The Doctor runs the sonic over the burn marks on Clara's hand slowly; once, twice, three times. By the third time the stinging has stopped, leaving behind only a dull tingly feeling, and when he drops her hand and moves toward the console she examines it to find only a couple of light pinkish marks where once she had a palmful of scorched flesh. She touches it lightly, traces the fading lines with the tip of one finger. No pain.

"Good as new," the Doctor says abruptly, pocketing his screwdriver and punching in coordinates. "Well, not quite new, but it'll get there. Give it a few minutes; the rest of it should clear up." He throws a lever and the TARDIS jerks, sending Clara hard into the console room chair.

"You could maybe warn me before you do that," she complains. "I could get hurt, you know." His face darkens, but he gives no other indication that he's listening to her. As soon as the TARDIS stabilizes, she pushes herself up and rounds the console to him, trying to peer at the screen, but she can't make out the writing displayed on it. "So, where're we off to now?"

"You'll see."

Her eyebrows raise. "Is it a surprise?"

"I suppose you could call it that."

She'll admit it's a surprise when she steps out of the TARDIS doors to see the Maitland house.

"What's this, then?" she asks, looking back over her shoulder at the Doctor, who is standing hesitantly in the doorway.

"Home!" he says brightly, in his energetic way, but there's a clear forced undertone to his voice and he's wringing his hands in the way he does when he's nervous or anxious and she turns to face him.

"Why?"

He shrugs, feigning nonchalance. "Long day: flying the TARDIS, nearly dying, burning your hand… figured you needed a rest, is all. I thought you wanted to go home sometimes."

"Yes, but you usually only take me when I ask…." She trails off, eying him suspiciously.

"Well, if you had asked, it wouldn't be a surprise, would it?" He makes to step back into the TARDIS and shut the door but she grabs a fistful of his vest and drags him out onto the grass with her.

"Talk," she demands, spinning so that her body is in between him and the open TARDIS doors – he'll have to go around her if he wants to get in. (She ignores the fact that he's a head taller and likely weighs more and probably could move her rather easily if he tried and just focuses on glaring him down, arms akimbo.)

"Nothing to talk about." He won't look her in the eyes and she's not buying it.

"Doctor, talk to me. Right now."

"Errands to run. Boring errands. Space-y errands. Slightly toxic errands, in one case. Nothing you'd want to be along for. Not when you need a rest," he says, for the second time, and she realizes he's right – she's exhausted. Like she's been up for days. She'd been tired earlier in the TARDIS, but somehow now she's pretty sure that if she were to climb into bed right this minute, in what looked to be the middle of the afternoon, she'd sleep until the next morning. The Doctor takes advantage of her distraction to grab her by the upper arms in an attempt to move her out of the way, but she fights her sudden fatigue enough to plant her feet and take a firm stance. He seems unwilling to be rough with her, because he doesn't try to force her aside – just stands there almost helplessly, hands on her arms.

"Clara-" he begins.

"Promise me you'll come back?" she blurts, because he's making her nervous. "Wednesday, like always. Promise?"

She stares up at him as he towers over her, brown locks flopping into his face. He doesn't answer, still won't look at her, but his fingers tighten just a little and his jaw clenches in the way it always does when he's trying to work out a problem.

"Promise?" she presses, again, and then suddenly he's pulling her to him, lips crashing hard against hers. It lasts only a second or two. No time for her to react, to even process, before he's pulling back and letting her go, ducking around her as she's temporarily motionless from shock.

"Doctor!" she shouts when she recovers, whirling to face the TARDIS just as the doors slam shut. She rushes forward, pounding at the blue wood as the familiar vworp-vworp of the engine starts up and the TARDIS begins to fade from sight. "Doctor!"

She nearly pitches forward into the grass when the TARDIS fully dematerializes and there's nothing left there for her to pound on. Catching herself at the last second, she backs up, staring at the square of crushed grass where the TARDIS had just been. Then she spins on her heel and stalks back toward the Maitland house.

Well, if that's the way he's going to be, fine. She'll just let him have it when he comes to pick her up next Wednesday.

If he comes.

He doesn't come.

