Archive of Our Own ^beta

Clara sits on her bed, cross legged, wearing only the Doctor’s t-shirt, her own fluffy pink socks, and a pair of underpants from so long ago the writing on the tag is long worn off. Discarded essays lie piled and strewn about across her bed—it turns out university students write far more than her students back at Coal Hill. She shovels another fork of channa masala into her mouth and blinks at the episode of an alien cop procedural playing on the television. “It’s the maid,” she grumbles. “It’s obviously the maid.” 

Predictably, the orange, scaled alien onscreen doesn’t take her advice.

She picks up one of the essays by her knee, titled Dystopia Through the Lens of Social Justice, and scans over it while the show plays in the background. Not bad, even if the citations are formatted improperly. She still dreads grading it. 

With a click, the TV shuts off, and Clara startles, the essay nearly slipping out of her fingers. “What are you doing?” she complains at the TARDIS, and the TARDIS merely responds with a long whistle-beep-beep sound. “Hello?”

“Productive, are we?” says the Doctor, leaning in the door frame, raising an eyebrow. He smirks. “I’ll turn it back on, don’t worry. You look like the poor victim of an Academy student’s discography of mediocre papers.”

“Some of them are good,” says Clara, despairingly hopeful. 

“If you say so.”

She frowns, pats the bed next to her. “Well. Where’ve you been, anyway? Nardole was looking for you.” 

The Doctor shrugs, stepping over to the bed and swinging himself on, one of his unfairly long legs falling around her. “My old—our friend downstairs—well, you know. She wanted milkshakes.”

Clara does know. The doors in the basement. The voice from behind them. She’s visited. Of course she’s visited, in the past seventy years. What else is there to do? Grade papers, gossip with Nardole, shag the Doctor in the supply closet. The Vault is big and cold and airy, and Missy is smaller but not much warmer. Not with those chips of ice sparkling in her face instead of eyes.

The Doctor snatches the paper from Clara’s hand, scans over it, his mouth curled up. “Awful,” he declares, tossing it to the comforter.

She giggles, looks up at him. “Not even mediocre anymore?” she protests, pouting her lips in an exaggerated mockery of insult. Not that he’s wrong. She’d have thought university students would be a bit better at cutting down on run-on sentences than her primary school ones, but alas, some things are meant to haunt a teacher no matter how old her students get. She pushes the plate off her lap and turns to him, ruffles his hair. It’s so much better so much better long like this, all curls and hand-holds. “Shouldn’t you be lecturing some poor children about ethics? Physics?”

“I left them to fend for themselves.” The Doctor clicks his tongue, reaches up and grasps her wrist, pressing her knuckles to her lips. A shiver runs through her, despite all the years they’ve spent like this. He holds her fingers there for a long while, without breaking her gaze or saying a word. 

“Hunger Games-style?” Clara finally says, unable to stand his piercing eyes much longer. She sets aside her channa masala to maneuver in front of him, cupping his face with her free palm. “Nardole couldn’t have been happy.”

“Is he ever?” He drops her other hand. “He complains to Bill now, you know that? She told me to get him a therapist—”

“That’s not a bad idea, actually. For either of you.” Clara leans forward and presses a kiss, sweet and chaste, to his cheek, to soften her words. He turns his head, catches her mouth instead. She leans forward, presses herself against him, enjoying the way his lips move against hers, the taste of cherry and sugar on his tongue. The only sounds for a while are their breathing and the gentle rustling of fabric. 

He grins when she breaks away. “Good?” he says, wiping a smear of her vibrant pink lipstick from the corner of his mouth, her eyes tracking the movement of his fingers with laser focus. “Hello?”

She shakes her head, trying to dispel the misty smitten muddle in her head, and then nods. “Yeah. Yeah. Um. Did you just have a lollipop?” Clara manages, still dazed, annoyed at herself for letting him mess with her thoughts so predictably. 

“Yes. Why?” 

She laughs, stroking circles against the soft flesh under his ear. “I can taste it. I still think you should get a therapist, lollipop kisses or not. You and Nardole and Bill, probably, and. Well. Her.” Clara’s eyes flick downward, even though the TARDIS isn’t actually, spatially, above the Vault. “Me, too, actually.” 

“I’ll consider it,” says the Doctor, briskly enough she knows he’s lying. He leans forward for another kiss, missing her mouth, landing on the skin between her nose and her top lip. There’s a word for that spot. She can’t remember it. 

“The school must have counselors.” He frowns, wrinkling his nose, and she says, “I’ll stop. Just… to consider, maybe.” 

“Maybe,” says the Doctor, kissing at the corner of her mouth, begging for attention. (Insatiable. The first time they kissed, bodies pressed together and warm from the novelty, she had to push him away to catch her breath. “Respiratory bypass,” he’d said, grinning like a boy in a candy shop, his eyes bright and hungry. “Sorry. Again?” ) 

Clara shifts her head, parts her lips, lets him lick into his mouth. His hand drifts up to cup the curve of her her throat, tickling the delicate skin there. Her favourite Gallifreyan erogenous zone, Clara remembers, and breaks away to dip down to his neck. She mouths at him, soft and tender and delicate.

“Please,” he says, breathless. “Please. Stay there.”

The thrill that spikes in Clara’s chest coaxes her to push him down by the shoulders, climb over him and straddle his stomach. The smear of lipstick on his neck marks that Gallifreyan nerve cluster, and she takes up kissing it once again, enthusiastically enough that her teeth scrape against him. He gasps. 

“Remind me about that spot.”

The Doctor makes a sound in his throat. “Obscenely sensitive. Extremely private.”

