clashildr one shots

As War Fades

 Broken, defeated, bruised - the victims of war lay scattered across the field, like rag dolls strewn across the dirt; forgotten. Disregarded.  Ashildr had lived through most human history - she'd seen bodies before, on every scale of destruction and number. From the butchered bodies with axes still lodged in their skulls to people cast aside en mass from nuclear fallout, and she rather wished to forget most of it. 

 Clara, however, had not. Her experience of the deceased was limited to pretty bodied in morgues and the occasional dismembered limb. And certainly not anything on this scale.

"What happened here?" she breathed, staring out at the field of corpses that stretched all through the valley. Two mountains separated by a river of the dead.

Ashildr stepped out from the safety of the diner and farther into the battlefeild. "Humanity."

Clara followed suit and took Ahildr's hand. Ashildr's heart spiked in concern - Clara was never one for PDA's, and especially not one for letting her emotions overwhelm her cool exterior. Ashildr squeezed her hand. "Getting to you, is it, love?" she asked gently.

Clara glanced over, catching Ashildr's eyes for the briefest of moments, and then fixing her gaze to the ground. "How can it not get to you? Ash, we're in a graveyard."

The stench was nearly unbearable. The longer she stood out in it, the more Ashildr could feel it. She let Clara's hand fall from her own to untie the bandana from around her wrist. Expertly, she unrolled it, the folded it in half and handed it to Clara.

"Cover your nose and mouth," she instructed. "It'll help with the smell. See that tent, up the top of that side of the valley? Hopefully somewhere up there has an explanation. Hopefully we can stop this from happening on this planet again."

"Isn't that a bit... Doctor-y?" Clara's voice was muffled by the bandana. 

"It is, yes,  but I'm not wading through one more goddamn battlefield in my entire life if I can help it."

Of course, Ashildr was painfully aware of how she would, most likely, have another sea of corpses waiting for her soon enough. For many more years that could ever be documented in a library of a reasonable size, she had found herself at the scene of domestic tragedy. Even if it was one death, one body, one life ripped from the hands of a child who had barely even lived, she swore, never again. The Doctor's voice echoed in her head. We need the mayflies. That doesn't mean we can't try and save them, though. 

That was the Doctor's whole thing. Ashildr's thoughts pulsed in time with the squelch of the grassy hillside underneath her boots. He can't disapprove if he would do the same thing.

Oh, contrare, a voice from the back of her mind piped up. The Doctor despised himself and every decision he'd ever made. Self-hatred was basically his branding. How do you convince yourself you're a decent person with more blood on your hands than you can remember?

Once the pair reached the tent, eveything changed. The material parted as two heavily armed, mud-caked boys came running out. They held guns out in front of their scared faces, eyes skittish and so young. Ashildr raised her hands reflexively, but was far too desensitised to be anywhere near afraid.

Clara laughed from behind her bandana. "This whole guns thing isn't considered polite where we come from." She pulled it off from her nose and let it rest around her neck. "People invite you in and ask if you want a cuppa, actually."

Ashildr turned her head slowly to stare her dumbass girlfriend right in the eye. She was far to ballsy for-

Oh. Anger. She's grieving. 

The soldiers readied their rifles, taking a shuffled step closer to the pair.

"Let them in," a raspy voice called from inside the tent. "Old Earth slang. They're friendly."

One of the boys lowered his weapon immediately; the other hesitated, finger itchy and distrusting on the trigger, before straightening up from behind it. His eyes never left the women. Military idiots. Shoot first, ask questions later, set up camp on the hill above your dead comrades. There was so much money in suffering. 

The tent was basic - fabric tied around poles sunk six inches into the ground with a slab that barely classified for a table slap bang in the middle. Duct-tape doctoring was pretty much the only thing keeping the old general's head on his round little shoulders so deep were the gashes on his neck. How was he still alive?

"Welcome, humans," he wheezed. He made the attempt to sit up, bracing one arm against the plinth underneath him and pushing upwards before slumping back down again. One of the boys pushed between the two travellers, supporting his head and neck as he settled back into the stone. "General Karl. I would shake your hand, but..." He raised both his arms to show his rounded off wrists. "Bastards took my hands!" He chuckled darkly, which then led to him coughing up a Jackson Pollock. Internal bleeding, multiple limp amputations, and partial decapitation. This man had a best before and it was yesterday.

Ashildr stared. "How are you not dead?" she blurted, aware of her rudeness but honestly far too interested to care. 

The other boy spoke from behind them. "The enemy we fought are savages in appearance only. They know how to sustain a man on the brink of death and never give him the peace of passing over. And they're not long gone. How did you get here?"

Ashildr pretended not to notice his finger inching towards his trigger again.

Clara pointed her thumb over her shoulder. "Big, fat building that just happened to materialise? Did- Did you catch it?"

It was like she wanted to get the both of them shot.

"What did this?"

"We mustn't say. Speak of the devil and so he shall appear."

The general scoffed - well, he made a sort of groaning wheeze, but it was probably meant to be a scoff - before being thrown into another coughing fit. "We don't know. All we know is that it turns people into monsters and sets them loose on the rest of the world. We terraformed this planet years ago and spent millennium building a peaceful society that was wiped out in an instant. We are the only survivors. Run."

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A/N - This was just a quick 2am spit-out and I Am Tired. I'll write a part two at some point