The Time of Change

Help Him

The Doctor pulls away from Clara now, and she has to fight extraordinarily hard not to grab onto him, to make him stay put. Her heart beats rapidly against her ribcage, like a hummingbird's, and she has to gasp for air. It's as if his leaving has knocked the wind out of her, as if she's slipped and fallen on ice and all the oxygen fled from her lungs almost in fear. The sensation is cold: a horrible, freezing, bitter cold that she cannot seem to warm. It numbs her insides to the point where she isn't even sure if she has them anymore. Although she's looking at it, she is positive that everything within her has dropped out of her stomach and is lying, still and useless, on the dusty floorboards under her feet. Dimly she notices her fingers twitching, searching for something to hold onto, something to comfort her. She doesn't even look at him as he begins tottering up the steep staircase, but she hears him mumble to himself, "The trouble with daleks is, they take so long to say anything. I'll probably die of boredom before they shoot me."

A smile cracks the mask on Clara's face despite her efforts to stop it. She hears, distantly, a dalek shout his name, calling for him, coaxing him forward. Threatening the world he's found a home in after travelling for so very long. She's always wondered how he would be if he settled down, and here he is. He sits, fixes toys, becomes amnesiac and kills the bad guys. And Clara's heart is breaking.

With a thought blooming in her head, she takes two large strides to stand at the wall beside which is his makeshift cot. Subconsciously she marvels at how he never made a nicer sleeping arrangement, in all his years here. An unearthly light glitters, casting eerie shadows across the floor and causing the dark corners to look even more menacing. Somewhere, in the deep recesses of her mind, she hears the message being replayed on its loop. Calling out for the Doctor's true name. Clara breathes, and stares at the crack in the wall. It's no more than three inches wide in the very center, where it is largest, but it is at least a yard in length.

And Clara starts speaking to it.

"Listen to me, you lot," she growls. "Listen!" She crouches next to it, and lays her palm flat against the wall directly underneath the opening. She puts her head very close to it. "Help him. Help him change the future. Do it. Do something."

A dalek screams outside, "DOCTOR!"

"You've been asking a question," she whispers to the crack, her eyes filling with tears yet again, "and it's time someone told you. You've been getting it wrong." As if it's waiting, anticipating her words, the air around Clara grows silent as the grave. Her voice drops to something far quieter than a whisper, so quiet that, if they are listening on the other side of this crack, she is not sure if they will be able to decipher what she's saying. Her words tremble. "His name... his name is the Doctor. All the name he needs. Everything you need to know about him. And if you love him... and you should... help him. Please, help him."

Her legs unsteady, Clara straightens and turns her back on the crack. She wipes her tearstained cheek with the back of her hand. Her footsteps slow and measured, she makes her way out of the Doctor's clock tower home to join the townspeople of Christmas. They stare up at the bell chamber at the top of the tower in awe, in fear. Clara's heart speeds up again and she watches as the Doctor comes into view at last.

She is not inside the room in the tower, so she does not see the white light glow brighter than ever before. And she does not see the crack snap itself closed for the first time in over three hundred years.