Clara's POV:
Emma hands me a watch. It's bronze, with Gallifreyan written across the top. Samantha Tyler. I take it, unsure of what she wants me to do. She nods at my hands. "Go on, Clara. Open it." Her expression is emotionless, but her eyes are alive and full of electricity, almost as if she's whispering to me, I dare you. Open it.
I flick the top, and the watch springs open.
I almost pass out from the sudden wave of memories and images, as if the watch contains someone's life that can be played and viewed like a movie. Well, no, not someone's life. My life. It's everything and nothing all at once, overloading my brain. I sense centuries of information, much much longer than a normal life span.
Then it's over. The watch, just a watch.
I stare at Emma, who is now smiling. "I still don't understand."
"No," she agrees. "Took me nearly twenty years to piece it all together, and by that time I had to erase it all over again."
I look at her like she's a joke. "Twenty years? You're sixteen."
A creak in the Tardis makes me snap my head up, and the Doctor comes running up. "What happened? What'd you do?" he asks Emma.
"What has she got to do with anything?" I ask.
His eyes flicker down. "You looked in that watch, didn't you?"
"Yeah, so?"
"Oh, Clara," he whispers, like he's standing above my grave. A sudden memory comes flooding from the back of my mind. It's one from the watch, and it's him, standing over my grave. He nods to Emma and sighs. "Carry on and explain, make it quick, too."
Emma rolls her eyes. "Right, so basically I'm you. A future version of you. You're part TimeLord. You're the daughter of Rose Tyler and the Doctor, the regeneration before this one. He had this brown striped suit, sometimes it was blue? Okay, well, Rose Tyler used to be a companion, but she got stuck in an alternate universe. A half-Doctor joined her. It's really too hard to explain.
"You, well, we, were about five when the half-Doctor came and started raising us with Rose as his own. Rose got pregnant before she got stuck in the alternate universe, but never told the Doctor about it because she thought she'd never be able to see him again, and didn't want him to worry about us. But then the half-Doctor, let's just call him TenToo, started to get weaker, and he died. He was part human, one part Doctor, one part Donna Noble- long story.
"The human part killed him. Rose, our mum, built a dimension canon to get us back to this universe, but she thought something might go wrong, so she gave me a watch. That watch. It enables Time Lord's to create false identities and become human. She gave it to me, and right before we were launched, she somehow just knew it would go wrong. She activated the watch and made us forget about her.
"We got separated. We arrived different places, but the point is, Rose is somewhere in this universe. You made a bunch of different false identities. At one point you became a Dalek, but there was one constant' you met the Doctor in each life. And you kept dying, but you're part TimeLord, and even though you don't change faces, you can regenerate. Like Jenny. The Doctor's other daughter. She got shot and she died for a while, but she's alive.
"Then, you died again, in Victorian London. It took you a long time, but you finally did regenerate, and you made another identity. That false identity was Clara Oswald. That's you. You not only became a different person, you found a happy couple and gave them false memories as well. They think they raised you from being a baby. They think you're their biological daughter.
"But they're not. You only have one pair of true parents. Anyway, I'm you. I'm the next version of you, Emma, but I came back younger for some reason. I pushed the Doctor towards you so you would meet earlier, and then came back in time and signed on as a companion. Your death to become me never happened because I was able to let the Doctor save you, at least once. You're welcome
"And that's it, basically. I guess this time it might take a lot longer to get your memories back. A full 100 years, I'd say. But now you understand why we're practically identical, I'm just younger in looks. And there's little things, too. Souffles- Rose's favourite thing to make for our birthday. Oswin- the name of our pet cat
"I opened my watch ages ago, got all the memories back. So I go by Emma, the very first version of us. I've been searching this whole time while on the Tardis, a couple days ago I found your watch. And here we are."
Emma finishes her long speech, and although I want to deny it and run as far away as I can, the memories are coming back, and they make sense. All of them match with what she is saying. I place my hand on my chest and I almost have a stroke. Two hearts.
I look, to the Doctor. He looks...angry? "I should've realised," he mutters. "The moment Emma stepped on the Tardis she stopped working properly, but I suppose she got through it because you, Clara, weren't technically Emma yet because you didn't have the watch, and you were human. But now...the Tardis probably landing right now." Then his face turns scared. Frustrated. Angry. "Don't you realise what you've done?" he hisses to Emma.
"What?" she asks, surprised by his reaction.
"Two Clara's can't exist in the same year, much less interact with each other. Plus, you said it yourself, Clara's death to become with you never happened. That means you never happened. And yet here you are," he says.
Emma cracks a weak smile. "I always was the impossible one."
He shakes his head, not amused. "You don't get it. The only way to fix this is to kill you, right after you regenerated from Clara, or somehow, go back in time and make me never meet this version of Clara, make her die the way she should have."
"What if we do neither?" I ask. "I met three Doctors at once, that wasn't a problem."
"Because we weren't altering deaths or anything," he explains, as slowly as he can. "If we don't do either, you'll start to blend together. You'll start to be able to read each other's minds, if I cut your leg off, she'll feel the pain, stuff like that."
"Cool!" Emma says.
He groans. "No, not cool. That's the Tardis' way of repairing the damage, but it can't be repaired any other way. As a result, the younger version of you will die. The first version, to try to fix this."
"That's okay though, right?" I say. "I mean, we'll die, but it's just us that'll die. One person wouldn't make a difference."
"Yes. It makes all the difference," the Doctor says. "You're my Impossible Girl. You've saved me so many times. If you hadn't saved me, the whole world would be gone. Not just the world, but the whole universe." He shakes his head. "No, not even that. Everything would collapse. Everything that ever happened. Everything in existence. Think about the universe you grew up in, Clara. Now imagine an infinity of those, all with different lives and people. Everything, all of that, every planet in every universe would be gone. Life as we know it, for everyone would just disappear."
"Oh."
"So...now what?" Emma asks.
"Well, it's Clara's choice," says the Doctor.
"What?" I ask.
"You choose," he repeats. "Save yourself, or save her. You can't save both. Well, you can, but then you'd kill everything that ever existed. And since the Time Lord's are...out of service, nobody else has a Tardis. We will be the last living things ever, trapped in the Tardis forever until we die of old age as many times as it takes."
**If you'd like to finish this as an entire book, you're more than welcome to, but give me credit for the IDEA.
