"That's actually a really good question," he said, glancing up at Clara, who was now busy cleaning off dishes again, and turning his attention back on the device in his hands.

"I think you have dish duty tonight. I'm beat. Join me when you're done," Clara said, kissing him on the cheek and heading up the stairs into their bedroom. She threw herself onto the bed, and listened to the Doctor clatter the dishes together downstairs, occasionally cursing to himself.

She decided to get up and close the drapes, noticing that it was snowing, or at least that it had snowed, and smiled to herself quietly, whispering nonsensical words under her breath. The snow looked like a soft blanket, oddly peaceful and undisturbed. Clara thought it even looked slightly warm; that if she wrapped herself up in it she would never be warm again. Logically, she reminded herself, it was below freezing. But some part of Clara was absolutely positive that the snow was warm and inviting.

Clara touched the window and she suddenly felt like a child again: when snow seemed magical, when she had both of her parents, where the world held so much promise and oppurtunity, if she chose to take it. Now as an adult, Clara realized how ridiculous her childhood was, full of dreaming and hoping and wishing for things that would never happen. Clara thought about her life now: her mother dead, traveling with a man who said he loved her but would leave in a moment's notice, and being an imposter and a fake in this house that she didn't even own with a life she knew she would probably never have.

Every part of Clara's brain told her to run the other direction, to stop traveling with the Doctor, to live a normal life because what she was doing was not healthy. Her brain also told her that she had to face real life eventually, and that she should not be content with her current situation. But depsite everything, her heart told her that she was happy. She was in love, living in a home where she got to have a life with the man she loved. Even if it was fake. She knew that she shouldn't be happy at all, but despite all logic, she was.

Clara hated it, too because it meant that once again her heart would win, not her brain. Clara had always believed that while logic would keep us from making decisions that would only end up hurting us, that the heart would let us make those decisions and hurt and damage ourselves, only to forgive and forget, going back at it. The brain balanced the heart, and the heart balanced the brain. But with Clara, her heart always win, and that was how she was so naivë and let people hurt her.

She just wanted to be happy. Isn't that what everyone wanted? To just make people happy, and to be happy. Clara had always lived for everyone else, making sure they were happy, so that she could feel accepted by the people around her. Clara had realized a while ago that people would always be there when they needed you, but never when you needed them. And when she met the Doctor, she was sure she had found the exception to that rule. He was always there, never asked, never beckoned, but always there. Then she saw that the reason he did what he did was to feel accepted and loved, and it was like looking into a mirror for her.