**warning**: this is crappy because I haven't slept in FOREVER and I didn't edit, I may have to go back and change errors as I spot them, but eh :P I couldn't resist writing something for my Whouffle ;_; and I kept listening to In My Veins by Andrew Belle and it was slkfjlkdsjfsjf

*tears*

Something was wrong. Clara was a clever girl; she could tell. The gleam in his eyes just wasn't quite right, she thought as she crossed the floor. Just a bit too hard, perhaps, or too greedy.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, and his voice was unfocused somehow, as if dodging the entire situation at hand to focus only on one thing. "That one. Now, tell me: does it happen possibly to have a sort of remote triggery thing?" She had to admit, that did sound like him. The usual Doctor, always exercising his gift for paring the most complex of concepts into silly, simple phrasing. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips; she couldn't help it.

"Brilliant," the Doctor continued, "pass it here."

She pulled back. The decision was a quick one: "No."

"Why not?"

Clara eyed him. How stupid did he—or the Cyber-planner, whoever—think she was? "In case you're not you right now. Or even if you are," she added, "just in case." She knew him well enough to know that he could be clumsy, oblivious, sometimes even careless without meaning to. Handing him a detonator didn't seem quite like idea of the year material. And besides, she did sign for it.

"Oh, don't worry," said the Doctor-or-maybe-not. "The Cyber-planner's hibernating between moves right now. Shh." The way he whispered and shushed her like a child didn't seem like him. Clara couldn't be one hundred percent sure, but she felt he normally trusted her enough not to talk down to her. Her confidence in her instincts swelled as she bent to look into his eyes, his dark, wrong eyes.

But oh, they were still his eyes. So full of wisdom and pain and everything. Of infinity. She had to steel herself against them to blurt, "Prove you're you. Tell me something only the Doctor knows."

He swallowed and looked down. Clara studied his face for any trace of inconsistence, a betrayal, a defeat. She smirked at his grasping for something to say. He wouldn't come up with anything of consequence; she had him now.

"Clara… I suppose I'm the only one who knows how I feel about you right now."

What? Clara expected a possible Cyber-planner to draw on the Doctor's experiences and come up with something relevant and true, but vague. This was never accounted for. What did he mean, "how I feel about you right now"? Feel? What can a Cyber-planner know about feelings? Nothing, she surmised from her brief dealings with the Cybermen so far that day. They were robots, right?

Clara's heart raced. She couldn't help it, couldn't stop the fluttering in the surface of her skin, all over at first and then rushing to concentrate in her cheeks. Desperate for an out, she held his gaze. He was steady, didn't look away. Leaned closer, even. Her mouth went dry. He couldn't be serious, could he? This put a hitch in her confidence for sure, her confidence that the Cyber-planner would muck up and reveal itself without having to hash out anything personal. Hopefully the shock wouldn't set too clearly on her face.

"How funny you are," the Doctor-but-maybe-not said, drawing nearer still. She fought back her smile. "So funny."

His eyes were losing their wrongness. Were they? Or was she just not paying attention? She never looked away from him, held fast to her stare, but her guard slipped down all the same. Internally she panicked and grasped for any sense of reality, of the way things were before this moment, but then she wanted him to go on. It frightened her how she longed to hear what else he had to say.

"So pretty," he continued, and she couldn't repress the smile any longer. It beamed, spread across her face, and for a brief moment her elation leaked out. She let him see it, her weakness to flattery, to confessions, to hearing exactly what she wanted to hear. He had her, hook, line, and sinker.

And then…

As quickly as the smile had broken free, it fell and died. She realized two very important details. As much as she wanted to ignore them and throw herself into that moment, the Doctor would always want her to consider, to analyze the situation. She did, and she noted the cracks in the Doctor's story, namely that, one, of passing importance, these qualities of hers that he so claimed to like were admittedly vague. If he were truly the Doctor, he might have supported his opinions with a story, an adventure they'd shared. Every girl wants to hear that she's funny and pretty. Any man can tell a girl that she is funny and pretty.

Secondly, her most important objection, the one that froze her on the spot, was that the Doctor, the real Doctor, her Doctor, would never tell her that he thinks she's pretty. He might exclaim how beautifully human she was, but "You are so pretty, Clara," were words that would never, ever leave his lips. For the briefest of moments she wondered, under the lump in her throat and the ice shards that seemed to have thrust their way through her gambler's heart, if he might actually think those things, even if the Cyber-planner was the one expressing them.

Stop it, Clara. You're only thinking what he wants you to think. It doesn't matter. He'd never say it. It didn't happen.

Taking her own advice was one of the hardest things she'd ever had to do. She looked down, just long enough to slip herself out from under his spell.

But it didn't work, not entirely. The problem was that he had said it. It might have been the Cyber-planner in his brain pushing the words out, but his lips formed them, his voice gave them life, his eyes were calm and constant as he delivered them like little bombs in Christmas parcels to her door. "And the truth is"—there is no truth, there is no truth here—"I'm starting to like you in a way that is more than just—"

He crossed the line from trickery straight into mockery, and her hand connected with his face. The slap resounded in the near-empty room. Did he think he could make a fool out of her so easily? Tears stung at her eyes, though her outwardly self-assured demeanor never wavered. She couldn't just sit there and listen to gilded lies, not any longer. They were like torture. They injected themselves in her veins and made her light and sick and worthless.

How could she ever be good enough for him? He was brilliant, infinite, the most important man in the universe, and she… just a person. Just Clara.

An unruly fantasy sprinted through her thoughts: she saw herself grab him, press her mouth into his, taste the past and the future and all the possibilities she would never know. She was just one girl, and this was too much for just one girl. She ached.

The Doctor was thrilled to regain control of his body, of course. "It's me!" She put on her biggest, brightest smile and nodded, trying to be happy that he was happy. "How did you know that was him?" His voice squeaked a bit with the excitement and the significance of the encounter sank in deeper: you will never be those things to him. And the Doctor, well, he was apparently just pleased she understood.

"Because even if that was true, which it is—obviously—not, I know you well enough to know that you would rather die than say it."

She would rather die than listen to him say it again knowing, knowing that he could never mean it. She looked into his eyes and she swore he loved her, maybe not how she wanted deep down, but there had to be some foundation for her wild, crushed, pointless hopes to have grown on. Somehow she remembered the taste of his mouth. She saw his eyes, placid and sincere, and heard his calculated "So pretty," every time she closed her eyes.

"Finish your stupid game."

She blinked and his hand was around her wrist. It hurt—between his fingers, beneath her skin. Oh, you're in my veins, and I cannot get you out. Fear shone in his face, but no one could be as afraid as her. How could she forget this now?

Please just finish your stupid game.