Title: Six Teas Pairing: Clara/12 | Teawald Summary: A brief history of Clara and the Doctor’s relationship and the teas that defined them. Rating: T+-ish Note: FOR THE AMAZINGLY LOVELY cardinalcapaldi! Happy birthday and may your day be filled with tea, Peter Capaldi, and loads of laughter ♥
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There was a warmth in tea that could not be matched by the warmth of a hand.
But on a few occasions, his came pretty close.
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English Breakfast blend – rich, oaky, timeless. Wakes you in the morning. Wakes you from a bad dream. Wakes you from a day that went on for thirty-eight mornings, thirty-eight nights, thirty-eight please don’t gos. Best accompanied on these occasions with nothing but honey. There must be sweetness somewhere.
When he dropped her off before heading to fetch their coffees, she felt the weight of hundreds of years on her bones.
She collapsed down on her sofa, still in those same clothes that she felt should have already turned to dust by now. It seemed a century since she’d been entertaining her family for Christmas. They’d long gone; the Doctor had gotten her back a bit too late. She was glad for it. She couldn’t imagine putting on a cheery façade. She couldn’t imagine pretending that everything was the same.
She was stuck in a tangle of emotions that just didn’t slot well together. Joy, sadness, relief, fear. They left her prostrate with terror and, above all else, a sense of being overwhelmed. She was certain nothing could move her, that she’d never felt this worn, but she wouldn’t allow herself to be like that. She wouldn’t allow herself to mope on her sofa. She was Clara Oswald and her best friend in the entire world was the Doctor—no matter the face—and she would patch herself up and be on her way.
So she did was she always did. She walked barefoot to her kitchen and put the kettle on. She browsed through her cupboard, searching through her mounds of tea, trying to decide what appealed to her most. She spotted the blend of black teas and grabbed the bag. She just needed to wake up.
She leaned back against the counter once she’d made her tea and peered down at the cloudy contents. She let the steam waft over her face, she took the time to deeply inhale the oaky aroma that always made her feel safe. She pressed her lips gently against the rim of her favorite mug and took a short, savory sip. She shut her eyes and she exhaled the breath she’d been holding for hours. She felt her shoulders relax, her spine unknot, her heart settle. She was home and she was okay. And the Doctor was, too.
It brought Clara back to herself. There was no other way to put it. And she had been gone for a very long time.
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Chai tea – spicy, quick, warming. A tea to drink when you don’t want to drink tea at all. When you don’t want to be where you are at all. When life is drab and you feel dull—dull inside, dull outside. When you’re living inside a moment of fragile contentment, bookended by dread and sickening anticipation. A tea for when you’re the one who’s been left behind.
The minutes passed heavily and they left her sore.
Two days passed and she told herself it was fine. He could’ve gotten lost; too much time hadn’t yet passed for her to believe that. Three days. Then four, then five. By the time an entire week had limped by, she was partially certain that he was never coming back. But she always thought that.
She was Clara Oswald, so she refused to let the ruptures show. She turned up to work perfectly on time every day, dressed in clean, pressed clothes, her hair washed and styled, her makeup precise. She taught her lessons with as much enthusiasm and bubbliness as she could muster. She took extra classes for sick colleagues, got drinks with her friends from university and work…she did everything there was to avoid returning to her empty flat.
It was always halfway through the week when she felt herself collapsing. She would take to the teacher’s lounge every Wednesday and sit in the old red armchair she’d claimed as hers. She’d brew a mug of chai tea to add a bit of spice to her devastatingly dull week. The sharp taste always made her head feel lighter, clearer. It felt like a special treat (like buying a new skirt, like traveling the universe). She worried it would be the only special treat she’d have from then on. She was worried her life would remain like this forever. And she loved her everyday life, she did. Enough that she’d never abandon it. But it seemed so flat and lifeless without the Doctor.
When he finally showed up, two weeks later, it was the first time she’d had coffee in ages. She decided she would only drink it with him. Coffee was for the adventures and the running and the adrenaline; tea was for home and recovery.
