Nate was standing in the hallway, just grinning at him – like nothing had changed. Like neither of them had died and were now in the afterlife.

Charlie was silent for so long, that Nate's grin started to slide away.

His mum seemed worried, trying to wordlessly ask him if he was okay.

Charlie walked over to Nate, and threw his arms around him, and pulled him into a hug which lasted a rather long time.

Nate lightly patted his shoulder, with clearly no idea on how else to respond.

For Charlie, this felt real. Nate felt real.

Nate laughed nervously. "…Okay?"

Charlie finally released him. He couldn't believe how good it was to see him again.

He had lived through months believing he would never see his best friend again.

Nate glanced at his mum, chewing on his lip.

"Uh… shall we go upstairs to talk? I think we might have a bit to catch up on."

Charlie nodded.

"Yes, well, I've got other things to do," his mum muttered, trying to make herself look busy. "They're still making Corrie, and I've missed a couple of episodes…"

She rubbed her arms, politely waiting for them to jog upstairs, before disappearing into the lounge and switching the TV on.

Charlie closed his bedroom door, blanking out the noise of sitcom chatter.

He leant back up against the door, thrusting a fist under his nose in an attempt to keep his emotions in check. His eyes were already stinging.

"Charlie…" Nate began. He was stood in the middle of Charlie's bedroom, a little unsure of what to do with himself.

"Jeez, Nate!" Charlie exclaimed.

This was it. This was what months of turbulent emotions had been leading up to.

"I've missed you. Every day since the day you died, I've missed you."

Nate was staring at him a little passively, the only movement a little nod here and there as Charlie spoke.

"I thought I'd never see you again!" Charlie was gesticulating wildly with his arms. "Mum made me go see a therapist because I got so bad. I was… I was prepared to go to hell and back just to find you again…"

Charlie shook his head, and shuffled over to the window. Outside was a view of the Nethersphere, thousands of skyscrapers closing in on them; in this claustrophobic afterlife that crushed the air out of his lungs. If this was even air he was breathing now. He turned away from it.

"I guess it worked," Charlie muttered, staring anywhere in the room where Nate wasn't standing. "I think… I guess what I'm trying to say is… I really don't know what to say now."

"I… I know, Charlie," Nate said calmly. "I know all this. You've… 'reset' before. It's just…"

He took a breath, and looked at him imploringly, his shimmering blue eyes betraying his emotions. "Please don't be angry with me, Charlie."

"I'm not," Charlie replied quietly. "I'm just… happy to see you again."

Charlie shook his head, and stared at Nate. His brow creased; the muscles in his face twitching nervously.

"Why? Just… why?"

Nate shook his head. He muttered something about having talked about this before.

"Nate," Charlie implored. He was desperate. He was desperate for an answer – to know, to understand. "I think you at least owe me an explanation."

"I don't," Nate returned sharply, his features twisting momentarily into a scowl. "Actually, Charlie. I don't owe you that at all."

He raised his hands, as if to grab something, but his fists clenched around thin air.

"I regret a lot of things, Charlie. This was one of them. I don't think I can ever get over what I did. But I'm trying, Charlie. I'm trying."

Charlie snapped his eyes shut for a second. What the hell was he doing? Why were they getting this frustrated with each other?

"I'm sorry."

They sat down for a moment; Charlie swinging gently side to side on his swivel chair, Nate perched on the edge of the desk.

"We should have talked more," Charlie mumbled. "I should have seen something was wrong. I should have done something. We shouldn't have argued – and I shouldn't have avoided you because of it."

Nate was fixated upon his shoes. He was listening, but he wasn't saying anything back.

Charlie thumped the arm of his chair. "I was too caught up in what was important. What I thought was important… But it wasn't at all, was it? I'm really sorry, Nate. I'm really sorry…"

Nate looked up, and offered him a half-smile. "You're my best friend, Charlie. You've got nothing to be sorry for."

He rubbed his eyebrows, a little agitated. "Could we just… forget about it? I don't think I want to talk about this anymore."

Charlie nodded. "Yeah! Yeah, okay."

Charlie hastily agreed, because he didn't think their conversation could become any more uncomfortable.

An overwhelming silence grew between them, and Charlie realised he'd left it too long to try and say something else.

Nate pulled a rolled-up magazine from his back pocket, and dropped it on Charlie's desk.

"I actually came round to give you this. It's the sci-fi zine about the two space agents who solve crimes and battle supervillains. I guess you might have to read the other ones again first, or'st it's not gonna make sense…"

"Okay," Charlie picked up the cover; it showed two armed space-suited agents, heroically battling a giant reptilian cyborg, on what appeared to be a space-station breaking apart with the customary spectacle of explosions. "This actually looks pretty cool."

"Do you remember when we used to do those comics about the private detectives?" Nate asked.

"Of course I do…" Charlie muttered as he flicked through the comic in front of him.

He had spent hours drawing a ton of barely comprehensive scenes featuring his and Nate's likenesses as a team of investigators who were supposed to solve crimes – but always got side-tracked when aliens would appear in the middle of the story.

