Decisions

The Doctor frowned as they looked at the Mexicans' survey and sample equipment. "What is killing the moon?" he mumbled.

"How can the moon die, though?" Clara asked.

"Everything does, sooner or later."

"Can we save it?"

Adelaide shrugged. "Depends what's killing it."

"There are the other three," Lundvik pointed at the spacesuits lying among the abandoned equipment. They hurried down to them, taking care to note the large cobwebs and cracks.

"Is it those germ things, then? Are they like cockroaches? Is it...is it an infestation?"

"Is it?" Lundvik looked at them.

"Well, we've only seen one of them. It would take an awful lot more to cause the moon to put on 1.3 billion tons."

One of the spiders launched out of a crack at the Doctor, forcing him back as it attacked his helmet. Clara grabbed Courtney's disinfectant, but Lundvik stopped her. "It's a vacuum. It won't work."

Adelaide and Lundvik grabbed the spider and managed to pull it off the Doctor, making it hurry back into the crack.

"Well, that makes two," the Doctor said, blinking a bit and trying to look into the crack it had vanished into.

Clara blinked. "Sunlight?"

Adelaide frowned at her. "Sunlight?"

"If they're germs. My nan says it's the best disinfectant there is."

"Shine your light down there," the Doctor said.

Lundvik came over, using her torch to reveal the thousands of spiders inside. "Where have they come from?"

"Maybe they've been there all the time." The Doctor held a hand in, feeling the air. "It's warmish. They're multiplying, feeding, evolving."

The group stepped back quickly, moving back from the crack. "If the moon breaks up, it'll kill us all in about forty-five minutes," Lundvik said, looking at the Time Lords.

"I agree. Unless something else is going on." The Doctor flicked his yo-yo into another nearby fissure and made a face when it came back visibly wet.

Lundvik frowned. "There's no water on the moon."

The Doctor scanned it. "It's not water. It's amniotic fluid. The stuff that life comes from." He looked to Adelaide. "I've got to go down there."

"Doctor..." Lundvik said.

The Time Lord, nodding to Adelaide, had already moved towards the fissure. "Adelaide, get them back to the shuttle. Lundvik, get your bombs ready. Clara, get to the TARDIS. Get safe. Get Courtney safe. I will be back." He grabbed the germ spray from Clara.

"What? No. Doctor. Doctor!" He'd already jumped. Clara ran forwards, but Adelaide grabbed her shoulder to keep her back.

Honestly, Adelaide was annoyed that the Doctor was the one who got to go into the hole, but the fact it was clearly filled with some sort of liquid made it easier to tolerate. "He'll be back," she told Lundvik and Clara, hoping it was true.

She didn't want to have to jump down into the hole to save him.

"Miss?" Courtney called through Clara's comm. "Come in."

"Courtney?"

"I'm bored. When are you coming back?"

Clara glanced at Adelaide. "We're on our way. What are you doing?"

"Putting some pictures on Tumblr," Courtney said.

Clara's eyes widened. "No! Courtney, don't put any photos on Tumblr!"

Lundvik shrugged. "My granny used to put things on Tumblr." The ground shook, making them all stumble, but Lundvik spotted something a bit away. "There he is!" she rushed over to it, Clara and Adelaide following.

It was Henry, or what was left of him. His helmet had been opened, but he'd become a skeleton.

"Was that where we landed?" Clara asked Adelaide, pointing to where the shuttle was. There were more cracks now, making the area almost unrecognizable. "It looks so different."

"It's going down!" the cracks grew until the ship tumbled into the ravine.

"Courtney!" Clara lunged forward.

Lundvik took a deep breath. "We're going to have to take cover. We're running out of oxygen."

Clara spun to Adelaide. "Courtney."

But they were all interrupted by the Doctor appearing behind Clara, completely covered in the amniotic liquid but grinning. "Today's the day, humankind!"

|C-S|

They returned to the module, the Doctor still attempting to find a reasonable excuse to give Lundvik as to why he and Adelaide had to have a private conversation. A long private conversation, given what he'd just found. "Where's the TARDIS?" Clara asked them, not at all close to being ready to let it go.

