The TARDIS drifted aimlessly, slowly turning in the endless realms of the time vortex. A soft glow of light shone through the tiny windows, and even the noise of her being was subdued. It was almost as though the ancient machine was holding her breath.

Deep within, however, all was not so quiet.

"DON'T – YOU – BLOODY – DARE!"

With each word, Clara Oswald brought both of her fists down on the motionless chest of the supine figure on the great bed, ignoring the bloody wounds in the lean body, not caring if she caused further bleeding from the festering holes in the Doctor's shoulder or more damage to his already shattered ribs. Bones could heal, especially those belonging to a Time Lord.

Right now, all she cared about was his hearts.

"C'mon-c'mon-c'mon … breathe, damn you …"

She tried to frantically remember her CPR training – essential for a teacher – and failed miserably, although in the back of her panicking mind she wondered if it would work on a daft nerk with two hearts and was she actually beating the hell out of the Doctor's chest in the right places.

She let out a furious wail of anger, and redoubled her efforts … again … and again … and again …

But after a while Clara stopped. She was done. Every muscle in her arms and back was on fire and she was dripping with perspiration, and all around her was the hum of the TARDIS, concerned, sympathetic, but oddly not angry. Clara knew when the TARDIS was annoyed, usually with her, but that wasn't the feeling she had right now.

She stared at the comatose body lying on the bed, all skinny, bony and so, so damaged, the bloody wounds stark against the pale skin.

"No, Doctor … please … don't do this … not again …" she sobbed, and waited for the tell-tale golden drift from his mouth and his hands … the sign that he would once more be new and different and not her doctor –

But nothing happened.

She ran a trembling hand through his short curls and was horrified to already feel the chill of death on his skin, his eyes closed and his mobile, brooding features now at rest, serene and calm.

Clara suddenly realised there would be no regeneration this time.

"Oh god … no …"

This was it. The Doctor was dead. After all they had been through since he had suddenly regenerated just a mere twenty-eight days ago, and now he was gone. Forever.

Clara hitched a sob, and ran her fingers through her hair, the tears now streaming down her face. But she wouldn't allow herself to collapse into a weepy, girly, mess … oh no, that would never happen. The Doctor would have been horrified at her puffy eyelids and watery leaking eyes, and would turn into a blustering, noisy idiot, so she hiccupped and lifted the Doctor's lean hands with their long, elegant fingers and laid them gently … wait … wait just a bloody minute …

There … just at the pulse point in the scrawny wrist … the faintest disturbance. An almost-not-there double flutter.

Clara frowned. No … it couldn't be …

She pressed a little more, and stood, tense and desperate, but there was nothing. It must have just been a figment – no - it damn well wasn't, because there it was again, surely, and she held her breath, eyes wide and body shaking with tension, and she counted to herself. Nine-thousand … ten-thousand –

Thump-thump.

The stupid, moronic pillock was still alive!

Clara let out a yelp of pure joy.

"He's alive! D'you hear me? He's alive!" She yelled at the TARDIS, who let out a satisfied electronic sigh.

But his body was cold … so cold, and when she lifted his eyelids she saw his eyes were filmy, and she could have sworn there were ice particles forming on the surface. His muscles appeared to be in advanced rigor mortis, and when she placed a tiny hand mirror in front of his mouth, there was nothing. No breath, no rise of his battered chest … not even a whisper. Yet, when she returned to the pulse point in his wrist, there it was … every ten seconds, a very, very faint double flutter.

Clara sat down and stared at the badly damaged Gallifreyan in front of her. What was this? Was he in some kind of suspended animation? A self-healing process? She had no idea.

"Can you help me?" she asked the air around her, "can you explain this to me? I don't know what to do … if I have to help, or … or do something …"

The TARDIS' hum this time was soft with satisfaction, and Clara knew that she would get some answers when she returned to the console room.

So she did what she could to clean up the blood and the mess on the Doctor's freezing body and taped dressings over the devastating wounds in his shoulder. She took off his boots, smiling tearily at the fetching striped socks, and then covered him in a light quilt. Would it upset whatever-it-was he was doing to heal himself? She doubted it.

"Is … is it alright if I leave him, or … or should I stay …"

The TARDIS hummed a little tone of impatience.

Clara raised an eyebrow even as she wiped an unbecoming drip of snot from her nose. The Doctor hated it when she leaked.

"You're going to explain this to me, right?"

This time the TARDIS was silent, waiting.

"Right." Clara did her best to pull herself together. "Right … I need tea. And a biscuit. A chocolate biscuit. Probably three."

She studied the Doctor's still features, his long body now well below freezing, and sighed. There was nothing she could do right now, and she needed information. As she told her class, information was power. It was how life was conducted at all levels. Without information you were dead in the water.

