#process thoughts

She has never been more herself and less Clara Oswald than she is in this moment. She has never more clearly understood the how and the why of Clara Oswald. She has never hated herself more or felt more at home in her own skin.

She has never been more blindingly, incandescently angry.

“Well, shit,” she groans. Her voice is hers and yet not hers, utterly familiar despite the maze of memories now coursing through her mind, and under the control of absolutely no one but herself. This has always been a curse of her own making, a death sentence ordered and carried out by herself alone. But here on the other end of her grand master plan, she is filled with anger and disappointment, instead of the triumph she had so long envisioned.

All those years of planning, all those decades of hiding, wasted, and for what? The life of one solitary human? One inconsequential blip of a boy and his overly adorable offspring?

It was the Doctor with Rigsy’s baby that did her in, really. Damn him. The moment is burned into her mind in a way she knows will stay with her for lifetimes. His or hers or the universe’s, it’s all up for debate just now.

She pushes herself up to sitting, takes a moment to readjust to gravity. She half expected to find herself still on the cobblestones of the Trap Street, but she’s in a quiet back room, laid out on a bed. Of course they hadn’t left her where she fell. The Doctor wouldn’t have allowed it. Not for Clara, not for his Impossible Girl.

She wishes now that she had let him say it, let him confess the words that so desperately needed to be spoken aloud. That’s how native she’d gone, how thoroughly she had believed her own lie, that with moments left until her death all she could think about was sparing his feelings, reminding him to be a Doctor. What an inconvenient time to have finally perfected the art of disguise.

The Doctor is no longer here, he had snarled at Ashildr, Mayor Me, whatever the hell she wanted to call herself. You are stuck with me! And I will end you, and everything you love.

That was him, the love of her life, finally showing his true face for the first time in centuries. And she had to go and beg him to stop. Of all the idiotic things to do.

Every one of her muscles burn in a way that she knows from long experience means this is only a temporary reprieve before her body goes all explodey, just the reset before things get real. She needs to get out of here, she needs to get back to the TARDIS.

She needs to find the Doctor.

How long has it been? This process shouldn’t have taken more than mere minutes, but she can feel the shift in local relativity that can only mean one thing. She’d told Ashildr to remove that stupid transmat bracelet from the Doctor, but then she’d up and died before she was able to enforce that demand. There are voices coming from the next room, but she knows, she knows he’s gone, out of her reach just when she really needs him, just when she finally truly understands, in a way she never once before in her very long life understood, and she is, she is—

She is enraged is what she is. At him, at herself, but most of all at the meddling little bitch who lured them here and ruined everything. This was not the way it was supposed to happen.

Clara Oswald was supposed to die in the Doctor’s arms, someplace far more private. Dramatic, overwrought, and ultimately unavoidable. The perfect climax they’d been building to all these years, the final tragedy after so many narrow escapes. A poignant, heartbreaking end to everything that might have been between them, rendered in blood and tears and the Doctor clutching her broken body. Without an audience.

The rest of it had held startlingly close to script, she is forced to grudgingly admit. He had gone through all the stages of grief right in front of her, threatened to summon armies in her name, to rain down destruction for all time in exchange for her life. He had nearly said the words they had both so carefully danced around for so long, and would have done if her overdeveloped sense of self-sacrifice hadn’t gotten in the way. He was sure as hell thinking them, doing his best to press them into her temporarily-deafened skin in those last moments.

But the key turning point of The Plan— he was supposed to be there when she woke up, he was supposed to witness the miracle of her restoration to life with his own eyes. He was supposed to hold both of those truths in his hands and realise he couldn’t have one without the other. It had come so close to being perfect.

Damn it all to hell.

She pushes her body into motion, every cell screaming out for release. It is irrelevant, unnecessary in this moment: the pain isn’t overwhelming, she can put it off awhile yet. At least long enough to find out where Ashildr’s stupid teleport bracelet sent the Doctor, and maybe wring from her the information of just who set this all up, who was pulling her strings.