"It was mainly you though," Nate added, grinning. "I was the dashing, but useless sidekick."

Charlie smirked.

Nate cracked another joke, and Charlie laughed. For a while, they both forgot everything that they'd been through. For Charlie, there was a glimmer of hope that things could almost be normal. That he could actually live a new life here.

Perhaps death wasn't the end of everything. Perhaps it wasn't doom and gloom, spending the rest of eternity roasting in the fires of hell, or whatever.

Before he knew it, they were discussing the plot of another crazy adventure. Charlie sketching a spaceship on a scrap of paper, Nate animatedly describing a couple of the characters he'd thought of.

And within half an hour, they were furiously mashing buttons on Charlie's gamepads as they fought as strange alien characters in an arena. It was a game he'd owned in real life, and it was weird playing it again now.

It felt like he was back to his old life – in the afterlife. His life before the Doctor. The games used to be fun, but now it felt empty and meaningless. Like nothing would ever be exciting again without the Doctor in the TARDIS landing on a new world in the past or in the future.

How could you go back to any kind of life after that?

And all the while, as he beat Nate's orc with a half-remembered power-up combo, it really bothered him that nobody else thought the Doctor was real. Nobody else thought it had happened.

"Have I… told you about the Doctor?" Charlie asked, his concentration slipping.

"Yeah. Yeah, you have," Nate uttered, stealing a glance at him for a second – still too caught up in the intense on-screen battle to look away for longer. "Time machine… aliens… that sort of thing."

Charlie died. His frail, blue wizard was knocked off the edge of the platform.

He chucked the controller down on his desk. Nate looked at him, puzzled.

"You don't believe he's real, do you?" Charlie asked. "You think I'm making it up."

He shot the question like it was an accusation – and Nate was a little stunned.

"No, I…"

"You don't," Charlie grunted. "You think I keep lying about it."

"I… I want to believe you, Charlie," Nate insisted. "But you don't even remember him."

"Yes I do!"

"No," Nate shook his head. "I mean it's not in your memories. You've showed me, and those memories - they're not there."

Charlie blinked. "What's that supposed to mean?" he muttered sharply.

"No, look…" Nate sighed, and rubbed his eyebrows again. "Can I… can I tell you something?"

"Yeah… anything!" Charlie uttered with as much sincerity as he could muster.

"It's going to sound kinda weird…" Nate began. "This is actually something I've never shown you before."

"Okay…?"

Nate leapt out of his chair, and closed the game.

He shut his eyes for a moment, and reached out to the screen, placing his fingertips on the monitor.

Charlie was about to ask him what he was trying to do – then remembered where he was. He waited patiently for something to happen.

"There!" Nate muttered, his eyes suddenly wide open.

Charlie's computer screen crackled with static for a moment, and then the all too familiar image of the school lockers.

"What's this?" Charlie asked.

"They're my memories," Nate explained. "I… oh yeah – you won't remember. We can re-watch our memories like this."

"How…?"

"Uh…" Nate scratched his head. "We don't really know. It's kind of an intuitive thing, I guess? You figured it out before I did."

"Oh, really?"

"Anyway, watch this." Nate turned back to the screen, as it played out one of his memories.

Charlie watched, wondering what he was supposed to be looking for, as Nate, in his memory, fumbled through his locker.

Nate slammed the metal door shut, glancing around – doing a double take when he saw Charlie standing at his own locker, flicking through a textbook, apparently lost in the pages.

It was quite surreal, Charlie thought, watching himself in someone else's memories. He couldn't remember this himself, but it could have been any one of the hundreds of times he'd opened his locker.

Right now, Nate was knelt on the floor, completely rigid, watching the memory play out with apprehension.

In the memory, Nate turned to the tall lad standing next to him, looked him up and down. He was smirking at whatever he was watching in his phone. Charlie recognised him. They used to be in the same form.

"Wait, is that Adam? Adam Mackenzie?"

"Yeah," Nate grunted.

Charlie returned his attention to the screen.

Nate shot another look at Charlie. This really was weird. Maybe Nate was wondering if he should have gone over to talk. A glance at Nate's watch, and a curse muttered under his breath, told him he didn't have the time.

He turned back the other way, to head down the corridor towards the science labs, and Charlie jumped at what he saw.

There was a creature looming over him – right there in the middle of the school corridors.

It was a grotesque thing, like a cluster of corpses melting together.

Nate froze, mid-step. Charlie was glued to the screen, trying to see what the creature was. He couldn't identify any human features. Definitely alien.

"Remember the part you play, Nathan Slate," the creatures rasped. It had the voice of a hundred dying things.

Beside him, Nate was trembling.

"What was that?" Charlie breathed.

"I don't know…"

"The time is near," the creatures hissed, their sinuous appendages curling towards him. "You will do as is instructed of you. Else you will suffer the consequences. Do not forget that you are easily replaced. You are insignificant in the universe."

What Charlie didn't know, was that these creatures whispered to Nate every day, every night. They taunted him, reminded him that he was nothing special; a plaything they could use as they wished.