Seven o'clock PM on Wednesday hits and she most definitely has not packed her overnight bag and her window is only open to let some of the cooling night air into her too-warm room and not at all to better listen for the TARDIS engine. Because that would be silly.

By seven-fifteen she's gotten a bit antsy, first bouncing one leg restlessly and swiveling to and fro in her desk chair, then jumping up to pace around her room (twice she tries to resist the urge to look out the window, and twice she fails), and then finally heading downstairs in case he's somehow turned up without her noticing and has been sitting around in the living room teaching Artie bad card tricks (it wouldn't be the first time).

Angie looks up from her laptop as Clara rounds the corner into the kitchen. "Isn't your boyfriend usually here by now?" she asks, raising her eyebrows.

"Running late," Clara lies smoothly, ignoring the way the word "boyfriend" makes her stomach do a funny turn even though it's not really true (but he kissed you, a voice in her head reminds her, and she shoves it away because he may have kissed her but he also left her pounding on the TARDIS doors and it's going to take a lot more than that kiss to keep her from ripping into him when she sees him again). Quickly, her eyes sweep the counters for something to tidy up just so that she has something to do with her hands. She finds an overlooked splash of sauce on the stovetop and goes at it with a rag, continuing to scrub at the spot long after it's gone.

"You okay?" a voice at her elbow asks, and she jumps and whirls to find Artie looking at her, concerned. "You've been cleaning that spot for five minutes."

"Her boyfriend stood her up," Angie calls back over her shoulder.

"He did not stand me up," Clara insists, but it's hard for her to tell if she's trying to convince the kids or herself more. She tosses the rag over by the sink. "Just a bit late, is all."

"If I were you, I'd make him get me something really nice to make up for it. Like flowers or sweets or something."

Clara smiles a small half-smile to herself, remembering waking up unexpectedly in her bed to find a vase of flowers and a plateful of jammy dodgers and the Doctor waiting outside her window. "Maybe I should do just that."

She waits a week, reasoning that maybe he just got his Wednesdays wrong (it's a miracle he ever shows up on time for her, really; they never seem to get where they're going when she's aboard), keeping busy to fend off the thoughts that maybe he's not coming back, that the kiss was a goodbye kiss. (Or, worse, that something horrible has happened – that he's died in the future or the past or on a world she's never heard of, or somehow can't get back to her, and she'll never know.)

When he fails to show up a second time she resigns herself to the reality that he's probably not going to come for her again. And good riddance, she tells herself; not worrying about getting killed on a Russian submarine or an alien planet on a regular basis will be a relief. But then she snaps at Angie for asking why her boyfriend's stood her up again and, okay, maybe she's not really that all right with it yet. Not all right with having time and space and the Doctor at her fingertips and then suddenly having it yanked away without warning. She will be, though, she decides. With time and a good book and lots of tea. She's lost people before. Important people. It always gets better with time.

(And a good cry, it turns out. After everyone goes to bed that second Wednesday she locks the door to her room and buries her face in a pillow and properly sobs. It alleviates some of the tension in her chest she's felt ever since the TARDIS dematerialized beneath her fists. Not much, but it's a start.)

It's when she's tidying her room in a fit of restlessness later that week that she finds it, thrown haphazardly into a desk drawer: the phone number, written in looping handwriting on a scrap of paper. The one she had called the day she met the Doctor.

She sinks onto her bed, holding it gingerly, reading the numbers over and over until they're seared into her memory. He'd said that first day she had called him that he happened to be in the neighborhood on his mobile phone. The TARDIS, of course. He'd pointed to the TARDIS, though she hadn't known it at the time. This was the TARDIS phone number, here in her hands. She moves to grab her mobile from her nightstand but hesitates, hand hovering above it. He left her; is she really going to call him up and beg to be taken back like that boy she'd broken up with in year 10 had done every day for a month?

No, she decides, she's not. But she is going to call him up and give him a piece of her mind, even if she has to leave a message on some sort of intergalactic voicemail, and she ignores her shaking hands and the queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach and punches the numbers on the paper into her phone before she can change her mind.

It rings. Once, twice, three times. Halfway through the fourth ring there's a click as the other end is picked up, and then a tentative, "H-hello?"

