I definitely don't know where I'd be without my dear beta NoPondInTheForest, nor will I ever be able to write enough words to thank her! I've sort of rewritten the story of the siren in "The Curse of the Black Spot", hope you guys won't mind too much! Thanks again for your reviews and favourites and follows! I hope you'll enjoy this chapter :-)
"Don't worry about the Bard," the Eleventh Doctor eventually told his friends. "I've met this creature before. She won't hurt him."
"But she's turned him into dust!" exclaimed Jack, utterly unable to believe his ears.
"Yes she has, but she's not killed him," the Doctor replied much to Jack's dismay. "The first time I met her everyone thought she had killed lots of men – pirates –, that she had haunted them to their deaths. In the end we found out she had actually been saving them."
"Saving them?" asked the Tenth Doctor.
"We were on a pirate ship," the Eleventh Doctor went on, staring into nothingness as the memory of Amy and Rory made his hair stand on end. "A female-looking creature kept emerging from the ocean, singing and driving the pirates mad. The siren. That's what they called her."
"But we're not in the ocean now, Doc," Jack cut in, "so how can she be here?"
"She came from in there," answered the Doctor as he turned and pointed to the corner of the chamber, where a bucket full of water had lay unnoticed all along. "All she needed to get here was the reflection of our lights on the water."
"So she uses reflections as a portal…," the Tenth Doctor thought out loud, frowning.
"Okay, reflections and portals," promptly said Clara. She might not have been travelling with the Doctor for too long, but she had soon developed the ability to process any information he'd give her quickly, no matter how incredible or impossible it might sound. "Now back to Edward. If she didn't kill him, then where is he? Where did she take him?"
"Nowhere," the Eleventh Doctor told her. "He's still here."
"Doctor, I don't understand," she replied, shaking her head slightly.
Of course she didn't understand, the Doctor thought. In fact, he very much doubted that any of the others had understood him at all! Were Amelia Pond's face to disappear from his mind, then he might stand a chance to make himself properly understood, but that face would not leave him, and for as long as it stayed with him, he knew he would never be able to say anything that made sense.
And yet, for the sake of all the people who had disappeared from the Tower, he had to try.
"Have you ever seen one of those films in which a suspect is being interrogated by the police, Clara?" he started to explain, as slowly and as carefully as he could. "Usually, there's a mirror in the room. Well, it's not really a mirror, but it looks like a mirror to the people inside that room. What it really is, however, is a window, and behind it other police officers are watching while the suspect's being cross-examined. Well, the siren's hiding behind one of those fake mirrors. From inside this room, all we can see is the mirror, but she's on the other side, and every once in a while, when she's convinced that someone needs her help, she opens the window and jumps out."
"Is she watching us now then?" asked Clara.
"Watching us?" asked the Doctor with a grimace of disgust. "Why would she be watching us? That'd be silly! What she's doing right now is… Sort of smelling our blood."
"And does she really need a magic window for that?" asked Jack.
"Of course she doesn't," said the Eleventh Doctor. "What she needs is a spaceship. That's what her window is – her spaceship."
"So she's on a different plane!" exclaimed the Tenth Doctor, his eyes beaming with delight. "She comes from a different reality!"
"Exactly," replied the Eleventh Doctor, snapping his fingers and pointing his index at his past self. "And her reality has collided with ours."
"And how can we get into her reality to find Eddie?" Jack asked with impatience. "Through that bucket over there?"
"We'll get in the same way he did," the Doctor told him. "The same way all the others did. And that is, through the looking glass."
Having said those words, the Eleventh Doctor turned around and pointed at the breast ripper hanging on the wall.
"We need to prick our fingers?" asked Jack incredulously. "Why?"
"Because she's a nurse," the Eleventh Doctor replied, "and the moment we get even the most insignificant injury in our bodies she'll come and take us to her space-travelling sickbay."
The Tenth Doctor's eyes and mouth gaped wide.
"So that's what's happened to the prisoners!" he exclaimed, raising his eyebrows.
"They were taken down here to be tortured but then they were never seen again, remember?" the Eleventh Doctor told him.
Clara and Jack looked at each other with a glance of recognition.
"All we have to do is prick ourselves," the Eleventh Doctor went on. "She'll come for us as soon as we've done so, and then we'll do what Edward did – we'll reach for her hand in a trance, and when we touch her we'll break into millions of ashy specks. That's when she'll take us to her dimension – to her spaceship – and there we'll find Edward and all the others."
