history

CANON

Clara Oswald was born in Blackpool on November 23, 1986. Her parents were Ellie and Dave, a young couple who fell in love over a leaf, and she had a happy, normal childhood with them. She liked science kits and Sunday School and travel books, which Ellie read to her every night, instilling a lifelong wanderlust in her daughter. Clara always said she would go traveling after college, but in 2005 her plans were put on hold when her mother passed away. After losing her mother, Clara became a live-in nanny for some family friends - and it was during this job that she made an accidental phone call to a Time Lord in an ancient monastery, changing her life forever.

Within twenty-four hours of first meeting the Doctor, Clara had already been imprisoned inside the wifi, and had a database of computer knowledge uploaded to her brain. While saving the world together tends to make fast friends, Clara didn’t fancy the idea of swanning off through space with the Doctor as a permanent lifestyle. She still had the Maitland children to care for, after all, and decided on less rigorous travel schedule. The Time Lord would pick her up once a week for short adventures across time and space, and deliver her back later on the same day.

Throughout their early travels, Clara often got the sense that the Doctor was hiding something he knew about her. At their first meeting, he had seemed to already know her face. The explanation finally came out during a bit of a time crisis, deep inside the TARDIS - the Doctor had met her before, once in the past and once in the future, and both versions of Clara had died to save his life. Though she protested any knowledge of this, the truth was confirmed to her when she saw photographic evidence of a woman identical to herself, living in Victorian London.

It woulds not be long before Clara understood how her multiple lives had come to occur. A vicious killer let loose to his jailer that he knew a grave secret of the Doctor’s, prompting the Doctor and his companion to travel to the forsaken graveyard planet of Trenzalore, where the Time Lord himself was said to be entombed. Inside his tomb was a great column of light - the physical manifestation of the Doctor’s own timeline. A villain known as the Great Intelligence planned to use his access to this timeline to reverse all of the Doctor’s victories across the ages, destroying not only the Time Lord but everything that still existed because of him. In an act of great courage, Clara sacrificed herself and leapt into the timeline to save her closest friend. She was shattered into countless “echoes” of herself, which then spread throughout time and space. A million times, she lived and died and saved the Doctor, but never came in contact with him until his Eleventh self entered an asylum for faulty Daleks. A young traveler called Oswin Oswald had been brutally transformed into a Dalek, but retained her human mind enough to help the Doctor and his companions escape the planet. Both years later and centuries in the past, the Doctor encountered Clara Oswin Oswald, another clever young woman, who helped him battle what can best be described as an ice zombie, before falling to her death. After realizing these women’s striking similarities he went searching for answers, and found them when a nanny from Blackpool made a wrong-number call to a monastery.


The mystery finally solved, the Doctor leapt into his own timeline to rescue Clara, and returned her home to London safe and sound. She quit her job as a nanny and instead began working as a teacher. By the time Christmas came around, she and the Doctor were thick as thieves, and she invited him to her family’s Christmas dinner, to which he showed up stark naked. These happy days were not to last, however. Later that same day they wound up back on Trenzalore, in a town called Christmas, and the Doctor sent Clara away to safety so he could defend it from the Dalek threat. Clara would not stand for this, and returned to his side twice - once by her own, clinging to the side of the TARDIS, and again with the help of an acquaintance. Though centuries passed for him while defending Christmas, Clara was forced to see her best friend age before her eyes in the space of a day. She herself pleaded with the Time Lords to grant him a new cycle of regenerations, the energy from which he was able to use to finally defeat the Daleks plaguing the town. However, he unfortunately still underwent a regeneration, and Clara was left with a cross, amnesiac old man in place of her formerly lively, bumbling best friend.

Traveling with a new Doctor required a large learning curve for Clara. Their first adventure together was entirely an accident, as the Doctor managed to get them swallowed by a dinosaur and ejected into Victorian London. While she was still unnerved by the Doctor’s new appearance and stinging personality, she was determined to stay by his side and continue traveling with him. Shortly into her travels with the new Doctor, Clara also had a large development in her personal life. She met a fellow teacher named Danny Pink, and quickly fell for him. They struck up a relationship, but Clara’s constant travels and disappearances grew to be difficult.


Clara continued to grow not only as a person, but as a leader. During one of their next adventures, she played the role of the Doctor herself while he was trapped inside a shrunken TARDIS, and pulled it off flawlessly, showing how similar she was becoming to the Time Lord. However, her life soon took a tragic turn, when Danny Pink was struck by a car and killed. Clara fell into a deep, listless depression, but it transformed into anger when she realized that the Doctor owed her a better lot than she had gotten. Possessed by grief and anger, she nearly destroyed the TARDIS’ keys in an attempt to get the Doctor to reverse her boyfriend’s death. While he would not take her back in time, he promise to try to find a way to get Danny back for her. The two traveled to the 3W Institute, a mausoleum that entrapped the minds of the deceased. It turned out to be part of a plot by the newest incarnation of the Doctor’s oldest rival, now called Missy - the souls were intended to be placed inside Cybermen, robot-human hybrids who have had their emotions “deleted”. The Doctor and Clara were unable to stop the process, and all of the human souls, including Danny Pink’s, were placed into Cybermen and sent to Earth. But even with his emotions deleted Danny could still feel his love for Clara, and that led him to sacrifice himself to thwart Missy’s plan.