"She's in the shuttle, isn't she?" the Doctor shrugged, moving to the computers again. "She'll turn up."

"Last time you said that, she turned up on the wrong side of the planet."

He glanced at her. "You two have never gotten on, have you?" He mouthed 'old cow', glancing at Adelaide.

Clara just sighed. "Look, we need to know where Courtney is."

"Courtney is safe." Clara raised her eyebrows. "Well, do you have her phone number?"

"No, no, no. Of course I don't have her phone number."

"Does the school?" Adelaide asked, pulling out her phone. "The secretary?"

"I can't." Clara shook her head. "The secretary hates me. She thinks I gave her a packet of TENA Lady for Secret Santa. Look, Courtney's posting stuff on Tumblr. Doesn't that know where you are?"

Lundvik shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not a historian."

"Phone, please," the Doctor said to Adelaide, the two moving to actually look at what Courtney had been posting. "Oh, she can't post that. She can't put pictures of us online." He quickly soniced her phone before one of the wall monitors, bringing up an image of Courtney.

"Yeah?"

"You can't put pictures of us online."

Clara, however, had larger concerns at the moment. "Are you okay?"

"Er, I'm fine. What's up?"

Lundvik stepped closer to the Doctor. "You said you know what the problem is."

The Doctor sighed. He'd wanted to tell Adelaide first. "Yes, yes. It's a rather big problem."

"Okay, do you care to share it with the class?"

"Well, I had a little hypothesis, which I know Adelaide shared. The seismic activity, the surface breaking up, the variable mass, the increase in gravity, the fluid..." he looked at Adelaide and was relieved to see her nodding. This was one of the reasons he'd wanted to tell her first, they hadn't had a chance to discuss anything that they'd found so far. "I scanned what's down there." He moved to the center of the room, moving a mobile console and using it to project an image of the moon as it currently was. "The moon isn't breaking apart. Well, actually, it is breaking apart, and rather quickly. We've got about an hour and a half. But that isn't the problem. It's not infested."

"What are they, then, those things?" Courtney called, still there.

"Bacteria," Adelaide said. "Small bacteria living on something that weighs about 1.3 billion tons."

The Doctor nodded. "Something that's living. Something growing."

"Growing?"

"That." The Doctor flicked the sonic to switch the image of a baby alien curled inside the moon.

"That lives under the moon?"

"No."

"What?"

"That doesn't live under the moon. That is the moon."

Lundvik shook her head. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"The moon isn't breaking apart. The moon is hatching."

Clara blinked. "Huh?"

"The moon's an egg!"

"Has it...er...has it always been an egg?"

He nodded. "Yes, for a hundred million years or so. Just...just growing. Just getting ready to be born."

"Okay. So the moon has never been the moon?"

"No, no, no, no. It's never been dead. It's just taking a long time to come alive."

"Is it a chicken?" Courtney called.

The Doctor frowned. "No!"

"Cos, for a chicken to have laid an egg that big..."

"Courtney, don't spoil the moment."

"Doctor, don't scold a child."

Clara allowed herself a quick smile at Adelaide for that. "Adelaide, what is it?"

That hardened Adelaide's expression ever-so-slightly, but it was enough that Clara had to blink in a bit of shock. "It's unique and possibly the only one of its kind in the universe. Utterly beautiful."

"How do we kill it?" Lundvik asked, extremely blunted. Of course. She was a human, after all. Adelaide was all too aware of what humans would do when threatened.

Clara gasped. "Why'd you want to kill it?"

"It's a little baby!" Courtney agreed.

"Doctor, Adelaide, how do we kill it?"

"Kill the moon?" Lundvik nodded. He flicked off the hologram. "Kill the moon. Well, you have about a hundred of the best man-made nuclear weapons, if they still work. If that's what you want to do."

"Doctor, wait..."

"Will that do it?"

"A hundred nuclear bombs set off directly above a living, vulnerable creature?" Adelaide asked. "Yes. It'd never see light."

"And then what? Will the moon still break up? You said...you said we had an hour and a half?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Well, there'll be nothing to make it break up. There will be nothing trying to force its way out. The gravity of the little dead baby will pull all the pieces back together again. Of course, it won't be very pretty. You'd have an enormous corpse floating in the sky. You might have some very difficult conversations to have with your kids."

