Katie sat silently, fingers pressed to her forehead as she processed everything that she had seen. She and the Doctor were in the back of a hover-craft van, the easiest way to move them through the Rahki ship/planet. The Doctor was also quiet, somehow staring at her and at the wall across from him simultaneously.

"What are you supposed to feel?" Katie asked quietly. The Doctor's eyes focused on her, but otherwise he didn't respond.

"When you see friends die like that, what should you feel?" she asked again, folding her hands together but not looking at the Doctor. When he still said nothing she finally looked at him.

"Doctor, I'm being completely serious about this. What are you supposed to feel?"

"You shouldn't have to be asking that."

"But I am."

"Which you?"

Katie was silent for a moment. "The one that doesn't know what an emotion is."

"You can't feel anymore, can you?"

"Only terror of It." Katie blinked, her eyelids moving slowly in from the sides. "Headache's gone."

"Even your brain structure changed?"

Katie nodded. "All the pathways?" the Doctor confirmed.

"Yeah." Katie stared at her shaking fists. "There's nothing human left. Nothing to hold onto. Nothing of me." She scoffed lightly at herself through her nose. "I just saw eight-two people murdered and I'm thinking about myself. I'm not even angry at Assavapisitkul anymore." Katie inhaled deeply. "I know that that's wrong. I should be infuriated. I should be crying. I should feel something."

Katie looked up at the Doctor again. "Please say something."

"What would you want to hear?"

"I don't know. Say that I'm really lying somewhere in a deep coma and this whole thing is a horrible dream. Say that I deserve to be dying in my own body as It takes over. Say that death always brings death and I should have seen the massacre coming. Say that I shouldn't exist and you regret the day I crashed into TARDIS. Say you were right to leave me on Kurunathan and you should have left me here."

"You're right," the Doctor broke in. "I should have."

Katie inhaled deeply and let it out. "Well," she said, her voice thickening. "At least something's still human." She inhaled again. "I think I just felt my heart break."

Neither of them said anything for a minute.

"If you didn't…if you really think that little of me, then why did you...?" Katie shook her head, searching for the words. "Why couldn't you have listened for once and stayed away?" she said, a touch of anger seeping into her voice. "Everything I've done since I've met you has been so that you keep on living, and you had to be the guilt ridden idiot…"

She looked away again and the Doctor spoke quietly.

"I came anyway Kathryn."

There was no answer for a moment. "Why?"

"You asked me to come find you."

"You also told me that you'd always come back for me," Katie said scathingly, "but you didn't. You came for Scorch. You showed up at UNIT because the Krize called you and said that the puzzle was going to be solved. Is that why you picked me up in the first place?" she accused, looking at him again. "Because I was a strange new…thing to figure out?"

"Why are you asking this?"

"Why aren't you answering?" Katie only waited a split second before jumping in again. "I spent two months holed up underneath TORCHWOOD for you, bored to the point of insanity, with no one to speak with but three British lunatics that didn't know what the hell to make of me. I couldn't sleep, didn't eat, and the only contact I had with anyone was for five minutes a day, if that. You stuck me there because I had nowhere else to go after Kurunathan. So tell me the truth for once; why the hell did you pick me up in the first place?"

"Because you needed someone and I wanted to be needed."

Katie laughed humorlessly. "Sounds a lot like the reason I decided to go with you."

"My turn then," the Doctor said. "Why are you asking this?"

"Because I'm a file. I'm a bloody file. In my own brain," Katie said, stressing the words. "My entire life has been one carefully selected for me to live. I screwed up who knows how many families back on Sol 3, including the one I lived with. I messed up an innocent girl's life because the Rahki decided to make me. A boy is dead so that I can know what it's like to kill someone. I am a mix of who knows how many species so that I can be the perfect traveling mate for you. I have a base program that is this close to taking over my head. So right now, I'm trying to figure out if anything I ever did, felt, or had, was real." She breathed heavily. "Identity crisis taken to the absolute limit."