He had come to fear them in his nightmares, so much so, that every waking moment was filled with dread at the prospect of seeing them again.

"What the hell are you staring at?" Someone growled.

Adam stepped through the monster, and the apparition dissolved. He clearly hadn't seen it. Nobody else had, apart from Nate.

"I… nothing. Sorry," Nate muttered, quickly hurrying past, shying away from Adam's repulsed glare.

Nate swiped the memory away, and Charlie's computer switched back to the desktop background of the planet Jupiter, and its moons.

Charlie stared blankly at it for a minute, processing what he'd just seen.

"They were always there, Charlie. All through my life," Nate admitted, his voice shaking.

Charlie turned to him, very concerned by Nate's fears.

"This is why I want to believe everything you said about the Doctor," Nate said, his wide blue eyes shining, fraught with unease.

He desperately wanted Charlie to understand. And after everything he had seen with the Doctor, he did. He believed his friend. He believed that these creatures were something real, something he could fight. Something he could put a stop to.

"Nate… why did you never tell me?" Charlie asked.

Nate shook his head, ashamed. "They said I had… schizophrenia, or something. They said it was a hallucination. They said it was all in my head."

"But it clearly wasn't!"

Nate sighed. "I don't know that for sure. The memories… these are only… what our brains recorded. I saw them, but they might not have been real."

"No…" Charlie uttered. "They must have been. I've seen things like this, Nate. With the Doctor. Are you still seeing them?"

Nate shook his head.

"But we can still find out what they were!" Charlie exclaimed, becoming more animated as he considered what he was up against. "And what they were up to – and why only you could see them."

"Um, Charlie?" Nate ventured.

Charlie look up, startled, when he realised that there was a girl in his room.

A very pretty one, he might add, but nonetheless, she had wandered in unannounced, and had apparently been watching him for a few minutes.

"He's not talking about the Doctor again, is he?" she groaned, with a dry smile, and folded her arms.

Charlie shot her a puzzled look. Who was she? Why was she here?

"Hi Nate," the girl added.

"Hey, Sam," Nate mumbled back, his gaze dropping to the floor.

Charlie looked between the two of them.

Nate clearly recognised the girl, but he had never seen her before in his life.

"Who…?" Charlie began.

"She's your girlfriend, Charlie," Nate sighed.

"My… girlfriend?" he uttered in astonishment. "I have a girlfriend in the afterlife?"

"Yeah."

"Oh," Charlie said quietly, at a loss for anything else to say.

"Reset?" Sam asked.

"Yeah," Nate replied.

Charlie got up, and peered at her in confusion.

The girl had dark eyes, with subtle black winged eyeliner drawing him in. Her long hair swayed gently, as if caught in a breeze. There was something about her: a supernatural quality, which was captivating.

"Okay, Charlie," Sam said softly. Her voice was silky, almost unnaturally so. It sounded as luxurious as velvet chocolate. "I know you don't remember who I am, but you can trust me."

She grabbed his hands; her palms felt cold, and slimy. The exact opposite of what he expected her skin to feel like.

"I am here for you, and I always will be. Maybe there's a little part of you, deep down, that knows that?"

No, Charlie thought. There certainly wasn't that. She was completely unfamiliar to him.

"Er," he croaked. "I…"

Charlie shook his head, and pulled away.

"What's the matter, Charl?" Sam asked sweetly.

Charl?! he exclaimed inside his head. I let her call me Charl?

"No, I can't deal with this," he mumbled, retreating into his room. The back of his legs struck the side of his bed, forcing him to sit down awkwardly.

"Are you okay?" Nate asked as well.

Am I okay? What could he say? No, not really. I'm dead. So are you, and now I have a girlfriend. What the hell has been happening?

"Get out," he growled.

Nate looked at Sam, his features contorted somewhere between a scowl and a plea.

Neither of them moved.

"Both of you," Charlie spat sharply. "Just get out. Leave me alone."

"He needs a bit of time," Sam instructed Nate. "Come on."

She left, and Nate followed.

The door clicked shut quietly behind them, and Charlie was alone.

He sat in cold silence for a minute, before burying his head in his hands, blocking out the world around him.

He could feel his legs shaking; a dense knot burned in his chest, making him quiver like a neutron star.

Even as he threw himself on his bed, he couldn't rest in peace. There wasn't a position he could curl into that was even remotely comfortable.

That night, if indeed it was ever night here, he couldn't get to sleep. He didn't know if it was because he was dead – and didn't need to sleep.

Or if it was because he was worried about Nate. He couldn't help him in life – in all that time he'd been plagued by those terrible creatures.

Or if it was the Doctor. he was terrified by the thought he might never get back to him. He would never see the TARDIS again. And nobody else believed the Doctor even existed. He knew Nate wanted to, but Charlie wasn't convinced he truly believed.

Had he really made it all up, just for some pathetic sense of validation? Did Charlie Drake really believe that his life was worthless without the Doctor?

Or perhaps it was merely the restless souls outside the window, howling and groaning all through the night; the ghosts of the dead that haunted the underworld.