Chapter Text
Clara was never quite sure how she had ended up in Liverpool. When she was younger, she had always thought she’d end up in London, or some other place that was much further from her home in Blackpool. After her mum had died, she had spent her days dreaming of living out her life in Brighton or Dover, all the way in the opposite corner of England. For a short while, she had even thought about leaving the country altogether, but after a very short stint in Scotland at the age of eighteen, she had decided that the blunt and cold nature of the people from the North was not for her. And yet, somehow, after all the dreaming and the scheming, she still ended up in Liverpool, barely an hour’s drive away from her childhood home.
When she had moved into her first shitty flat at the age of twenty-three, Clara had very genuinely hated the fact that she had landed herself in Liverpool. She had still felt overwhelmed by her proximity to her father’s new marriage and the old memories of her mum, and she didn’t feel like the distance was great enough to get away from it all.
Nevertheless, the change of scenery had helped and things had gotten better as time passed, especially as she became better friends with her flatmates and made connections with people at work. These days, all she could feel was a sense of gratitude for having avoided ending up in Manchester. Or Leeds. She shuddered to think of ending up there. Yes, Liverpool was a much more attractive option.
Now, she was surprisingly happy in the city that she had come to think of as home. She still had flatmates at the age of twenty-eight and her job didn’t pay as much as she would like, but she had a loving boyfriend and great friends and an acceptable distance from her dad and Linda.
“Are we still on for drinks tonight?” A male voice with a soft west country accent startled her out of her thoughts.
Danny. Her beloved Danny. Clara thought that he may very well be her favorite part of Liverpool.
“Of course we are!” She turned to grab his arm and kissed him on the cheek before they each went their separate ways in the school hallway. In response to their innocent display of affection, she heard some of her students giggle and whisper amongst themselves and couldn’t stop herself from smiling.
Danny had been so endearingly awkward when she had first asked him out. Now, when she thought about his newly developed confidence and comfort with their relationship, she couldn’t help but feel a little bit giddy. Frankly, she felt that her ex-soldier, maths-teacher boyfriend was perfect for her. He put up with her crazy antics and her hyperactive need for control while somehow managing to slow her down and keep her grounded.
As Clara made her way into her classroom, she pondered their development of mutual trust. At this point, she was fairly certain Danny knew everything bad that there was to know about her and her life.
“Clara, where did you put my soldering iron?”
Well, nearly everything, anyway.
As soon as she saw her wild, gray-haired companion kneeling on the floor and rooting around her desk, Clara turned back towards the door and quickly shut it. She did not need her students gossiping about a strange, older man making himself at home in her classroom.
“John! What the bloody hell are you doing in here? How did you even get into the school?”
“Easily. Everyone who works here is a pudding brain. Now, can you answer my question? I was supposed to modify the motherboard for some boring mob guy’s computer last week, but I forgot, and now he’s sending his men around to harass me. Unimaginative slob.”
“What?? John, you cannot honestly be insinuating that you’ve come to hang about a secondary school while you’re being followed by some mob men. Are you out of your wits? You’re putting my students in danger!”
Clara instantly started to pace in front of her desk as John continued to pull drawers out and throw things on the floor. In what she assumed was a response to the genuine irritation and panic in her voice, he peaked out over the edge of her desk and sighed as he watched her begin to shake her hands about.
“Calm down. I made absolutely sure they lost my trail very early this morning. Everything will be back to normal mediocrity at this school very soon. I just need my soldering iron.”
Nodding to herself, she rushed around her desk and pushed him out of the way before he made even more of a mess out of her immaculate organization system. His eyebrows raised in indignation, but before he could say anything, she reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out his soldering iron. Looking remarkably pleased at having gotten what he came for, he took it from her hand and quickly stood up. Without saying anything else, he dramatically turned and ran out the door.
Danny knew about basically everything in her life, but he did not know about John. No one knew about John, really. Clara wasn’t ever quite sure how to talk about him to other people. Yes, he was one of her best friends, in a weird, we-don’t-really-talk-about-our-lives kind of way, but describing him that way to others seemed somehow wrong. Amy and Bill were her best friends, and that title suited them perfectly. They were her flatmates, and they talked about everything, ate junk food together, took care of each other when supremely drunk, snipped at each other about dishes and hair in the shower, painted each other’s nails, and occasionally helped each other out with rent. With John, friendship was more about depending on someone who understood that, on the inside, you were just a little bit crazy and lonely and hurt by previous loss. Not that they ever talked about it. They never did.