She's torn between almost crushing relief that he's alive and white-hot anger at the audacity of just leaving her behind without so much as a goodbye; she channels both. "What the hell is the matter with you?" she shouts, cursing herself for letting her voice crack.

"Clara," he breathes, and her chest tightens. "I… I can explain-"

"No."

There's a stretch of silence that lasts so long she'd be afraid he'd hung up if it wasn't for the fact she can still hear him breathing on the other end. Finally, "I'm sorry?"

"I said, no," she repeats, stronger this time. "Not like this, not with me in my bedroom and you… wherever you are."

"Somewhere in the Jansk Galaxy. I think."

She doesn't have the faintest idea where that is and at the moment she doesn't particularly care. "You think?"

"Haven't paid much attention lately," he admits.

"Yeah, well, you'd better be paying attention now. It's two-fifteen in the afternoon, Saturday, exactly two weeks after you dumped me here." She hears him start to protest ("I didn't-") but keeps talking over him, the words pouring out almost faster than her mouth can keep up. "If you want to make excuses you have exactly twenty minutes to fly your damn ship here and make them to my face and if it takes you even just a second longer then I don't want to hear them, do you understand me?" There's another silence. "Doctor?"

"Yes," he says quickly. "I… yes. Yes."

"Good."

Before he can say anything else, she hangs up.

Eighteen minutes later, she hears the sound of the TARDIS engines, and when she dares to peek out her window she sees the familiar blue box across the street. An almost dizzying sense of happiness hits her at the sight, and she takes a deep breath and pushes it down because she's still mad as hell and he's not getting off just because he parked his stupid box near her house when she told him to.

She waits, but it becomes clear after a few minutes that he's not coming to the door. In fairness, she supposes she hadn't asked him to, and she's worried enough that he'll change his mind and leave again that she decides to suck up some of her pride and just go out there. As she descends the stairs, Angie's voice comes from the other room, "I thought I heard your boyfriend's car."

"Yeah, he's… waiting outside for me," Clara calls back, slipping on the first pair of shoes she finds.

"Remember, don't take him back unless he brought you flowers!" Angie yells after her as she steps out the door. "Or diamonds!" she hears, just before the door latches shut.

Once she's in front of the TARDIS, she hesitates, unsure whether to knock or to just walk in. Finally, she reaches out and gives the door a tentative push; to her surprise, it actually swings open for her. She steps in, closing it behind her and leaning back against it.

The Doctor is on the other side of the console room, sitting on the steps with his hands in his lap, about as far from her as he can get while still being in the same room. He looks up but not quite at her when she walks in, and she ignores the way her heart speeds up almost painfully when she sees him. There's silence, again; she doesn't think there's ever been so much silence between them as there has in the last half-hour. It's normally all banter and jokes and teasing, rapid-fire speech bouncing around the console room, and to have it so eerily quiet with nothing but the faint hum of the ship to break it is unsettling. But she knows that if it's bothering her it's getting to him twice as badly, and so she waits.

He breaks first, as she knew he would. "I made it on time, right? I'm sorry, I would've been here earlier, but… well, you know the TARDIS." He waves a hand helplessly at the console.

"Better than I know you, apparently," she retorts, and he flinches.

"Clara, that's… you don't understand."

"No," she agrees, folding her arms over her chest, "I don't. So explain."

"You could get hurt."

She gapes at him for a moment, dumbfounded, because she'd spent the last two weeks going over every reason for his behavior she could possibly think of and that one hadn't even been on the radar. "I could get hurt," she repeats flatly, once she finds her voice again. "Seriously, that's it? That's your excuse for… for just dumping me back on earth and leaving me to think you'd gotten… I don't know, bored with me, or that something terrible had happened and you'd died-"

"It's not an excuse," he cuts in.

"Is this about my hand?" she asks, pushing away from the door and making her way across the room to him so that she can shove her palm in front of his face. "Because it's fine, see, all the marks faded, just like you said. Hasn't even hurt since you soniced it."

The Doctor grabs her hand, pulling it away from his face as he gets to his feet and moves to stand at the console. "It's not about your hand. Well, it is. But it's not."

