The Doctor is not the sort of man – if he could be called a man at all – who says I love you.

He is the kind who asks you to hold his hand, the kind who snaps at you when he gets frightened for your safety, the kind who quietly admits that he didn't hate it that much, the day you took him with your class to feed the ducks.

She clings to those memories now, oh god, does she, this woman from Earth. She doesn't want to go while he is like this, in this so un-Doctorish state. She doesn't want to remember him as a storm.

So she thinks of his guitar solos and his bowtie days and his gruff protectiveness and the thousand ways he said he loved her.

And then tells him he doesn't have to now.

Clara Oswald is not the sort of woman you kiss on the lips.

She is the kind you quarrel with across the console, the kind who stops your hand before the unspeakable, the kind who is… just that. Who is kind.

She is the kind who would have been better off left well alone, left to her life and her school and her Danny. Left to grow old, as he had found her once in a dream. He tries to picture her old as she stares him down hopelessly with those eyes.

When he kisses her, it is on the hand that he held throughout the universe. It is the softness against his cheek and the stinging smack across his face. It is the hand that bore her mother's rings on their first adventure.

And even though she is not that sort of woman, he asks her to stay.

The Doctor and Clara Oswald are not those sort of people.

There are no hysterics or clinging, but no brave faces either. Just a cobblestone street on a corner of a world where an old man in a box finally found the woman twice dead.

Staring down the darkness, Clara tries to remember dying before. All those echoes, all those lives. She tries to remember something worthwhile, but no one tells you there's no time for it. The fear – the same fear she once told a little boy was a superpower – fills her up like a poison that won't let her find comfort.

Clara Oswald, two days shy of her twenty-ninth birthday, goes from an is to a was, screaming in pain and believing herself to be very much alone.

The Doctor is the sort of man who refuses to be proud of her for it.