"Okay, so what are we waiting for? Let's get to it!" said Jack as he dashed towards the breast ripper on which the Earl of Oxford had pricked his finger. He stopped right in front of it, studying its sharp edges for an instant before he raised an arm and pricked his right thumb with one of them.
On the other side of the room, the Tenth Doctor had decided to use one of the Judas chairs to hurt himself instead. Getting close to it, he slid a hand along the armrest so as to get his palm scratched by the countless metal spikes that covered it.
Regardless of the different methods they had chosen to cause themselves their injuries, both Captain Jack Harkness and the Tenth Doctor could soon check how the black spots they'd been looking forward to appeared in their palms in just a split second.
"Okay, here we go again!" said Jack, nodding as his eyes darted in the direction of the Tenth Doctor, who hurriedly strode over to his immortal friend to stand side to side with him.
The singing started immediately afterwards.
"Come on, it's our turn now," the Eleventh Doctor said to Clara. Putting his hand on her back and pushing her gently, he led her to the table on which lay the objects she had previously been studying in the company of Captain Jack Harkness. The Doctor inspected the small and abominable artefacts on display with the light of his sonic screwdriver, which became fixed as it reached a particularly repugnant one.
"We could use those needle-nose pliers on the corner," he told Clara.
"I can't see any needle-nose pliers on any of the corners, Doctor," she said, her voice sober.
"Well, I can," he said. "Over there. Upper left-hand corner."
"You mean that thing with a crocodile head?" asked Clara, pointing in its direction.
"Yes, that one. It's got tiny but very sharp teeth in its mouth," he added, waving his fingers. "Can you see them?"
Clara narrowed her eyes, trying to get a proper view of the crocodile teeth.
"Okay!" she replied with resignation. "Let's do it! But just so you know, Doctor, I'm so not going to enjoy this."
"Believe me, Clara, neither am I."
The Doctor held her hand in his in an attempt to reassure her, and the eeriness of the gasps and the giggles that had just started to escape the Tenth Doctor's mouth made Clara only squeeze it harder.
Their gazes and their attention were suddenly diverted to the opposite side of the chamber the moment the creature reappeared by emerging out of the bucket. She twirled around once she had risen high enough for her head to almost touch the ceiling, but she stopped still as soon as her eyes pinpointed the two men she had come looking for. The Eleventh Doctor and Clara saw her feet descend onto the ground leisurely and her head tilt to the left as she slowly approached Jack and the Tenth Doctor.
The sight of men such as the Tenth Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness as they hypnotically paraded towards the creature had suddenly turned into something Clara believed she wouldn't easily forget. Captain Jack Harkness was drowning in tears, desperately reaching for a luminous human shape that his mind, in its present demented state, probably believed to be its salvation. The temperature of her blood dropped dramatically, however, the moment she looked at the Tenth Doctor. His eyes were so widely opened that she had the distressing impression they might actually fall out of their sockets. A creepy smile had spread across his face, and his neck muscles had tightened so much that it seemed to her they were on the point of breaking. He looked so much like a lunatic that, for a moment, she feared their decision to cross realities might have irreparable consequences on his sanity.
The Doctor and Clara watched with a feeling of helplessness when Jack and the Tenth Doctor were finally turned into dust upon simply brushing their fingertips against the sirens'. However, unfortunately for Clara, she would soon find evidence that things might just be about to get even worse.
"Doctor," she said, studying every detail in her Doctor's face intensely, no matter how small, as he kept looking at the creature. "What's wrong?"
The question took the Eleventh Doctor completely by surprise. He immediately took his eyes off the orange-glowing alien that was wearing the face of his cherished friend Amelia Pond to fix them on the bright brown light in the gaze of Clara Oswald, his impossible and splendid girl. Perceiving the profound uneasiness that her big round eyes were unable to hide, it hit him that the concern he had heard in her question couldn't have been any more earnest.
"I always know," Clara had said to him not long before. And indeed, she always did.
"I've seen you meet aliens many times," she went on, "but you've never acted like this before. You're always impressed by how astonishing they are or how beautiful they look, but not now... I know you've met the siren before, but still… This is so not like you, to look at her with sadness instead of admiration and wonder."