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Cinnamon tea – comforting, light, sweet. Soothes an upset stomach. Soothes a raging mind. Provides the foundation for a moment of pure thought, a moment of contemplation. A moment of wondering: am I the person I want to be? Am I where I want to be? Soothing for when you realize the answer to both of those questions is no. Soothing when you understand that you’re a liar.
She fell into Danny Pink’s arms.
She liked to make it sound faultless when she thought of it. Like it’d all been a grand accident out of her control, like she hadn’t wanted it to happen. Like she wasn’t lonely.
She couldn’t even admit to herself why she didn’t want the Doctor to know of him. Every time she lied to him (whether full-out or by omission), she felt her heart twist with guilt. But it was not enough to make her fess up. Sometimes, when she was kissing Danny, she thought about the Doctor.
Sometimes, when he was cringing back from a hug, she thought about Danny.
Sometimes, when she was caught in the middle of her lies, she thought about punishment.
The important thing was that they were both on her mind, always, always. Enough to push her to the edge of panic. Enough to make her feel ill. She wanted things to be perfect, and she tried so hard to keep them that way. She always thought, if only she micromanaged enough things in her life, she could keep them tidy. Perfect. Neat. Outside hands were the troublemakers. Outside forces wrecked the tidy rooms in her heart.
That had always been true, until it wasn’t.
Suddenly she was the one wrecking her own home and her own heart.
She got caught up in one of her lies and ended up missing a week of her life, inadvertently standing Danny up for two of their dates. When the TARDIS finally dropped her off, Clara couldn’t even tell the Doctor what it was she was so distraught to have missed. To him, it didn’t make much sense. School was on holiday break. Her flat was fine. Why was she so upset?
“I’m ill,” she lied. It was at least half-true. She leaned back against the wall. “I feel so ill.”
He went into hyperdrive and she had no problem letting him. He helped her to her bed and gruffly took her vitals.
“You seem fine,” he said. He perched on the edge. “What’s hurting?”
“My stomach,” my heart, my heart, “my head.”
He recoiled.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he murmured underneath his breath. He jumped up with a swish of his red lined coat and stormed back onto his TARDIS without another word. Clara felt her heart sink, and she was sure he was going to leave, but he came back out only a moment later with an odd device. It looked almost like a spoon, but it was made of a rough metal and had an electronic screen. He held it in front of her mouth. “Blow onto this.”
Clara complied, startled. She watched his face as he paced, waiting for the device to tell him something. She kept asking what he was testing her for, but all he could do was mumble distractedly about some incurable parasite from the planet they’d just visited. I was sure they were gone at the time we landed, he said. His voice was laced with such poorly-concealed panic that Clara herself began to fret. I was sure.
The device beeped shrilly, and when he looked at it, he stopped. Clara froze. She forgot that she was faking. She was ready to face her doom—when he spun around and rushed over to her bedside, the most relieved expression soaking every feature on his face. He fell down to his knees beside the bed. He was gasping around reprieved exhalations. His hands grasped hers and held it tightly. He bowed his head over it and pressed his lips to her closed fingers, his breath skidding over her knuckles.
“Thank you,” he whispered. He began repeating the phrase almost as intently as Clara screamed I’m sorry! in her head each time she was with Danny. “Thank you, thank you.”
Something had shifted. He did not leave her flat, and even though Clara knew she needed to invite Danny over, she couldn’t ask him to. He slept on her sofa. She lay awake in her bed as guilt ate holes out of her heart, but eventually it got too painful to handle. She went to her kitchen and she searched through her cupboard for a low-caffeine option. She closed her fist around the last cinnamon tea bag there.
She sat in her chair and watched him sleep. The cinnamon tea calmed her racing heart (or maybe it was just the image of his chest rising and falling so peacefully). She set her empty mug on the side table and ended up falling asleep right there. For once, her mind was with no one but him. For once, they were breathing in time. She could still taste sweetness on her tongue as she drifted off.
There must be sweetness somewhere.