“You wouldn’t let me do this in the Capitol, then,” says Clara, brushing her thumb against the raw, red skin. 

He flushes, deep, nearly orange-tinted. Different blood. She notices all the differences now, more than she could before. They thrill her. “No,” he says, strangled. “God, no. Not outside the TARDIS. Not out in public. Clara, you know…” 

She does know all the rules, the Puritan repression. She doesn’t care. “Mm.”

“Clara…”

This is good. Something about the way Clara can feel his hearts pound quick, almost frightened in his chest, like cornered prey. Something about the idea of kissing him like this, fuck him, coaxing out screams in a dusty alley, his face bright with embarrassment and arousal in equal measure. Kissing him is always good, but this is.

This is something else.

Clara’s not been unsatisfied lately, or anything like that. She knew this would be drier, blander, than their usual adventures. He’d even told her, “You don’t have to stay. Not for all of it,” and she’d insisted on keeping him company. And she doesn’t regret it, not even when he looks at those big metal doors with unspeakable softness or when he disappears for the night and returns with bloodred lipstick marks tracing down his collar.

She’s not unsatisfied. Just bored, sometimes. Clara can live with bored; bored’s easy when she has the Doctor. Bored’s easy, except when it’s not.

So this is good. This is very good.

Clara fiddles with the top button of his starched white shirt. “Okay?” she asks.

“Yes. Very okay.”

It’s good, because he’s good. He always is. The way he says her name, pleading and desperate, the way a helpless man pleads to his god. And the way his back arches, curved like his slim, nimble fingers between her legs. It’s good, and Clara knows it, but it’s just not quite enough.

The TARDIS has changed its books on the bridge again. While the Doctor’s lecturing on quantum physics and telepathy, Clara glances through them, finds something interesting about alien cultures and travel with a worn red leather bookmark halfway through. The notes scrawled in the margins with a thin black ballpoint pen are in a neater handwriting than she’s ever seen the Doctor use, with pointy Ts and As. 

“Incorrect!!!” the annotator adds next to a section about Gallifreyan formality, and “Only accurate two centuries ago. Matching embroidery now in fashion,” next to a bit about wedding makeup tradition. Clara can’t help but imagine some Time Lord dressed in orange and red and a silly metal collar, chewing on their pen as they consider the inaccuracies of the information before them. An old friend of the Doctor’s, maybe. 

One section is titled TARDIS Driving For The Inexperienced. Whoever read and marked up the book has commented, “Will land you in a wall,” and “Only for pre-Cloister War computers!!! Telepathic print now used for ID.” Clara remembers the last time the TARDIS listened to her, her hands in its glowing guts. She could have gone anywhere.

Gone anywhere, and returned soon enough nobody would notice her absence. That’s what a time machine is for, when you use it properly. Anywhere and back for her afternoon class…

Clara doesn’t let herself think. She squints at the Time Lord’s notes again, taking in the stress for precision and caution, and springs up, dashes to the console. She’ll pick somewhere safe for the test drive, somewhere she can be sure nothing particularly concerning will happen. Not before she can snatch an extra sonic from the Doctor’s desk. Maybe his psychic paper, too, for good measure.

She presses the button to warm up the engine. The TARDIS whirrs warmly in response, its controls buzzing against her fingertips. Clara can feel something nudge up against her mind the same way the Doctor’s thoughts do when he’s not watching them, except the TARDIS’s are more controlled, more purposeful. “Hello there,” she says. “How do we feel about a nice little moon?”

A light near her hand flashes green, once, twice. Referencing the book, she finds the right buttons, the right switches, silently thanking the Time Lord who had enough time and care to bother making corrections. The TARDIS buzzes beneath her. Clara can’t hear its telepathic signal, but she can practically feel the tendrils of it brushing in her mind, pleased for the attention, pleased to be taken off the shelf and played with after so long left to collect dust.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Clara slumps, her shoulders falling. The same light flashes again, this time a bright amber colour. She’d forgotten to take him into account. “I’m… taking her out for a spin. Exercise. She’s not just a box, you know.”

Nardole tsks and steps up beside her. His steps are disconcertingly silent. “The Vault is to be guarded,” he says. 

“By the Doctor,” Clara protests. “I’m not a Time Lord. I wasn’t even going to do anything dangerous.”

“I’m not as dense as you think I am. The TARDIS tracks distress signals, doesn’t it?” Nardole grabs a lever and pulls, and the engine’s quiet purr lurches to a stop. The amber light turns a pale, disappointed blue. “What would the Doctor do if you hurt yourself? He’s barely here for the Vault as it is—don’t think I don’t notice—he’d go ballistic. With no TARDIS.”

Clara frowns, planting her hands on her hips. “I can take care of myself. I’ve done it before. Without him. I’ll get the sonic, if that makes you happy.”

“You’re not going anywhere. I’m to keep the Doctor at the university. If you’re becoming a distraction…” Nardole lets himself trail off. Clara might find the threat more menacing, she thinks, if he wasn’t wearing a turmeric-orange bathrobe and a hat with a pom-pom on the top. “No flights.”

“Fine,” says Clara.

“No flights. Promise me.”

Clara chews her lip, considering. She hates that he’s right: if she and the TARDIS disappeared, there’d be no telling what he’d do. He and Missy, left all alone, with nothing to hold them back. Poor Nardole. The poor planet. “Fine,” she says again. “I promise. No flights. No adventures.”

Nardole nods, satisfied. He holds out his hands, and she gives the book to him with only a shred of hesitation. The poor planet, she reminds herself. 

