clashildr one shots

And So the Dominos Fall

     Clara never quite intended to fall in love. In the way that it so often does go, she simply had. One day, Ashildr had returned from a trip out with a bleeding gash above the eyebrow, and the mere sight of it set Clara off. She was overcome with the urge to hold Ashildr to her chest and destroy all that had caused her harm. That day, they had sat in the diner with gauze and rubbing alcohol. Clara had cleaned and dressed the wound, trying very hard not to catch the eyes that gazed steadily into hers.
     The days you're in love are not the hardest, no; those days are the sweetest. Those are the days when the kiss of the pink sky reflects the kiss on your cheek that lulls you to sleep. Those are the days of peace - the days when you could feel your pulse quicken at a thought and your mind wanders to them at any time of day. Those are the days when their face is plastered across the sky. The days when God himself could appear to you as an apparition and you would dare to contradict him.
     The hardest days are before love - when they plague you but you cannot figure why - and after. The hole they leave behind.
     Clara had never been so corroded. She was drowning in the misery that taints joy in the dark times that follow. Her life became a constant battle between integrity and collapse. In the days, she chose integrity; she continued to move as much as she could with Ashildr's final arrangements. Taking her to where she'd want to be - the sea her village fished in all those years ago. Finding her a longboat and setting her off to sea with flames lapping at her heart and the Ulfbert she so treasured in life. She had truly never let go of Valhalla. But she felt nothing. The hands that dressed Ashildr were not her own. The movements that set her boat to sail were not hers. The tears that fell on the water as it numbed her legs were not hers.
     In the nights, she chose collapse. No room in the TARDIS was free of reminders of Ashildr. She couldn't sleep, even if she wanted to; she couldn't stay in any one room j without a thousand visions of Ashildr flashing through her head. She would simply pace the corridors and wait until the sun outside rose again. She hadn't been able to move the diner from where she'd landed in the hills up from the village.
     It was getting to the point where she wasn't able to cope. Humans have low-level telepathic abilities which can be exacerbated by long-term exposure to alien technology; due to the strength of their bond and the millennia spent in a TARDIS, Clara and Ashildr had become mentally linked, and a psychic imprint of her Ash lingered in Clara's mind. She was just there, right behind her, and just out of reach.
     This was the most divine form of torture. Nothing Jeremiah could have imagined for them could contest this.
     It may have been years before Clara eventually plugged coordinates into the console of the diner. All she could think was that the smog wasn't lifting, and that the pain she felt was more than anything she had ever experienced. She was done.
     Gallifery. The long way round. She'd finally run out of corridor.
     They still weren't her actions. Still weren't her legs that walked her through the halls of an unfamiliar planet at the end of time. Still weren't her ears which picked up the garbled messes of speech. She was underwater. Drowning. Done.
    Even though it went against everything inside her that had not yet been corroded was screaming - although there was not much left - she took the step back into the blindingly white light. Beyond that light was Ashildr, alive and well, and maybe Clara's final heartbeat could be spent with her, as all the lifetime of the universe could never have been enough.