Clara took a deep breath and went about reorganizing her stuff. She would have to talk to John later about boundaries and work and his flippant attitude towards his own safety. For now though, she had students to teach, and she was remarkably good at that.
---
Walking back to her flat with her hand in his, Clara felt herself warm from the inside out. They had been walking in a companionable silence since they had left their usual pub, enjoying the nice weather they were having for a spring night in May.
“Summer break is coming up fairly soon. Do you have any plans?” Danny bumped her with his shoulder.
“Nah, I don’t have anything planned. Though I’ll probably go to Blackpool for a bit to say hi to my gran and my dad.”
“Would you want to go somewhere with me? I was thinking maybe we could go on holiday to Brighton. I know you’ve always wanted to go.”
Clara felt a wave of genuine affection rush through her at the thoughtfulness of the suggestion. She had never made it to that part of England, and she was surprised that he had remembered what she was sure were only fleeting comments about her past desires to live there. As they made it to her building’s front stoop, she turned to him and pulled his face down for a tender kiss. They held each other in a warm embrace before Clara pulled back and nodded.
“I would love to go to Brighton with you, Daniel Pink. I love you.”
“I love you too, Clara.” He smiled the brightest smile she thought she’d ever seen.
Giving him one last quick kiss, Clara turned, made her way up the steps, and opened her building’s front door. Once she made it inside her flat, she leaned back against the door and bit her lip with a small smile on her face. She giggled quietly to herself as she thought about her splendid night out. She couldn't wait to share the news with Amy. As their biggest supporter, she would freak out.
“PE walks weird. Did you ever notice he doesn’t walk like anyone else? Why is he teaching children PE if he can’t even walk?”
And just like that, Clara was yanked back down from her happy euphoria by a voice that was altogether too familiar. Her heart raced in her chest and she fought to breathe through her sudden fright as she flipped on the lights.
“Christ, John! You really can’t just show up like this. You know other people live here.”
“So? They’re out.”
“How long have you been sitting around here in the dark? Why are you even here? Didn’t you have some computer thing or other to make?”
“I modified the pudding brain’s motherboard in under an hour. It was extremely easy. One of your students could have done it. Probably would have learned more doing that than sitting in a classroom.”
Ah, one of John Smith’s patented talents: only answering the questions that he wanted to answer. Sod the rest of them. Clara had gotten used to this frankly infuriating habit and was now less bothered by his evasive nature. John was not good at communication. In fact, he was atrocious with interpersonal interactions in general. Clara said nothing as she went about making them both tea. He would come out and say what he needed to if he so desired, and if he didn’t, she had a list of issues she wanted to talk about anyway.
As she dropped the seventh sugar cube into her Scottish friend’s drink, she heard him clear his throat. She turned to watch him shift about on her sofa, looking like he was fighting with himself about whatever it was he was trying to express. Suddenly, he turned to look at her, and she stared into his eyes from across the room.
Sometimes, their ability to communicate nonverbally scared her. He was such an intense person, and in these quiet moments, she felt like maybe she was an anchor to his floating soul. He rarely ever understood other people’s emotions, always running about wildly from one thing to the next, always being rude and brilliant and arrogant beyond belief. He rarely understood her emotions either, but it was in these moments of quiet intensity that she felt they understood each other best. Yes, he was an absolute git most of the time, but she knew that he hurt.
He broke their eye contact and grunted quietly to himself about “pudding brains” and “PE” and “relationship drama”.
She sat down in the armchair next to the sofa and handed him his disgustingly sweet tea as she thought about how she wanted to have this conversation.
“Listen. What you did at school today? You can’t do that. You can’t just show up at my place of work and look through my stuff and potentially frighten the students or put them in danger. You can’t just show up at my flat and sit around in the dark, waiting for me to get home without letting me know that you’re going to be around beforehand. What if I had brought Danny back up here with me? What would I have had to do to explain your random presence in my home? How could I ever possibly explain the fact that you have a key to my place, not only to Danny, but to my actual flatmates? We need boundaries, John.”