"That doesn't actually make sense, you know," she snaps, frustrated. He's doing that thing, where he talks without actually saying anything, and if he thinks he can get away with that today of all days he's got another thing coming.

"Anything could happen to you while you're with me. Anything at all. This time it was just your hand, no big deal. Stings a bit, sure, but I patch it up with the sonic and you're fine."

"But?" she prompts.

"But frankly that's best-case scenario. Things don't always work out that well. People have died, people in my care, and it was my fault-"

"Is this about that friend of yours again? Because I told you already, I'm not her."

"It's about you, Clara," he says, whirling to face her. "I thought I could protect you, I thought you'd be safer with me. But you're not. Not even in the TARDIS. And that's not acceptable."

"Maybe I don't care," she challenges, hands on hips. "I never asked you to protect me. I'm not a china doll."

"Whether or not you care isn't the issue here. The issue is that I want you safe and you being with me is not going to accomplish that."

"So, what, I don't get a say then?"

"As a matter of fact, no, you don't."

"Well, too bad, because I'm going to have one anyway."

"This is my ship, Clara-" he begins, his voice raising as he takes a step toward her, straightening his bowtie in that way he does whenever he's getting intense (if she wasn't so angry, she'd be amused). He's clearly trying to intimidate her, to get her to back down, and she's not having it so she calls his bluff and steps forward instead of back. If they were the same height, they'd be nearly nose to nose, but she's a full head shorter than him so instead she's looking up.

"I just don't understand why you couldn't tell me all this in the first place, why you felt you just had to… distract me and then run off without even saying goodbye!" She's shouting at him by the end, all the myriad of emotions she'd felt over the past week bubbling up and out, fists balling at her sides.

"I knew if I tried to explain it to you you'd just fight me like you always do. Case in point," he says, motioning back and forth between them.

Clara flings her hands in the air. "Of course I'm going to fight you! But if my opinion isn't important, if you were just going to leave anyway, then why would it matter? And why come back?"

He lets out a self-mocking laugh. "Because I am old, and selfish, and the only thing worse than the thought of something happening to you was the thought of never seeing you again." She's meant to be mad, properly mad, but the admission sends a warm thrill of pleasure through her. "I thought I could handle it, if I knew you were safe, but when you called, I couldn't… well. Like I said. Selfish."

Clara takes a deep breath, feeling her anger cool to embers as she lets the air out slowly. "So where does this leave us then, Doctor?"

"I don't know," he admits, raking a hand through his hair.

"Because if you think I'm leaving, you're wrong. You are a brilliant, brilliant man, but sometimes you are the thickest person I've ever met." She braces herself for another shouting match, but the Doctor just sighs and shakes his head and reaches up to cup her face with one hand, fingers brushing against her hair and ear.

"I'm just trying to keep you safe, you know."

"I'm just trying to keep you company," she tells him, leaning into his hand a little. God, but she missed this.

"Why are you so stubborn?"

She just smirks. "It's why you like me." His eyes go wide, just for a second, but before she can wonder about it he's closing the gap between them and she's stopping him, just centimeters away, with a finger to his lips. "If you're about to kiss me again just so you can get me back out that door-"

"Clara Oswald," he interrupts, words muffled slightly by the way her finger is still resting on his mouth, "if I kiss you right now I may never let you out that door again."

She pretends to think it over casually, even though her heart is thudding in her chest, and then withdraws her hand. "Well, that could potentially be a problem, but I think we can discuss that later-"

He cuts her off a second time by pressing his lips to hers, much more gently than he had two weeks ago out in front of the Maitland house. This kiss lasts longer, his other hand coming up to her other cheek, cradling her face. When he finally breaks it, pulling back to look at her and stroking her cheek gently with his thumb, she hesitates only a second before grabbing him by his coat and yanking him back down.

It feels like something of a release for her, a proper outlet for the two weeks of hurt and anger and loss she'd been left alone to deal with. His admission – that he had done it for her, that he had missed her – had gone a long way in soothing some of the wounds, but there's enough residual emotion left to fuel her, especially since the Doctor, for his part, is hardly discouraging. He kisses back hard, in a way she hadn't really suspected him of being capable of, turning it into a kind of battle with both of them fighting to be in charge (isn't that always the way of it? she thinks).