Touché, the Doctor thought.
His hand was still holding hers as he kept looking at her in silence. The sadness wouldn't go from his eyes any time soon, that much he knew, but the tender smile he gave her had somehow made him feel relieved in a comforting sort of way.
Without letting go of her hand, the Doctor wrapped his free arm around her neck and, letting his chin rest on her head, he held her close to him in a tight embrace.
"Clara," he whispered. "My Clara. If I didn't have you, where would I be?"
"Up on cloud number nine, as usual," she replied casually, trying to make the fact that there was a siren from outer space singing an enchanting song right there beside them a little bit less alarming.
"I know that face, Clara," he said finally, stroking her head. "The siren's. I know it very well. I used to see it every day, a long time ago. Long before I met you."
"Whose face is it?" Clara asked.
"My friend's."
"And where is she now?"
"In a place where I can never see her again."
The Doctor removed his arm from around her neck and pulled back just what little was necessary for him to be able to keep eye contact.
"And why does the siren look like her?"
"I'm afraid I don't know."
"'Cause there's no way for that thing to really be your friend, and I really mean your friend, as in flesh and bone, and also the secret the Queen's been keeping all along, right?"
For lack of time and also because of an overdose of feeling, the Doctor's brain had not even considered that possibility.
"Much as I wish there was, I'm afraid the odds of that being true are really very small," he told her.
"Let's wait no more then," she told him sweetly. "Let's find out why she's wearing your friend's face, shall we?"
Clara squeezed his hand again, and the Doctor nodded gently before he let go of hers and turned to the table. Stretching his arm, he reached for the crocodile shears on the corner, and once he'd grabbed them, he held them in front of her face. Looking at one another's eyes just one more time, each of them lifted an index and directed it to one of the crocodile's jaws. Having pricked their fingers with those tiny but unbelievably sharp teeth, the Doctor immediately put the torture device back on the table and held Clara's hand again. Then, they both turned to face the siren, who had patiently been waiting for them to consummate the action that would take them to that other reality with her.
Before their minds started to lose their grip on their own reality, the Doctor looked back at Clara, and smiling softly, he said the only thing that always plucked up under similar circumstances.
"Geronimo!"
She smiled back at him and repeated that word herself.
The images of the events that had taken place while in the torture chamber lingered in their minds from the moment they started to regain consciousness, and as soon as Jack, the Doctors and Clara woke up, they noticed something that none of them, not even the Eleventh Doctor, had anticipated in the slightest.
All around them there were children laughing, and the echo of their laughter seemed to impregnate the air on the other side.
They tried to open their eyes but immediately shut them again as the incandescent light of the reality they were now in unexpectedly blinded them all. When they tried again, they protected their eyes by either putting a hand over them or by opening them slowly so that their pupils would gradually adapt to the light. Eventually, they managed to take a look at their surroundings, and each of them found the place they were now in to look a little bit too much like the Tower of London to really be a spaceship. On and on as the Eleventh Doctor had been going about mirrors and windows, there were none to be seen at all. The room was infinitely bigger than the torture chamber or the Zygons' lair. Two lines of columns that seemed to form a central passage helped to create the effect that it was divided into three completely different sections. No torches or candles could be found anywhere, but they were not necessary.
None of them could ever have imagined that they would show up in the middle of what appeared to be a heap of gold in the shape of coins and bars and countless jewels of all possible shapes and sizes, and the light that bathed the place in its entirety seemed to be emerging from the gold itself. Flanked by the four columns that stood in the exact centre of the room, a long piece of red velvet spread across the floor, and what they saw on top of it left them all as breathless as the myriad of gold treasures to be found all around them. Numerous crowns and golden orbs and golden sceptres with innumerable pearls and all sorts of precious stones embedded in them, a golden flask in the shape of an eagle, a golden salt container with the shape of a castle which also counted with a surprising number of encrusted jewels, stunning diamond and sapphire and ruby rings, gold bracelets with colourful and delicate engravings, silver-gilt spoons and plates occasionally set with pearls, golden spurs, swords holstered in the most ornate scabbards any of them had ever seen... They were all being exhibited on top of that place of honour in the room, and to their left, there was a majestic wooden chair embellished with golden drawings. It was a throne without the shadow of a doubt, although its peaked back was hidden underneath another surprising and overpowering object – a majestic robe in golden cloth onto which roses, thistles and shamrocks had been embroidered.
