Clara was exhausted.

Exhausted was the only word she could think to use. She wasn't thinking very well. Everything was slow, and slurry, and she couldn't seem to find the energy to do a thing.

She wanted to cry. She hated it, she hated that that was all she really wanted to do, she hated that that was the only thing she felt she could do, but she was too tired to care. "Hatred," she whispered brokenly, desperately, burying her aching head in her shaking hands, "is too strong an emotion to waste on someone you don't like."

And if there was anyone in this universe she didn't like, Clara knew it was herself. Yet she couldn't bring herself to stop doing the one thing that could...

After everything she'd done, everything she had done, she hadn't stopped. She had ruined the lives of people she had loved, or at least thought she'd loved, she had ended their lives, and yet she still wouldn't stop.

She couldn't stop, she couldn't stop any of it.

Clara just felt so helpless. She had no control over anything any more. She had no control over what she felt, and even, it seemed, what she did. What she was doing to herself, what she had done to everyone else.

She had been told once that love wasn't something you had to deserve. That had made sense to her, at the time. Anyone could love, and be loved. There didn't need to be a reason. There didn't need to be any limits.

But now, Clara knew that was wrong. She had, unwittingly and unwillingly, proven to herself that she had been right all along. She didn't deserve anything, anything at all, least of all love.

If there was one person in this universe that had proven this, it was her.

But maybe she was wrong about something. Maybe there was something she deserved. Her prize was close, and she knew it was only getting closer. She knew that she could help, of course, aid its arrival, ask it, plead with it, beg it to arrive quicker and maybe just fix her, but she was afraid. She was always afraid, even though she'd learnt how to hide it, hide it so very well. And it was coming, now, whether she wanted it there or not.

She tried very hard to feel relieved.