“I already told you, those kids were fine. I had lost those harebrained mobsters without any problems. No one was in danger.”
“You can never know that for certain! If someone had followed you in, those children would have been put at risk, and I would have been responsible.”
“Don’t be daft, you would not have been responsible.”
Clara shot him a furious glare.
“I won’t do it again.”
“Okay. What about my flat?”
“What about it?”
“You can’t just come in here whenever you like. I gave you that key as a symbol of trust, just like you gave me yours, but it’s not meant to be a free invitation to sit in my home whenever the mood strikes. It’s for emergencies. Amy and Bill don’t even know that anyone else has a key to this place.”
“That’s irrelevant, I always make sure no one is here when I come in.”
Clara slammed her tea down in frustration.
“John! That’s not what this is about! God, you’re infuriating.” She took a deep breath and steadied herself. “This is about you not understanding boundaries. This is my space and this is my life, and they are important to me. Don’t treat this like a non-issue.”
Clara watched John struggle and try to understand the point she was making. As he fidgeted with his empty mug of tea, she saw him attempting to genuinely comprehend what he was doing wrong. Sometimes, because he had such a preternaturally good understanding of so many other topics, she forgot that he had such a truly poor grasp on human relations. After a while, she watched him nod slightly to himself as he apparently came to a conclusion.
“Alright.”
“Okay.” They made eye contact, and Clara gave him a reassuring nod. “Now, tell me all about how you got involved in your motherboard-fixing emergency.”
John’s shoulders loosened up a bit, and he launched into what she was sure was a very overblown story involving money, screwdrivers, and serious bargaining with technology. As she listened to him go on, Clara smiled to herself. Life really was great. She was soon going to go on holiday with her boyfriend, she had an unorthodox but great friendship with John, work was going well, and her friendships with Amy and Bill were as strong as ever.
Clara went to bed feeling like the luckiest woman in all of England.
---
She hadn’t quite intended for them to meet, but after it was all said and done, she figured that it was probably inevitable.
---
She was sitting in the passenger seat of John’s shitty car, enjoying riding around Liverpool with the windows down while listening to John’s punk playlist, when she requested a pit stop at a nearby coffee shop. As she waited for their usual order to be ready (regular flat white for her, some gross sugared-up concoction with an extra shot of espresso for John), she heard Danny’s familiar voice laughing from across the room and felt her heart skip a beat. Quickly, she ducked behind the counter, successfully diving down before she could be seen, and breathed a sigh of relief for the near-miss.
Unfortunately, as usual, the barista serving up orders called out her name. Loudly. In another panic, Clara peaked over the counter, signaling the worker to be quiet, realizing too late that it was a futile effort. She made exceedingly awkward eye contact with Danny while still crouching and stood up, trying to pretend that she had been tying her shoes.
He walked over to her.
“Clara? What are you doing here?”
“Danny! You know me, I love coffee.” Clara realized she was now awkwardly holding two travel cups and shrugged while overcompensating with a loud laugh and a smile.
“Why do you have two cups?”
“Er… Just couldn’t decide what I wanted, you know. Got ‘em both.”
Danny made a face. “Right…”
After an awkward moment of silence, she shrugged and laughed awkwardly again. “Anyway, better be letting you get on with your day! I’m going to go now.”
She then tried to run off, but before she could make it fully outside, Danny caught up to her. “Wait, Clara. Is there something going on?”
Right at that moment, John chose to make himself known by yelling out his driver’s side window while looking down at his phone.
“Hurry up, Clara! We’re going to miss it if you take any longer.”
She flinched and watched Danny arch an eyebrow. “Clara, who is that?”
Apparently exasperated with the amount of time she was taking to linger outside the shop, John opened his car door and stood, turning towards her. She couldn't see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but she saw him hesitate for a split second when he spotted Danny standing next to her.
“Oh. Hello, PE. Could you and Clara hurry this up? We’re in a bit of a rush.”
“PE? What? Who are you? How do you know Clara?”
“You can call me the Doctor.”
