Her Impossible Wolf

7

"That is mad!" Rose exclaimed, laughing.
"Isn't it?" Clara agreed, also laughing. "And that's not even the half of it!"
"What's the rest, then?" Rose asked. She had decided that she really liked Clara, and that they were going to have a lot of fun while she got better, and they redecorated her TARDIS.
"Oh, well it's a very long story. It spans almost a year of travelling with the Doctor, and then also seeing all of the faces he's ever had."
"Okay, no. You've got to tell me know, Clara. You told me you've seen all of his faces. We've got all the time in the world and we can talk for days, if needs be, my little brother's at a summer camp for the next month, and both of my parents have met the Doctor a few times."
"I guessed that last bit from your mum asking me if I was him." Clara sighed. "Okay, fine. I'll tell you the story. It gets a bit confusing though. So, I was travelling with the Doctor, as you know, and during that time I was stuck in the TARDIS, before we crossed our time stream, the Doctor told me something. I didn't remember it for a long while, because it technically never happened, but he told me that he'd met me before in times and places I could never have been to before meeting him. And that I had died helping him both times.
"The first time, I was on the asylum of the Daleks. The planet where they sent all the nutjob Daleks who wouldn't cut it as ruthless, heartless killing machines. I thought I had myself barricaded in a room, where I was keeping them out and baking souffles. Classic me, that. He called me Souffle Girl. Turns out, I'd been turned into a Dalek, but had surpressed the memory because it was too horrific.
"The Daleks had sent the Doctor and his friends at the time to the planet, to blow it up, using it as a two-birds opportunity. I transmitted the Doctor and his friends back to the fleet at the same time as blowing up the planet myself..."
"Oh my god!" Rose exclaimed shocked and horrified.
"Don't worry, the second one wasn't nearly as bad. I was a governess and barmaid in Victorian London. Some alien entity animating some snow was manipulating the spirit of the previous governess to come for me and the children, and to help repopulate Victorian London with alien snow creatures.
"He showed me the TARDIS and the ice governess had managed to get up onto the cloud where he kept the TARDIS. Don't ask me why it was on a cloud, I figure he was depressed. The ice governess pulled me from the cloud and we both plummeted. She shattered into shards of ice and I was mortally wounded from the height from which we'd fallen.
"A couple of the Doctor's friends managed to stabilise me, but I was still dying. The Doctor told me he was going to save the day, but I had to promise to live and travel with him. He did save the day, but I got a lot worse while he was gone. Both times, the last thing I said to him were 'Run you clever boy and remember'."
"Woah! This is crazy! It's more nuts than my craziest story!"
"I'm not even half-done, still. Tell me about yours once you've heard the rest."
"Yeah, of course I will, yeah."
"Okay, so about half a year later, I'm at home, and I get this letter from the friends I was telling you about from Victorian London. There's a candle to light that will knock me out and allow me to speak with them across time. I drop because that's freaky, then read that it was also laced into the paper, and fall unconscious.
"So we're having this conference thing because some criminal in Victorian London claims to know a secret of the Doctor's. He even gave Vastra, one of the Doctor's friends, the information. It's coordinates in space. For a planet. Then, one by one, the Doctor's friends in Victorian London vanish. Another of the Doctor's friends, a Professor River Song, wakes me up, but keeps the link intact.
"She must've married him or something at some point because she looked like she could kill him when I said I hadn't known she was a woman. Anyway, the Doctor then came round and I told him what I had heard in the conference. He said it wasn't the secret that had been discovered. It was his grave. A secret he would take to his grave, and they'd found his grave. So we had to go.
"It's something he said no time traveller should ever do, visit their grave. But we had to go because Jenny and Vastra and Strax would undoubtedly have been taken there, if they were even still alive.
"I also discovered that River was his wife. Because there was a grave for her, and he said that it must've been a trapdoor, because they'd never bury his wife out there. It was in the catacombs the grave brought us to that I remembered the conversation from before..."
"Jenny, Vastra and Strax?" Rose asked. "Only Jenny is a Victorian sounding name."
"Yeah, Jenny is Victorian. Vastra is a Silurian. She puts it best herself. She calls herself 'a lizard-woman from the dawn of time'. Strax is a Sontaron. But he's not a very good one. Well, not quite anyway. He was disgraced in battle and demoted to a war nurse, which is where the Doctor found him. He met Vastra and Jenny through the Doctor and became their butler. He still sometimes slips up and says things like 'boil them in acid'. Then he corrects himself, usually. He's just not very good at genders."
"What's a Sontaron?"
"They look like baked potatoes and are apparently clones. They're not remarkably bright because they're bred for war, but don't let that fool you. They know their way around warfare and are very hard to fight.
"Anyway, the Great Intelligence is back, the entity that was terrorising Victorian London, and they wanted the Doctor to open his tomb. The Doctor wouldn't, so they started killing us until the tomb suddenly opened. River had said the Doctor's name, but I don't really remember it because I was half dead at the time. But either way, they stopped killing us and we entered the tomb.
"The Great Intelligence had wanted him to do it so they could enter his time stream and change every one of his victories into a defeat. Including the Time War, but that one was more of a stalemate than a victory. By doing so, they were killing the Doctor millions of times over and he was in agony.
"And I just had this notion. This idea of how to save him. He tried to stop me, but he was endlessly dying, so we didn't have a choice. I jumped into his time stream to reverse the Great Intelligence's work. But before I did, I turned to him and told him: 'Run. Run you clever boy, and remember me', because I knew going into his time stream would kill me.
"That's how I saw all of his faces. I saved each and every one of them, hundreds of times. Then, I was dying. I could feel it. I was being torn into tiny pieces. That's when I heard his voice all around me. He told me to stay still, because he was going to rescue me. To save me for once. He sent me a link to my past. The leaf that caused my parents to meet for the first time. And he jumped into his own time stream to save me. I passed out soon after because I was nearly dead. Then I woke up back at home."
"Oh my god," Rose muttered after a couple of minutes. "That's insane!"
"Isn't it? He even took to calling me his impossible girl," Clara agreed. "So go on then," she added after a pause, "what was your craziest adventure?"