A/N: Sooooo this bit of fluffiness was partially inspired by Moffat saying (on the subject of the "Do you think I care for you so little?" speech) that the Doctor is "surprised he has to say it."

Oh reaaaaally, Moffat? Have some kissfic, then.

Let's set the stage: moonlight over an open sea, glimmering off the frozen waves. They're far away from civilization. The last set of holiday-makers disappeared hours ago over the faint horizon, leaving only faint barking noises echoing over the cardamom dunes to remember them by. It's finally time to make his move, and he does so, untying the knots around their joined ankles deftly, after attacking the ones around his wrists with his teeth, which are, as she comments, particularly suited for just this action.

"Regeneration is a lottery," he says, like he always does, and she rolls her eyes and says,

"That old chestnut? It's got so many wrinkles, I'd think it was your brother if it suddenly started speaking Scot and running about like a penguin."

Which leads inevitably to more invective and cheap shots. And there is no way to stop Clara, not when she's like this, short of gagging her in some fashion. So while she's still trying to work her own hands out of their knots— that's what she gets for making personal remarks before he's untied her— he leans down— he's on his knees in front of her, and still so much taller— and shuts her up the old-fashioned way.

So, yes, the first time is his fault. He's not going to take all the blame, though; he's intended it to be nothing more than a quick peck, something to shock her into silence, if such a thing is possible. But he's absolutely not going to take responsibility for how she leans up and against him, and gets to her knees to follow him as he draws back. Or for how they sit and stare at each other wordlessly for a moment afterward, before he undoes the rope around her wrists and pulls her to her feet.

"Why?" she says later, when they're back on the TARDIS.

"Why what?" He pushes a lever that doesn't really need to be pushed.

"Don't why-what me, Doctor. I want an explanation." She's a bit shaky. "I demand an explanation."

"Very well," he says, putting his other hand on his hip and facing her with a reasonable facsimile of patient indulgence. "What sort of explanation would you like?"

"The explanatory kind," says Clara.

"Alright." He rubs his hands together slowly, thinking this over. "What was the question again?"

She stomps her foot.

"Now you're just avoiding the subject—"

"I might be, if I could remember what the subject was."

"—which you know perfectly well—"

"I wasn't paying attention," he tells the TARDIS, shrugging. "So sue me."

"—is the matter of why, exactly, you attack-snogged me without warning—"

"It wasn't an attack," he explains, impatiently. "And if it had been, then of course I didn't warn you! You might have—"

She shuts up suddenly, and stares at him, waiting on his next word. Which he is struggling to find, suddenly, and turns away from her again to hide the fact that he's not sure what he wants to say.

"What?" she says. "I might have what?"

"Dodged," he tells the console.

She heaves a sigh, which is a classic trick, for which he refuses to fall. If he looks at her now, he knows, she'll only be all eyes again, and he'll have to do something drastic to keep them from swallowing all matter in the universe. He's had enough drastic action for one day, at least where Clara is concerned.

"Why did you do that now?" Her voice is plaintive.

"Now," he says, "seemed as good a time as any, and better than some. Imagine if I had kissed you last week, when we were covered in the remnants of that fellow's aunt. Some races might find being slathered in green goo to be romantic, but Time Lords lean towards more traditional set-ups. Candle-lit dinners, long walks on the beach, running from giant crab creatures."

"But why now?"

He lifts his head and fixes her with a gimlet stare.

"Now," he says, "as opposed to before? Now, as in, not then? When I looked different? When I was— him?"

He's all set up for an angstfest, but she rolls her eyes.

"No, you berk," she says. "This doesn't have anything to do with you looking older."

"Who said anything about me looking older?" He puts his palms over both hearts. "Honestly, Clara, I don't know what you're harping on about."

"I mean, why not any of the times this last year when you could have— why not when you were jealous over Robin Hood?"

"Now, now, I was not—"

"Why not when you were terrified of the monster under the bed?"

"'Terrified' is a strong word for— "

"Why not when we danced together on the Orient Express?"

"Trying to save you from a mummy."

"Or when we stood together on my balcony and watched the world being saved by disappearing trees? Or when I needed comfort after losing Danny? Or when Santa basically set us up?"

"He did not set us up."

"Oh, please. He did everything except hang mistletoe over the TARDIS doors." She folds her arms, having made her case. And made it well, he has to admit.

"Er," says the Doctor, and he shrugs. He supposes there's a reason— it has something to do with self-control, he suspects— but it isn't one he feels up to the challenge of adequately explaining.

"Don't 'er' me, Doctor. There's got to be some sort of thought process to, hmm, my companion is conveniently tied up, I'll just lean over and have my way with her mouth, shall I?"

"I was trying to shut you up!"

"Oh, don't make excuses!"

"It didn't have anything to do with you being tied up!"

"Fine!" snaps Clara. "Just so's we understand each other!"

"Well, I wouldn't go that far."

"The last thing I want is to find, after all this time, that my best friend has some sort of alien bondage fetish. Surely even you can understand that."

"You've been in chains practically every week for the past six months," says the Doctor, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "If it was that much of a thing, I'd have cracked well before now."

