justasimplecointrick:
“Who are you.” Those three words jump from his teeth like blades. Even if this woman, this human, had already given her name he was going to have none of it. Whatever sat across from him at this table was lying through its teeth and he didn’t take well to liars.
It was like watching something crawling inside of a mouse’s corpse. The way a parasite would manipulate the host into a garish display.
“What do you know.” The perfect rhythm.
- and there's the tall glass of water she's been waiting for, the way his anger turns his dull face into something almost worth watching, a cinema screen painted in suspicion that can't quite find a foothold. She crosses her ankles, uncrosses them, debates the style inherent in leaning fully across the table to better underscore the victory she knows she's draping about herself. There's enough of the cat left, of the virus where it prickles under her skin and presses her tongue to the sharpest turns of her teeth when she's not thinking to stop it, too little to make use of but just enough in the memory of new muscles to tempt her. She doesn't move an inch in his direction.
Her eyes drop to the table between them and back up again, slow and measured, pitch lashes sweeping through the air like the final movement of a knife. Counting. Waiting. Incubating, to steal his metaphor from his own narrative string and make it her own, the yellow of her jumper sliding from childish mustard into shades of wasp, her smile a perfect nursery row of eggs. If he'd call her it she'd laugh and nod along, a girl who died doing what she felt was right who left a space in the universe like an abscess, easier and more disgusting to wear than that awful American.
"Clara Oswald."
Pennies into a well, nothing but metal and damp and rot all the way down with that perfect clear finality, nothing at all. He's not asking for her name. First mistake. Humanity never gave enough time to that idea, never thought about names the way they should - or, no. The tiny slice of those awful apes she'd met never had, hadn't even put themselves on the first step of that thought, couldn't see the road for their own useless ignorance. Clara Oswald. It's as good an answer as any, and better than most.
"I know you're not Time Agency."
It slides over her like a shadow, up her legs and into the dark space her lips parted over, into her eyes until there should be nothing left but pupil blown wide. They shine. The pillars crumble beneath her, the age drains out of her gaze, and only the human is left. Suspicious and tiny in turn, a product demonstration. Her words sound warmer, better, a speech she's rehearsed a thousand times until she can add-lib the rest of the play in perfect cadence`. It takes her like lightening, sweet and terrible, an actor playing out their final piece while the globe burns around her. It's real. It's honest. It makes every word out of her mouth until that moment fade into the background, casts her in hindsight as clinical and bitter. Hideous.
She widens her eyes. Disney in disguise, the only truthful place left in the universe despite her best efforts to deny her own emotional tells, Clara Oswald - human, teacher, friend - underlines her rehaul in personality with thick strokes. A thousand Victorian novelists at their most smitten couldn't explain it, couldn't take her face down from her skull and explain it in words, innocence and pearls and fear and steel all at once and perfectly in collaboration despite their conflicting natures. She is stupid, and small, and determined. Oh, the Doctor would weep to see it.
"- and I know you've been following me! I'm not stupid, I have eyes. Maybe you're the one who should be explaining themselves, hmm? What are you? Government? Freelancer?"
She jabs her finger into the table for punctuation, points straight at him and lets him watch as her face changes again. To borrow a narrative theme from herself - oh, the Doctor would rage to see it. She reinhabits her own cells like acid through muscle, like ink through water. Anger to suspicion to fear, all of it wiped away in one simple smirk like sandcastles when the wave hits. The human in her drowns, vanishes, gone. Her face settles back in, the animation tugged back and handcuffed into something worse - sleeker and uglier, something that shimmers when it moves and only moves to strike, snakescales in the wake of her.
Of course, sat opposite this awful pillar of supposed superiority, this hatchet made skin, it's not hard to add them up and come off as the better of the two. It's the lack of a challenge that keeps her sharp, the endless rote of predictable sneers and sentences and sobs that her life has become through the sheer necessity of action. It's enough to make a girl nostalgic for a different sky, a different time, people worth proving her betterment over. He, by comparison, stinks. Walnut for contrast, the difference between him and everyone else wasting the air in the cafe a simple matter of breeds. Pug to Pomeranian, or - something a little better suited for hunting, perhaps, something a little bit better suited for companionship.
Oh, oh! She should have caught it sooner, should have seen back through the years to his older types and picked up that typical trend, shouldn't have gotten her hopes even an atom of up. She'd been confusing the familiar buzz of a man out of time with the metal-on-metal shriek of a life better off ended at her own hand. He stares at her as if he can hear the shatter rattle of her own head, as if he's spotted the car before it hit him. He's one of the Doctor's little projects - and now she knows, she can see it in every inch of him, every single pathetic second. Of course he is. When aren't they?
"No," she laughs, leaning in to get her drink, a mockery of a bow drawn down with her tipped shoulders. "You're not. You're one of his, aren't you. Well, golly gosh, isn't that a thing to see."
