Brighton Rock

2

"I told you – didn't I tell you?" the Doctor said, grinning, as they stumbled through their own front door together, both in the midst of laughing. Laughing at what, it was tricky to recall, but they had finally got back to just enjoying each other's company without worrying about anything. No alien threat to fight, no students to teach, not even any chores to do – just the Doctor and Clara Oswald.

"Okay, okay, yes, today's been great," Clara admitted, locking the door, "It's been fantastic," she dropped her keys into the bowl near the door, "But do you know what'll make it more fantastic?"

"I have no idea," she lied. Really, she had a very good idea of what Clara thought could improve their day, the most exciting Friday in recent memory.

The scene was punctured by an explosive pain bursting into her head, like a migraine triggered by a gunshot. A deafening screech rang in her ears and felt like it was tearing her brain to pieces. Thirteen staggered, unable to hold herself up, and fell to the floor in front of her suddenly horror-struck wife. That was the last thing the Doctor could recall for an unknown length of time, and then the white-hot, blinding pain had receded enough for her to see an oval-shaped, white handset looming in front of her eyes. Had she fallen unconscious? When she started to mumble unintelligibly – speaking what she recognised to be native Gallifreyan out of some deeply-buried reflex, but which Clara didn't understand – Clara shushed her gently.

"You're alright," Clara told her, though she sounded uncertain in her tone of voice. Clara was kneeling in front of her on the staircase in their hallway, with the Doctor sitting on one of the steps. Clara was scanning her with the Helix unit they had brought with them; she must have fetched it from upstairs in the brief seconds or minutes Thirteen had not been present. The blue light hurt her eyes and she squinted and tried to push it away. "No, no, Helix needs to do a check."

"Coo…" she moaned, feeling raw after the episode upon their return.

"Stay still," Clara said firmly, though not without a note of worry. The Doctor shut her eyes against the light and slouched against the wall, trying to look away. The sound of tinnitus, along with Helix's buzzing, was faintly present, as was a stiff ache inside her skull.

"No abnormalities detected," Helix said.

"What do you mean, no abnormalities?" Clara questioned, "She just collapsed and you're saying she's fine?"

"I am fine – turn it off," she managed to see, keeping her eyes shut tight. "Ignore the scans – just find me something… something with sugar."

"You've got your rock."

"Grab that." Clara felt about in the Doctor's jeans pockets – something which the Doctor would ordinarily find quite exciting – but came up short.

"I can't find it."

"How can you not find it? I had it a second ago."

"Maybe you dropped it?" Clara got up to look around on the floor in the hall, then phased through their front door. She was only gone for a few seconds, but in her weakened state the Doctor's hearts panged for her return. It came shortly. "Couldn't see it out there."

"I didn't drop it, I had it when we came in."

"Are you sure? Maybe you're confused."

"I'm not – I'm not confused!" she said, louder than she wanted, then she pressed her hands to her eyes. She heard Clara leave, going towards the kitchen, and she returned a second later with a bar of Dairy Milk of her own she had been saving. The Doctor took it without hesitation, tearing open the foil and biting a huge chunk straight out of it. "Someone changed something. A fixed point in time."

"I thought that's impossible?" Clara sat down next to her on the stairs.

"It's not, it just has repercussions," she said, then thought, "Or, Reaper -cussions." The sugar was helping her already as she ate the chocolate ravenously. "Did you hear it? The screeching?"

"I didn't hear anything."

"No… stupid, stupid head, stupid brain…" She hit herself on the side of the head with the bottom of her hand, until Clara grabbed her arm and stopped her.

"Don't do that," she said softly.

"It's just so frustrating! It knocked me for six! A stupid timeline change!"

"C'mere," Clara put her arms around the Doctor and hugged her while she continued to eat her chocolate. Neither of them said another word until Thirteen had finished the entire chocolate bar, which just left her craving even more – she needed an energy drink but knew they didn't have any in the house.

"Is there any soda?"