Somehow, this doesn't really help matters.

"Just don't," she says. "Just— don't do it again."

"Fine," says the Doctor, and it isn't that he's speaking tightly, he's just showing her what a Botox injection would do to him.

"Let's just leave it at that," she says, and she nods decisively. "Yes. That's good. A good place to leave it. Just like that."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"If that's the way you want it."

"That's exactly the way I want it," says Clara, with utmost sincerity.

So the next time it happens, it is most definitely her fault.

"You're a fine one to throw stones," says the Doctor, when he's got his breath back. They weren't even running for their lives, this time. Their lives weren't even in danger. Well, maybe just a little bit of danger, because he's taken her to the eighth moon around Stratusus, the one that all the other moons make fun of and shove around. But apart from the occasional earthquake, and the tendency towards excessive volcanic activity, everything's absolutely copacetic.

"I'm sorry," says Clara. She has her hand over her mouth, and she's watching as the Doctor does up his buttons. Just the top three, but it came as a shock to find Clara's cold little fingers worming their way through to rest over his hearts. "I don't know what came over me."

"It's the moonset, I expect," he says, nodding towards the horizon. "Does something to even the most hardened of space travelers. Eighty percent of this galaxy's population were actually conceived here. Well, not right here, out in the open. They have rules about that sort of thing. But there's a bit of a bed and breakfast not far away, run by some very enterprising fellows from the planet proper."

"Doctor," says Clara, interrupting him finally, "is it— could there be something in the air here? Something— catching? Something that makes you feel—" She trails off, and gives a shrug.

"What, like a virus, you mean? Is your throat sore?" He picks up her wrist and takes her pulse, and she just watches him.

"No," she says.

"Stuffy nose?" he questions next. "Itchy ears?"

"No, just—" She looks shifty. And embarrassed.

"Is something else itchy, Clara?"

"Doctor." She shuts her eyes tightly, and breathes through her nose. It's a sign of irritation, he recognizes that, but he isn't sure why. "No. Just—"

"Well, you have to give me something to work with, Clara," he says pragmatically. "Otherwise, I can't help you."

"Never mind."

"I don't want you taking some bizarre disease back to the TARDIS."

"Doctor."

"What?"

"Shut up."

So. He shuts up. It seems best, under the circumstances. Best to shut up, and ignore the fevered snogging, and one hand undoing his shirt buttons again while the other creeps up to tangle in his hair. It isn't important, he decides, isn't relevant to anything that's happening now. Best they both just forget about it.

Which he does, more or less, until it happens again. And he knows— oh, he knows it like it's been written in stone— who's going to take responsibility this time.

"What're you going to blame it on now?" she demands, shoving him away after a moment. "You tripped and your tongue landed in my mouth?"

So he just walks away from her, then. Because there isn't anything to do with Clara when she gets like that, except gag her in some way. And he remembers how that worked out.

Walking away works, to his surprise. She comes back to the TARDIS a few hours later— he hasn't left, he would never just abandon her, no matter how confusing this whole issue of Olympic-level companion snogging has become— and joins up with him without saying a word about it. Which is fine, he thinks. In fact, it's perfectly lovely, by comparison. They go on a few adventures in which they don't even come close to getting killed, but he's willing to make sacrifices for the good of their friendship.

Then they get captured by the Verasians, who have been hunting for a suitable spouse for the youngest member of their royal family. Hunting far and wide, it seems, because there's some sort of prophecy about a stranger from the stars, and how they will bring five hundred years of luck and low taxes and also many, many children.

"Oh, shut up," he snaps at her, because she's giggling as she watches him be dressed in the traditional red robes.

"No," she says, leaning her arms on the bars of her cell. They're under the impression that she's the Doctor's attendant, and have locked her up in case she feels like helping him escape his upcoming nuptials.

"Then don't say a word." He holds up a finger. "Not one word."

"They suit you," she says, her eyes sparkling, and he holds her gaze for a moment, and his throat is dry, and his tongue feels unusually large, maybe this is the virus that Clara was mentioning back on the eighth moon? He should probably do something about it.

They leave him to say his prayers before the ceremony begins, and he does something about it. Can't get through the bars, but they're wide enough. She reaches through and he reaches through, and she's half climbed up him, one knee hooked around the bars and the other through and around his narrow hip, when the Verasians come back in to see how he's getting on.

"Why didn't you tell us you were bonded?" they demand, a bit later, as they set them free in a meadow full of what looks and smells like lavender.

"Oh, no, we're not—" say the Doctor and Clara, speaking over each other, "It isn't like that, and—" A bit more confusion, and the Doctor sends his apologies to his intended wife, who waits with a presumably broken heart, and hefty taxation reforms to deal with.

And it happens more than once, too, which is the really embarrassing bit.

"Really we're just good friends," they always tell the aliens, and the aliens say, "Ha ha ha ha ha ha hahaha," in a manner the Doctor finds to be unnecessarily sarcastic.