“I suggest meditation!” he calls after her, as she storms away. 

She waits a week before trying anything else. The days don’t blur, but they fog a bit with the monotony. Wake up, freezing cold, the Doctor on the other side of the bed with all the blankets. Eat breakfast, whatever alien flavor of oatmeal the TARDIS has scrounged up, and tea. Classes, and lunch, and an afternoon class, and dinner. Kissing in bed, which turns into sex, which turns into falling asleep hot and sweaty, just to wake up cold again.

Clara’s been alive for too long, she thinks. She’s not suicidal. She likes her life, she likes the Doctor, she likes Nardole, even. She’d just appreciate something fast and dangerous and interesting. Something like the old days, just her and the Doctor and the TARDIS. She wears the blue shirt she wore with the Vikings, and makes a face at herself in the mirror. Maybe Lady Me would come by if she asked.

She doesn’t ask.

She lingers in front of the classroom door ten minutes before her class starts. Rests her palm against it, weighs her options. The idea of walking in there and talking about literary themes and whatnot for an hour instills deep dread into her bones. Clara doesn’t hate teaching. (Though she does hate a few of her students, a little bit). 

But fast. Dangerous. Interesting. The Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS. 

She listens to her breathing, puts a finger to her wrist and feels the stillness. Everyone’s death is less interesting than their life, she supposes. (Not Danny. Poor, poor Danny). She’d just thought that living with a genocidal alien in a box downstairs would make her day-to-day routine more interesting.

That genocidal alien… Clara hasn’t visited her in a long time. Too long. Not long enough. The last time she’d visited, she’d lingered near the door. An exit strategy. Wordlessly, Missy had stalked closer, slowly, steady, until she was so close Clara could feel her breath brushing against her lips. Her teeth had looked so white, so sharp—she’d wanted to kiss her, for a moment, just to see what it would be like. Missy’d offered, after all, when they’d first properly met in 3W all that time ago, surrounded by skeletons.

Clara had stepped out of the Vault, locked the door with Missy still standing there smiling. If she had a heartbeat, she was sure it would’ve been pounding in her breast long into the night. She asked the Doctor what kissing her was normally like.

“Just like kissing anyone else,” the Doctor said. “She’s not going to eat you.”

Then again, on Skaro, she had offered to do that, too.

She takes out her phone, opens her teacher email, and sends a message to the class. Class cancelled. Something came up. Reading and response still due Friday. She adds a little smiley face emoticon, sends the email. Then she texts the Doctor. R u still in ur office?

Yes, he replies, within an instant.

Clara’s there too fast, climbing on top of his desk, sliding down to sit on his lap, stroking his chest with one hand and playing with the waistband of his trousers with the other. 

The Doctor bites his lip, shifts under her, grins. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he says. 

“Mmm. Nothing interesting. Kiss me.”

“Don’t you have class?” He leans round her to catch sight of the clock on his office wall, which has three different faces, none of which are labeled with actual times or possess the right amount of hands. “I have class, at least.”

“Skip it,” Clara says, smiling. “Kiss me.” 

The Doctor doesn’t need much more encouragement, tilting his head forward to press his lips to hers. Her fingers creep up from his waist, skimming his belly, and he laughs into her mouth. She shifts her weight onto her knees, giving herself more height, angles her face downward. The faint grumbling whirr of the Doctor’s respiratory bypass starts up, and she can feel the skin of his chest vibrating through his shirt.

Clara moves away to look at him gazing up at her, his eyes half open, and she taps his mouth. He darts forward and snaps her finger between his lips, sucking at it happily. It’s an incredible turn-on. She examines him, wondering if his clothes need to stay on. “Did I lock the door?”

He pauses. “No.”

She hums, withdrawing her fingers and tapping his teeth. “Trousers off.”

“My students.”

“Off,” she says again, wiping her finger, wet with the Doctor’s saliva, on her leg. “I want,” she continues, fiddling with the persnickety clasp on her skirt. “To ride your cock.” Zipper down. She lets the fabric pool by her knees, draping around the Doctor’s thighs. “Till you lose your mind.”

He glances to the door. “My students,” he repeats, weakly. He’s close to rubbing himself against her through his trousers like an adolescent at a minimally-chaperoned school prom. 

Clara’s about to shut him up and shove her tongue down his throat when the door hinges squeal and footsteps enter the room. Her eyes meet the Doctor’s, and she mouths, who’s that?

“Pro—fessor?”

“Fuck,” the Doctor says, shoving Clara off his lap unceremoniously. 

She manages to shoot an arm out, catch herself on the desk, the corner of it digging into her palm. She slides the rest of the way off on her own, dragging her skirt back up and securing it in place. “I didn’t…” she says.

“Hello,” says the Doctor to the newcomer, as he stands, squeezing Clara’s hand. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I got startled. Are you ok?”

“I’m fine.” 

She turns around, catches the student’s eyes. He is, presumably, a student. He’d called the Doctor professor, and aside from the time she’d moaned that to him late at night, it’s a student thing to say. He runs a hand over his buzzcut. “Professor,” he says again, this time more certain. “And, erm—”

“Professor Oswald,” says the Doctor, his eyes conspicuously fixated at the ground. He shifts from foot to foot. “My coworker. Thank you for dropping by, coworker.”

Clara nods. “Yes. You’re welcome… coworker. I’ll be on my way.”

“Sir. You missed lecture today. This is my essay.” The student chews his lip, procures a stack of stapled-together sheets of paper. “The one you gave me an extension on.”

“Thank… you. Mr. Moore, was it?” He drops the essay onto the table, makes a shooing motion towards Clara. 