"I'll go see," Clara left her side again to hurry down the hall and into the kitchen, where the Doctor heard her dig around in the fridge. Thirteen began twisting her wedding ring around on her finger, which was her usual bad habit whenever she became particularly stressed, it being one of the few things she had to fidget with. When Clara got back this time she was carrying a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola, which Thirteen took gratefully and began to chug. It didn't take her more than thirty seconds to down the entire thing and then throw the empty plastic bottle onto the floor at her feet.

"Whoo!" she exclaimed, "That hit the spot!"

"You feel better now?" Clara asked, concerned. She turned and managed to smile.

"I do." The caffeine had been a big help, too.

"…Have I been affected by changing a fixed point in time?" Clara asked.

"You? The interdimensional time traveller? No, you shouldn't be, you're oozing Artron and time energy; you've been absorbing it for fifty years. That'll grant you a certain amount of immunity. For a while."

"'A while'?"

"It's not Back to the Future, Coo. You're not gonna start disappearing. But, if I know about a change in history, the Reapers know about a change in history, and they'll come after me first, and then you immediately afterwards," she explained, "Look, all we have to do is, y'know, find what happened and fix it. It'll be localised and relatively significant to bug me like that, as in, not someone stepping on a butterfly ten million years ago."

"Alright, so, we'll just check the local news," Clara said, taking her foldable tablet out of her pocket and opening it. The Doctor leant against her shoulder to look at the screen but the smell of her hair so close was suddenly distracting Clara. "Are you using new shampoo?"

"What?"

"I don't know. You smell good."

"Nice to see you prioritising the fact that somebody has changed an important part of history somewhere. And it's not shampoo, it's perfume. You remember when Zelda gave me that fancy perfume a few years ago? Well, I was looking for my Pokéball terrariums yesterday and the bottle is remarkably similar – though Squirtle still evades me… at least I found Bulbasaur."

"Remind me to give Zelda a proper thank you next time we see her," Clara whispered in the Doctor's ear. The Doctor shrugged like she was trying to brush away an insect and Clara smiled.

"I pray I never find out what that means. Go on, get to googling."

"I thought you hate when people say 'googling'? I thought you said it represents 'the endless reach of the capitalist oligarchy to be able to transplant itself into the vocabulary of common language so that nobody questions the economic dominance of a digital monopoly'?" Clara asked her. She began to stammer nonsensically.

"Yeah – well – I – you see – just, shut up." Clara snickered. "How do you remember what I say word for word?"

"Because I listen to you," she said, bringing up the news app on her tablet, "Always. And besides, one of us needs to be able to remember things."

"Hey! You ruined it."

"Shh, I'm trying to google." The Doctor scoffed and crossed her arms indignantly. "Oh, fuck me…"

"What? Right now?" Thirteen asked, surprised. Clara didn't answer, she was scrolling through articles on her tablet. "Clara? …Do you mean right now?"

"Shit…"

"Clara."

"Look at this," Clara showed her the screen. Thirteen read what she saw aloud.

"'Gang violence continues to damage Brighton industry' – hold on, gang violence?"

"It's not the only one, there's a running statistic here of the number of casualties associated with gang crime – it's almost five-hundred, just this year so far. That's a hundred people a month, hospitalised because of gang crime. In Brighton! If these statistics were for stabbings in central London they'd be absurd, quite honestly." Clara went back to looking through articles with the Doctor observing.

Most of the articles they found were about crime and violence, including a poll which listed Brighton as one of the most dangerous places to live in the United Kingdom. House prices were way down – no longer was it incredibly desirable real estate (which did irk the Doctor a bit when she remember how much they paid towards their mortgage each month) but a gangland warzone full of what she could only describe as 'yobs.' Pale-faced savage children stabbing one another outside greasy spoon cafés and souvenir shops, throwing each other off the end of the landmark Pier. This was not the idyllic, crowded Brighton they had been walking through so recently.

"Okay, wifey, I take it back, maybe it is like Back to the Future. Specifically, Back to the Future 2. Which one of us do you think has the hot mom?"

"There's nothing in here about Pride," Clara said, "Nothing at all. I saw this morning's issue of The Argus about gearing up for Pride Month starting next week. Because they're doubling up on the amount of rainbow bunting in public spaces."

"What about that?" Thirteen pointed out a headline. Clara was aghast.