"You're real Kathryn."

"Shut up Doctor. You've been reciting that same empty phrase since I met you, but we both know it's not true. I was a program, a cover program based off of someone else. I wasn't even an original!"

"You're speaking in past tense."

She smirked. "How sickeningly ironic. You came to save someone who never really existed!"

The Doctor finally moved and crouched in front of her, his eyes forcing her to look at him. "Kathryn, you are real. I need you to fight her."

"What do you think I've been doing?" she asked. "Not that it mattered—matters. Even if she—I, somehow got out of this, I'd just have to go to the Krize anyway. I'm going to die Doctor. You can't save her—me." Katie chewed on her lip for a moment.

"Doctor, if you find a chance to get away, whatever it may be or do to others, take it."

"Only if you can get out too."

"Stop saying things you don't mean!"

"What makes you think that?"

"Because you never said good-bye," Katie whispered. "You never even said good-bye."

"You didn't answer your phone."

"That's a weak excuse and you know it. I'm a bleeding energy swarm, Doctor. I'm not hard to find when you're sharing a planet with me. But you just ran. That was it. You ran from me."

"I knew you'd come back into TARDIS and keep traveling if I dropped by."

"Of course. Wash your hands of me. Makes sense."

"Randalls told me that you were nearly done charging temporally," the Doctor tried to explain. "TARDIS is full of temporal energy, and I didn't want to find out what would happen if you finished."

"And you couldn't have told me that?"

"And leave you sitting alone in TORCHWOOD asking yourself all this?"

"She would have been able to handle that better than the questions she did ask herself." Katie's eyes widened for a split second before she closed them.

"And here she comes."

"Kathryn—"

"Oh shut up!" Katie snapped. "You knew this was going to happen. Before the Rahki zapped me off the Krize ship, you told me to fight it. You said that once it started, I needed to fight. You knew this was going to happen, that I was going to have my existence erased by my own body, and you said nothing. Do you know what it's like to lose your mind and know that there's nothing you can do about it?"

"Every day."

Katie looked away from the Doctor, temporarily silent. The Doctor took the opportunity.

"When I found your files on Kurunathan, I immediately thought of a dozen uses for you. I thought about telling you. But I also knew that you'd leave if you did, convinced that you were, by all accounts, a monster. I'd rather have you convinced I'd abandoned you."

"You did. No, I could have answered the phone," Katie corrected herself. "I could have called from TORCHWOOD." She sighed, a heavy sigh full of emotion, like everything she'd felt was locked in the sigh. "I wanted to be saved for once. I wanted to know if I was worth following. I wanted you to follow me and tell me that…that you wouldn't really just leave, that I wasn't Kavrin. I wanted you—not just anyone, but you—to rescue me." She gave him a look. "And you will promptly forget I ever said that."

The Doctor smiled. "See? Still there."

"I hate you sometimes."

"No you don't."

"Yeah, you're right."

"You could have invited me to your wake you know."

"She was trying to avoid this," Katie said wryly, gesturing slightly at the van. She winced. "And there she—I go again."

The Doctor sat back on his heels, not taking his eyes off Katie. She reached up to her necklace and snapped it off, holding it out to him.

"Here. You may as well have this back."

"Why?" the Doctor asked, his voice a little harsh as he recognized the purple crystal.

"It means nothing to me—to her."

After a moment's hesitation, the Doctor took back the necklace. "What happens to you?" he asked, tucking it into his pocket.

"I'm a file. I'll be shoved into a corner and slowly deleted," Katie said matter-of-factly. "Erased and forgotten. I wonder if it'll hurt." Her emotions came back to her eyes for a moment.

"Please say good-bye this time."

"No. I'm getting you out of this."

"Please Doctor."

He stared at her for a moment, his thoughts hidden behind old eyes as always. "Good-bye Kathryn."

"Thank you." Katie paused before speaking again. "You know, I always wanted to donate my body, but I was hoping it would be as a cadaver for a med school rather than have someone move in while I'm watching. Rather disconcerting."