So turning, she silently left the Doctor to his own devices and headed back to the console room.

The flickering images and oral narrative were something Clara had not expected.

Never had she really asked about previous companions, and for the first time she began to understand how long the Doctor had lived … really lived, his everyday existence, his life, his highs and lows, his dreams and ambitions, all seen through the eyes of one of his previous companions.

Susan Forman was supposed to be his grand-daughter. A natural-born Gallifreyan, she had travelled with the Doctor when he had first stolen the dysfunctional TARDIS, and had seen more than anyone the turmoil and endless dichotomy of the Doctor's being.

The TARDIS had apparently hacked into UNIT's Black Archive, and Susan had at some point related all of her memories with the Doctor to the academics there. Clara sat nursing a hot cup of tea and munched on the remains of a packet of chocolate chip cookies the Doctor had apparently stashed secretly – or so he thought – in a cupboard.

Susan, a pretty, dark-haired young woman, told of many things, including, to Clara's profound surprise, her time as a student at Coal Hill School.

But she also spoke of her own 'healing coma', as she called it, and the processes involved. Gallifreyan physiology being what it was, Clara realised that the Doctor, to all intents and purposes, had just shut his body down. She was also horrified that she hadn't helped with her CPR, because, as she had belatedly figured out, she would have had to work on both hearts, and she had actually not done any good to either of them.

She mentally noted that she would get the Doctor to give her a condensed course of basic medical trauma care for errant Gallifreyan idiots. If … no, when … said Gallifreyan idiot surfaced from whatever was going on in his body.

But as for how long she would have to wait … Clara searched the database for further information, sipping her cooling tea, and it appeared the length of time this healing process took could be anything from a few hours to a couple of weeks.

She took a deep breath and let it out gradually, and then finished her fifth biscuit. She looked at the packet. Only three left. Oh well. She'd just have to buy the Doctor another packet. She dug out another one, and thought hard.

"So …" she said to the air, "what do we do now? Wait? Do I have to sit by his bed and soothe his fevered brow, or what?"

She didn't admit either to herself or the TARDIS that she would feel better if she did just that, just to make sure the fool was still alive by checking every five minutes.

The TARDIS was no help either, as she heard a somewhat belated burble which sounded very much like an electronic shrug coupled with a slightly teenage-y beep of '"I dunno. Whatever."

She finished off the biscuits and made a decision.

"I'm going to shower and change into some clean clothes, and then I'm going to eat something more filling than a biscuit. Then …" she took a deep breath, " … I'm going to sit with the Doctor. Please … please … leave him where I can find him?" Clara knew the TARDIS had a habit of moving rooms if she felt like it. "We both know we'll be happier if we can keep an eye on him. Is that okay?"

The TARDIS probably knew Clara was playing to the old time machine's fussiness about her Doctor, but this time she knew Clara was on her side.

Clara smiled gratefully at the soft murmur in the air around her.

"Thank you. We'll look after him, won't we?"

A little bit of a machine-y snort of 'Don't pull the old I'm-a-caring-comprehensive-teacher hooey on me' wafted Clara's way, and she grinned wearily.

"Well … it was worth a try," she added. "I do mean it, though. Thank you."

The TARDIS softly hummed a 'you're welcome … this time," and Clara patted the console affectionately.

"You're not such a bad old cow, really, are you," she said kindly.

The TARDIS filled the room with her version of a chuckle.

Clara soon found out why the concept of time in the TARDIS was meaningless.

She sat beside the Doctor for longer than she could have ever thought possible, given her tendency to fidget and complain. But now she checked his icy hands and peered into his filmy eyes, pulling back the stiffened eyelids and studying his gaunt, frozen features. He reminded her of a corpse she had once seen in a documentary about 19th century sailors buried in the Arctic, the permafrost preserving even the fingerprints on their long-dead hands. The Doctor's hands were eerily similar to the elegant, bony hands of one of the men, beautiful in their emaciated elegance.

But Clara didn't like seeing the Doctor's hands so still. They should be waving about, she thought, pointing and gesticulating and occasionally fluttering around his head which he was prone to do when he was flustered. He really was like a great, big, idiotic stick-insect.

"Twerp!" she whispered, even as she watched over him.

But he didn't wake up. But then he didn't die either, which in Clara's book was a little bit of a win. She checked his wounds at least twice every twenty-four hours or so, the TARDIS reminding her patiently with an odd quoink noise which was daft enough to make Clara smile, and loud enough to wake her as she dozed on the sagging-but-heavenly chaise longue which lay along the entire base of the Doctor's bed.

His wounds were healing though. Clara watched as the red, swollen lines diminished and then disappeared, and the bruises became more colourful and the swelling lessened. Even the bite wounds fought their way from dreadful, deep punctures to scabby, pink-fleshed scars. Clara knew that if the Doctor had been awake, the itch of healing flesh would have driven him barmy.