"I don't have any kids."

Clara stepped forward. "Stop. Right, listen. This is a...this is a life. I mean, this must be the biggest life in the universe."

"It's not even been born," Courtney added.

"It is killing people. It is destroying the Earth."

"You cannot blame a baby for kicking."

"Let me tell you something." Lundvik's tone hardened too. "You want to know what I took back from being in space? Look at the edge of the Earth. The atmosphere, that is paper thin. That is the only thing that saves us all from death. Everything else, the stars, the blackness. That's all dead. Sadly, that is the only life any of us will ever know."

"There's life here," Courtney said. "There's life just next door."

"Look, when you've grown up a bit, you'll realize that everything doesn't have to be nice. Some things are just bad. Anyway, you ran away. It's none of your business."

Adelaide closed her eyes.

"I want to come back."

Clara shook her head. "Courtney, you'll be safer where you are."

Lundvik started entering a code.

"I'm sorry," Courtney said. "I want to come back, okay? I want to help."

"Ah, there's some DVDs on the blue bookshelf," he said, glancing at Adelaide. The Time Lady had yet to open her eyes.

This was why. He'd known what would happen the moment he realized their true situation and he'd wanted to prepare her, but the humans hadn't let him. Normally she'd be fine, but it had been so dark, so restrictive, it was like Christmas. It was like Midnight. It was like Mars. Her control was a bit off, things were affecting her more than they normally did. He'd wanted to help her, but he hadn't been able to. And now there was a human talking about killing and not listening to his attempts at reason and they were surrounded by the expanse of space. "Just stick one into the TARDIS console. That'll bring you to us." So the Doctor was going to do this for Adelaide. He was going to do what Adelaide would have done. She was all that mattered, in the end.

"Right."

"And make sure you hang onto the console, otherwise the TARDIS will leave you behind."

Clara looked at Adelaide too, but by then the Time Lady had opened her eyes and stepped closer to the Doctor, taking his hand. "So what do we do?" Neither answered her. "Doctor? Adelaide? What do we do?"

"Nothing."

"What?"

"We don't do anything." The Doctor tightened his grip on Adelaide's hand, meeting her eyes. "I'm sorry, Clara, we can't help you."

Clara shook her head. "Of course you can help."

"The Earth isn't our home. The moon's not our moon. Sorry."

Clara clearly didn't believe him. "Come on. Hey."

"Listen, there are moments in every civilization's history in which the whole path of that civilization is decided. The whole future path. Whatever future humanity might have depends upon the choice that is made right here and right now." The Doctor nodded to Lundvik. "Now, you've got the tools to kill it. You made them. You brought them up here all on your own, with your own ingenuity. You don't need Time Lords. Kill it. Or let it live. We can't make this decision for you."

"Yeah, well, I can't make it."

"Well, there's two of you here."

"Well, yeah. A school teacher and an astronaut."

"Who's better qualified?" Adelaide asked, though she didn't smile.

"I don't know! The President of America!"

"Oh, take something off his plate. He makes far too many decisions anyway."

"She," Lundvik corrected.

"She. Sorry. She hasn't even been into space. She hasn't been to another planet. How would she even know what to do?"

Clara stepped closer. "I am asking you for help."

"Listen, we went to dinner in Berlin in 1937, right? We didn't nip out after pudding and kill Hitler. We never killed Hitler. And you wouldn't expect us to kill Hitler. The future is no more malleable than the past." This was what Time Lords were meant to do, what Adelaide had done.

One of the few tenements of their civilization that she'd abided by. It was time he tried respecting it to. For her sake, even if it made him resoundingly uncomfortable.

"Okay, don't you do this to make some kind of point."

"Sorry." The Doctor shook his head. "Well, actually, no, I'm not sorry. It's time to take the stabilizers off your bike. It's your moon, womankind. It's your choice."

Clara raised her eyebrows. "And you're just going to stand there?"

"Absolutely not."

The TARDIS arrived and Courtney stepped out, the two Time Lords moving to it without another word.