"But… This is wrong," the Eleventh Doctor muttered almost imperceptibly. "We should be inside a spaceship or a sickbay, so why are we are here? Why are we looking at a treasure?"
"Correct me if I'm wrong, Doctors," said Jack, "but even if this really is a spaceship, I think these are the Crown Jewels."
"Correct me if I'm wrong too, Doctors," said Clara, "but even if this really is a spaceship, it looks pretty much like St. John's Chapel."
"St. John's Chapel?" asked Jack.
"The oldest church in London, Captain," Clara told him, "and it happens to be in the Tower of London."
The Doctors' eyebrows shot up with the instant realisation that both Jack and Clara were absolutely right.
"What's going on here?" muttered the Tenth Doctor.
From behind the sublime wooden chair then came the childish laughter children they had heard upon waking up from her reality-crossing experience. Then, out of the blue, two very young boys who couldn't be much older than ten or eleven emerged from underneath the robe and started to run and run in circles around the throne, laughing as merrily as they could while playing with the swords they were wielding. Both children were impeccably dressed, the one that looked slightly taller was wearing purplish blue velvet clothes – a tunic and a long robe –, and the other, who was probably slightly younger, dark green velvet ones – a stuffed doublet, a short cloak, and a stuffed trunk-hose. They were also wearing blunt shoes and black stockings, and their stiff-brimmed hats covered their little golden and light brown heads.
"Who are you?" asked Jack, as tears started to well in his eyes.
None of the children seemed to be able to hear him or see them, but someone else had distinctly done both.
"Don't you know, sir?"
Darting their eyes in the direction the voice had come from, the Doctors and his two companions saw Edward de Vere, smiling as he had never smiled at all since they had met him. Behind him was the creature, to whom he immediately turned. She started singing again, only this time her song failed to be hypnotic, but even so, Edward kept listening to her attentively.
"Oh, what's this now? Have they suddenly become besties?" asked the Tenth Doctor, raising his upper lip with disdain, while the Eleventh Doctor decidedly strode beside the Earl and the creature.
"Can you understand what she's saying?" he desperately asked Edward.
"Yes sir," he replied. "And yet, I cannot recognize the language she is speaking, but nonetheless I seem to be able to understand her. In fact, sir, she has just said that she remembers you."
"Why has she taken that form?" the Doctor asked gravely. "Ask her!"
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
"Why has she taken that form?" he repeated, now infuriated. "That face, it doesn't belong to her, so why did she take it? You ask her that!"
The creature resumed her song again, her melancholic eyes now set on the Doctor.
"She says it belonged to someone she once met," Edward translated as he turned to her. "Someone brave and strong… Someone who only wanted to protect and look after her loved ones and would never give up. Someone… Someone like her."
"What?" the Doctor muttered. He narrowed his eyes and kept looking at the siren, trying to understand.
"Her name is Melusina, sir," said Edward, "and her story has been commonplace in our mythology for centuries, Doctor, but us, humans… We just got it wrong!"
"And what's that story?" asked Clara, right behind them.
"Oh, I've heard that legend…," said the Tenth Doctor, frowning. "Melusina was a water deity who lived in a river, and a young count fell in love with her when he heard her sing. They got married and had children, but then one day he discovered that she was a siren and rejected her, and that was when she disappeared..."
"He had married her and had children with her, and he hadn't notices that she was a siren?" asked Jack with a smirk.
"Legend has it she had human legs when she was out of water, Jack," the Tenth Doctor explained to him. "Have you not seen that film with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah?"
"However," said the Eleventh Doctor, turning to Clara, "after she left her husband's castle, still she was seen there every evening, entering her children's rooms to spend the night looking after them…"
"With all due respect, Doctors," said Edward, making him wake up from his daydream, "that's not the end of her story. Legend has it that Melusina is in fact an ancestor of the Kings and Queens of England."
"Now's when I'm completely lost again," said Clara.
"In the days of the Wars of the Roses, my lady," Edward went on, motioning towards her, "when the Houses of Lancaster and York were fighting for the throne of England, King Edward IV married a commoner, Elizabeth Woodville, the Queen's great-grandmother."
"Oh," the Doctors replied in unison, whilst the historical events that Edward was narrating to them got pictured in their minds.
