When Omara King finally left Leadworth, she left a trail of ash.
It's been three years since it all fell apart, and Amelia Pond's wedding is the first time the town has really come back to life.
But a ghostlike Omara shows up on the night before the...
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She found me in the study. Sitting cross-legged in a leather armchair, with a knife in one hand.
"And who are you?" She hissed - we'd been preemptively introduced, but she didn't know that.
I closed the knife quickly and set it down with its siblings on the desk and got to my feet. "My name's Omara. I'm sorry to break in, but no one was here when I arrived and it's cold outside. You could really use a footman in a big house like this."
"I don't know who you presume to be - " She began, drawing herself up to the full height of her indignance.
I cut her off, pulling the sonic from my pocket and tossing it onto the desk.
"The Doctor sent me. Is your wife home, Madame Vastra?"
*
I was dreaming of my parents more and more, reliving memories of them that I shouldn't have detailed access to.
The Doctor had realized fairly quickly that convincing me to sleep would not be a one-time issue as long as Amelia was gone. A few weeks in, he was still finding me zoned out in places where I shouldn't be at the ship's synthetic equivalent of midnight.
Rory was sleepless as well, but he crashed sooner.
It didn't help my case that I still I couldn't manage to go in my room. Which was insane, because it was the one room that she stayed away from, thereby it should be the least haunted.
Something about it felt wrong, though.
Most nights, when Rory finally announced he had to sleep, the Doctor had to pull the breaks on me himself by walk me to the library himself, where he could work and keep eyes on me while I lay on one of the dozens of couches on the ground floor. He made sure I didn't just get up and walk out again. Or if I did, he would follow and pester me until I regretted going on walkabout.
A couple of times I woke up on the cushions and saw him on the couch opposite to me, an arm folded behind his head and his eyes closed.
One night I sat up while he was asleep, and his brow furrowed, breath changing like the mere sound of my shifting body was enough to wake him.
"You've got three more hours," he murmured without opening his eyes. "Back to sleep."
"I can't."
"Try."
"I can't."
He groaned, my name coming out as a complaint on his lips. "Omara."
The Doctor slept so rarely, I almost felt bad for interrupting him. But he didn't have to tie his consciousness to mine, that was just a stubborn decision he'd made.