"Doctor?" Clara frowned. "Adelaide?"

He glanced back, waving. "A teenager, an astronaut, and a schoolteacher."

Lundvik rushed over. "Hang on a minute. We can get in there, can't we? You can sort it out with that thing."

"No," Adelaide said sternly. "Some decisions are too important not to make on your own." The two closed the door, still able to hear Clara shouting after them.

"Adelaide! Doctor!"

Immediately, Adelaide hugged the Doctor tightly, taking full advantage of the privacy.

She was never going back to the moon.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor mumbled, resting his head on the top of hers. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"You did nothing wrong."

"If I hadn't told her she wasn't special, or if I'd apologized, we would never have come here."

Adelaide pulled back. "Some things happen for a reason, Doctor. If we hadn't come, and Lundvik had managed to discover something wrong with the moon, she wouldn't have had Clara or Courtney to convince her not to kill a child."

"She never would have discovered it."

She smiled. "And here I was thinking you were the one who'd adored humanity for centuries. She's a scientist, she's clever."

"Not as clever as you." The Doctor kissed her forehead. "Clever girl."

"Foolish boy."

|C-S|

A benefit of having a TARDIS was the ability to observe a location one wasn't physically present at. The Time Lords watched as Clara made a plea to the world and watched as the humans decided to kill the moon.

And they watched as Clara overrode the decision.

They landed moments after the decision was made, the Doctor rushing to the TARDIS door. "One, two, three, into the TARDIS," he pointed to each of the women, gesturing behind him.

"What's happening?" Lundvik asked, the moon making an impressively large rumble.

The Doctor grinned. "Let's go and have a look, shall we?" he ran back to the console after the three humans had run inside.

"Bloody idiots," Lundvik grumbled. "Bloody irresponsible idiots."

Adelaide paused around the console close to her. "Mind your language, please. There are children present."

Lundvik shook her head. "You should have left me there, let me die. I wanted to die up there with the universe in front of me, not being crushed to death on Earth."

"Nobody's going to die."

"Could you please let us see what's happening?"

The Time Lords brought the TARDIS down on a beach, stepping out first to the clear view of the moon in the sky. It was obvious now that the moon was falling apart, the alien visible inside spreading its wings.

Courtney gasped. "What's it doing?"

"It's feeling the sun on itself." The creature actually roared. "It's getting warm. The chick flies away and the eggshell disintegrates. Harmless."

Clara looked at the Time Lords. "Did you know?"

"You made your decision," the Doctor said instead. "Humanity made its choice."

"No, we ignored humanity."

He shrugged. "Well, there you go."

"So what happens now, then? Tell me what happens now."

The Time Lords closed their eyes, feeling history seal itself around them. "In the mid-twenty-first century, humankind starts creeping off into the stars, spreading its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the universe."

"Someone even eventually falls in love with a Tandonian prince and begins a whole new species," Adelaide said quietly. Adelaide Brooke was a result of today, which meant Adelaide herself was, in some twisted method of fate, if such a concept existed.

The Doctor nodded. "And it does all that because one day in the year 2049, when it had stopped thinking about going to the stars, something occurred that made it look up, not down. It looked out there into the blackness and it saw something beautiful, something wonderful, that for once it didn't want to destroy. And in that one moment, the whole course of history was changed." He grinned. "Not bad for a girl from Coal Hill School and her teacher."

Courtney gasped, pointing at the sky. "Oh my gosh! It laid a new egg. It's beautiful." A brand new moon had replaced the old one, looking identical except lacking all the craters. "It's beautiful."

"That's what we call a new moon."

Courtney glanced at Lundvik, who had tears in her eyes. "You can be the first woman on that."

"I think that somebody deserves a thank you," the Doctor mumbled.

"Yeah, probably." Lundvik nodded, turning to Clara. "Thank you. Thank you for stopping me. Thank you for giving me the moon back."

The Doctor examined the area around them. "Okay, Captain. Well, you've got a whole new space program to get together. NASA is...er...it's that way." He pointed. "About two and a half thousand miles." He looked at Courtney. "You still got your vortex manipulators? We'll give you a run home."

|C-S|

Adelaide was busying herself with organizing a set of books, the Doctor with something at the console, when Courtney and Clara returned from changing back into their original clothes. "Not that it's any of our business, but we think you did the right thing," the Doctor called.