Thank God he's out of it, she thought, because she would have probably had to kill him herself because he would have been appallingly annoying to live with as he healed.

But he was obviously on the mend at last. Clara allowed herself to leave him to his own devices and relaxed a little.

She read a lot. The TARDIS was being uncharacteristically kind to her and didn't move the library, so she wallowed in literary bliss, hot chocolate and custard creams beside her, spending hours keeping company with Austen and Verne, Pratchett and Crais, and even indulged in suspiciously well-thumbed Mills and Boon romances. She was amused to see a couple of them annotated in the margins with comments in a familiar chicken-scratch scrawl.

She was scrunched up in the Doctor's chair on the mezzanine doing a crossword when she sighed.

"Chinese food," she murmured longingly. "I would kill for chicken kung po."

The sudden screech-and-tilt of a TARDIS on a mission almost shook her out of the chair, although she couldn't stop a yelp as she banged her shin on the small table in front of her. The screeching and shaking stopped as quickly as it began, and Clara was busy rubbing her shin while trying to pick up her pen from the mezzanine floor when there came a knock at the door.

Clara blinked, and then cautiously made her way down the steps. She was just making her way around the console when the knock came again, this time with a slight note of irritation to it.

When she reached the door, she stood for a moment, sensing a presence on the other side.

"Who is it?" She yelled, louder than she really intended.

"Dragon Pearl Takeaway!" came the yell back. "Your order! Hurry up, will you – it's bloody raining out here!"

When Clara opened the door she came face-to-face with a tall, lanky orange being with four spindly arms and four gangly legs astride something that faintly resembled a slug with leathery wings. The being eyed her with one of its six goat-like eyes. The rain was a slow, miserable drizzle and the landscape was equally drab without any kind of dwelling in sight.

"About time!" the creature said with a strong Liverpool accent. "Hang on …" It delved into the pocket of its sodden jacket and pulled out a docket. It squinted and another hand attached a monocle to one eye. "Right, chuck … " it muttered, "… chicken kung po, special fried rice with jumbo prawns, sweet and sour Arcanian Shwarg and a portion of chips." It stared at Clara expectantly.

"Um …" Clara said.

"Look, sweetheart, d'you want it or not? It's paid for so I don't care either flippin' way, alright?" The creature sighed, obviously feeling a little put out.

Clara decided the food smelled utterly delicious, so pulled herself together, took the rather soggy brown bag, and nodded.

"Yes … yes, thank you."

The being sighed.

"Thank you," it muttered sarcastically. "You might try living somewhere a little bit less remote, missus. You were a bugger to find."

And before Clara could say a word the slug-thing stretched its wings and with surprising agility it soared into the air and was off, its rider busy yelling at someone on an antiquated alien form of walkie-talkie.

Shutting the door, Clara sniffed at the bag. She was starving.

The TARDIS hummed, sounding just a little smug.

"Yes, yes," Clara said to the air, "this is exactly what I wanted." She smiled. "Thank you."

There came a TARDIS burble of satisfaction.

The next twenty minutes were absolute bliss, once Clara had waited while the TARDIS hoisted herself back into the drift of the time vortex and settled down. The food was the best Chinese takeaway she had ever eaten, and whatever Arcanian Shwarg was, it tasted fantastic.

She made little noises of happiness, poking about in the boxes with her chopsticks and nibbling small morsels of deliciousness. The sweet and sour sauce was a little different, she had to admit. An interesting shade of turquoise and, Clara thought, with just a hint of a sparkle. But it tasted magnificent, and she had learned long ago not to take food from alien planets at face value.

She was just thinking about putting the leftovers in the refrigerator for later when the TARDIS suddenly let out a squawk of surprise and lurched slightly.

The air was filled with a wail of confusion, a voice unsure and hurting and lost.

"Doctor?" Clara whispered, and then her face was alive with hope. "DOCTOR!"

Slamming the refrigerator door, she stumbled out of the kitchen and back to the console room where she was met by a vision in tartan.

The Doctor staggered into view. He was in his pyjama bottoms and his feet were bare, but he was swathed in a warm tartan dressing gown. He was wild eyed, unbalanced and tufty-haired, but it was obvious he was feeling much, much better.

He spotted Clara and his face broke into a big, goofy grin, which Clara, despite her profound relief, found a little disconcerting.

"There you are!" he crowed, and grasped her shoulders. "My little, short, round Impossible Girl!"

But before Clara could mentally shift from relief to beating the Doctor about the head with a baseball bat, he began to sniff the air with great, snorting breaths, letting go of Clara and using his hands as some sort of guidance system.

"Chips!" he bellowed happily. "I smell CHIPS!"

And rotating slightly he staggered, tripped, and fell over.

To be continued …