"Elizabeth Woodville, my lady, was one of Melusina's descendants," Edward explained. "The Luxemburgs, her family on her mother's side, always claimed the mythological water goddess to be their ancestor."
"Except that she wasn't a mythological goddess at all," said Tenth Doctor. "She just happened to be an alien, and for some reason, really fond of reflections."
"I still don't understand," said Clara, looking up to Edward. "You said that Melusina wanted to protect her family, so what's she doing here now? Does the Queen need protection?"
"No, my lady," Edward replied. And then, lifting a hand and pointing to the children who were still happily playing around a throne with their swords, he went on. "But those two children do – they always have! And she has been their most devoted guardian for a very long time."
"But who are they?" asked Jack, turning her head to them as did Clara and the Doctors.
Silence filled the room for an instant until the truth dawned, first of all, upon the two Time Lords.
"Oh no, they can't be…" said the Tenth Doctor taking a deep breath, his eyes narrowing and his mouth agape.
"Oh yes, they are," replied the Eleventh Doctor, whose features mirrored his.
"Oh no, they can't be!" the Tenth Doctor repeated, shaking his head.
"Oh yes they are!" the Eleventh Doctor repeated in his turn, with a grin as immense as the ones that would suddenly find the way to his mouth whenever he discovered something otherworldly.
"Doctors, Captain, my lady Clara," said Edward solemnly, "you're seeing before you His Majesty King Edward V and his brother Prince Richard, Duke of York."
"What?!" exclaimed Jack.
"Edward and Richard as in… 'The Princes in the Tower'?" asked Clara, lowering her head and knitting her brows together.
"The very ones… Oh!" exclaimed the Eleventh Doctor. At long last, full realisation had hit him. Melusina had taken the form of that woman who once signed a contract with her, that woman who, like her, had only wanted to look after someone she loved more than anyone else in the world. Suddenly, he felt like dancing around the room to the grandiose music that had just started to sound inside his head.
"The Princes in the Tower!" exclaimed the Tenth Doctor, stunned. "Prince Edward, heir to the throne, who was awaiting his coronation after the death of his father, but was locked up in the Tower together with his brother, Prince Richard. After that, they were never seen again and nobody ever found out what had really happened to them. And since their uncle Richard proclaimed himself king, it's been presumed for centuries and centuries that he had them killed."
"That was King Richard III, my lady," Edward added, smiling sweetly at Clara.
"I know," she said, smiling back at him.
"The greatest murder mystery of all time…" said the Tenth Doctor in ecstasy, "and it was her!"
"She has been looking after her descendants for centuries, Doctor, ever since she was banished from their side," explained Edward, "and she has been here protecting the princes for over a thousand years."
"A thousand years! How is that even possible?" asked Jack. "You're saying those kids are Queen Elizabeth's great uncles, so I reckon they must've disappeared over a century ago…"
"Time works in a different way when you're in a different reality, Jack" the Tenth Doctor told his friend. "Even space does."
"And this place, Melusina said, is full of temporal distortions," added Edward.
"It is… It definitely is!" exclaimed Clara, as the memory of Professor River Song saying those exact words to her came back to her mind.
"Melusina has also said that she has tried many times to take the princes with her to the stars, sirs, and each of those times, to no avail," Edward added.
"And I think I know why," said the Tenth Doctor. "Like the walls of a labyrinth, those temporal distortions must've suddenly built up around her spaceship, blocking its way out. She must've been trapped here ever since, jumping from one reality to another, and another, and another, for over a thousand years…"
"But the children… How can they be a thousand years old and still be children?" asked Clara.
"Because she put them into stasis," said the Eleventh Doctor. "That's what she always does to the people she takes with her. It's the only way she can save those who are about to die."
"So… She truly saved them," said Clara, her voice full of emotion. "Whoever was trying to kill them, she saved them from their deaths."
"That was what she said, my lady," Edward told her.
"And what about the people who disappeared from the Tower?" asked Jack. "Where are they?"
"They are also here, Captain," Edward told him. "I have seen them. They are all safe."
"We can help you get back home," said the Tenth Doctor, sauntering towards Melusina. "We can help lower those temporal walls surrounding your spaceship so that you can go home."
"Where exactly is your home?" asked the Eleventh Doctor, narrowing his eyes and crossing his arms on his chest as he drank her in.
