The TARDIS was in her kitchen.
Clara came home and there it was, like some unfathomably twee applianceâsomething to keep in all the Mason jars of snacks you might see on Pinterest. She opened it up, hoping the Doctor hadn't been waiting longâit'd been a long day at Coal Hill and she'd taken a long supper grading papers before finally heading home. She hadn't heard the distinctive
vworp-vworp
of the TARDIS materializing as she'd gone up the walk, and her ears had become hypersensitive to that sort of thing. So odds were that it'd been there at least a little while.
Inside, the console room was quite empty. It was hard to tell with the disarray, but there didn't seem to be any signs of a struggle. She doubted that the Doctor could be compelled to leave the TARDIS, but from the way there was some methodâor maybe lack of methodâto the madness, she got the sense he hadn't been dragged away from some adventure or intellectual curiosity partway. Everything was waiting to goâbooks on their first page, levers neatly waiting to be thrown, phone on the hook and the time rotor was cooling off. From all indications, it'd been a safe, stable landing, the Doctor just popping in for a visit and finding her not at home.
"So where is he?" Clara asked the TARDIS, and it gave a slow pump of the time rotor in response, the vast architecture wheezing a bit. Clara had gotten good at reading the room over the yearsâliterallyâand took this to mean the Doctor was inside. Ducking back into her kitchen, Clara poured herself a glass of port and then went back inside, headed into the bowels of the TARDIS.
It'd been a while since she'd explored the vast innards of the old girl. She hadn't lived on the TARDIS for quite some time, instead simply using it as conveyance from wherever the Doctor had picked her up to wherever the Doctor had taken her. All those many rooms and hallways and other such had become something like the glovebox or trunk of a friend's car.
"Doctor?" Clara called in a gentle voice, aware he could be in the midst of some sensitive scientific experiment, or seeing how long he could balance a battle ax on his nose. She sipped from her wineglass. "Doctor?"
From one of the rooms came a noise that sounded much like this: "Hmfhurglplikmacuuu." Instantly, Clara's lips twitched upward in amusement. She
had
once looked for a bathroom and stumbled upon a vast, Victorian-decorated parlor with a four-poster bed dumped right in the middle, by the fireplace, much where a Chess set and a pair of wingchairs would go in a Sherlock Holmes movie. In it, the Doctor was fast asleep, but tossing and turning in response to her stimuli, his covers drawn down to his waist.
He was wearing a set of pajamasâtailored, but slightly too big for his springy frame, the blue and white pinstripes making the long lean lines of his body appear longer and leaner. A nightcap dotted his head, sagging over one eye, its cap falling down at his lips to stir with his breath. He looked adorable.
Clara pictured it: him arriving to pick her up, finding her out, waiting on herâshe could imagine him with his feet up in the console room, playing some music obnoxiously loud to announce himself, or reading a paperback, or admiring how his sonic sunglasses sat on his prominent nose. Then he'd gotten bored, and tired, and decided to take a nap while he waited. With the way he drove himself, Clara couldn't imagine he got much sleep. When it hit himâwhen the adrenaline all sapped awayâhe must've slept like death.
Finishing her wine, Clara went to check his day planner, which looked rather more like a paper fortune teller than anything else. Currently, it showed a string of letters and numerals that she took to be the day on the Doctor's personal timeline. Scrawled below that official-looking number was, in the Doctor's scratchy handwriting, "2,840 years young!"
It was his birthday! Clara picked up the day planner and opened it up, seeing a list of activities arrayed out like some diagram explaining a Christopher Nolan movie. He had all kinds of things planned. Petting the first dog on Earth. Riding Apollo 12 into orbit. Dinner date with the cannibals of New Guinea (this had been Xed out). And instead, all he'd ended up doing was napping on Clara's doorstepâor linoleum, rather.
"Silly old man," she said, making a b-line for the TARDIS's kitchen.
***
The Doctor woke to snatch the nightcap from his face, wondering as usual why he went to sleep with a thing that inevitably acted like a pet spider when he woke up with it on, then just as usual tossing it onto the fireplace's mantel to put it on again the next time he slept, in a week or two. It was a good jolt... better than coffee, which he distrusted.
Something told him he hadn't completed his fifty hour sleep cycle, not even closeâhe'd awoken from something rather startlingly repressed about Donna. In fact, taking in his surroundings, he'd woken up to Clara Oswald sitting on the side of his bed, a soufflĂŠ held proudly aloft.
"Happy birthday Mr. President..." she drawled in a bad American accent.
"I was only President twice," the Doctor demurred. "And 'the President' sounds like the name of a bad Frank Sinatra impersonator."
Clara offered him the soufflĂŠ. "Chocolate," she declared. "Even you can't turn down chocolate."
"Clara, I have been busy all dayârepair work, vortex manipulation,
cleaning
âyou know how many dirty dishes you can pile up in a few hundred years? Let me finish my nap."
"You aren't ready to celebrate your birthday?" Clara displayed her bare leg as if someone might pick her up hitchhiking. "Look! I took off my kitâI'm in my pants."
"All very agreeable," the Doctor said complimentarily. "Certainly a leg that's very functional, but with quite a bit of form as well. I still need my sleep."
"One bite," she insisted, digging a spoon into the soufflĂŠ and offering it to him.
The Doctor made it disappear like a magic trick. "Yes, quite a confection, very much a confection,
I'm tired
."
"I'm in my knickers," Clara reiterated, pulling on the waistband of her panties as if displaying the Calvin Klein logo that ran across them. "That doesn't wake you up?"
The Doctor yawned. "It takes a lot out of a Time Lord, I'm afraid, running from the Daleks and the Cybermen and the paparazzi. When I finally do curl up, I really do need my sleep. And look at this bed, it is
so
comfortable, the pillow is
so
softâ"
"Alright then." Clara set the soufflĂŠ aside. "Move over."