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Lapsang souchong tea – fire in a mug. This is not meant to soothe. This is not a tea you drink when you’re lost. This is not a tea you drink when you’re tired. This is a tea you drink when your soul is smoldering, when your heart is crumbling to cinders, when your skin is seared and you can’t stand the look of water. This is what you drink when you don’t want to put out the fire. This is what you drink when you want to burn. When you find yourself sleeping with someone you shouldn’t be. When you find yourself happier with him than you have ever been with your boyfriend. When you wish someone would set you alight and just get it over with. (When you come to terms with the fact that his fingertips on your skin are striking matches).
He was different for a while after the parasite scare.
He stood closer to her in the TARDIS, he held her hand tighter as they ran, he peered at her with unspoken words in the quiet moments. Clara noticed but she refused to change her behavior because of it. She wouldn’t come to rely on it and she wouldn’t expect it, because he was so changeable, and at any moment it might stop.
It took less to push them together than she would have thought. She was weaker than she would have thought. All it took was an alien bar on an alien planet, one too many drinks, one genuine hug, and she completely burst open. She molded her mouth to his and gripped his hair. She exhaled into his mouth and pressed her body fully against his, feeling him opening his arms for her, feeling him pushing his tongue past her lips. Things with Danny were sweet and gentle. It was anything but with the Doctor.
She had imagined plenty of times what making love to a Time Lord might feel like. She never could’ve guessed that it would feel like making love to exploding stars. It was the best sex she’d ever had with a human tripled; it was inexhaustible, passionate, overwhelming. When he touched her, he set her alight, and it hurt and it soothed and it pulled her apart only to string her back together again. His lips singed her skin. His hands charred her hips. His body poured into hers and she felt her blood boil.
It was not romantic. It went beyond that.
When they fell against each other in bed, naked and soaked and nothing but damp ashes, she didn’t have a doubt in her mind that he had just given her everything he had. He had just given her his soul, and he trusted her to keep it. She loved him with enough love to fill the hearts of thirteen men. She loved him with enough love to turn to ashes from his kiss.
This time, when he dropped her off, she paced her flat in a frenzy. He had gone but he’d left the flame inside of her. She didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t want to douse it. She didn’t want to lose it. But she couldn’t carry it and sit across a table from Danny.
In the end, she canceled their date. She sat at home with a mug of lapsang souchong tea. She tasted burning wood, smoke, flame. She realized it tasted like home.
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Red rooibos tea – sweet, full, alive. If your good days were a tea, this would be them. This is the tea of waking up smiling, of windows opened on a warm day, of an older and perfect hand locked in yours. This is the tea you drink when you’ve recovered from a slamming door. This is the tea you drink when you finally answer those questions, and the answer is yes. This is the tea you drink when you’re finally home.
If asked to indicate the most reliable constant in her life, she would not answer any other way:
The Doctor.
It was always him.
She said goodbye to Danny. It tore her open, but it silenced those guilty voices. The holes in her heart mended. She said goodbye to a normal, human life and she said hello to the stars for good. There would be no more goodbyes.
They were aching from an adventure and on their way to get their usual coffee when Clara stopped. She stood in the middle of the street, her heart warm. Her mind sure.
“What are you doing?” The Doctor asked impatiently.
Clara looked up at him with an almost dazed smile.
“I don’t want to get coffee.”
He huffed.
“Well, it would’ve been nice if you could’ve mentioned that before we started walking…” he grumbled.
Clara crossed the short distance between them. She reached forward and she took his hand in hers. She ran her thumb over the back of his hand and beamed, because she understood. Tea was for home and recovery. Tea was for them.
“Let’s get tea instead.” She prompted. She gave his hand a tug and began walking forward. She peered back at him with a cheeky smile. “You’re buying.”
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Earl Grey tea – familiar, safe, perfect. This is the tea you drink with him between adventures. This is the tea you drink while sitting in his armchair beside him. This is the tea you drink in a moment that’s as close to perfection as you will ever get.
This is the tea you drink when you realize you’re happy.
