clashildr one shots

That Which Beguiled Her

  Darkness breeds darkness. Shadows multiply, coalesce, linger; they glare. And in no place are they more prolific than the human mind.
  One such breeding ground for these shadows crouched on one of the tables in the diner, casting perhaps the largest taint onto Ashildr's soul she had ever felt.
  Staring. Looming.
  She glared at it, fingers interlocked under her chin to support the overarching weight of her own mind, so enveloped in her internal conquest to purge the impure from existence she had missed the fact her very heart had inquested into her actions.
  The words barely made it through the thick fog of thought clouding Ashildr's mind. In fact, so invested was she, Ashildr failed to even meet the eyes of the woman across from her until after she felt her lover's hand on her arm.
  "Why are you intensely staring at a cake?"
  "For the pure and simple reasoning that it is, functionally and for all purposes, completely impossible." An impossible number of questions, an impossible number of impossibilities, all sat before her. Mocking. "The very existence of these things... They shake me to my core, Clara. I cannot live in peace while these exist. What magic could possibly create such an evil?"
  "Well, I'd imagine it developed over many years- Ash, where are you going?"
  A gap in the fog. The puzzle slotting together. Missing pieces falling into an order that aligned. The answer shone, as plain as the harsh white of the console she now stood at - the lighthouse in the storm to ail all that made no sense.
  "If a bootstrap paradox was to occur," she declared, "then sense could be made of these such Devil's folly. The cake exists because it always has!" She smiled, triumphant, aware, winning.
  Then, she slowed. She realised.
  A massacre of Time was something she did not bat an eyelash at, was even completely complacent in creating, because an invention of ingenious descendants of hers beguiled her. For no reason other than her punity. 
  The Doctor's words, some of the very few she ever remembered through the Mists of Time that condemned her so, rang in her ears.
  We need the mayflies.
  Ashildr collapsed, no longer able to support the weight of her consciousness. "I'm a disheveled husk of disappointment and unaccomplished childhood dreams. I am a blasphemous heretic: I challenged God to strike me down, expecting lightning; instead, he struck me with hubris, and decided that my demise would be by my own hand. I am a woman so afraid of silence for the violence of her own thoughts is the company of an executioner."
  "We are the most unreliable narrators of our own lives."
  "I am afraid my understanding is not what it could be." She flicked her head up, eyes suddenly ablaze; she felt the disheartenment that her face so clearly betrayed. How much of a child she must have looked.
  "It means," Clara said, covering Ashildr's hands with her own, "that you cannot possibly know for sure that you are a disappointment and heretic for the same reason a tree cannot be aware it is in a forest."
  Far too long had Ashildr been travelling. Far too old had she become. Far too careless she was prepared to be.