Eight Days A Week ("Wit" entry)

[templeremus.livejournal.com]

Title: Eight Days A Week
Rating: PG
Genre: Character Study/Humour
Characters/Pairings: The Eleventh Doctor, Clara
Author: templeremus
Word Count: 560
Summary: The Doctor's in a tight spot. Luckily for him, it's Wednesday. Set during the latter half of series 7.

She found him in the third freezer along, looking about as relaxed as anyone can be while hanging upside-down from a meathook.

"I won," he said, by way of greeting. "Biggest baddest mob boss in the whole quadrant, fate of twenty villages riding on a single poker game, and I. Won."

The freezer stank of rotted meat, the tile floor crusted over with blood. Clara put a hand over her mouth, trying not to breathe in any more than was necessary. There was a panicked moment while she ran through the symptoms of shock - wished she'd paid closer attention during biology class, instead of trying to exchange notes with Katie Durham in the row behind. But the blood was too old to be his, and she was pretty confident that 'inappropriate chipperness' tended not to be a sign of anything fatal.

"They were gonna pull out my tongue," the Doctor continued happily. "Sharpening their pliers and everything."

Unless, of course, she succumbed to the urge to throttle him in the next five minutes.

"There's some rhino police upstairs who want to talk to you," she said. "They need witness statements. Apparently, some of the gang are saying that you were in on their whole crime racket."

If his arms hadn't been bound together at the wrist, the Doctor would have folded them. He contented himself with an irritable huff. "Judoon. You know, you didn't have to bring in the cavalry. Me and the boss were rubbing along fine until he got wind of those ships."

Clara indicated the room to him. "So I suppose all this is thanks to your brilliant charm and wit?"

He narrowed his eyes at her, drumming his heels in mid-air. "That was one of those clever rhetorical things, wasn't it," he said at last.

Clara gave the chains knotted around the meathook a sudden, violent tug. His left foot broke away and the rest of him followed in a loose somersault. Not for the first time, she wondered quite how he managed on all the days that weren't her Wednesday. There'd been others before her, of course; she wasn't daft enough to think she was as special as the Doctor occasionally made out. Not once-in-a-thousand-and-something years, only-girl-in-the-whole-universe special, anyway. She'd seen the discarded backpacks in the wardrobe: the ranks of clothes that were made to fit other people. But that room had a kind of airlessness to it, like a house that had been boarded up for years, and the order of the hangers stayed the same between visits.

Perhaps he picked up friends along the way: part-timers like her, drifting through without leaving a trace.

Perhaps there was a rota.

From the floor, a bruised-sounding voice said: "Whenever you feel like helping me up. Handcuffs - just a bit awkward. Never seen the appeal."

The gang had tried to make off with the sonic screwdriver, as well as the Tardis key. Clara collected them from a sleepy-eyed Judoon while the Doctor ran verbal rings around the chief investigating officers. Eventually, and quite possibly out of sheer exhaustion, they let him go. He came bouncing over like a toddler set loose into a playground ("Right then. Ice cream? Nineteenth-century Italy, I know a place"), and she felt her heart give a corresponding lurch of relief and excitement.

It could be Wednesday for a little while longer.