"Can't be particularly pleasant."

"She didn't think so."

The Doctor felt a chill run down his back as Katie didn't correct herself.

Though he was a firm pacifist, when the van finally stopped the Doctor was very much in a fighting mood. Of course, being the Doctor, this smply set his brain humming at a faster pace than normal, fitting everything that he possibly could together. It was obvious that he would need everything he could get if he had a chance of getting out of this.

Or of recovering Katie.

The doors opened and the Doctor stepped into a large, rectangular room. At the far end a group of five or six Rahki were working around a steeply inclined table that reminded the Doctor of a single person cyber-converter. One wall was full of computers and servers, while the opposite wall seemed to be made of glass. Visible through the glass was an enormous room, nearly ridiculous in size. The far side of the cavernous space held a circular apparatus that the Doctor felt he ought to recognize, but couldn't quite grasp the memory. He was surprised to see TARDIS just sitting on the floor, about fifty yards out from the…whatever it was.

"Impressed?" Assavapisitkul asked.

"A bit," the Doctor admitted. He turned to see where Katie was. She was sitting on the edge of the van, hands folded in her lap as she swung her legs back a forth and glanced around the room with mild interest. She looked for all the world like a child patiently waiting for something they'd expected for years. And why not? the Doctor thought. Katie—or rather, Scorch—had been built for this room.

A Rahki had already approached Katie. The Doctor recognized him as Randalls, the scientist from Kurunathan that had admitted to heading Katie's design team. Randalls was discussing something with her. Deciding to leave it for the moment, the Doctor turned back to Assavapisitkul.

"So what's this big finale you've got set up?"

"You've read everything on her," the Dictator said, leaning back slightly on a railing in front of the glass wall. "Let me hear your theories."

"I'm not here for games."

"You're here for Scorch, and that is what we're going to discus. Further generations will want to know how clever you really were in the end."

Whether he knew it or not, Assavapisitkul had just given the Doctor permission to do what he did best: talk.

"Since we're here for her—" the Doctor jerked her head at Scorch—"let's talk about her. She's got a completely normal, average, human background. Well, except for the parts where she gets into deep trouble selling drugs, shoots her best friend, and then destroys his image to protect herself. Well, that and the fact that she was so brilliant that she had to hold herself back in school to try and avoid the envy of classmates. And of course if things had gone to plan she was supposed to sit and watch as everything she'd ever known was upset and someone else took her life, thus losing her family in the very worst way, though that happened in the end anyway. Kathryn is young, has gone through some of the worst emotional trauma you could devise, carries guilt around like a rock, can never again see her family, is exceptionally brilliant, speaks dozens of languages, and has more quirks than you could comprehend."

The Doctor finally paused for a breath. "In short, you've created my perfect friend. Soul-mate, as one might put it. Considering the fact she was supposed to be eighteen when we met, which for humans is usually when they start searching for a mate, you were hoping that there would be some kind of romantic attraction between us, thus giving me even more reason to spring to her aid when you took her back."

"That's not hard to piece together, Doctor," Assavapisitkul said.

"I'm not finished," the Doctor told him. "I was just giving a recap of who she is." The Doctor looked purposefully back at Randalls. "She'd better still be in there when we're finished here."

Scorch smiled condescendingly. "You're so cute when you're trying to be the hero." She turned back to Randalls, sitting perfectly still as she continued talking to him. The Doctor shifted his attention back to the Dictator.

"As you were saying," Assavapisitkul said dryly.

"Yes. Who she is and what she is are two very different things." The Doctor paused. "She's a key."

Assavapisitkul lifted his eyebrows slightly but said nothing as the Doctor continued. "Well, actually she's a lock pick. Well, more of a battering ram."

The Doctor stood with his weight shifted back slightly as he put his hands in his pants pockets. "I think you're going to un-lock the Time War."

*Constructive critisisim welcome, praise happily accepted, flames not wanted*