"Yeah, you're right." Clara's tone was harsh, which had Adelaide glance at her. "It's none of your business. Come on, Courtney, off you go. Double Geography."

"Can we do it again?"

"Go," Clara waved her towards the door. "Go, go. Chop chop." Courtney left the TARDIS and, though the Doctor moved to set it flying, Clara stopped it. "Tell me what you knew."

"Nothing," the Doctor said quickly. "We told you, we've got grey areas."

"Yeah. I noticed. Tell me what you knew or else I'll smack you so hard you'll regenerate."

Adelaide stepped up to the TARDIS. "We knew that eggs are not bombs and that they usually don't destroy their nests."

"Essentially, what we knew was that you would always make the best choice. We had faith that you would always make the right choice."

But Clara frowned. "Honestly, do you have music playing in your head when you say rubbish like that?"

"It wasn't our decision to make. We told you."

"Well, why did you do it? Was it for Courtney, was that it?"

"Well, she really is something special now, isn't she?" the Doctor shrugged. "First woman on the moon, saved the Earth from itself, and, rather bizarrely, she becomes the President of the United States. She met this bloke called Blinovitch..."

"Do you know what?" Clara cut him off, shouting. "Shut up! I am so sick of listening to you!"

"We didn't do it for Courtney," Adelaide said. "We didn't know what was going to happen. We wouldn't lie about this."

Clara had started crying by then. "I don't know. I don't know! If you didn't do it for her, I mean. Do you know what? It was...it was cheap, it was pathetic." She pointed at them. "No, no, no. it was patronizing. That was you patting us on the back saying, 'you're big enough to go to the shops by yourself now. Go on, toddle along!'"

"No, that was us allowing you to make an informed choice about your own future. That was us respecting you."

Clara frowned. "Oh my God, really? Was it? Yeah, well, respected is not how I feel." The Doctor blinked. "I nearly didn't press that button. I nearly got it wrong. That was you two, my friends, making me scared. Making me feel like a bloody idiot."

"Language," he mumbled.

"Oh, don't you ever tell me to mind my language. Don't you ever tell me to take the stabilizers off my bike. And don't you dare lump me in with the rest of all the little humans that you both think are so tiny and silly and predictable. You walk our Earth, you breathe our air. You make us your friend, and that is your moon too. And you can damn well help us when we need it."

"We were helping."

"What, by clearing off?"

Adelaide nodded. "Yes." It was how she'd helped, how she'd always done it if she landed in the middle of a crisis. Provide information and then leave the planet to their own devices. She'd never wanted anyone in her debt. She'd never wanted to share in anyone's air or moon.

"Yeah, well, clear off! Go on. You can clear off. Get back in your lonely...your lonely bloody TARDIS and you don't come back!" She turned and made for the doors.

"Clara..."

"You go away! Okay? You go a long way away!" she slammed the TARDIS doors her, leaving the Time Lords just standing there.

There was a reason Time Lords as a whole only used the non-interference policy. That they never did like the Doctor did and interacted closely with a species. That they never reached the point where making a choice like this for someone else was even a possibility.

Adelaide should have thought of that. She was the one with the most experience with that, the one who should have warned the Doctor.

But she'd never gotten this close with any species besides the Silurian. She hadn't known what would happen.

They'd made a mistake.

Because she knew that the Doctor would never let her just blame herself for this situation. And she was finally willing to let him.

"I'm sorry," she told him, making him turn slowly. "I know you behaved like this for my sake."

"It was the right thing to do."

"That doesn't make it kind." Adelaide stepped closer to him. "You always were the kind one." It was a key difference between them, a balance that they needed to maintain. Adelaide was the rational, contained, and theorizing one. The Doctor was the kind one. The emotional one. The unpredicable one.

The one who made friends and stayed behind to help them.

A/N: I always thought this episode was a bit out of character for the Doctor, suddenly deciding not to interfere, but Adelaide, thankfully, helped balance that. Hopefully they can maintain this balance for a bit longer ;)