"'Pervert Parade Not to Go Ahead'!?" she exclaimed, "Oh my stars, it's… it says, 'Again, homosexual pressure groups have tried to organise a so-called 'gay pride event' in Brighton, the most conservative city in the country'… This is disgusting, it – Brighton's the gay capital of the UK. The only Green constituency. But apparently this seat now belongs to the bloody BNP! BNP hold for decades! A city full of racist, right-wing criminals! This is backwards, completely backwards." Somebody knocked at the door and Clara automatically got up to answer it, handing the tablet to the Doctor. "The reason we live here is because it's forward-thinking, liberal and free. And even if it wasn't, this is the future! These kinds of homophobic attitudes aren't even welcome in the most rural Tory stronghold, it's utterly obscene!" She opened the door to be faced with three gaunt, tall men, leering and wearing black suits and ties despite the boiling weather.

"Funny to hear you talking about things being obscene," the one at the front said. They looked like bouncers. Alarmed, Thirteen got up too and hurriedly put the tablet away.

"Who are you?" Clara asked, "Are you selling something? We don't need any quadruple glazing, thanks."

"Nah, we're not selling anything."

"Oh. Are you Jehovah's? Because we were just in the middle of converting to some other, totally conflicting religion, so you'd really just be wasting your time here."

"Surprised your type knows anything about religion."

"And what might 'my type' be?"

"Perverts. Heard a rumour that a couple of heathens were living here, in sin. Brighton isn't that kind of place. It's not acceptable to be bent around here."

"…Right," Clara said slowly, "Interesting idea. But, uh, I'm afraid I'm not really sold on the whole 'being gay is a sin' thing, because of the fact that you're a massive cunt." When she said this, she smiled.

"You fucking what."

"Clara!" the Doctor exclaimed. All three of them drew knives.

"We'll gut you for that."

"Good luck." She slammed the door in their faces with her telekinesis, barely managing to get it locked behind them. A fist stuffed itself through the letterbox as far as it would go with a glinting, silver switchblade shining in the sun. "We need to leave."

"You think!?"

"You activate the undercover-thingy-"

"Failsafe perception filter."

"Yeah, that – I'll get the emergency bag."

Avoiding the flailing, stabbing hand of the twenty-something hoodlum hurling reams of vicious, homophobic abuse at them through the door, the Doctor took out her sonic screwdriver and made a beeline for the burglar alarm fixed to the nearby wall. But it wasn't just a burglar alarm; she removed the plastic case and revealed a highly complex security interface, all in case they had to make a swift exit or hide the traces of themselves from the house. She had been intending to use it in case they were hunted down by rogue aliens but supposed this was good enough. Activating the failsafe perception filter meant that everything inside was hidden and an emergency alert was sent to the TARDIS – though she doubted the TARDIS's ability to land when the timeline was so badly disrupted. After all, when Rose had prevented Pete Tyler from being hit by a car, the TARDIS was rendered utterly useless as the Reapers bared down upon them.

She also activated another security measure, one which created a forcefield around the exterior of the building, which would allow people to leave but not enter. Including both of them. It even blocked out the majority of teleports, save for the TARDIS. Though, again, she doubted the TARDIS would be able to help them at all.

Clara reappeared with a backpack and held out her hand towards Thirteen, just as the forcefield blasted the desperate arm away from their door. The gangster outside screamed in pain; no doubt he had received a nasty electric shock from it. The Doctor took Clara's hand and Clara steered her away to the back of the house.

"Brace yourself," Clara warned.

"Brace-? For what?" That question was shortly answered by her being phased through the kitchen table, all the cabinets, and finally the door into the back garden. Once outside she stumbled and fell into Clara's back. "You know I hate that!"

"Shh!" Clara hissed, "It saves time, just deal with it. Come on, before they climb over the fence and come round the back." And so she resigned herself to being dragged around by Clara, running towards the fence into next door's garden and phasing straight through it. There was nothing the Doctor hated more than phasing; it was one of the most uncomfortable sensations she had ever experienced, and she hadn't a clue how Clara did it so often without a care in the world. Utter indifference to the fact she was walking through solid objects.

After passing through about three gardens, however, the Doctor tugged on Clara's arm to get her to stop moving.