“Jonathan Moore,” the student says, and waves awkwardly at Clara as she backs out of the room.

“Thrilling,” she says drily to herself once she’s out. 

She’s going to need something better.

Clara scans the newspapers for anything that looks like alien behavior, but the only alien she can find remains the one that wakes her up before the sun rises. She picks through appealing photographs of other times, other places, leaves them lying about enticingly on the console. 

The thing is she knows he’s taking Bill places, because he smelled like nineteenth-century England the other day (even more so than when he disappears into the basement for a few hours), and his cheeks were pink from unseasonal winter cold. He’s not bored. But he’s not the one stranded without even a heartbeat to keep him company.

Clara resorts to idly flipping through decades on the television. The Dick Van Dyke Show, Battlestar Galactica, The Breakfast Club, Xena: Warrior Princess… She skips the twentieth century. She’s seen most of it, anyway. The TARDIS TV system, obviously worried it’s not doing its job, offers up something from the 3050s starring a lady with eight huge spiderlike eyes and impressively large tits. Clara groans and shuts it off entirely.

These are all human things, that’s the problem. TV and books and sex. They’re good—the sex, especially, is good—but she’d gotten used to space things. Alien books, alien sitcoms. She has the alien sex still, at least. Small comforts. How human is she, now, if she can’t be happy with a human life?

That question was answered a long time ago, she thinks, feeling for her pulse, and finding that same stillness she’s grown used to since dying on Trap Street. Since waking up on Gallifrey. 

Fine. She wants alien sex? She’ll have alien sex. 

She’s earned it.

The Doctor is fiddling at the console on something mechanical and slightly steampunk, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, grease staining his nails. “Hi,” he says without looking up. “I’m about to hop in the shower.”

“Is that an invitation?” 

His mouth softens, though he seems too distracted for a proper smile. “Would you like it to be?” 

Clara’s not intending to shag him in the shower. She can tell he expects it, with the way he trembles as he unbuttons every button of his shirt and slides it off his shoulders, but once she’s pushed him into the steady stream of water, she’s all business scrubbing the grime of the Doctor’s tinkering off his skin and out of his hair. 

“Something wrong?” he says, brushing his thumb against her collarbone, sliding it down to the top of her breast. “I don’t mind, um, slowing down. There’s no rush.”

“I want you and I want her to listen,” she grunts, squeezing conditioner onto her palm and crooking her finger. The Doctor leans down and she begins massaging it onto his head as she talks. “I want you,” she says more slowly, in case he hadn’t gotten it the first time, “And I want her to be listening. While I make you forget your own name.”

“Wait, what?”

“Her.”

“No, I know you meant—” He straightens, a droplet of soapy water rolling down his cheek. “You don’t like Missy.”

“No, I don’t.” That isn’t strictly true. It’s hard to dislike Missy; she’s charismatic, she’s beautiful, she’s dangerously sexy. Clara doesn’t dislike her. She hates her, though, and that comes all too easily. In the early years of St. Luke’s, of the Vault, Clara had woken up with sweat coursing down her back, the nightmare of Missy’s bright eyes through the lens of a Dalek eye-stalk still burned into her brain.

“Then why…?” 

She taps his chest and he brings his grey hair back into reach. “I want to do something… something like we used to do. Something that might hurt me.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” says the Doctor, his dark brows furrowing, his forehead wrinkling. “And Missy wouldn’t—” He pauses, reappraises his sentence. “Missy can’t hurt you. Not anymore.” 

“I know. I don’t want to hurt. I just want to do something alien.” Clara finishes rinsing off his hair and lets him stand upright, scanning him clinically for any remaining grease spots or muck, not letting her eyes linger between his legs for too long. “I miss it.”

“Well, you know.” The Doctor’s hand brushes her forearm, tickles the fine hairs there. His other hand brushes her stomach, creeps up to cup her breast. “You could always do something alien right now.”

Clara giggles. “You’re impatient.”

“I’m—” the Doctor starts, cutting himself off with a yelp as Clara reaches around him to shut off the water. He shivers. “Point taken. The Vault?”

“Get dressed,” she says, stepping out of the shower and wrapping a towel around herself, drying off her hair with another. She steps into the hallway, turning slightly on her heels to add, “I’ll just be a moment. Don’t wait up.”

She heads to their room, gets dressed, and collects a few things, stuffing them into her purse. She adds, against her own better judgement, a Swiss Army pocketknife: a small thing with a blade shorter than her finger. It won’t offer much protection if Missy does break out of the Vault to attack her, but it comforts her. It’s better than nothing.

Clara slips out of the Doctor’s office, offering Nardole a nod as she leaves. He holds up his teacup in greeting. 

She’s been down the darkened stairs that lead to the Vault more than once, but a few spiders have taken up residence since her last visit, and she puts her hand through a cobweb when she reaches to the wall. She jumps, already shaken by the idea of what she’s about to do, and wipes her hand on her trousers. “Oops,” she says to no one, her voice echoing.

The Doctor is already at the Vault, sitting with his back against the doors. His eyes are closed, and he’s smiling, one arm twisted around to touch the metal of the door he leans on. A spidery tune, played on the piano, drifts through the walls. “I told her,” he says.

“Oh. Oh.” This suddenly doesn’t seem like a very good idea. “I don’t… I…”

“We don’t have to.” The Doctor clambers to his feet. He’s wearing the kind of shirt Clara likes to take off button by button, and trousers she thinks are pyjamas. He holds her face, tilts his head to the side. 

