In which Belgium feels personally victimised (by Missy) and a great deal of tea is consumed (by Missy).


4. EYE SPY (THE FINALE)


The clock on the wall beside Clara's dining table had struck noon.

It was a very loud and obnoxious clock which one of Clara's students had given to her and which she'd put up with a great sense of duty and an even heavier heart. Rather than striking the hour with a simple 'bong' like other clocks might have done, this clock packed a decidedly more modern punch and opted to emit an aggressive dubstep-alarm-bass-drop-kind-of-noise for each hour passed.

This was not a welcome addition to the 'peace-talks' Clara was currently trying to hold with one very big-headed Time Lord and one exceptionally irritated Time Lady.

WAAAAAAA-aaaaaaaa-WUB-WUB-WUB-WUB! went the clock on the wall.

Ice blue eyes filled with murderous rage glared directly into Clara's soul from across the table.

"Sorry...I, uh, one of my students...he was switching to another school and wanted to give me a present...so..." Clara trailed off, somewhat sheepishly, as the clock let out another aaaaAAAAHHHHHHHHHH-WOOB-WOOB-WOOB!

"That's not a present that's a curse," Missy hissed through clenched teeth, "He must have hated you."

"Hey, I don't-"

eeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-UB-UB-AAAAAAA-WUB!

"It's more like a death sentence," The Doctor piped up, wincing and rubbing his ears, "That racket's enough to drive anyone over the edge-"

"You're not helping-"

WUB-WOOB-OOB-OOB-UB-AAAAaaaaaAAA!

Clara gave a defeated sigh and leant back in her chair, arms folded across her chest as she waited for the clock to finish its strikes. Missy still had an infuriated glare locked onto the brunette which didn't fill Clara with a wealth of confidence that these 'talks' were going to work.

Three more dubstep strikes bulldozed by.

The Doctor opened his mouth to suggest they tear the wretched thing off the wall and drop it into a live volcano at their earliest convenience but Missy, as usual, was a split second ahead with a laser pistol in hand.

waaaAAAHHHHH-WUB-WUB- ZAP - poof! went the clock on the wall.

Missy let out a sigh of relief and gently placed the laser pistol onto the table.

Clara was not so enthused. "Excuse me-"

"You are not excused," The Time Lady said.

"You can't just-"

"And yet I did."

"Doctor, could you-"

"Doctor, could you," Missy mimicked irritably, "You know, owners can put their pets down if they start becoming a nuisance-"

"Missy," The Doctor's voice interrupted firmly. The two exchanged a long, hard stare. Clara shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

"Fine," Missy said, although her tone suggested it was anything but.

"We also agreed not to bring weapons to this talk."

"Well Clara had her clock," Missy pointed out, gesturing vaguely to the scorched mark on the wall.

"That wasn't a weapon!" Clara retorted hotly, "That was a gift from a student of mine and you just blasted it-"

"Oh, well boo-hoo! Do excuse me, Clara, for bringing an end to what can only be described as an instrument of pure torment-"

"I think," The Doctor's calm voice interrupted, "we could all benefit from a brew."

A pause. Missy and Clara's eyes met for a brief moment before moving onto the Time Lord as they simultaneously echoed, "A brew?"

"A brew," The Doctor confirmed. Clara couldn't help but notice the look of resigned pain on his face as he said it.

Missy, in contrast, seemed to be blissfully unaware or wilfully ignorant. "I never thought the day would come, Doctor," she began emotionally, taking out a handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes, "you...me...a teapot...maybe some biscuits?" The last few words were suggested hopefully, almost childishly, as Missy peered over the top of her handkerchief.

The Doctor, looking as though every ounce of his strength and willpower was being called into action, forced himself to nod.

Missy was positively beaming.

"Clara," The Time Lady said, "Be a good pup and go and put the kettle on, would you?"

"I don't think so-"

The Doctor cleared his throat. Gave Clara a look that was almost pleading.

Clara gave him a scowl back but rose to her feet all the same. "Fine. But I'm doing it for him, not for you. Not after what happened with that bloody snack trolley."


Clara had been handcuffed to the snack trolley and sent careering out of a giant hole in the holding cell wall, courtesy of Missy having "had it up to the pins in my hair with the bloody Doctor!"

