I was surprised that this was more difficult to write then I was expecting, but I've always wanted to see the surface of the moon and so I injected some of what I imagined would be my enthusiasm into Wilf's experience. Happy Holidays and I hope you like this latest installment!

Much Beta Love to BMG as always, keeping those pesky americanisms in line!

"Wait Donna! I forgot my camera!" Wilf turned around, stumbling when the reduced gravity on the moon sent him spinning. "Whoa! That's going to take time getting used to." Wilf laughed softly as he caught himself against the Doctor who was suddenly there beside him, his arm grabbing hold of the older man as he stumbled.

"Don't worry about your camera, Wilf. It wouldn't work well in a vacuum anyway. I made sure to bring one that you can use." The Doctor reached into a heretofore unseen pocket in his spacesuit and pulled out a small silver box that had what obviously looked like a lens on one side and a screen on the other.

Wilf fumbled with the camera, his hands nearly engulfing the small box in his large orange gloves. "That's a nice camera, Doctor! It's definitely smaller than many of the ones I'm used to seeing."

The Doctor laughed, patting Wilf lightly on the shoulder before he turned and began to lead the way across the lunar landscape once more. "It's only from about 20 years in the future, Wilf. I tinkered with it a bit though to make sure that it had unlimited memory and would work in a vacuum and zero g with no hiccups. You'll be able to take as many pictures as you like!"

Wilf grinned and held the screen up to his faceplate before he carefully turned and waved at Donna as she walked behind them. "Give us a smile, Sweetheart! We're on the moon!"

Donna laughed at her grandfather's enthusiasm, raising her hand to wave at him as he fumbled the camera then snapped off a few pictures before turning back to follow the Doctor. She made sure to place each foot carefully as her first few steps out of the Tardis had seen her nearly fall flat on her face, the lighter gravity was enough to make each step an adventure.

She looked up at the sky above them, making sure not to look towards the brilliant ball of the sun overhead though it seemed her face shield had some sort of protective film built in that would darken anytime she happened to get too close to that glowing orb. She had expected to be able to see an absolute blanket of stars above since there was no atmosphere, but other than the sun she could only see a few pinpricks of light glimmering in the absolute black of the sky above.

"Doctor, why can't we see a lot of stars?"

The Doctor turned to look back at Donna, his gaze taking in her cautious steps and he hid a smile as both she and Wilf showed the typical uncertainty of people who were experiencing microgravity for the first time. He knew that it would only take an hour or two before they were hopping along and letting their steps take them farther and farther with each leap.

"The sun blocks out all but the most brilliant of stars, just like on earth, but we're at the edge of the terminator so we should be able to see the stars come up when the moon shifts a little more in its orbit in an hour or so." He turned back to continue over the harsh terrain, his steps far more certain than either Donna or her grandfather's had been.

"Earthrise is going to be in about half an hour and the lip of the crater over the Apollo 11 landing site is the perfect place to watch it."

"Oh ho, I've dreamt of seeing that for years, Doctor! Let's not be late, I want to make sure to take pictures of it!" He clutched the small camera close to his chest, his eyes shining as he inadvertently hurried after the Doctor and stumbled over his own two feet.

He fell awkwardly onto one knee, his hand shooting out to break his fall while he cradled the small camera against his chest.

"Gramps!"

Donna hurried towards her fallen grandfather, concern blazing through her before she heard his muffled laughter coming over the headset. She stumbled in her haste and quickly settled down into the powdery soil beside him. She looked up as the Doctor returned to their side, the burst of amusement pouring into her mind was enough for her to just shake her head and join into the laughter that suddenly seemed contagious.

"Wilf, it might be better if you kept the camera in a pocket in your suit until we're relatively stationary. It's going to take you a while to get used to walking in microgravity and I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself if you fell again trying to save the camera from a tumble. "

Wilf just continued to laugh as he patted his chest, his hands finding the large zipper of a breast pocket that he awkwardly pulled open and deposited the camera into in order to keep it safe. "Right you are, Doctor! But that fall was probably the most fun I've had in years!" He pulled the zipper closed before he chuckled some more. "It felt like I was falling in slow motion and it didn't really hurt at all when I landed. I think I could handle a few more tumbles like that without any real problem."