“No. I want to.” Without warning, she shoves him by the shoulders against the wall, and he makes a muffled squeaking noise. She kisses him, dropping her bag to the floor. She didn’t think this through—it’s easier to reach him sitting on his lap, or on the bed, than standing up. He’s craned down a bit to help her, but she’s still on her tiptoes, her neck at an uncomfortable angle. “Is the floor clean?”

“What?” The Doctor’s eyes widen. “No. You can’t…”

Clara nibbles on her lip. Various things are scattered about outside the door, on a workbench. A couple of works in progress with wires hanging out, a torn canvas, a couple of large books. A mechanical arm that she’s sure once belonged to Nardole. “Have you got any… blankets?”

“What?”

She chews her lip, raps on the Vault door next to the Doctor’s shoulder. “Hey. You. Can I have a couple of pillows? A blanket?”

After a minute, the piano music stops, and Clara can hear the clicking of heels, the rustling of fabric. “Clean this afterward, will you?” says the woman inside the Vault. Says Missy, inside the Vault. Something drags against the floor inside, flops against the interior doors. 

The Doctor’s sharp eyes watch Clara as she shoves him away and clicks at the locks. She learned how to do it, seventy years ago, give or take. Her muscles still remember the motions. 

Missy is sitting in front of the piano, her legs crossed, wearing a purple skirt and what appears to be a political campaign shirt that reads Vote Saxon in large black print across her chest. She waves, smiles. 

She’s leaned a naked mattress against the entrance, and Clara grabs the end of it and flips it onto the long side, dragging it out onto the basement floor. “Thank you,” she says, and Missy nods. 

When the door is safely sealed again, Clara turns back to see the Doctor sitting on the mattress and picking through Clara’s bag. “I didn’t agree to knifeplay,” he says, holding up her Swiss Army knife and flicking out one of the tools. He squints at it. “Or, uh, tiny scissor-play.”

“It’s not for you,” says Clara, snatching it out of his hand and dropping it safely in the bag once again. She crawls over to him, murmuring, “On your back,” and presses her lips against his mouth. He falls to the mattress, obediently shifting himself to splay himself out, nice and open.

“The knife,” the Doctor says, making a happy noise as Clara fiddles with his trousers. They’re soft, with an elastic band, and she tugs them down his thighs, taking hold of his already half-hard cock. He sighs. 

Clara murmurs some inane nonsense, something along the lines of “You’d like me in you, wouldn’t you,” and various sweet nothings, as she strokes him absentmindedly. With her other hand, she sorts through the bag, finds the bottle of lubricant she brought. She lets go of him to slick up her fingers, letting him squirm with anticipation.

She can focus all her attention on him for the moment. As she probes his hole and listens to his stifled sounds, she wonders how many times Missy’s done this to him on this very mattress, made him call her all sorts of names. Her own name. Mistress. Master. The idea sends a thrill between Clara’s legs, and she tells herself it’s not because she wants to watch, not because she wants Missy to do the same to her, although she stores those thoughts away for the next time her fingers go wandering in the dark.

The Doctor twitches as she curls a couple fingers inside him, and manages to sound very cross indeed as he demands, “Are you going to use the strap or not?”

“Yes. I am,” says Clara. “You saw that, hm?”

“And the knife.”

“Not for you,” she reminds him. She draws herself out of him, wiping her fingers on the mattress, and stands up to wiggle out of her trousers, then her pants. Clara finds the harness in the bag, adjusts it with the dildo around her waist. The Doctor watches attentively as she slathers on the lube. “This is okay?” she asks. 

He nods, squirming, his fingers scratching at the mattress at his sides. “Would you—could you—” he says. His skinny hips desperately jut forward into thin air.

Clara laughs, and her strap rests on the mattress between them, the tip resting just in front of his inner thigh. “You’ve been good,” she says, even though they haven’t actually done anything. She pets him with a fingertip, stroking the length of him, watching his face scrunch as he tries to keep himself from making any sound. She doesn’t give him much; that’s what the dildo is for, and he’s louder when he’s mostly untouched. And she’s very, very much going for loud.

She looks at the Vault again, that same thrill running through her, and she stops teasing the Doctor’s cock. “Three,” she says, lining herself up between his legs. “Two.” 

It’s almost certainly her imagination, but something new seems to settle in her head, a telepathic signal that brushes against the lobes of her brain with a reddish, rusty tang. She can almost detect the scent of lilac, the scent of blood. Missy.

Clara thrusts into the Doctor hard, trying to get rid of that idea. She says, “Three,” with a wink, her plastic cock buried inside him, and he cries out. “Comfortable?”

“You didn’t warn me,” he grumbles, but he’s flushed, his eyes dark.

“Mmm. Should I stop?”

“No,” says the Doctor, as Clara slowly pulls out of him. “God, no.” She keeps her stare fixated on him. Finally, she’s not the one falling apart. She’s not the one who’s unsure. “Please, Clara.” 

She can feel herself practically purr her response. “You want my cock.” This always happens, when he threatens to fall to pieces, this other version of her. The version with nothing to lose. 

The Doctor’s eyes flutter closed, his lips press tight. “Yes. I want you.” 

She looks, despite herself, at the Vault. She hopes Missy’s watching, through his eyes or Clara’s own, although she’s not sure why. Something about how intensely focused the Doctor is on her right now, even though the object of his centuries of pining and rivalry is so close. But it’s not about jealousy. She’s not jealous.

She’s not jealous of Missy, anyway. 

