Darkness
Clara kept looking back to ensure the Time Lords hadn't wandered off again – namely, that the Doctor hadn't, as she found him mainly to blame for the current situation. Of course, given Adelaide hadn't stopped him, the Time Lady was also responsible, but the Doctor needed more scolding at the moment. "Courtney Woods. She has gone crazy. She's uncontrollable. She took your psychic paper. She's been using it as fake ID."
"To get into museums?" the Doctor said, honestly sounding serious.
Clara blinked at that. "No, no, no. To buy White Lightning or alcopops or whatever."
The Doctor shook his head. "I've no idea what you're talking about. What...what is Courtney Woods?"
"Disruptive influence?" Adelaide offered. "She was in the TARDIS."
"Doing what?"
"Throwing up."
He nodded. "Oh, her. Oh, that was ages ago."
"For us, Doctor. Not for Courtney or Clara."
Clara sighed. "Look, she says that you told her that she wasn't special."
"Rubbish."
"She says that's what sent her off the rails." They'd reached where they'd left the TARDIS, a supply cupboard like always. The Doctor scoffed. "Doctor, I know, I know. But I know that Adelaide has told you that you say something like that to somebody, it hurts. Especially if you're somebody of her age, especially if you're you. Doctor, it can affect her whole life."
The Doctor scoffed again, all of them entering the TARDIS to find Courtney standing at the console. "Oi! Give over!"
Courtney held up paper towels. "I got stuff to clean up with."
The Doctor frowned. "What?"
"And I got these from the chemist." She held up her wrists.
"Vortex manipulators?"
"Travel sickness."
"Good." The Doctor nodded. "Because Adelaide doesn't like people being sick in the TARDIS. No being sick. But as many manners as you can manage, she likes that. And no hanky-panky."
Clara's eyes widened. "Doctor!"
"Sorry," he shrugged, "that's the rules."
Clara moved towards Courtney. "Look, Courtney, you're not going to be needing those because you're not going to be doing any traveling. Adelaide, make the Doctor tell her."
"Tell her what?"
Adelaide turned to the Doctor. She hadn't heard the Doctor tell Courtney this originally, so she certainly hadn't been happy when Clara had told them about it...and that the Doctor hadn't told her himself. "Tell her she's special."
"Do I have to?"
Clara stepped forward. "Do you really think I'm not special? You can't just take me away like that. It's like you kicked a big hole in the side of my life. You really think it? I'm nothing? I'm not special?"
The Doctor made to scoff again, but Adelaide raised her eyebrows at him. He turned to Courtney. "How'd you like to be the first woman on the moon? Is that special enough for you."
Courtney shrugged. "Yeah, alright."
He grinned. "Okay. Now we can do something interesting." He ran to the console, ignoring Clara's shouts as he set them all into motion.
|C-S|
The fact they had to use the spacesuits from Mars was not a fact that went unnoticed by Clara. She'd never actually heard the Time Lords discuss what had happened, just get the general sense that it had been with Caroline and it had been notably bad. It was obvious that the two of them were trying to ignore where the suits were from as they both suddenly got far tenser around each other while they all used the suits.
She would have recommended they just pick somewhere else, but Courtney was looking forward to the moon and the Time Lords were not people easily convinced.
They exited the TARDIS into what looked like a storage area. "This isn't the moon." Courtney frowned. "Where are we?"
The Doctor looked around. "On a recycled space shuttle. 2049, judging by that prototype version of the Bennett oscillator." He nodded at a particular thing and they all removed their helmets.
"Where's the gravity coming from?" Adelaide mumbled, bouncing a bit in place to test it.
Clara frowned at a bit of writing on the cylinders that surrounded them, a few American flag drawings dotted among them. "What are they?"
The Doctor flashed them with a sonic. "About a hundred nuclear bombs." An alarm sounded and the Doctor moved towards the window. "Ah. We're on our way to the moon. Check that." He stepped back. "We're about to crash into it! Hold on! Hold on!"
They all grabbed onto cargo nets around the room, Clara holding onto Courtney. "Why didn't you just tell her you didn't mean it?"
The room shook as the shuttle hit the surface, making a horrible noise until it finally came to a stop. The door opened and three people, led by a woman, strode in. "Who the hell do you think you are?" the woman held up a gun at them.
Adelaide resisted the urge to comment on the woman's manners, which seemed to shock Clara – and the Doctor if he'd been paying attention to her at that moment.
"Why have you got all these nuclear bombs?"
"I'm not going to give you another chance."