"Don't get any ideas there, Gramps! I don't need you giving me a heart attack every time you decide to practice your landings," Donna huffed.

The Doctor laughed and reached out a hand to help Wilf to his feet, making sure he was steady before he turned to help Donna up as well. "Don't worry, you'll get your moon legs soon enough. It comes faster than you think and soon you'll be bouncing along the surface like the Apollo astronauts."

Donna looked into the Doctor's faceplate, not missing the huge smile on his face as he held onto her a while longer than was strictly necessary. "Moon legs? Come off it, Doctor. You just made that up!"

The Doctor laughed and held up his hands as he replied, "That's a real term, Donna, from the early days of human colonization of the solar system. It's similar to sea legs, but on the moon!" He said the last as if it weren't obvious, his voice rising in that excited way it always did when he was going on about something or other. "They had to have a term for all the fumbling and stumbling that new arrivals on the moon did and since many of the first settlers were descendants of many naval families, they just adapted the term to fit the situation that they had here. So, I assure you moon legs is a very real and very technical term used by moon colonists in the future. Isn't that brilliant?"

Donna laughed softly as Wilf piped up excitedly with more questions about those future settlements, his hands gesturing madly as he pointed at the hills and valleys that surrounded them. "Do they settle here in the Sea of Tranquility, Doctor?"

The Doctor turned back to Wilf and looping his arm with the older human's, he resumed his trek across the surface of the moon. Each step he took was carefully measured to the older man's stride so that he would get used to the reduced gravity more quickly.

"Humanity does eventually return to the Sea of Tranquility, but not right at the beginning. They wanted to make sure that they could properly preserve the site of the first human landing on the moon, and so they stayed away from this area for nearly 50 years." His steps began to slow as they crested a small rise and nestled down in the shallow valley below stood the remnants of the Apollo 11 landing site.

"And here we are."

Wilf hadn't even noticed the terrain that they were walking over as the Doctor spoke of the humans that would one day live on the moon and the lengths that they would go to in order to preserve the history of humanity's first hesitant steps on another celestial body. His mind was travelling with the Doctor and those future astronauts, thinking about everything that humanity would one day do that when they stopped, he simply stood still.

He gasped and turned to look down on the small camp below them, his eyes picking out each piece that the Apollo 11 astronauts had left behind, from the American flag that stood stiff on a windless plain, the descent stage of the lunar module as well as the small pieces of experiments and various other items that had been discarded when they were no longer needed.

"They left the place in a bit of a mess, didn't they?"

Donna's voice was sounding none too impressed as she looked down on the scene below her, her gaze traveled over the large piece of equipment, to the flag and then over the detritus that was strewn across the plain below. "Typical men, dropping things wherever they want when they were done using them! Sounds like someone else I know."

The Doctor felt a flash of indignation at her words even though he could feel the teasing light in her thoughts as she ribbed him, her thoughts were dancing with images of the mess in his workspace and throwing them at him as if to prove her point. "Really, Donna? Is that all you can see down there?"

"Sweetheart, this is the culmination of centuries of science and innovation! The astronauts could only take back so much weight and they had to leave behind a lot of things that were in the lunar ascent module to make room for samples and the completed experiments that they had to take to earth. You really can't fault them for making a bit of a mess when they were preparing to launch in order to make their rendezvous with the orbiter. Time was a bit short!"

Donna laughed and patted her granddad's arm, her gaze sweeping over the Doctor with a smirk before she sat down on the ground and looked up at them both. "I know, Gramps. I was just expecting something a little more… I don't know, grand?"

"They ran the entire mission on less computing power than a calculator has, Donna. Grand definitely wasn't in the picture!"

Wilf shook his head with a laugh, carefully lowering himself to the ground beside Donna so that they could sit and watch the earthrise together. He reached up and unzipped the pocket on his spacesuit, pulling out the Doctor's barmy futuristic camera before he looked up at the Doctor and motioned for him to sit down as well. "Come on then, Doctor. You said that earthrise was happening soon and we don't want to miss the show!"

