Don't go just yet. The Doctor wanted to say. How many times had he said so in his very long life? Enough times he could predict her future with few blank spots. She would be perfect for him and him for her, filling their days with the heady drugs of adventure and danger. And then it would end. Abruptly. If she lived long enough he would have to end it, leaving her enough time to settle down to a normal life and start a family, find a new purpose in life. At least that's what he'd tell himself that was the reason, and it was to some extent, but mostly it was not wanting to see her decay, to love a mayfly was one thing, to watch it die another.

Heartache for him, a brilliant life for her.

That didn't happen often.

The Doctor watched her inspect the TARDIS for the first time and wondered about her far more likely end: a violent death.

Maybe the spaceship she was on would blow up. Maybe his DNA would rip her mind apart. Maybe she would step in front of a bullet for him. All these things happened to other companions. When they happened to her, she wouldn't blame him. None of them did, not outright at least, but it would be his fault, always, for being too weak, for saying 'don't go yet. Come with me."

He cleared his throat. "Can I drop you off somewhere? Where's home?

"At the moment it's the Hotel Leon a few blocks from where you found me. I travel too much to justify a house."

"Really?"

"Yeah, my parents were travel junkies, never spent long enough in one place to develop any particular loyalty to it."

She was too perfect for him. Some companions went with him to ease the boredom of their mundane lives, but they grew tired of their new life as quickly as their old one and had to stop just as he was unable to. Here was a woman with the same Traveler's blood.

Stay focused, he told himself, home is where the heart is. Family. "Where are they now?"

"From what I'm told they're in A Better Place."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"Yeah."

"So, Hotel Leon, it is." He spun a dial and with a grinding groan and a thump, they arrived. "Don't do any heavy lifting for 24 hours, drink plenty of fluids, oh, and quit visiting dark allies in the middle of the night. Seriously, what were you thinking?"

"'How lovely your face looks encircled in the soft moonlight.'"

"Eh?"

"From La Boheme, have you seen it?" She said, pointing to the advert across the street, preferring to keep herself to herself.

"I was there at the premiere." He said.

"Right. Goodnight Doctor." She stepped out and turned around. "Huh. It's smaller on the outside."

"No. It's bigger on the inside."

She waited for an explanation that didn't come. She shrugged, accepting the refusal since she did the same. "Whatever floats your boat, big guy…"

'Come with me.' The urge to say it was stronger now, insistent now that her departure from his life forever was imminent. She would never know how lucky she was he kept silent. He would not destroy this glowing life.

"I never said thank you."

"It was nothing."

"I guess this is goodbye."

"See you around." He watched her cross the street. "Have a fantastic life, Meg." He closed the door and locked it. Turning around to set the coordinates for his next trip he saw her shirt on the console. He hadn't given it back since he took it from her in the warehouse. It was half caked in blood, probably ruined, but he took it up and went to the door to give it back anyway. He didn't want the reminder.

He expected to rush to the hotel before she disappeared into a hotel room. He didn't even know her last name. But it turned out, finding her was not the problem. She was still where he last saw her, face down on the concrete.

He ran to her and turned her over. "Run." She was coming out of the faint, murmuring, "Monsters."

"It's okay, Meg. The monster is gone now." Wait. He thought. Monsters? As in plural?

The Doctor wondered if he heard right, or if subconsciously she grouped him in the same category as the Verloc. He remembered her beautiful face twist in an ugly way when she saw the Verloc wasn't human.

Meg's eyes opened.

"Hello." He said brightly.

"Hmmm." She moaned and tried to stand.

"Easy."

"I'm fine. Blood loss equals lightheadedness. I'll eat something and – ow!"

The Doctor tried to help her to stand when she yanked her hand back with a hiss. He took her hand, gently this time, and tilted it to the light. The flesh around a small pinprick on her palm was an angry red and puffy to the point of bursting.

"When did you get this?" he asked. He hadn't noticed it before.

"In the fight, I think. One of them shot this dart at me, and it sorta disappeared."

"You didn't think I might need to know something like that?"

"I forgot about it till now." Meg defended. "I kinda had other things on my mind."

"Come back inside. I'm going to see what's causing this infection; it's too quick to be normal."

"Do you think it's flesh-eating bacteria?" she asked with far less fear than he felt a person in her position should feel.

"Maybe." He admitted. "But I have just the thing for that."

He waited for the results with impatience. The swelling was going down quickly. If she hadn't passed out from the blood loss right when she did, he wouldn't have noticed it. That it looked no more dangerous now than a bee sting didn't ease his mind one bit.

With a ping, the computer announced it had a result.

Meg looked over his shoulder at the screen, but it was nothing but geometric shapes, mostly hexagons, and concentric circles. "What does it mean?"

"Lambda." He said, gripping the sides of the screen till his knuckles were white. Why Lambda? There were several diseases terrorists used, but Lambda was not one of them. It was too contagious, too deadly. Terrorists made statements of power, but it was self-defeating to kill everyone – possibly themselves along with their victims.

"So what's Lambda?" Meg asked.

He turned around and put his hands on her shoulders. Lambda was used for the extermination of entire worlds, or if the world had space travel, entire quadrants.

"Okay, it's bad. How bad is it?" Meg asked.

"I will find a cure, Meg. I won't let you die." He jumped to the console and started flipping switches and setting coordinates.

"Verlocs don't settle down – and I didn't mean what I said back there about him being abandoned, I was just revving him up. He was in his prime which means there have to be others out there and some form of transportation. So-" the TARDIS lurched with a thump. "Have you ever been in space before?"

"Where are we?" Meg asked, frozen. She knew instinctively they were no longer on Earth even without the Doctor's question. There was a tingling along her skin like a static discharge, subtle and easily ignored, but all the same, it rubbed her the wrong way.

"The Verloc's ship right above where we were and about…" he double checked the computer screen. "Twenty-eight and a half minutes in your future."

"Twenty-eight?" she wondered about the significance of twenty-eight and a half minutes.

He shrugged. "It happens sometimes — half an hour's nothing. I, er, accidentally went twelve months in Rose's – a friend of mine – future instead of twelve hours. Difficult day, her mum called the coppers on me."

"And there are more of those things that attacked me outside that door?"

"Nope. Abandoned hallway, completely deserted… tell you what I'll poke my head out first." He offered, forgetting the number of times he'd walked into a circle of soldiers with weapons aimed at his head. He poked his head out the doors then cheerily announced they were alone. But the Doctor and Meg were not as alone as they thought…