She winds up against the console, a lever pressing into her back, but with the Doctor trailing kisses down her jaw and neck to her collarbone she can't really bring herself to mind the discomfort for the moment. Her hands find the buttons on his vest, and once those are undone, his bowtie and the buttons on his shirt go next. When she slips her palms against his bare skin he stills, breath hitching. Lightly, she runs her nails along his chest and he lets out a groan, the sound muffled by the way his lips are pressed into her neck. Then his mouth is on hers again, the fingers of one hand tangling in her hair, pulling her hard against him with his free arm. Clara uses the momentum to move them away from the TARDIS console, the two of them stumbling a bit in the open space of the console room, neither willing to break contact (something inside of Clara is still almost terrified of letting him out of arm's reach ever again).

The Doctor backs into one of the chairs, the impact causing him to lose his balance and sit down, hard, Clara nearly pitching forward on top of him. She catches herself just before she goes sprawling. He grabs her, tugs her onto the chair with him so she's straddling him, her dress bunching up around her waist, and when she settles in she can feel him through his trousers (which answers at least half her questions about Time Lord biology). Her decision not to wear nylons under her dress today suddenly seems like a smart one. His hands run slowly up and down her bare thighs, the tension that had been coiling in her chest for the past two weeks moving lower the longer he does it. In response, she slides her hands from his neck to his bare chest, palms resting flat on either side to feel the double heartbeat before trailing down, stopping just above the waistband of his trousers. He's looking at her, eyes lidded, hands coming to rest at the top of her thigh where the fabric of her dress is just barely covering her. The fingertips of one hand skim along the inside of her thigh, all the way up to her knickers, and then pressing against her through the material. Clara gasps and arches against him almost involuntarily, and he does it again and again before she reaches down to slip his hand underneath the material. He presses first one finger and then two into where she's warm and wet and she lets out a moan, leaning in to kiss him as she undoes the button on his trousers.

"Clara," he says suddenly, "do you… I mean, is this…."

She hooks her fingers around the waistband of both his trousers and his pants, tugging at them. "Do shut up, Doctor, I'm trying to get your trousers off, here."

He lets out a low laugh, arching up so she can push the offending material down to his knees. And then he's removing his fingers and pulling her knickers aside and she's grabbing him and lowering herself down slowly until he's inside and they're moving together, slowly at first, her forehead pressed to his, arms draped over his shoulders. It's a relief, this closeness, and she squeezes her eyes shut and lets it chase away the last of the hollow feeling from when he'd left.

One of the Doctor's hands comes to rest on the back of her neck; the other finds the bundle of nerves between her legs, thumb pressing against it in time with their movements. It makes her speed up, the warm little coil of tension from earlier winding tighter every time he touches her and moves with her. He speeds up with her, breath coming in gasps as they both become more frantic, the hand on the back of her neck pulling her to him in a rough kiss. His tongue and then his teeth graze her bottom lip and she brings her hands up to grab fistfuls of his hair and he says her name in a way that is half groan and half plea and she feels like every single nerve ending in her body is on fire and then-

She's pretty sure the universe explodes across her vision as her orgasm hits (she wonders if that's some weird side-effect of being in the TARDIS) and she can't stop the strangled half-whimper of "Doctor" that comes from her, doesn't really want to. Her fists tighten in his hair, clenching with every pulse of it, and she feels him finish underneath her right as she comes down, collapsing limply against him, feeling warm and languid and not particularly inclined to move right away. His arms wrap around her waist and she dips her head down, resting against his shoulder, breathing deeply.

"Angie said I shouldn't take you back unless you brought me flowers," she mumbles sleepily into his neck. "Or diamonds."

The Doctor chuckles, reaching up to run a hand through her hair and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "I'll do you one better - I know a little planet that's got fields of diamond flowers. Well, not diamond, exactly, but the composition is very similar, and the way they catch the light…. We can go, if you like."

She yawns, feeling a half-smile tug at her lips. "I'm up for anything."