One time, he gets sent through something that looks like a carnival mirror in the shape of a tube, and comes out the other side with the face of a twenty-something punk rocker from Glasgow. At least— it's still his face, she thinks— but she's never seen it like this. And his hair is a flaming auburn that has nothing to do with nature, and his eyes are startlingly large without the years pressing in on them, large and light, like instead of windows to his soul, he has skylights. And his face does something to her, something strange, makes her want to laugh at him— even more than usual— and hold his young, young, youthful face in the palms of her hands, and twists some of her insides into something odd and wondrous, like origami, and she thinks, paper hearts make the luckiest cranes.

And he gets put to rights not long afterwards, and she comes to him and holds him in her arms for as long as he will concede to stand still.

They carry on.

They run for their lives.

They don't die.

They do kiss rather a lot, though.

He never, never asks her how long she's going to stay with him. He's done that before; it's just asking for trouble. There's some vengeful force out there, he's always thought, and the vengeful force has a strong sense of poetic justice. He tries very hard to keep what he feels, what he thinks, out of words and only in actions. Till it slips out, once. The problem was that they were having a discussion which he has gone to great lengths to avoid, namely the increasing frequency of mostly-accidental snogging that they're encountering. Why, is what Clara wants to know, without letting on that she wants to know, and she's trying to be subtle and jokey about it. She's trying to make out that it means nothing, which irks him. In the end, he puts it down to a lack of concentration. Whatever the cause, he says it, the words spill out, and he's left standing there awkwardly, while the heartstruth he's accidentally let fall seeps into the grating of the TARDIS floor between them.

Clara stares at him, wide eyed.

"What?"

He shrugs, and looks around him in case there's a more blatant way to state it hovering in the air. "I do. I love you."

"Shut up. You do not." She laughs, but it's the irritated laugh.

Nothing compared to how he feels right now, though. "Clara Oswald," he says, as though preparing for a rant about how global warming affects penguins, "I thought I had made myself perfectly clear multiple times over the course of our acquaintance, but apparently, although you can be reasonably clever when it comes to making quips about my face, on other issues you appear to be insufferably dim."

So she has no choice to believe him. Insufferably dim? He wouldn't break out a phrase like that, not for her, unless he really meant it. So she has to believe him, but what does that mean? What is she supposed to do with this, this thing that he's given her? She wants to poke at the heartstruth gingerly with the toe of her boot.

"I can't say it back. I can't tell you that," she says, her enormous eyes more enormous than ever. "I promised Danny."

He doesn't say the obvious— that Danny is dead. He doesn't, and this breaks her heart more than almost anything.

Almost.

His eyes, his sharp wolfish face, his voice— all are kind, and it's the kind of kindness she finds most difficult to deal with, the kind she can't bring herself to show in return.

"When did I ever ask you to?" he says. "When did I ever ask anything from you, but to be my friend?"

Clara makes the effort, but it's cruel, in the end, the way she lies; the way she doesn't say it with her mouth, but takes his face in her hands and cups him like water, and looks at her reflection in his eyes for a long, long time. She lies to all of them, in the end. She doesn't say it— so she lies to him— but she means it— which is a lie to Danny— and she tells herself you cannot be loyal and true to everyone, you just can't— which is selling herself drastically short. She is the impossible girl, after all.

She bites her lip, looking up at him.

"I've never been very good at it," she says.

"I remember," he tells her, looking down. "You apologized to Danny for it. Don't apologize to me."

"I won't," she promises, and drags her fingers over his mouth. "I won't be sorry for being terrible at things. Nobody's perfect."

"Anyway," says the Doctor, "there's always room to learn."

She has dreams sometimes, and the dreams are like echo chambers, and she can hear his voice. Things he's said and things he's meant to say but never quite managed. Do you think I care for you so little, he says once, while she's asleep, and the words seep through the cracks in the world and bounce around for a little while, and then a little while longer. Till all that comes back to her is the partial, the parity: do you think I care for you? he says. I care for you so.

So she sets her mind to learning.

He's a pretty amazing teacher.

Let's set the stage: months from now, or possibly years. There's some vague threat on the horizon, and it's dressed fantastically. The sombrero it's stolen from the visit to Earth is a particularly nice touch. The best kind of danger is the kind you can laugh at, Clara thinks.

Anyway, they're running.

They run over the shifting sands— Clara barefoot, because she was moonbathing, and the Doctor's Doc Martin's caked in grey sludge— and she stumbles slightly. He reaches back without looking and catches at her hand, and she runs onward, putting on a burst of speed till she shoots past him, still hand in hand, and she's leading him down the strand now, till he has to stop and catch his breath. She stands and looks at him, her eyes alight, while he pants and wheezes with his hands on his knees, and she chuffs out a laugh, and shakes her head, and bends to sketch something swiftly in the sand between them. He looks down, sideways at it, and hasn't time to look back up and fix her with his startled gaze before she decides he's had enough time, and reaches for his hand, and tugs him onward.

"Run," she suggests.

They run.

Behind them, a few moments later, danger follows, treading heavily on the two hearts she's left in the sand, stirring the lines, mucking them about, till like timelines they blend together; till like lovers, they're one.