Clara Oswald always had a predisposition to nightmares. She’d have them a lot as a young child, and while they certainly became less frequent as she grew older, they never really disappeared entirely, and traumatic events ( like, for example, the death of her mother ) tended to kick that frequency right back up.
After she began to travel with the Doctor, some scenes from her adventures would play out in her nightmares. She’d see twisted, grotesque corpses, or an entire army of Cybermen spilling out into the universe, or her best friend turning on her with a frightening look in his eyes, claiming to not know who or what she was. She could never remember that last one after waking, but the terror stayed.
She preferred to keep these a secret from the Doctor. There was no need to worry him with her silly human reactions to things. It was a fair enough trade-off for the amazing things he was showing her, anyway.
That changed after Trenzalore. She really didn’t cope with being splintered well at all, and even if she’d had enough presence to realise that she still didn’t want him to know about her nightmares, it was impossible to keep them a secret- and she knew a thing or two about impossible, by now.
As she started to find herself again, her nightmares once again became less and less frequent. They didn’t vanish entirely, but that was fine. She could cope with them, as long as they weren’t every single night.
Her sleep remained mostly restful, right up until the death of Danny Pink. After this, her nightmares became totally out of control. Clara found herself trying to avoid her sleep altogether, which only became easier when she took up traveling with the Doctor again.
She’d push herself entirely too far, going on too many adventures in a single day, so by the time it came to sleeping she’d be too exhausted to dream.
By the time she died, she hadn’t found a healthier solution, however in her frozen state she no longer had the ability to sleep. Some nights, as Me dreamt deeper in the TARDIS, she found herself oddly missing it.
Clara’s brand of immortality post-Hell Bent is a lot more effective than her companion, Me’s. While Me is only functioningly immortal- as in, she can still die, albeit with difficulty- Clara is as close to truly immortal as you can get. ‘Immortal until I die’, as she puts it.
It isn’t possible for Clara to die anywhere aside from Trap Street. Even if her body was to be completely destroyed, she still wouldn’t actually die.
Clara is frozen in time in the moment before her death. That is the moment that her body will keep reverting back to. No matter what happens, she’ll return to that moment. If she was to get physically injured in any way, the wound wouldn’t exactly heal itself- more, it’d be undone. Like wiping chalk from a chalkboard.
Her immortality is more comparable to Captain Jack’s in that way, but there is one key difference. Jack dies and resurrects- Clara is practically dead already, so she doesn’t have that luxury.
Being practically dead, she can’t do things like sleep or get knocked unconscious. If she was to suffer an injury significant enough to ‘kill’ her, she wouldn’t ‘die’. She’d be conscious and awake through it all, though perhaps unable to move until her body finishes the ‘reset’.
As you can probably imagine, this isn’t a pleasant experience, so she’d still prefer to avoid those situations as much as possible.
But, well, she is Clara Oswald. She values people’s lives. If she was in a situation where she had to chose between suffering for a while and someone else’s life, it should be obvious which she’d pick.
It’s Pride month, so I figured I’d make a sexuality headcanon post!
As we all already know, Clara is very, very bisexual. If asked, she wouldn’t really be able to identify one moment that made her realise that she liked girls, though if pressed she might hesitated, and admit that she could identify one person who made her realise it.
That person, of course, was called Nina.
Nina was the daughter of one of her mother’s close friends, and she was around Clara’s age. Whenever their mums would visit each other, Clara and Nina would be left to their own devices to play or talk or just generally exist in each other’s presence.
They didn’t see each other too often, but when they did Clara always left with a bright grin on her face.
Coming up to Valentine’s day in school, when Clara was 14 years old, all of her friends were discussing their crushes, and whether or not they should ask them to be their Valentines. When the conversation turned to Clara, she denied having anyone that she liked that way.
Her friends teased her that ‘of course no one lives up to Clara’s standards’, until one of them wondered if Clara even knew what it was like to have a crush on someone. Clara empathetically denied it, but her friends made the decision to educate her anyway, much to her annoyance.
She didn’t realise immediately that those feelings they’d described were what she had begun to feel around Nina, until the next time they saw each other. Clara suddenly found herself becoming hyperaware of her everything, and she was forced to accept that maybe she did have a crush.
When Valentine’s day finally came around, Clara forced herself to do the right thing and confess her feelings to Nina- and to her absolute surprise the other girl admitted to feeling the same.
For a few months the two saw each other secretly, both nervous about how their parents would react to their relationship, until Clara couldn’t take lying to her parents anymore and decided to let them know.
And, in true Clara fashion, it was absolutely not half-hearted at all.
She told her parents that she was in a relationship and that she wanted to bring her partner to dinner with them. Her parents, both amused and curious, agreed, and that was that.
When Nina turned up, Dave was shocked, but Ellie just smiled and continued as usual. The dinner was a complete success, and after Nina had left, Ellie turned to Clara and asked, “Does she make you happy?”
Clara thought for a moment, then nodded and said, “Yes.”
And that was all Ellie needed to know.
After that, Clara became a lot more open about her sexuality, and it paid off. Her friends were supportive, and while the whole world might not accept it, she didn’t care as long as those who mattered to her did.
Clara’s relationship with Nina didn’t last forever- things happened that no 16 year old really knows how to cope with, and it put a strain on things- but even after they broke up Clara and Nina stayed in contact.
As she grew older, Clara continued to be very, very bisexual, developing crushes on all kind of people- male, female, nonbinary. It wasn’t all the same to Clara, but she found that people’s genders coloured her attraction to people in different, unique ways.
She was also very happy in her romantic relationships with others, such as Nina, Danny Pink and Jane Austen.
In summary, Clara Oswald is, was and always will be a bisexual woman who is wholly comfortable with and happy in her identity, and she’d want you to be able to feel that way about who you are, too.