Clara had thought about a lot of things as she rocketed through the air, trapped to a trolley which had biscuits and teabags flying off it. She mainly thought about how she didn't want to die - especially in a way as undignified as this - and also about how she hoped she wasn't about to get impaled by any of the pieces of debris raining down from the wrecked death ray above her. She also thought about how much she despised Missy, despised her cruelty and laughter and those horrible ice blue eyes, despised her hair, despised the colour purple, despised plums for that matter, despised the red of her lipstick like someone had taken a knife to her mouth and slit it open, red, red, red like the blood on her hands, despised her for what she did to Danny, for what she did to so many people, for handcuffing her to a bloody trolley and sending her falling to her death after they'd almost begun to get along in some weird, twisted kind of way.

"We could have fun, you and I," Missy's velvety soft voice echoed in her head, "I'd take you to see collapsing stars and the ends of whole galaxies. Black holes and colliding planets. It's beautiful, watching how things end so suddenly and simply."

A bit like how Clara was going to come crashing to the Earth, broken and bloody and dead with a snack trolley and biscuits around her, the brunette supposed.


"Are you sure I can't tempt you with a nice chocolate bourbon biscuit?" Missy had asked, still leaning on the trolley, "I hear they're all the rage at the moment. Or was that ten years ago?" A pause as Missy, for once, looked genuinely stumped. "Jog a Time Lady's memory, darling, what year is it again?"

"You were lying, weren't you? About him being dead."

"May my mind remain as strong as my body," Missy had said to herself, as though under great strain, "I'm rather regretting bringing you on board Clara dear, it's like living with a permanently depressed parrot-"

"If you've hurt him-"

"Oh, what - you'll do what?" Missy had snapped, pushing off from the trolley to begin half-walking, half-dancing around the pipe Clara was handcuffed to, "Poor, lonely little Clara, helpless, sad, lost little puppy-"

"Shut up-"

"First Danny, now the Doctor - not very good at holding onto the ones you love, are you Clara dear?"

"I said shut up," Clara had replied, sounding no way near as tough and intimidating as she might have liked, "It's not like you're exactly surrounded by friends, is it?"

"I have you," Missy had said pleasantly, dance-dancing around her, skirt grazing against the metal floor.

Clara had scoffed at that. "We're not friends."

"Aren't we?"

"No."

Missy had suddenly come to a halt in front of Clara. Leant in closely and tucked a stray strand of hair behind an ear.

"We could have fun, you and I," Missy had said, voice softer than usual, "I'd take you to see collapsing stars and the ends of whole galaxies. Black holes and colliding planets. It's beautiful, watching how things end so suddenly and simply."

Clara hadn't known quite what to do at this juncture, mainly because despite every fibre in her body screaming at her to fight, to run - she couldn't help but want to stay and stare into those ice blue eyes a little longer - maybe even follow the lunatic Time Lady to the edges of the universe and try to understand what exactly it was in death and disaster that she found so alluring-

A sudden, powerful jolt. Missy had grabbed rather heavily onto Clara's shoulders to remain upright. The Time Lady's expression had switched instantly into one of white-hot rage.

Then, as it became evident that Missy's precious death ray had come under a swift and very forceful attack, and that it was already beginning to fall back to Earth, Missy had opened her mouth and let out a furious, pent-up roar of: "I HAVE HAD IT UP TO THE PINS IN MY HAIR WITH THE BLOODY DOCTOR!"


It was eventually revealed that the whole giant eyeball/death ray debacle was an elaborate plan orchestrated by Missy so she could get some 'special-one-on-one-girly-alone-time' with The Doctor's dear companion.

"You built a giant, metallic floating eyeball and a fully-functioning death ray so you could spend some time with Clara?" The Doctor said, unable - and not for the first time - to fully comprehend Missy's motives, "Why didn't you just use your vortex manipulator to time-travel into this flat?!"

At this suggestion Missy daintily added another handful of sugar cubes into her cup of tea, waved her other hand dismissively at the whole topic and stated "Well, it was all rather on a whim."


Clara had been ready to meet her untimely demise. She'd been ready for the crunch and the inevitable blackness to follow. She'd definitely been ready to be free of the accursed snack trolley and to never, ever clap eyes on Missy's insufferable smirking face again.

Fortunately, The Doctor had other plans and Clara had found herself dive-bombing headfirst through the open doors of the TARDIS and slap-bang into the middle of a swimming pool.


"Isn't anybody going to ask how I survived?" The Doctor asked as Clara began dutifully pouring yet another cup of tea for Missy (who was watching the brunette do so with a very satisfied smirk on her face).

"It's obvious, isn't it?" Clara replied, trying her best to ignore the fact Missy had practically begun purring, "You're The Doctor."