Clara threw John a heated glare, and watched him frown in confusion at her anger. After some extended signaling with her eyes and face, John rolled his eyes and sighed. He stepped away from his beloved car, closed its door, and approached them.
“Danny, this is John. John, Danny.”
“Yes, yes, yes. PE. Hello. Can we go now?” John desperately gestured at his very blue car. Clara felt Danny staring at her and sighed in resignation.
“Fine. Take your disgusting coffee.” John quickly took his cup from her and beat a hasty retreat back to his car.
She turned to look up at her boyfriend and saw him seriously frowning at her. He evidently did not find any part of this amusing.
“Who is that man? Your uncle or something?”
“What? No. He’s, er… he’s an old friend.”
“Why does he call me PE? He must be like twice your age. How did you two even meet?”
“Listen, it’s a bit complicated, but I promise that he’s mostly harmless. He’s just a friend. I promise I’ll explain later.” She grabbed and squeezed his hand, attempting to reassure him with a warm touch.
John honked his horn. Danny glared in the direction of the car.
“Fine, but I don’t like him, Clara.”
“You don’t know him, Danny. Sorry, but I’ve got to go.” With another squeeze to his hand, she turned and rushed back into the passenger seat of the ‘TARDIS’.
---
After a number of extended conversations with Danny regarding the nature of her friendship with John, the perceived animosity between the two main men in her life began to settle down. Danny was clear in his trust of Clara, and while he told her he wasn’t going to stop her from doing whatever it was that she did with the older Scot, he also made it perfectly clear that he didn’t trust him. It was a point of contention for a while, but eventually, Clara decided that it was irrelevant whether or not Danny trusted John as long as he trusted her fully and completely.
Things with John, as expected, were a little less straightforward. He initially resented Danny for messing up the way they went about business as usual, and he blamed her boyfriend for her new demarcation of personal and professional boundaries. They argued about it extensively, and for a short while, Clara and John did not see nor hear from each other. Eventually though, they both cooled off, and they once again began to hang out at coffee shops and live music pubs and university lectures and hole-in-the-wall restaurants and as many weird outdoors spots as they could find.
Clara felt like she should have known that her attained level of peace couldn’t last.
Everything turned to shit two weeks before Danny and herself planned to leave for their holiday in Brighton. She had been talking to him on the phone about their holiday plans and what they should be packing and how much she loved him when she heard the screeching tires.
The moments that followed became a bit of a blur.
She remembered calling Amy and Bill and blindly running through the streets of Liverpool until she found his body, his poor body, sprawled out on the street. She had the image etched into her mind. Her beautiful and wonderful Danny Pink, rendered so so ugly by the shape of his oddly bent and broken legs, by the blood seeping from the injury on the side of his head, but most of all by the empty look of his cold dead eyes.
She screamed and raged at the world. How could anyone deprive this planet of Danny Pink? Her caring, gentle, disciplined boyfriend. Gone.
She spent the next few weeks in her room. She barely ate and rarely showered and really didn’t talk to anyone except for the occasional check-in from Bill and Amy. Her dad constantly called, but she never picked up. John was curiously absent throughout the whole ordeal, but Clara hardly even noticed. She didn’t think of much other than Danny, anyway.
---
School had just started again when she heard from John for the first time since Danny’s passing. The text she had received showed no indication that he was acknowledging her current state of affairs, and for a split second, Clara was absolutely furious. But then she thought about the pity and the sorrow and the soft, sad looks that she received from everyone else, and decided that she felt somewhat relieved.
Clara genuinely thought she could handle being around John again, but she was horribly wrong. She knew that she and John were tightly bound by mutual experiences of dealing with loss, but she was very wrong in assuming that coping (or not coping, in his case) with past loss and dealing with a very recent death were going to be the same. For some reason, Clara was fine with John’s evasive nature when it came to handling past loss, but she couldn’t stand his complete aversion to talking about it when it came to Danny’s death. She somehow felt simultaneously grateful that John tried to talk to her about matters that had nothing to do with her dead boyfriend and also fully incensed that he thought he didn’t have to talk to her about it directly or really address the issue.
Inevitably, she just lost it.