"Oh?" the Doctor snorted. "Well, you're just going to have to shoot us, then. Shoot the little girl first." He gestured at Courtney.
"What?"
"Yes. She doesn't want to stand there watching us getting shot, does she? She'll be terrified. Girl first, then her teacher, then me, and then Adelaide. You'll have to spend a lot of time shooting the last two because we'll keep on regenerating." He frowned. "In fact, I'm not entirely sure that I won't keep on regenerating forever, especially when I keep sacrificing myself for Adelaide."
"Maybe don't tell them that," Adelaide mumbled, bouncing in place again.
"Adelaide, what are you doing?" Clara asked, frowning.
"Gravity test."
"So, it'll be very time-consuming and messy, and rather wasteful," the Doctor continued, "because I think Adelaide and I might just possibly be able to help you. You see, we're super-intelligent alien beings who fly in time and space. Are you going to shoot us?"
The woman, after hesitating for a moment, lowered the gun. "No."
"Good. Why have you got all these nuclear bombs? No, no, no. Easier question. What's wrong with my yo-yo?" he pulled a yo-yo from his suit pocket.
Clara looked at Adelaide expecting comradeship at the Doctor's antics, but the Time Lady didn't look surprised. "Doctor, it goes up and down."
"Exactly," Adelaide said.
The human's eyes widened. "Ah."
The Doctor pointed at her. "Ah ha. We should be bouncing about this cabin like little fluffy clouds. But we're not. What is the matter with the moon?"
The woman shook her head. "Nobody knows."
Clara eyed the Time Lords. "Do you know what's wrong with the moon?"
"It's put on weight."
"How can the moon put on weight?"
"Oh, lots of ways." He shrugged. "Gravity bombs, axis alignment systems, planet shellers."
"So it's alien."
Adelaide frowned. "There must be chaos on Earth. The tides will be so high that they drown whole cities."
The woman nodded. "Yeah."
"So what are you doing about it?" The woman took a case off the wall. "This?"
"That's what you do with aliens, isn't it? Blow them up?"
|C-S|
The Doctor managed to convince the woman, Lundvik, that Courtney should be the first one to walk on the moon. "Wow. Wow! One small thing for a thing. One enormous thing for a thingy thing."
Lundvik sighed. "So much for history." She and the rest of the crew led the way towards a large modular settlement in a nearby crater, with Courtney lagging behind a bit in order to take some pictures of her surroundings. "There was a mining survey, Mexicans. Something happened up here. Nobody knows what. That's when the trouble began back on Earth. High tide everywhere at once. The greatest natural disaster in history." They reached the airlock, which was wide open.
"Cobwebs?" Clara nodded at the things on the edges of the door.
"Henry, go back and prime the bombs."
"Er...is there any instructions?"
"There's a switch on each of them. The light goes red."
"They won't go off?"
"No, not till I fiddle with this thing." Lundvik held up the case.
Henry nodded, still looking worried. "Okay." He hurried back to the shuttle, which did not look as though it had properly survived the crash.
Lundvik turned to the rest of them, the Doctor already at the doorway scanning the webs. "Shall we?"
"Is that the best you could get?" the Doctor said, not looking at Adelaide when he knew that she'd be raising her eyebrows.
Lundvik shrugged. "Second-hand space shuttle, third-hand astronauts." She was the first one inside the module, with Adelaide ending up between her and the Doctor. The Time Lord kept a tight grip on her hand as they moved through the dark, no one but Lundvik having a torch.
They closed the door to the corridor behind them and Adelaide made a note to always carry a torch with her in the future. "How many people here?" the Doctor asked, not moving far away from Adelaide as he examined the small room.
"Four. Minera Luna San Pedro. It was privately financed. They were doing a mineral survey up here."
Clara passed Adelaide a large torch which, thankfully worked. "Any messages?"
"Pretty much all the satellites had been whacked out of orbit," one of the other crew members said. "They managed to send back some screams."
"So then you came up here to rescue them with your bombs?"
"Not quite."
"They disappeared ten years ago."
The Doctor frowned. "Nobody came?"
"There was no shuttle."
"You had one."
"It was in a museum. They'd cut the back off it so kids could ride in it. We'd stopped going into space. Nobody cared. Not until..."
She was cut off by Courtney's scream. "Courtney!" Clara shouted, rushing off in the direction the girl had wandered. She was standing opposite a spacesuit completely encased in a cocoon. "Oh my God. Tell me there wasn't anyone inside that thing."
The Doctor, who'd run over too, scanned the body. "I could, but it wouldn't make it true, and Adelaide prefers..."