It’s only a few steps from the bed to the door, but she refuses to open it until she can make an entrance with some level of dignity. She is Ashildr’s worst nightmare made flesh, and she should sure as hell act like it.

Breath in, breath out. Her ribs ache. Goddamned raven. Stupid bloody quantum shade of all bloody things.

She pulls herself up to her full height. Recites her titles in her head. Reminds herself exactly what all this was for. Lifetimes of work, millennia of longing. A dance of soulmates, played out across all of time and space. One pathetic pseudo-immortal viking isn’t going to stand in her way.

She strides through the doorway like the vengeful goddess of death she is, and revels in the way all conversation comes to an abrupt halt.

“C-Clara??” Rigsy stutters, wide-eyed in her peripheral vision.

She doesn’t bother to correct him. The less he knows, the better. “Run on home now, Rigsy,” she tells him, her gaze fixed on Ashildr with a ferocity that could ignite concrete. The viking girl has gone very pale, and takes a step away from her out of instinct.

“You’re alive! How? How are you alive??” the boy demands.

“Go home,” she tells him again, sparing him a glance. “Go home to your baby and forget this ever happened. Do not look for me. Do not contact me. Do not tell anyone what happened here. Go, now, before I change my mind.”

She doesn’t have to tell him a third time. The newly reunited Janus mother and daughter follow him out the door, leaving her alone with Ashildr and her own mounting rage.

“I don’t understand,” Ashildr says, retreating another step. “You were dead! You should be dead!”

“Death is for other people,” she says, pacing deliberately closer. “Do I strike you as someone who would let a little thing like dying slow me down? Or keep me from the Doctor?” Her voice is clear and steady, anger held in check like a coiled spring.

“But the raven—”

“Where is he?” she cuts her off, in no mood to listen to the babblings of such a pathetic excuse for a lifeform. “Where’s the Doctor?”

“I— I don’t know,” Ashildr says, eyes wide with fear.

“I’ve had a very bad day,” she tells her, angling her approach to block Ashildr’s path to the door. “And I do not have the time to drag the truth out of you in the sorts of painful ways I would prefer. Where. Is. The Doctor?” she demands, punctuating each word with another step closer.

“I don’t know!” the girl insists, backing up against a wall. “They didn’t tell me where they were taking him! All I was supposed to do was put the teleport cuff on him and make sure he couldn’t get to his TARDIS! They didn’t tell me anything else!”

“‘They’ who?” she demands, her patience fraying.

Ashildr shakes her head frantically. “I can’t, they’ll kill me, they’ll—”

Her hand shoots out and she grips the girl around the neck, hard enough to let her know she means business, but not enough to crush her fragile windpipe and make her useless. “I will kill you, don’t for a moment think I won’t. Tell me who took him. Do it now.”

“But all those things you said to the Doctor—”

“None of that was meant for you,” she tells her coldly. “You should not have had any part in my death, and whatever happens to you now, it’s your own bloody fault. Don’t make me ask you again,” she says, tightening her grip fractionally. “Who took the Doctor?”

“The Time Lords!” Ashildr gasps out, hands scrabbling against her grip.

“What?” she spits, her rage climbing to new heights.

“They threatened the Street! I had no choice! No one was supposed to get hurt!”

“Which bloody Time Lords?” she snarls, only barely managing to keep from wringing the life from the viking girl. Ashildr will heal from most things, but she can think of a few ways to make sure she stays dead.

Though, if the girl is telling the truth, her murderous intentions are better directed elsewhere.

“Rassilon, and others with him, I don’t know!” Ashildr cries. “The confession dial, they wanted the Doctor’s confession dial, too. I swear I don’t know anything else!”

She drops her hard against the stone floor, her mind racing as the girl sits at her feet, wheezing and rubbing at her neck. Rassilon and a transmat bracelet and the Doctor’s confession dial. Her bad day has just gotten significantly worse.

“Where is it?” she demands, once she can form a sentence that is anything more than howling obscenities. “Where is his confession dial?”