The Doctor smiled down at Donna and Wilf, his hearts constricting when he realized that for a brief moment in his long and tortured life, he had a family and he was going to cling to that family with every fiber of his being. He was momentarily choked with emotion when thoughts of the family that he had lost when Gallifrey had burned to ash filled his mind before he heard the dying scream of his mother as he'd sent the council back into its fiery hell in the Time Lock. He didn't say anything while he settled to the ground beside Wilf, his mind turned inward momentarily despite Donna's reassurances echoing in his thoughts.

"Would you look at that?"

It was the exclamation of wonder in Wilf's voice that broke the Doctor out of his melancholy and had him looking up just as a sliver of blue rose over the far horizon. No matter how many times he'd seen this very sight, it never failed to still his rage and fill him with wonder. He reached out to take a hold of Wilf's hand, feeling the older human squeeze his hand in return as they sat and watched the beautiful blue orb of Earth rise above the horizon of her only satellite.

"It's so beautiful and peaceful from up here, you could almost forget that so many people are killing each other down there and that there are so many stupid endless wars raging all the time."

The Doctor smiled softly as he listened to Donna, his thoughts had been similar to hers when he'd first watched the planet rise on the moon after he'd spent so much time on the surface back in his first incarnation. It had been after he had lost Susan and had felt particularly adrift that he'd come and just sat here watching the Earth rise and float in the endlessly black sky of her moon.

"This always brought me peace, no matter how troubled my thoughts were. Oh I'd watch her rise from different points all over the near side of the moon, but the view was always the same. I don't even remember feeling this sense of wonder when I first watched Gallifrey rise from one of her moons, trust me I returned time and time again to see if I could capture the same wonder that I did when I watched the Earth rise."

The Doctor let go of Wilf's hand and just swept his hand towards the site in front of them. The Earth climbing higher and higher into the sky, casting its own heavenly glow onto the tableau below. The debris left behind from man's first attempt to touch the stars, now simply a part of the history of a race that was striding amongst the galaxies. "I think the Time Lords forgot what it was like to be this young, or they never knew. But humans? You're always reaching out for something better, something to stretch your understanding that much farther and really that first step was taken down there. The first step that led to humanity eventually dominating the cosmos."

The Doctor grew quiet after he finished, his eyes were shining as he turned to look at Wilf and Donna while they stared enraptured at the sight before them. They were looking at every single human being that had ever lived all captured in one tiny spot that floated in the emptiness of space in front of them. He wasn't even sure if they were thinking such grandiose thoughts as he was thinking right at that moment, but he didn't care because he knew that he would never forget the look of wonder on either of their faces.

Thank you, Doctor.

The Doctor shifted slightly when he lifted his eyes to lock onto Donna's deeply blue gaze as she turned to stare at him, her eyes seemed to catch the blue of the earth and reflected it back at him. He felt himself falling into those endless depths, his mind was simply tumbling end over end in the warm embrace of her gratitude.

Thank you for bringing Gramps here, I know that he'll never forget this experience for as long as he lives. I know that I'll always carry this memory with me as well.

He smiled softly, nodding just briefly before he whispered back, You're welcome, Donna. I wouldn't miss this for anything!

"Come on you two, what are we doing just sitting around here faffing about? We're on the moon!"

Wilf had remained silent for as long as possible as Donna and the Doctor sat staring at one another, but he had finally had enough with waiting and with that exclamation, he jumped to his feet. Once more moving far too quickly for the reduced gravity, he drifted a little ways over the edge of the rise before he came down on the back side of the hill and with a stumbling run he launched himself into the air.

"Whoa ho! Watch that first step everyone, but come on love! This is brilliant!"

Wilf bounced again down the slight incline, each step carrying him feet further than it normally would as he was literally bounding across the surface of the moon in great strides like a man half his age.

"Hang on, Gramps!" Donna's voice sounded slightly alarmed as she rose to her feet, a slight panic when she moved to chase after him but the Doctor's hand on her arm stopped her.