Clara adjusts herself so she’s propped atop the Doctor, hands on either side of his chest. He gives her a stupid, dreamy smile, and she rolls her eyes, drives into him more forcefully. He gasps a little with every thrust. That whisper of lilac and gore curls in her consciousness again, encouraging her to change the angle of her hips, the rhythm of her movement. The Doctor starts to moan, as loudly and wantonly as she’d hoped for, broken syllables of her name dropping from her lips.

She wants to enjoy herself. She tries to enjoy herself, press her clit against her end of the strap, lose herself in the Doctor’s pleasure, but all she can think of is slender fingers, lilac and blood, lipstick and fangs. This is Missy in Clara’s head, overwhelming her. This isn’t Clara. This can’t just be Clara.

One of the Doctor’s hands grasps at her thigh, his fingernails scraping the skin. “Oh. Oh, Clara. Oh, oh…” 

She can’t enjoy herself. As if removed from her own body entirely, she realizes faintly that she doesn’t care about her own pleasure. Not this time. She watches the Doctor come, shouting his ecstasy for the Vault to hear, but as she removes the toy from him and takes off the harness, sets it aside, she thinks this has all been—lead up. Foreplay, of a sort. 

He reaches out to her weakly. “You didn’t come.” 

“No. Not tonight.” Clara bats his hands away, wipes them both clean and zips up her bag. She shoves the Doctor to nod off on the floor, onto his clothes, and starts to drag the mattress to the Vault. She hesitates for a moment, then knocks on the door. “I’ve got your mattress. I can bring it in, if you like.”

Silence hangs in the basement for a moment, and then: “Is it clean?”

Clara winces. “No.”

“Clean it. Or make his manservant clean it. I’ve just tidied up in here, I don’t need your juices dripping all over the floor.” 

Whatever presence, real or imagined, that has been occupying Clara’s head suddenly withdraws. Without it, her brain seems too small for her skull, rattling lonely and untethered against the bone. “What,” she says, fearing the answer, “Does your perfume smell like?”

“Roses. Jasmine. Lilac, tonight.”

Lilac. Lilac and blood. She touches the Vault door, her breath trapped in her throat, and thinks, I want her.  

“Come here,” says Missy, so quietly Clara can barely hear her. “Come in.”

“I…”

“She’s worth it,” says the Doctor, opening a single eye, and lifting his head. 

Clara glares at him. “Go back to sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am.” 

She turns her attention back to the Vault, to its singular, lonely occupant. A coffin. A box to hold a corpse. Missy was the opposite of a corpse. Missy made corpses. “No,” she says. “I can’t. Not tonight.”

Missy makes a low sound, something that sounds like a purr, like a laugh. “I’ll see you tomorrow, dear.”

“I never said—”

She really laughs now. Cackles. “Sleep well,” she says, like she knows Clara won’t.

Clara doesn’t. Sleep well, that is. The Doctor does, his face nuzzled into her shoulder, an arm slung over her middle. She lets him breathe, hot and warm, against her skin.

Every time Clara calls that taunting, muffled voice into her mind—that persistent scent of lilac—her fingers creep between her thighs, rub at her clit. She can’t seem to satisfy herself, even as she shakes with a silent orgasm, pleasure pulsing through her. She suspects she won’t be able to.

I’ll see you tomorrow, dear.

She worries that Missy was right. She hopes that Missy was right, and she hates herself for hoping. 

She tries not to go. She walks around the TARDIS, touches buttons and switches without pressing or pulling them. Things hum and buzz and whistle, the floor vibrating beneath her feet. It’s too loud. It’s not fair, Clara thinks, that the spaceship is so alive when her own body is so silent. 

The Doctor’s dealt with this, she’s sure. The Doctor will know what to do, so she steps out of the TARDIS, finds him at his desk. He’s got Scrabble letters in front of him, sorted into confusing and meaningless piles.

“I, um. Er.” 

The Doctor looks up at her incoherent stammering, placing a Q down on the table. “Morning, Clara.”

“Morning. Hi.” She gives a little wave, sits down across from him. Blows him a kiss. “Missy’s perfume. It doesn’t have any… side effects, does it?”

“Mm. Now that I think of it, occasionally her targets are wildly attracted to her.” 

Clara exhales, her shoulders dropping from her ears. “Oh.” So it’s normal. She’s still got stellar taste, she’s still only attracted to the one alien war criminal. She’ll just take whatever antidote the TARDIS is storing in some hidden room deep in its guts—“You’re smirking. Why are you smirking?”

“Clara,” he says.

“You’re kidding. Oh my God. It’s just perfume.”

“Clara,” he says again. “She is incredible. ” 

“Oh my God.”

“There’s no shame in liking her.”

Her face burns, and she pushes her chair away from the table, standing up. “Yup. Got it. Please shut up.”

“Just—”

“Shut. Up.”

The Doctor’s face reassembles itself from its teasing, gentle affect to something more serious. “Just tell me if she’s too much. Okay? I don’t want you to be overwhelmed. She can be. She can be a lot.”

“Doctor. She can’t be much more than you.”

His expression doesn’t change. “Promise me that you’ll tell me if something goes wrong, Clara.” 

“Okay,” she says, reaching out to pat his hand. “Promise.” 

She was prepared when she fucked the Doctor last night, but she doesn’t do much to prepare herself for Missy. Takes some deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, even though her heart doesn’t beat for the blood to pick up the oxygen and ferry it to her organs anymore. 

The Vault door clicks and beeps and unlocks. 

“Hello?” says Clara. “Missy? Mis…tress?”

A loud groan echoes from the bed behind the piano. “Who’s it,” says Missy. 

“Clara Oswald. The Doctor’s… friend. You invited me.”