Ashildr gestures vaguely towards the mantelpiece but says, “They took it already. I was told to leave it there for them, and now it’s gone, they must have—”

“If you are lying to me,” she says, staring down at her and forcing herself to be slow and calm, “I will use that Mire chip in your skull to make your death take a very, very long time. And then I will bring UNIT in here to make sure all your little pets get the same treatment. Do you understand me?”

The girl nods, wide-eyed. “What happened to you?” she asks, a millennia of being all but invulnerable making her reckless. “The raven should have killed you, not turned you into this.”

“The raven killed Clara Oswald,” she replies, her voice detached. “I woke up as myself.”

“Then who are you?” Ashildr presses.

She pauses before answering, both a well-honed inclination towards theatrical gravitas and a moment to consider. Names are tricky things, they can define a person as much as their actions, set a tone and an entire trajectory. There are dozens of names bouncing around her head just now, old and new, real and false. But in the end, there was only ever one name that truly fit.

“You can call me the Master,” she tells the girl. “And for your own sake, you should hope we never meet again.”

--

Of course, she thinks, as she makes her way to where they’d left the TARDIS as quickly as her deteriorating body will allow, she only wishes it was that simple. That clean of a break. Clara Oswald did die in that cobblestone alley — the cover persona, the human façade. And yet the Master knows herself well enough to realise that she is still Clara. She lived that life, she felt those emotions, and never once questioned her own identity. She willingly threw herself into the Doctor’s timestream to save him. She demanded he find a way to out manoeuvre death, if he loved her in any way. She told him that everything he was about to say, she already knew, and she meant it.

She can never go back to being just Clara Oswald, but she will never again not be Clara Oswald, either.

The friend inside the enemy, the enemy inside the friend, she said to the Doctor, back on one of her more self-destructive days, when she was still wearing her last face. She tried to get her future self killed that day, did her utmost to cause the death of her next face without actually assassinating Clara Oswald herself. It was all in pursuit of The Plan, of course, and she remembers wondering at the time if she told the Doctor too much, been too obvious, if he might finally look at the face of the woman masquerading as human and see her real self in there. But he had been simply too relieved to have his Clara back.

Oh what a death that would have been. Pity it didn’t work out.

The TARDIS is locked up tight when she finally reaches it, and she drags her key on its chain out from under her jumper, grateful to have the option. She has a vortex manipulator stashed away just in case, contingencies laid in place long before she became Clara Oswald, but she doesn’t have the time or the patience or the physical resilience to put up with cheap and nasty time travel just now. The TARDIS’s Cloister Bell starts tolling before she’s even got the door open, and she rolls her eyes as she fumbles her way inside. The regeneration process is starting in earnest now, she can’t put it off much longer, and it’s making her clumsy.

“It’s just me, you old cow,” she tells the TARDIS, pushing the door shut behind her.

The rotors make a worried sound overhead, but at least the Cloister Bell cuts out.

“You’ve known it was me for ages, haven’t you?” she asks absently as she goes to the console. She needs a quiet place to do this, somewhere she’ll be able to focus on getting the details right. Earth in this timezone would be easiest. Privacy, but an outdoor space. The Doctor always seems to want to do this inside the TARDIS, for reasons she’s never understood and certainly won’t be emulating. The only thing that could make this wretched day worse is if the TARDIS booted her out or crashed mid-regeneration.

This first, and then she can focus on saving the Doctor. Put your own oxygen mask on first, like the human’s aeroplane safety instructions always say. The Doctor needs her, but she won’t be any good to either of them if she goes off half-cocked with her brain still on fire.

The TARDIS makes another concerned noise, telepathic awareness reaching out, but she bats it away.

“Shush, mummy’s working,” she says, focused on the navigation system. There’s a field she knows, a meadow high up in the mountains, far enough from everything that she’s unlikely to run into any humans...

A holograph that looks like her flickers to life a few feet away. The last time the TARDIS did this, the Doctor was stuck in a pocket universe trying to save a lost time traveller. The TARDIS must have known then what she herself would never have believed, must have recognised her true self hiding in the shell of Clara Oswald. No wonder the old girl had shown such a marked dislike for her.