"Not the time, Doctor," Adelaide mumbled, making him step back by her side again. It had been a long time since she'd been in darkness or a space suit for this long. Since she'd needed the Doctor nearby to keep her from worrying too much. The Doctor tried to keep their adventures in some sort of light and out of the vacuum of space, though sometimes it couldn't be helped. She especially didn't like that they were in a group of practical strangers holding hands; in general, this was too much for her.
Now, she tolerated it for the sake of having the Doctor near her.
Especially when they were currently walking about a dark abandoned spaceship on the moon with no way to breathe if something horribly malfunctioned.
"I'll get some power back on," one of the crew said, moving past them.
"Come on," Clara moved Courtney away. "Now, Courtney, come here. Don't look. You all right?"
"I'm okay."
Together, the Time Lords cut the corpse down. Clara moved Courtney further away, trying to shelter the girl from this as best she could. "Hey. Look. Look at me. Look. It's all right if you're not."
Courtney shook her head. "I'm fine. What did it?"
"Perhaps something trying to determine how you're put together," Adelaide mumbled. "Or how you taste."
Courtney took in a sharp breath. "Do we have guns?"
Lundvik shook her head. "Not unless you brought some."
The Doctor shrugged. "Chicken, apparently." All of the lights turned on with a hum. "Save the air." They all took off their helmets, Adelaide greatly relishing the influx of oxygen to calm her slightly panicked brain.
She may love learning about space, but that didn't mean she was particularly a fan of walking around it in the dark.
The Doctor moved towards a computer console, pulling up the survey records. "They didn't find anything."
Lundvik glanced over at him. "Eh?"
"The Mexicans. They didn't find any minerals on the moon at all. Nada."
Adelaide went over to a table, covered in photographs of the moon. "Oh."
"Oh?"
"Lines of tectonic stress."
Lundvik shook her head. "That's the Mare Fecunditatis. It's been there since the Apollo days. It's always been there."
"No, these are much bigger." She started to go through the other photos, holding them up for the Doctor and the others to see. "Sea of Tranquillity. Sea of Nectar. Sea of Ingenuity. Sea of Crises."
"Meaning?"
The lights flickered. "Meaning, Clara," the Doctor said, "that the moon, this little planetoid that's been tagging along beside you for a hundred million years, which gives you light at night and seas to sail on, is in the process of falling to bits."
There was a bang and a rumble and the entire room started to shake. Soon, a high-pitched sound and a scuttling sound joined the fracas until everything stilled again, though the lights were off again. And something was still moving around them.
"What the hell was that?"
"Duke, is that you?" Lundvik called into her comm..
"I don't sound anything like that."
"Can you try and get the lights back on?"
"That's what I'm doing."
"Torch." The Doctor grabbed Lundvik's, moving around the room. "Whatever it is, it's in here." He moved closer to an adjoining corridor, tracking the sound. "I think we've found your alien." A gigantic spider stepped into the corridor. "Back, back, back! We need a door. A door, a door!"
"Here! Here!" Clara ran to it. "The door's locked."
"Come on, come on! There's no power to work it. Come on!"
"Doctor."
Adelaide pulled Clara and Courtney down behind a table. "Stay still. It's sensing fast movement, it can't see you."
The Doctor nodded. "There must be another exit through there." He flashed his torch in the direction." They all started to move. "Slowly. Slowly." They could hear the spider moving around them. "Head to that exit. Slowly. Slowly. Slowly. Slowly." They moved across the room as carefully as they could. "Gently, gently. When I say run, run."
Lundvik frowned. "Who made you the boss?" Which did not help Adelaide at that moment, because while this wasn't a bus, it was horribly close.
"Well, you say run, then." The Doctor, thankfully, didn't push it.
But Lundvik gasped. "Duke!" The man had emerged from the corridor and, before he could do anything, was attacked by the spider. "Duke!"
One of the doors opened. "Run! We have power. Run!"
"Quick, it's shutting." The door shut before Courtney could make it through, the girl getting trapped in the center of the room.
"Miss!"
Clara ran back to the door, trying to get it to open again. "Courtney! Courtney!"
"Miss!"
Somehow, the gravity in the room was shut off and Courtney was floating in the dark. "Courtney! The power's gone again."
"It's killed him. It's coming in here! Doctor, it's coming in here!"
The Doctor rushed up beside Clara, trying to use his sonic to open the door. "You'll be okay!"
Lundvik, standing back a bit with Adelaide as the Time Lady attempted to keep herself calm, tried to use her comm. "Henry? Henry?"