John had insisted on taking them to the Peak District National Park in his beloved blue car one Saturday morning because, as he said, they were predicted to have great weather, and if they timed it just right, they could see the summer sunset stretch on for miles out there. While frankly not in the mood, Clara had agreed and had sat in his car without saying much for the ninety minute trip.
She snapped practically as soon as they got there.
“So if we take that trail off to the right, we should be able to reach the ridge I was talking about earlier. It’s going to be quite the sight, especially becau-”
“Are you fucking kidding me, John?”
He whipped around to look at her with his eyebrows raised in shock. After a few seconds, his face settled into a somber expression, but he didn’t say anything in response to her question.
“Do you think you can just bring me out here and pretend that nothing is wrong? That Peak District National Fuck is going to make up for the fact that I never got to go on holiday with my boyfriend because he fucking died? That I can’t stand the sight of just about anything because I can’t stop myself from thinking that he should be the person who sees all the amazing things in the world? That I literally cannot sleep anymore because I won’t ever get Danny back?”
Again, John stayed silent.
“Say something! Do something, John! God knows that’s all you’re good for. Running about and causing problems and fixing them and blabbering on about absolutely nothing important while the rest of us have to deal with real life.”
John looked down at his boots and leaned back onto his car. Clara hated that he looked like he had expected her to lose it while he stayed calm.
“You know what, John? Fuck you. You don’t get to stand there and judge me about the way that I’m dealing with the death of my boyfriend. At least I deal with it! At least I acknowledge that he’s gone! Can you say the same? Do you even think about the fact that your wife is dead?”
At this comment, John’s eyes shot right to hers with a look of such restrained fury that Clara forgot to breathe for just a moment.
“Don’t.”
“Why? What kind of worthless doctor are you, anyway? You run around with all this knowledge and brilliance, but what good is that worth? You can’t bring Danny back. You couldn’t even save your wife.”
“Clara, you need to take a breather.”
“No, John. You really, really don’t get to tell me what to do. You and your stupid car.”
Having gotten a brilliant idea to make him hurt right alongside her, Clara turned around and looked for something to throw. Spotting a large rock on the ground, she picked it up with both hands, rapidly turned around, and threw it at John’s precious ‘TARDIS’. It shattered the passenger side window.
Satisfied with the look of shock and hurt crossing John’s face, Clara turned around to pick up something else.
“Clara, stop. Put it down.”
“No.”
She threw another rock at his car and broke one of its headlights.
“Do as you’re told, and put it down.”
“No.”
Using a sizable stick she’d found on the ground, she knocked off one of the car’s side mirrors. John was getting visibly angry.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing. Stop.”
“No!”
Using another massive rock, she simultaneously shattered his shitty windshield and took down his rearview mirror, where she knew John kept a picture of his late wife. Realizing what she’d just done, Clara fell to the ground and began to cry.
It started to rain.
“Are you happy now? Did that selfish display of destruction make you feel better?”
“I’m so sorry, John.”
He looked down at her in a mixture of compassion and anger and disappointment. “No. You’re not.”
It hurt to see him look at her like that. It hurt to see his sadness. And it really hurt to know that he was right. Naturally, Clara lashed out.
“You are such a smug bastard. Go away. I don’t want to see you ever again.”
He stood staring at her for what seemed like hours before finally speaking. “I hope you’re happy some day, Clara.”
He got into his battered car and drove away, leaving her hurting on the wet ground.
---
For weeks after having destroyed his car, she stubbornly refused to reach out to him. Her pride and a pervasive sense of embarrassment stopped her from trying to communicate in any way for quite a while. Eventually though, she got over it and tried to give him a call. When she finally did, she learned that the number she had been calling and texting for years had been randomly disconnected.
She pretended that she wasn’t absolutely crushed.
Another week went by in a depressive haze before she realized that she still had her key to his place. Fueled by the idea of seeing him again and finally apologizing, Clara rushed to his home straight from work. Without paying attention or bothering to knock, she burst into his foyer laughing, ready to call out his name, only to stop dead in her tracks upon realizing that the place was practically empty. All his books and records and tools were gone. The only things that remained were some empty shelves, unused chalk, and a layer of dust.
Clara didn’t see John again for a very long time.