She barely spares her holographic doppleganger a glance. “We do not have time for this,” she says crisply. “I have places to be, and you are going to take me there.”

“You are a danger to the Doctor,” the holograph says in her own voice, staring her down with lifeless eyes.

With an exasperated sigh, she turns towards the projection. “You do realise what we’re up against, don’t you? What Rassilon is doing to the Doctor, even as we stand here arguing?”

Overhead, the rotors make a distressed noise. Of course the TARDIS knows what’s happened to her madman, what the Time Lords must be doing to him. She bites her lip against asking for gruesome details that will only distract her when she most needs to be focused.

“I cannot permit harm to come to the Doctor,” the holograph says.

“Good, we’re on the same page: I’m not wild about the idea, either.”

“I cannot permit you to harm the Doctor.”

“How exactly am I a danger to the Doctor?” she demands.

The holograph stutters, then flashes rapidly through an array of her previous faces, Missy and Saxon and Yana and back and back through their shared past.

“Oh, don’t go digging up ancient history,” she tells the TARDIS sourly. “How am I, this me, a danger to the Doctor?”

The hologram settles on Missy, sneering out, “You would go to hell if she asked. And she would!”

“Except I’m not the one asking! I’m not the one who’s done this to him, and you bloody well know it. It’s them. The Time Lords. It’s Rassilon, because of-bloody-course it’s Rassilon.”

The projection shifts back to her current face. “And you want to kill Rassilon?” it asks.

Of course I want to kill Rassilon is on the tip of her tongue, but she pauses and forces herself to think through the haze of the beginning of the regeneration process. She has wanted to kill Rassilon for aeons now, but right this moment that’s not the point. “I want to save the Doctor,” she says instead, knowing it’s the truth. “Everything else is secondary.”

With a flicker, the hologram disappears. The overhead lights dim, and she can feel the TARDIS considering, pacing out possible futures branching out from this moment.

“Look, are you going to help me or not?” she demands impatiently. “I have every intention of saving him, just as soon as I’ve got this regeneration situation under control. You are welcome to come along, but if you prefer to leave the saving up to me, I’ll be happy to tell the Doctor that his beloved TARDIS abandoned him when it mattered the most.”

The TARDIS doesn’t respond, and for a long moment the console room is dark and silent, eerily empty in the absence of the one person she can’t bear to lose.

She braces her hands against the console and closes her eyes, dropping her chin to her chest. “Please,” she whispers, not above begging in this suspended, unwitnessed moment. “Please, you have to help me save him.” She gathers up all her worry and fear, all her anger at what Rassilon has stolen from her, all her concern and longing for the Doctor, and pushes it to the surface of her skin, willing the TARDIS to hear her. To believe her. “Please.”

Slowly, the rotors spin back into life overhead, and she opens her eyes to see the lever beside her hand flip itself into the ignition position, sending them into the Vortex. She remembers pulling that lever herself, the side of her hand pressed snugly against the Doctor’s, and her longing for him doubles. Clutching the edge of the console now, her hand has begun to glow with dim golden light, and she knows she’s out of time.

“That little hidden valley in the mountains, you know the one I mean?” she asks the TARDIS, her gaze fixed on the regeneration energy seeping from between her fingers. “Take me there.”

The TARDIS lands quickly, the doors swinging open before she can raise her numb hand to snap. The world beyond is lit by late afternoon sunlight, outlining the waving grass and wildflowers in gold.

“Wait for me, this shouldn’t take long,” she tells the TARDIS, then staggers out into the field, away from the TARDIS, trailing golden light behind her. There isn’t a moment to spare, but she can’t simply release her stranglehold on the energy coursing through her body. No, she has to be far more careful and strategic than that, if she’s to have any hope of salvaging her future.

Controlling the regenerative process, choosing a face, is merely a question of focus. Even the Doctor had managed it, this last time around. And she isn’t replicating someone else’s face, she’s choosing her own all over again, choosing to regenerate into exactly the same form. It ought to be simple enough.