Missy sits up, a dark figure in the Vault’s low morning lights. “Come ‘ere,” she says, so Clara does. She can see Missy better now. Her hair is unpinned, bouncing curly and huge around her head. She’s wearing that same Saxon t-shirt, although the neckline seems to have gotten enticingly lower. 

“It’s ten,” says Clara. Has she only just woken up?

“Is it?” Missy pats the bed next to her, an invitation Clara ignores. “Mm. Do you want to come back once I’ve got my corset on?”

“What?”

She pats the bed again, and this time Clara climbs on, sitting atop the blankets and excess of pillows. “You’re here for sex?” 

“No. I mean, maybe. I mean, I didn’t think of it that way, really.” Clara squeezes a pillow to keep more inane excuses from spilling out of her mouth. “Yeah, I’m here for sex.”

Missy stretches, yawns, her fingers curling into fists. The fabric covering her chest moves and crumples and shifts, almost artistically, and Clara’s sure it’s on purpose. Probably she shouldn’t be staring. “And would you like to unlace my corset for that?”

“Why would I—oh.” She can envision the Doctor’s fingers, nimble and gentle, as he unlaces and unclips his way through every garment on Missy’s body, the way she must run her fingers through his hair, her delicate skin slowly revealed from beneath so many layers. “Not really my thing.”

“Not yet.”

“I, um. I’m good. If you’re good, I mean.”

She nibbles on a fingernail. “I’m good. Take that lipstick off, it’s not my colour.”

“My lipstick?” Clara reaches up, still processing Missy’s words, but before she can do anything about it Missy is kissing her, grabbing her shoulders, forcing her onto her back without a lick of restraint. She gasps into her mouth, reaches up to tangle her fingers into her messy morning hair, but Missy bats her away.

“You’re doing a lot here,” says Clara. 

“The Doctor doesn’t do this to you, does he,” asks Missy. “Let you sit back and relax. You need it.”

“I.” Clara grabs at Missy’s collar, to worm her fingers underneath and get a handful of boob, but Missy shakes her head.

“Relax.”

“Fine. Fine.”

“Good girl.” Clara hadn’t thought before this that she was particularly susceptible to beautiful older women calling her good girl, but she is definitively, actively proven wrong. Missy squints at her. “Can I bite?”

Clara nods, and Missy kisses her again, her teeth closing on her bottom lip. She’s gentle, at first, and Clara melts, and the pressure becomes sharper, more painful. 

“Take off your shirt,” says Missy, drawing back to let Clara pull her t-shirt over her head. “And the bra.” Once she’s done, Missy appraises her bare chest, the generous shape of her belly, the light freckles scattered few and far between on her shoulders. 

Clara watches her eyes rake over her skin. “You can touch, you know.”

“Yes… Yes,” Missy says. “Touch. You’d like that?”

“Yeah, I’d like that. Are you… okay?”

She nods, dips her head down to kiss the tip of Clara’s right nipple. Moves her lips across the curve of her breast, the end of her tongue just beginning to brush warm against her skin. “I haven’t done this in a very long time,” she muses. “I missed it.”

“The Doctor must come down here.” More than that: she knows the Doctor comes down here. She knows the arousal in his eyes beforehand, the limp satisfaction in his muscles afterward. Something stirs in her at thought of them kissing like this, pleasuring each other, either disgust or pointed interest. “I thought you…?”

“Don’t talk about him. This isn’t about him.” Missy moves onto her other breast, still tender, still careful. 

“But.”

“He isn’t quite like this, love.”  

“Right.”

Missy’s free hand, the one she isn’t propped up on, skims Clara’s stomach, down to the button on her trousers. Clara squrims, hopefully imperceptibly. “Can these come off?” Missy asks.

Yes, says Clara’s brain, hungry, desperate. Yes, yes, wreck me. God, please, yes. “No,” she says, even though she’s sure Missy, noted telepath, can hear her thoughts as clearly as if they were spoken aloud. “Not yet. Take your shirt off.”

Missy crawls away from her and removes it, sitting on the duvet. She draws her fingertip around the bottom of her own breasts, down her stomach, and snaps the band of the men’s underpants she’s wearing. They look concerningly familiar, but before Clara can follow that train of thought, she reminds herself: This isn’t about him. “These off, too?”

“What?” Clara says, stunned, trying to keep up. She wants to touch Missy’s tits more, she thinks, than she’s ever wanted to touch anything in her life. It’s distracting.  

“Hmm.” Her hand drops away, moves to unbutton, unzip Clara’s trousers. “And this?”

“Keep doing that.”

She lifts Clara’s waist easily with one hand, pulls her trousers down her thighs with the other. Missy tosses the garment aside, once she’s done, and it crumples to the floor. She drops Clara back onto the bed, which is quite possibly softer than hers in the TARDIS. Damn spoiled for a prisoner. 

“Honestly,” says Clara, grinning to the high ceiling as Missy covers the skin from her thigh up to her hip bone in kisses. “I thought you were going to be a lot meaner.” 

“I’m a generous lover, when I want to be,” she says. “Do you want me to be meaner?” 

“I don’t know.” Tell me if she’s too much, the Doctor had said. “I don’t want you to hurt me. Not yet.”

“I won’t hurt you, then.” Her fingertips curl around the band of Clara’s panties, asking permission. Missy asks for permission more than she’d expected.

“Can you… I just…” She can’t put that hunger into words, the one that had encouraged her to the TARDIS console, the one that had driven her down to the Vault. She’d thought it was just a particularly intense crush, a yearning for Missy’s touch, but now she has that, and the hunger is still there. “I want a lot,” she says lamely. It doesn’t sound like she meant it to. 

