#yes7erdays

@yes7erdays

oh he's angry with her .

head bent between TENSE shoulders as palms lie flat against the edge of his beloved TARDIS console , as she swans about the spans of the room , almost gleeful in her recklessness . the doctor cannot bring himself to look at her just yet . mind whirring a thousand miles an hour as he battles as to whether or not he wants to confront her on this . after another milisecond , he DECIDES he has to . he can't keep this up .

it is a terrifying truth that travels with him are dangerous . he does his very best to ensure that it isn't . && every time it is , he spends every second ensuring that he can SAVE them .

it's aged him terribly .

❛ and before all the freak accidents, you were maybe one rainy day away from being called a bad omen, but now —- ❜ she rambles without even addressing that elephant, more concerned with fully securing her skirt-and-tights getup, ( are we matching right now? is this the same thing in a different color? ) and most likely assuming that it had been clara's reason for visiting in so timely a manner, anyway. ❛ they've already been cracking down on security, so if you've got a reason for being here that won't get me reprimanded, i'm happy to leave it to you. ❜

she'd sent out a distress signal, which most would probably think of as being pointless because of her status and situation, but oswin wasn't the one to give up. ever since the doctor had left the asylum, oswin had decided to live. the place hadn't blown up, she'd instead hacked into the mainframe that seemed to hivemind the broken dalek's inside. y'see, maybe that was why they had kept her chained up and away from the others, because they were scared that she would evolve and learn to control them. they had let her live in her comfortable little mind palace this long, letting her hack into the mainframe of the planet and change the coding and alarms to her will, all to keep her feeling like she was in a space of safety. how many messages had she recorded? how many days had she spent before, or had she forgotten only to start from the beginning, living in some kind of mental time loop to protect herself from reality? if she had come to reality before meeting the doctor, she would've lost herself. being alone for so long, making souffles and being clever all on her lonesome as she waits for someone to come rescue her, if she had found out on her own she would've had nothing left.

the daleks were scared of oswin oswald for a reason, and she had been given an unknown amount of time to learn how to hide her presence. how did no one think she could do the same for every other bleeding dalek here as well? oswin oswald had given herself a place not simply to protect herself from reality, but to learn how the daleks worked. their coding, the things that she knew best. no, oswin oswald didn't blow up the asylum, she fried the other daleks. she now lived in her solitary room, surrounded by the chains that had kept her there, and she took the time to figure out a way out of this dalek body. her mind was still active and if she is in the dalek suit, couldn't the doctor find a way to upload her consciousness into a cloud of sorts? maybe there are robot suits out there that she could take over, give herself a second chance.

thankfully, the doctor's visit had sparked the security of the asylum, recording the specific frequency of his ship. his presence even, she couldn't decipher it, all she knew was that it was alien and it was unlike anything she'd seen before. just like that chin on him, he was unique. so, when she knew she had enough information and data to prove to him that he could help her escape and let her live, all she did was reverse the frequency and blared it through the asylum at slow intervals. slow and then getting faster, so that someone would notice and therefore he would come back.

then she waited.

she was almost giddy, going to sleep and waking up each day. each recorded message was now days since the signal and days before the doctor comes to show her the stars. heck, maybe the nose would be there too, and he could finally see her as she truly looked: a clever and sexy genius who had saved the world, all while simultaneously cooking soufflés that were simply too perfect to live.

what oswin didn't expect was for some mousy woman to run through the doors leading into her safe haven.

They'd gotten comfortable, the two of them. In more ways than one. From the way that Balfour moved around the Hare and Hounds, collecting plates and cups and all else that had been discarded so haphazardly about the room, he might have looked like he'd been doing this his whole life. Like he belonged here, almost. He didn't even put on that deer in the headlights look when Clara touched him as he passed her. He stopped, of course, and smiled when she leaned against him, talking on of worker's rights, which he never had any clue about.

He must have said something in response to her. Must have. Balfour didn't have it in him to ignore Clara, and there was much to be said - fondly, if not teasingly - at her temperament, of how she could likely spark a revolution all on her own. But he had no hope of recalling the words that had just left his lips. Not a shred, with Clara's fingers at his chest, cold against his skin and pulling him closer, to where she relaxed back against the door. His own fingers tightened briefly around the edge of the plates in his hand, fighting the urge to let that usual rush of feeling force him to step back or straighten or make any move that might encourage her to let go. His other hand, naturally and without much thought, moved to cover her own; he'd always run hot, and there was no reason not to share his warmth on such a cold winter night.

"Mistletoe?" he asked, then, and glanced up, just briefly, to see what Clara meant. Ah. Of course. It was a wonder that Balfour could even feel the chill at all, from the way the usual blush spread across his cheeks and warmed his face. Returning his gaze to Clara, he managed a slight smile. Flustered and embarrassed and all of those usual Balfour Sutherland things that made him question why he ever said a damn word around her in the first place.

And something else.

In a week, in a week - God fucking help them if they were still here in a week. Balfour could barely stand the thought of being here for another day. No money, no food, no phones, no way home, no... anybody, except for each other. And it wasn't to say that he minded Clara - quite the opposite, in fact, and there were few people he would rather be stranded in time with - but this was...

This was the sort of thing that he had never let himself think about happening. Always a possibility, of course, while he worked at UNIT, but it was the worst case scenario. Living your whole life in the past, no way back. No Doctor to time travel it all better. There was no protocol for this, no UNIT to help him back in this time, nothing he could rely on to make it better and not the life-ending horror it was turning out to be.

No wonder they were both snapping.

There was no pretending that Balfour didn't like Clara. It was clear as day by this point, wasn't it? All the years he'd spent with UNIT - too many, but he was free of that now - and he'd never once bothered to try and befriend any of the Doctor's companions. They were just part of the job, weren't they?

But it had been a strange year without her. The sort of year full of moments, little moments, where he wondered if he'd seen the last of her. If she was okay, alive. Or if the life had caught up with her, in the way it often seemed to do with the Doctor's friends. What a relief, then, to be sat opposite her in a little Edinburgh café now. Like very little had changed. Even if it had.

He wasn't good at this stuff. Feelings. Well, specifically he wasn't good at talking about them. Balfour felt things all the time - was drowning in feeling, actually, though he never knew what to do with it. That didn't make him stupid, of course. Just repressed. But he could see quite clearly what was happening here.

You leave with one Doctor, come back with another. The differences didn't matter much to him. Changing faces, he'd seen loads. But then, he'd never given much of a shit about the guy. But her? His heart was too big to sit here on this bench and pretend that he didn't see her hurting.

A few moments passed. Then a few more. Balfour eventually let himself look at her again, a strange expression upon his face as if he were thinking too hard about something he couldn't quite wrap his head around. As if he were grasping for the perfect thing to say to her. Everything he could say felt like a lie.