"She said she is an Aurean, sir," Edward told him, "although the meaning of that word escapes me I am afraid. Still, she mentioned being inside a star…"
"What sort of a star?" asked the Tenth Doctor.
"A dying star, sir."
"A supernova… Of course!" exclaimed the Eleventh Doctor while his lips curled into a smile. "An Aurean… She's an Aurean! Of course! What else could she be? Isn't she just fascinating?"
"Doctor," said Clara, her heart loving the way he was grinning now that he was feeling utterly spellbound, but her brain plainly wanting to know more, "could you please elaborate?"
"When a star is dying, Clara," he expeditiously explained, his eyes still locked with Melusina's, "gold is made inside of it."
"Gold?" asked Jack.
"Yes," the Tenth Doctor went on. "Gold which, when the star finally explodes, is scattered all around the universe and left floating free in space."
"That's her home after the supernova explosion," continued the Eleventh Doctor. "The whole universe!"
"But before that explosion," said the Tenth Doctor, "something is born out of that gold."
"And that would be, the Aureans themselves," exclaimed the Eleventh Doctor, who at that point seemed to be enjoying his own explanation more than anybody else in the room. "They are particles of gold that literally come to life, and they come to life for a very simple reason – to look after the dying star."
"Looks like they're nurses after all, aren't they?" the Tenth Doctor concluded, darting his proud eyes to his future self and smiling.
"Then all that's left for us to do now is help her get out of here and back to the stars," said Jack.
"Yes," said the Eleventh Doctor. "But now she needs to understand there are terms and conditions to do that." He then turned to Melusina, and staring into her eyes, which were now identical to those of his beloved Amelia Pond, he made his meaning as clear as possible. "You can take the princes with you, Melusina. They're your family, your descendants, and no one else on this planet has earned the right to look after them more than you have. But the others… I know you mean well, but you can't take them."
Looking at the Doctor in a silence that was most unusual for a singing alien creature, Melusina reached out her hand to him.
"We need to sign another contract?" asked her the Eleventh Doctor.
"Another, you said?" asked the Tenth Doctor.
"A consent form, more like," replied the Doctor. "She will let the others stay if one of us takes full responsibility."
"But we can't do that, Chinny," replied the Tenth Doctor. "There must be other things we can do, but we definitely mustn't do that."
"But they've got families that love them..." told him the Eleventh Doctor. "She'll take them with her if we don't do it."
"But they are likely to be tortured and some might even be executed if we do!" shouted the Tenth Doctor.
"Well, here he comes again… The rule-observing Doctor!" said the older Time Lord with sarcasm.
"I'm not observing the rules this time, Chinny!" said the Tenth Doctor, visibly angry. "In fact, observing the rules is the opposite of what I'm doing right now… I'm coming up with a plan!"
"Oh yes, some plan you've got!" the Eleventh Doctor reproached him. "Sending them off to outer space, away from their homes and their loved ones!"
"Then tell me, how is that not better than what's really awaiting them if they stay?"
"What I'm saying, Sandshoes, is let's do something about that! Ideas would certainly be most welcome!"
"Doctors, Doctors," said Jack to everyone's relief. They had been quarrelling practically from the moment they got together, but now things seemed to be getting heated as Clara or Jack had not seen before. "No need to argue, Docs. Not anymore. Look!"
The Doctors took a look around and saw Clara standing right in front of Melusina. They kept looking up at each other while the palms of their right hands touched the other's and a bright ring of a warm orange light encircled them. They both remained like that for a few seconds, until the light of the circle vanished. Then, Melusina smiled at Clara softly, which was something she had not done at all since they had met her, and Clara felt how the warmth of her terribly human gaze was her means to express her gratefulness. The magical creature's eyes then darted to the children, who were smiling at her as they kept running up and jumping from the heaps of gold that were piled up all over the room.
Turning away from Clara, Melusina slowly floated towards the throne. Upon reaching it, she sat down, and no sooner had the two boys seen her sitting there than they ran to her. Wrapping her arms around them, she seated them on her knees and held them close to her as they hugged her and buried their shiny little faces in her long red hair.
"They're safe now," said Clara, whose big brown eyes had become soaked with tears as she witnessed that scene. "They're all safe now, aren't they?"
"Oh Clara," muttered the Tenth Doctor, sounding as if he was absolutely out of breath, "what have you done?"