"Courtney, look at me. Look at me! Courtney!" The spider had started to move across the ceiling towards where Courtney was hovering. "Try and get to the door! Try and get yourself down here." He managed to get the glass pane from the door. "Courtney, grab my yo-yo!" He tossed the yo-yo through the pane, Courtney managing to grab it, just as gravity returned to the room and she fell to the floor.
The spider fell with her, lunging, and Courtney screamed. She grabbed something from her bag, spraying it on the creature.
Clara rushed over to her, hugging her. "Courtney."
Courtney laughed, holding up the bottle to show the Time Lords once they'd turned to look at her. Honestly, the Doctor hadn't rushed to the human immediately, instead turning back to Adelaide. They hadn't paused at all, simply making eye contact before stepping back to join the rest of the group. "Kills ninety-nine percent of all known germs."
Adelaide nodded. "Good choice."
The Doctor took Adelaide's hand for a second. "Just don't try that at home, okay?"
Clara quickly looked her over. "You all right?"
"Why did I just fly? This is nuts."
Adelaide knelt beside the spider, sonicing it quickly. "A prokaryotic unicellular lifeform with non-chromosomal DNA..."
Clara blinked. "Adelaide?"
The Time Lady shook her head. "Sorry. It's a germ. You flew because that 1.3 billion tons of unstable mass shifted." She stood again.
Courtney moved closer to Clara. "I'm scared, Miss."
Lundvik stepped up to Duke's body, speaking quietly. "He'd just had a grand-daughter. Elina. She was his first. He was my teacher. He taught me how to fly. We were both given the sack on the same day."
The Time Lords nodded. "Which way to the Mare Fecunditatis?"
"Please, can I go home now?" Courtney shook her head. "I'm really...I'm really sorry, but I'd like to go home."
|C-S|
They walked in single file across the moon, Adelaide leading the way.
"Henry, come in," Lundvik was still trying to speak to the man she'd sent off at the beginning. "If you don't mind, Henry, come in."
Clara hurried forward to speak to the Doctor. "Doctor, this is dangerous now."
"It was dangerous before," he shrugged. "Everything's dangerous if you want it to be. Eating chips is dangerous. Crossing the road. It's no way to live your life. Tell her. You're supposed to be teaching her."
"Adelaide?" Clara asked.
The Time Lady glanced back. "He's technically correct. There's a reason I ran in the first place."
Clara sighed. "Look, I have a duty of care, okay? You know what that is?"
"Course we know what a duty of care is," the Doctor scoffed. "What are you suggesting? She's fine." He looked back at Courtney. "What are you, thirty-five?"
"Fifteen!"
Clara shook her head at the Time Lord.
|C-S|
The Doctor moved backward out of the console after depositing Courtney inside. "Now, don't touch anything."
Courtney paused at the console. "You got any games?"
"Oh, don't be so stupid!" the Doctor scoffed.
"Can I get reception up here?" Courtney held up her phone, but the Doctor had already stepped out of the TARDIS and locked the doors.
Clara frowned at him as he did that. "Why are you shutting her in? We don't need to stay, do we?"
"Eh?" the Doctor looked up, having glanced over at where Lundvik was messing with the bombs. Adelaide was standing next to Clara, close to the Doctor now, and he took her hand.
"It's obvious, isn't it? The moon doesn't break up."
"How do you know?"
Clara raised her eyebrows. "Because I've been in the future and the moon is still there. I think. You know the moon is still there, right?"
The Doctor shrugged. "Maybe it isn't the moon. Maybe it's a hologram or a big painting, or a special effect. Maybe it's a completely different moon."
"But you would know."
"We would?"
Clara nodded. "If the moon fell to bits in 2049, somebody would've mentioned it. It would have come up in conversation. So it doesn't break up. So the world doesn't end. So, let's just get in the TARDIS and go."
"Clara, there are some moments in time that Adelaide and I simply can't see," the Doctor said, suddenly truly serious. "Little eye-blinks. They don't look the same as other things. They're not clear. They're fuzzy, they're grey. Little moments in which big things are decided. And this is one of them. Just now, we can't tell what happens to the moon, because whatever happens to the moon hasn't been decided yet. And it's going to be decided here and now. Which very much sounds as though it's up to us."
Lundvik stepped up to the three of them. "None of you are going anywhere. I've lost my crew. We were the last astronauts. This is the last shuttle, these are the last nuclear bombs. We're the last chance for Earth, and you're staying to help me."
The Doctor nodded at the woman. "Decision made."
"Yeah."
A/N: Poor Adelaide, this entire episode won't be easy for her :(