Not wanting the Doctor to worry, Clara declined to tell him that she had not gotten Danny back in the end, and allowed him to go off on his way, leaving her on Earth. They were reunited by Santa Claus, however, leading them both to change their minds and set back off across the galaxy. This time, however, there was a slight difference in Clara's demeanor, and the Doctor was quick to pick up on it. She threw herself headlong into their adventures, taking wild risks and thinking little of her own safety. Her life was wholly among the stars now, as though she was running from something back on Earth, and the Doctor suspected it had everything to do with her continued grief over Danny Pink. However, he did not get the chance to confront her about it.

The Doctor and Clara were called down to London to help out an old friend named Rigsy who had gotten himself into quite a bind - a mysterious tattoo on his neck counts down to 00:00, and he had no memory of how it got there. Through some investigation, they finally found out the meaning behind the bizarre marking. It was a supernatural death sentence, issued by the mayor of a secret world tucked within the city, and when the clock reached zero a deadly raven with wings of smoke would come for Rigsy, striking him down on a hidden street just steps away from the bustle of everyday life. Adding to the mystery , the mayor turned out to be an old friend of the Doctor's - a Viking girl named Me whom he had granted immortality thousands of years earlier. With less than an hour left on the tattoo, the group set off to try to prove that Rigsy was innocent. However, Clara got her own idea.

Trying to think like the Doctor, she convinced Rigsy to transfer the tattoo to her. The mayor had promised not to harm her, and Clara was confident that should they not solve the case in time, her execution would be revoked by that vow. Unfortunately, her risk proved to be a fatal mistake. Taking on the contract changed the original terms, and even once the mystery was solved it could no longer be broken or altered by anyone, even the mayor. Clara quickly comes to terms with the fact that she had been running through time and space to escape her pain for the last several months, and this was how it was bound to end for her. She was trying to be like the Doctor, and it was going to kill her. With a tearful goodbye to her best friend and an order not to tarnish her memory with anger, Clara walked out to the street and went to her death with dignity and courage. The raven passed through her, taking her life, as the Doctor looked on in horror.



My name is Clara Oswald.
I blew into this world on a leaf...
And my story is done.

But - things are not always as they seem.

Mayor Me was in cahoots with someone, and her tattoo had been laid as a trap to lure in the Doctor. It was always meant to be removed, until Clara Oswald stepped in and changed the rules. Still, even moments after his best friend's death, the Doctor had to submit to the rest of Me's scheme. He was transported into a personalized torture chamber, where he spent more than four billion years being toyed with for information he didn't have at the hands of the Time Lords. When he finally escaped onto the planet Gallifrey, he had only one thought on his mind - getting Clara back.

Under the ploy of needing her to get the Time Lords the information they wanted, he used a device known as an Extraction Chamber to rescue Clara at the precise moment before her death. Frozen between one heartbeat and the next, she was devastated at the extent her best friend would go to to save her, as well as at the hell the Time Lords had put him through. She assisted him in stealing a TARDIS to escape the planet, but insisted that her time had long since been up, and continuing to travel with him could only cause harm to all of time and space. What she didn't know yet was that the Doctor was planning on wiping her memories of him, and sending her somewhere safe on Earth where she could live out the life she was supposed to have before she'd met him. That way, the Time Lords could never track her down through her knowledge of the Doctor, and she would never know she was supposed to be dead.

The draw of continued travel was attractive, even as Clara continued to check for a pulse that wasn't there. She accompanied him to the end of the universe, where he intended to implement the mind-wipe, but it was there that the Doctor met up with the old friend who had unknowingly caused Clara's death to begin with - Me. She informed the Doctor of what he already knew, that he and Clara made a dangerous pair, and all of time and space would be better off if they parted ways. He divulged his plan, but unfortunately Clara overheard and made a panicked attempt to sabotage the mind-erasing device. Not knowing what would come of using the device now, the two best friends decided to play roulette with it, and press the button together. It quickly started working on the Doctor, and Clara was forced to watch as he fell unconscious, knowing he would not remember her upon waking up, and would no longer be driven to risk the safety of the universe in order to be with her.

Clara and Me dropped the Doctor in Nevada, and after one last conversation with him, during which he thought Clara a stranger, she got back into her own stolen TARDIS - stuck in the shape of an American diner. She knew that she needed to eventually go back to Gallifrey, and reenter the Extraction Chamber to face the raven and fulfill her death, but since she was frozen between heartbeats and no longer aging, she told Me and that they had a bit of wiggle room before needing to return. And so, the two immortals took off in their time-traveling diner to traverse the stars together on the long road back to the raven.


I blew into this world on a leaf.
I'm still blowing.
I don't think I'll ever land.