"It's alright, Donna. There's nothing on the moon in this time period that can hurt him, let him enjoy it a little"

Donna chewed her lip thoughtfully at the Doctor's admonition, but there was no denying the sheer enjoyment in her grandfather's voice as she watched him bouncing in ever increasing circles on the back side of their little rise. His arms were wind milling at his side and he was laughing with child-like glee as he seemed to be trying to make each leap higher than the last.

The Doctor laughed softly, he truly couldn't remember anyone reacting with such giddy abandon over being able to leap higher and further in the microgravity of the moon and it caused some of the fear and tension within him to melt away. He decided that it was time to let go of his worries for a little while and enjoy this precious time with his new family.

"Come on, Donna, I'll race you to the bottom!"

The challenge issued, the Doctor leaped off the top of the small rise and began bounding towards the bottom away from the Apollo landing site with great ground eating strides that soon had him racing towards Wilf. He could hear Donna's indignant squawk through the com system and he looked up just as she launched herself after him, with far greater strides then he was expecting her to manage.

He threw his head back and laughed, his arms thrown wide as he joined Wilf in his bouncing circles along the dead surface of the moon. Donna's laughter echoed through the com system, joined by Wilf's cheers as she bounded in great leaping strides to join them.

Wilf had the camera out and was taking pictures of both Donna and the Doctor as they joined him in his mad dance, the three of them simply bouncing in a crazy circle across the surface of the moon before he missed a step and once more stumbled to his knees on the dusty plain.

"Okay, I have to remember that I'm not as young as I used to be!"

Wilf was laughing as he rolled back to sit on the boulder that had tripped him up, tears of laughter were streaming down his cheeks even as he waved off the concerned rush of both the Doctor and Donna.

"Don't you two worry about an old man! I feel 50 years younger right now."

Donna knelt in front of him, the concern writ plain on her face despite her grandfather's protests. "Do you want to go back to the Tardis, Gramps?"

He leaned away from Donna, the look of outrage on his face was nearly comical before he looked up and saw the same concern on the Doctor's face. "Now, now, don't you two start, I've just gotten to the moon and I'm not going to leave just because I tripped over a little moonrock."

Wilf slipped his camera back into his pocket and looked up at the both of them with such a look of mulish defiance that the Doctor was hard pressed to keep the smile from his lips. "Right you are, Wilf, but perhaps we should explore some of the other lunar landing sites with a little less… enthusiasm? I don't want you to tire out too quickly when there's still so much to see."

Donna cast a suspicious look at the Doctor, she was more concerned with her grandfather's health and was beginning to think that maybe they should take him back to the Tardis but she could feel in the Doctor's thoughts that Wilf would be just fine and really he just needed a moment to catch his breath.

His comments were exactly the incentive that the older human needed as he jumped to his feet, his eyes shining when he looked back over the featureless plain around them. "Let's hop to it then, Doctor! There's 5 more to go!"

The Doctor smiled and cast a look back at Donna, before he turned and began to lead back the way they had come. "We're going to have to use the Tardis to get to each of the other sites, Wilf. You remember that they cover the surface of the moon from the eastern to the western horizon."

Donna smiled when she saw her grandfather's domed head bob in response to the Doctor's words, his answer was lost to her as she simply reached out to the Doctor with a feeling of gratitude.

Don't worry, Donna. I won't let him tire himself out before he gets to thoroughly enjoy his trip, but at least the Tardis will be able to keep an eye on him between sites.

Donna felt a rush of tears when she heard the Doctor's thought, her love filling her mind to overflowing then he showed that he cared about her grandfather as much as she did. She let the worry that she had been feeling over her granddad's exuberance fade away and she finally allowed herself to look up at the endless black sky above them.

It finally hit her that she was walking across the surface of the moon with the Doctor and her granddad just like they were walking through Turnham Green. She pushed the worry over the prophecy to the back of her mind and focused on the sight around her, her arm linking with the Doctor's as together they made their way back to the safety of the Tardis.