Missy inches Clara’s underpants down. “I haven’t done this in a few decades,” she warns.

“Do you understand, though.”

“Trust me.”

One of Missy’s fingers brushes against the folds of Clara’s cunt, probing, pushing in slowly. Clara balls the sheets tight and bites down on her bottom lip till it stings. She crooks that finger in a beckoning motion, moving it slow and gentle. “Good?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Another finger, and while Clara’s mind goes fuzzy around the edges she feels something prick her thigh, where Missy’s fingernails have started to dig in. “Is this okay?”

“Yes. Yes. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you if it’s not.” 

Her head dips low, her hair tickling Clara’s inner thighs, and mouths at Clara’s cunt. Licks at it, gentle, cautious. Moves away as if to take a breath, appraising her. Something hangs in the air for a moment, thick and heavy, before Missy returns. She flicks the bottom of her folds with her tongue quickly, over and over again, her nails on Clara’s thigh scratching slightly. 

The small licking motion changes, her deft tongue zig-zagging Clara’s cunt. Clara whimpers at the new sensation, which is gone as quickly as it was introduced—and back to those fast lick lick lick s again. 

“Oh, God, don’t stop, Missy.” The sheet between her fingers is wet and warm with sweat. “The thing you… did before. Can you…” She groans when Missy does it again, the new contact sending shivers down her spine. “Ooh.” 

Missy plays around with Clara’s cunt for a while, her tongue flat and then pointed, quick and then slow. Her fingers, nails resting with a comfortable pressure against her skin, stroke circles on Clara’s leg. She rests her lips against her clit, as if to kiss it. Clara tenses in anticipation.

Missy sucks Clara’s clit into her mouth, and Clara whimpers, sparks of pleasure throbbing between her legs. Her weight moves, suddenly, as if she’s trying to draw away, and without thinking Clara detaches one of her hands from its death grip on Missy’s too-soft sheets to hold her head down at her cunt, grab hold of her dark curls. Missy grunts, sucks at her clit harder, and Clara moans, squirms. 

The presence in her head from last night, flowery, violent, seems to hum, as if in reassurance. As if Missy is telepathically approving of the motion, Clara’s brief flash of dominance. Which she is, probably.   

Missy’s fingers start to move again inside her, curling and stroking the quickly building pressure in her cunt, in rhythm with the sucking and licking and laving of her tongue. She keeps Missy’s head steady and hangs on to her hair for dear life, pressing her cunt against Missy’s mouth, the heat and pulsing pleasure burning her up. 

Clara doesn’t think she’ll be much longer on this plane of existence; someone will have to give the Doctor her regards. Her second death, gravestone reading: Here lies Clara Oswald, time traveller, teacher. Got head that was just too damn good. May she rest in peace. “Mistress. Missy. Oh my God.” 

A finger-curl, a clever swirl of Missy’s tongue around Clara’s clit, and she’s coming so hard it aches, panting and groaning. Her other hand has found its way to Missy, and she weaves it through her luxurious curls as her cunt throbs and her heart pounds. 

“Oh my God,” she says again, because she can’t think of anything else. Missy withdraws her fingers, giving Clara one last tap on the clit, and Clara twitches, shudders, lets go of her hair. “Come up here. Come here.”

Missy cooperates, crawling up beside Clara and lying on her side, wiping at her mouth. “Good enough for you?” she says. “If you’re up for it—”

“Ugh. Give me a second.” Clara presses her eyes shut, the cool air tickling her bare skin as the intense flush of arousal fades. She slides under the blankets. “These are really nice.”

“Mmm.”

“You’d think the Doctor wouldn’t…”

“He spends the night enough to make it worth it,” says Missy, without an ounce of tact. 

Clara opens an eye. “Hey.”

“We’re not fighting over a boy , now, are we?” she tsks. “Aren’t we better than that?”

“Hmph.” Clara closes her eye again, nuzzles her cheek into the pillow. Fought over or not, the Doctor might have been onto something with all the passing out after being thoroughly pleasured. This is what being content feels like, she guesses. It’s been a couple of decades. 

After a moment, something warm presses up against her front. Clara opens both her eyes, now, to see a truly decadent amount of curls, one of which is brushing against her nose and threatening to provoke a sneeze. “Missy?”

“You seem like the kind of person who likes to be cuddled,” says Missy, matter-of-factly; if Clara didn’t know better, she might describe it as an insult. “Am I wrong?”

Clara takes a moment to consider. “‘Spose not,” she concludes, landing somewhere near Can’t hurt, I’m tired, and very much ignoring the more persistent echo of I want to be close to her. She flops an arm over Missy’s waist. 

“Satisfied?”

“I think so.” 

Clara takes a deep breath. Lilac. Blood. Missy’s fruity, bright conditioner. She rests her fingertips against Missy’s breasts, feels the double heartbeat, slow and steady. She could stay like this for a while. She could stay like this… 

“By the way,” says Missy suddenly, snapping Clara out of her half-asleep daze. “I’ve heard very positive things about your skills with a dildo and a harness.” 

Something flickers in her. 

“I’ve got my own down here, you know. Big ones.” 

Of course. 

“I’m loud. So loud.”

Clara thanks the contradictory laws of time and space that allow her consecutive orgasms but not a heartbeat, and tweaks Missy’s nipple. “Fine,” she sighs. “Stay still. Shush a bit.” 

The entirety of St. Luke's, and the rest of world, can probably hear Missy's screeches and moans that follow immediately afterward. Clara thinks she could drown in them.