"Well, yes," The Doctor agreed, always ready and willing to boost his massively inflated ego, "But don't you want to know specifics? About how I knew the giant eyeball was a decoy all along - so I unattached the hook from the rod of Moosh-Poosh when you weren't looking and kept it hidden in my pocket - about how the hook allowed me to cut through that force field? Don't you want to know about how I blew up the eyeball with nothing but the hook of Moosh-Poosh, a wad of chewing gum and a passing pigeon, before I leapt into the TARDIS and made my way up to the death ray-"

"Wait-what? A wad of chewing gum and a passing pigeon?" Clara interrupted, halting her tea-pouring duties much to Missy's displeasure.

The Doctor's face lit up and he leant forwards, all hand gestures and excited eyebrows. "Well, Clara, it wasn't easy but using the energy from the force field and the hook as a conductor I managed to-"

"Doesn't anybody want to know how I managed to build a giant metallic eyeball and get it to stay floating like a cloud in the sky?" Missy's voice cut in, jealous and impatient.

"I think causing a massive explosion with gum and a pigeon whilst imprisoned in a force field is a bit more impressive than that," The Doctor remarked pompously, turning back to Clara to continue his story, "So I had the hook and I-"

"I vaporised the whole of Belgium," Missy said matter-of-factly, picking up her cup of tea and taking a delicate sip.


The Doctor had used some kind of large bazooka which warped gravity to blast Missy's death ray out of orbit and back through the atmosphere, where it broke up into tiny pieces of debris that would go largely unnoticed by the population of Earth.

This had been something he'd told Clara with great excitement and arrogance as he'd helped her out of the swimming pool in the TARDIS. Clara hadn't been quite as inspired by his story as he might have liked, most likely due to the fact she was still coming to terms with rocketing down out of the sky with a snack trolley attached to her wrists as the great expanse of Earth came up to meet and probably kill her.

In fact, after stumbling out of the pool and leaning heavily on The Doctor - who had stared quizzically at the handcuffs and "...snack trolley?" - Clara had unfortunately had to announce the fact she was about to be sick.


After much searching and panicking, Belgium was still to be found. On a small rocky planet 15 light-years away, to be precise.

"Missy you can't just de-materialize and re-materialize entire countries whenever you feel like it," The Doctor stressed after they'd managed - not without great effort and forced teamwork - to get Belgium back into place on Earth, "It's not acceptable. It's dangerous and thoughtless and-"

"Brilliant," Missy interrupted with a pleased smirk as she linked an arm through The Doctor's, "You have to admit, it's just a wee bit brilliant."

The Doctor gave an elongated and very exasperated sigh in response, but both of them knew deep down there was a not-so-tiny part of him that was really quite impressed.


"Isn't anybody going to ask how I survived?" Missy whined unhappily as Clara set about tidying the cups of tea away.

"Escape pod," Clara and The Doctor said simultaneously.

"Oh, you two are no fun," Missy remarked irritably, leaning back in her chair and scowling for all she was worth.


The 'peace-talks' had ended in a rather unsettled and begrudging manner. This was because The Doctor was too impressed by his own accomplishments that day to really worry too much about the gravity of what Missy had done, whilst Missy was too flighty and contrary to get any substantial or genuine information out of.

"Are you or are you not going to try and kidnap me and vaporise the world again?" Clara was demanding as The Doctor leant in the open doorway of his TARDIS and Missy began fiddling with the controls on her vortex manipulator.

"No, no, no, of course not," Missy replied dismissively, not seeming at all invested in the discussion, "You know, I mean maybe, I don't know. I might be your owner but I can't really be held accountable for your welfare-"

"You don't own me," Clara spluttered indignantly, glancing to The Doctor for help. He gave a roll of his eyes and held up his hands as if admitting defeat before disappearing into the depths of the TARDIS.

"Well, pet," Missy replied, looking up from her vortex manipulator to fix Clara with an impish smirk, "We both know you were rather catching onto the idea of travelling the stars with me, weren't you? Before old spoil sport blew up my death ray."

"I was not!"

"Shhh, shh, shhhh, don't worry too much about it, poppet," Missy said, a mischievous glint in her eyes, "It'll be our little girly secret."

And without so much as a 'Sorry I threw you out of an exploding death ray with a snack trolley handcuffed to you', Missy was gone.

From way inside the TARDIS, The Doctor's voice rang out:

"Clara, why are there so many bourbon biscuits in my swimming pool?"


Authors Notes: I'd just like to thank everyone who's left a review - the fact you're all enjoying this fic so much means the world to me!