In Her Eyes (A Whouffle Fanfiction)

Chapter 9- Secrets and Burdens

Clara woke up the next morning feeling ridiculously happy. She lay there in the soft sheets of the bed for a moment, a huge grin on her face, enjoying the sensation. It felt like ages since she had last been this at peace. Three days to be precise. She supposed it was down to three things:

1. She felt miles better than the day before. That medicine the Doctor had brought her had really done the trick; all of her aches, pains and general sickness had subsided. Clara was buzzing with pent-up energy.

2. The man had left. For good.

3. The third, and probably most likely reason for her unusually good mood, was that her hand was still firmly encased by the Doctor's own. So tightly, in fact, that her whole arm had pins and needles from lack of circulation.

Clara pushed herself up onto one elbow and wiggled her fingers in a half-hearted attempt to dislodge the Doctor without waking him. As much as she enjoyed the feeling of his large hands holding her own she did have things to do today, none of which included lazing around in bed with a numb hand that was likely to drop off any second.

"Doctor," she hissed, shaking her hand more violently than before. She winced as the pins and needles increased. Her entire arm felt like a rubber flipper.

The Doctor shifted in his seat at the sound of her voice and tugged her hand even closer to him, jerking Clara in such a way that she was now hanging on her front over the edge of the bed, face inches from his knee.

Great.

Clara swung herself sideways out of the bed awkwardly, overbalancing a touch and narrowly missing the Doctor's lap. She grabbed his shoulder and righted herself quickly, breathing a sigh of relief. That could have gone much worse.

Or better. Her subconscious reminded her. You could have fallen into his lap...

Clara ignored her and instead prised her hand out of the Doctor's own. It took some doing; for a skinny man the Doctor was deceptively strong, his grip increasing every time Clara created a gap in his hold. Eventually she resorted to slipping a rolled up blanket from her bed into the space where her hand was, ducking out of the way from him in the few brief seconds that the change over took place. Clara massaged the feeling back into her arm as the Doctor moved restlessly in his chair. When he didn't wake up Clara tip toed around his sleeping figure and slipped out of the med bay, leaving the door ajar so she knew which one it was to go back to. The corridors of the TARDIS looked exactly the same and no matter how many times the Doctor bothered to show her around Clara could never remember where anything was. Apart from her room, which was where she was headed.

Clara padded down the corridor cautiously. She really needed to shower. She felt unclean, like all of the misfortunes of the past few days had clung to her like dirt. Her skin itched constantly and she scratched her arms as she searched for her room. It took her a while to find it but when she did she hesitated outside of the familiar metal door, hand resting against the button in the wall next to it. Something felt different. She shuddered, goosebumps forming on her arms. In appearance everything was the same. The grey metal of the walls, the pipes that ran above her head, her name engraved into the door with the Gallifreyan, written by the Doctor's own hand, on the plaque underneath. She hadn't wanted it initially but the Doctor had insisted. The gesture touched her, but it reminded her too much of her Time Lord self for her to be entirely at ease with the idea. Every time she passed it the symbols had made her body stiffen, as if it was remembering some event that was too much for her brain to let her see. However that feeling disappeared when, wandering around the TARDIS one day, she had stumbled across some ex-companions' old rooms and had been surprised to see that none of them had the same plaque with their name on it. That, coupled with how the Doctor would run his fingers over the runes with a smile every time he saw them, erased any uneasiness Clara had felt about them. If her Doctor was happy, so was she.