She designed Clara Oswald back when she put The Plan into action, handcrafted all the little details she knew would get under the Doctor’s skin. Big, emotive brown eyes in a pretty face. A small stature, weak looking, so that the Doctor would feel instinctively protective over her. Quick-witted and funny, able to keep up with his babbling and his harebrained schemes. She’s known him for centuries, since they were children — she knows his type. In the end she hadn’t been able to talk herself into masquerading as a blonde, and she is grateful now to realise that gamble paid off. Brunette always suited her better, anyway.

There’s no stopping the regeneration process now, but if she can replicate Clara Oswald all over again, she just might be able to get The Plan back on track. Once this is done, she’ll go save the Doctor from whatever hell Rassilon is inflicting on him, and he will look at her and see his Clara, back from the dead. He’ll look at her and see the Master and all their long history together. He’ll look at her and see Koschei, his first love. He’ll look at her and see her.

Please, just see me he begged her, when she hadn’t yet been able to see the Doctor hiding behind his new face. That’s all she wanted, in the end. To be seen by him.

She can feel the regeneration energy coursing through her, pulsating in a rising tempo, and focuses her mind on what she wants out of this, what she needs.

Her face, her face absolutely has to remain the same. This face was the first face the Doctor saw when he regenerated, he would spot any tiny difference.

Her hands have to be perfect reproductions of themselves. After all these months, the Doctor had finally gotten comfortable with holding her hand again, and he would know if they changed.

Her voice has to be the voice of Clara Oswald. When she calls to him, he has to hear her, the woman he loves.

She resists the urge to add a few inches to her height. Five-foot-one and crying he once said. He would notice if she changed that. Her past faces had always resented his height, the extra inches he used to tower over her, but she had found the power of a small frame, this regeneration. Making him bring himself down to her level, fold himself smaller to accommodate her.

The hair, the hair needs a slight update, it can’t be what she regenerated into the last time, it has to match her recent haircut. Such a small thing, but she almost missed it.

She holds the idea of Clara Oswald in her mind, all the little details that make up her physical being, until she can feel her body acquiesce to her demand. Every cell will die and every cell will be replaced by an exact replica. Because she wills it to be so. Because she needs it to be so.

But the body is only half of it. The other half, the personality, well— she’s all over the place just now, and she scrambles for some sense of control, as the golden glow of regeneration spirals outwards from her hands, growing in intensity with each beat of her hearts.

Who is she? She’s never particularly had time for existential questions, but now it matters more than it ever has before. There are dozens of names in her mind, lifetimes of personalities, all muddled together now in this strange twilight between lives. Who is she? Who must she be, to save the Doctor?

She is Clara and Missy and Saxon and Yana.

She is the snake-eyed monstrosity and the one burnt beyond recognition, she is the wearer of disguises and puns and goatees.

She is Koschei, and she has been in love with him since before he took up the mantle of the Doctor.

She is a burning ball of anger and hate and loathing, she is the pounding of the drums, she is all the declarations of love that died on her tongue unspoken.

She is if you love me in any way, she is run you clever boy and remember, she is his duty of care, she is someone he can’t bear to lose.

She is his Impossible Girl, and she will dismantle the universe and rewrite time to get him back.

She is Time Lord and Human, she is Clara and the Master.

She is the Doctor’s best friend, his oldest enemy.

She is the one who loves him,

loves him

  loves him

    loves him.

It is the one truth that has sustained through all her lives, through all her schemes and misdeeds, through every dark day and every ecstatic moment of joy.

She loves him, and it is the most powerful force the universe has ever known.

That is the thought she holds tight in her hearts, as the golden energy rips through her, replacing every cell in her body and changing nothing.

--

With a gasp she comes back to herself, greeted by the smell of wildflowers and the sound of the TARDIS’s Cloister Bell.

The field, and regeneration, and—

She examines her hands, then uses their familiar size and shape to push herself up to a sitting position. The question that had so occupied her final moment before regeneration has found its answer, reverberating in her chest in time to her twin heartbeat.

She is Clara Oswald and she is the Master.

She was born to save the Doctor.