"Hold up a sec," she said.

"What?" Clara asked.

"This is the Thompsons' house. You know, Lyle Thompson's parents? In Year Eight?"

"So what? We shouldn't loiter."

"So, this house is empty. Look at it. Two of the windows are smashed in. I did family trees with that class last term – you know, to get them thinking about how they're all related to history despite the arguments that 'it was ages ago.' And when I asked him about his he said his family have lived in Brighton since the 2010s in the same house. Since the London Olympics, he said. And now it's empty."

"Okay, so whatever we're looking for that happened must have happened before the 2012 Olympics," Clara said, "Unless you're suggesting that Brighton becoming overrun with gangsters is because Lyle Thompson's grandparents didn't move to East Sussex?"

"I'm just trying to pinpoint a time period. Not that we have any way to travel."

"You can just ring the TARDIS, can't you?" Clara started pulling her again.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Too dangerous. Reapers disable time travel."

"They can do that?"

"They're older than the universe, Coo. They come out of the time vortex as the world's immune system against temporal changes. They don't care about the so-called prestige of the Time Lords or you and I as individuals, they'll just devour anything that smells hinky."

"Great. So, there's Reapers after us because we're suspicious time travellers, and there's gangsters after us because we're suspicious queers. We just can't catch a break," Clara complained. She phased the Doctor through the fence at the very back of what was once the Thompsons' house into a thin, dirt snicket. They usually walked through that snicket if they ever went to the park, but it had deteriorated drastically with the timeline change. Now there was a rusty bike with a wheel missing, weeds everywhere, and more than a few cigarette butts and dirty syringes. "This is supposed to be suburbia. A family neighbourhood. Not drug dens and squats."

The Doctor sighed, then squeezed Clara's hand. "We'll fix it. I promise."

"How? With no TARDIS, no time travel, how are we meant to go back and fix it even if we do find out what happened? We're sitting ducks here." She was about to launch into an explanation designed to soothe Clara, who was beginning to panic now that their lives had been mercilessly upturned by unknown causes, but she spotted those same goons who had been at their door making their way through the snicket in pursuit over Clara's shoulder.

"We have to find somewhere safe, come on." Now she was the one leading Clara, letting go of her hand so that it was easier for them to move quicker.

"You know something? I'm over seventy and I've never actually had someone try to hurt me because of my sexuality. Let alone show up at my fucking house!"

"There's a first time for everything – just, hurry up, we gotta find somewhere to hide and… think. Give me that." She took the bag from Clara and slung it over one of her shoulders with the goons coming after them, but luckily the snicket was so narrow it was much easier for the pair of them to navigate than their would-be assailants.

"We're losing them, boys!" shouted one of the goons, "Ain't no dykes getting away from us."

"What did you just-!?" Clara almost turned on her heel to face them.

"Clara, we have to go!"

"I can take them," she said, slowing down.

"It's not worth it."

"They shouldn't get away with saying that shit!" Clara argued.

"I know that – they're right on us, though! Come on, don't risk getting hurt over a couple of jerks!" They were almost at the end of the snicket where they would be able to find a good hiding place, the boys just a few metres behind them as they ran. One of them drew his knife again as Thirteen wrenched on Clara's elbow to get her to keep moving rather than stand and fight. "Trip them up!" Clara glanced back and waved her hand, nearly stumbling herself in the process as the foremost yob had his feet pulled from under him, leaving him sprawling in the dirt with his cronies trying not to step on him. His knife landed in some nearby weeds.

They finally burst out of the long alley with the Doctor still forcing Clara to stick close. The Doctor slipped on a rain-slicked sidewalk and was plunged into gloom. Her hand was still wrapped around Clara's arm despite the fact the sky was suddenly a cloudy sunset and it had been raining recently, though to her best recollection it hadn't rained in Brighton for the better part of a week.

"Look out!" Clara exclaimed, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her out of the road right as the sound of buzzing engines whooshed by. She turned to see three vintage Vespas shoddily painted with Union Flags shoot by underneath the clouds. The Doctor was nearly knocked off her feet and would certainly have been hit if it wasn't for Clara. But a stabbing pain had entered her head again, like a migraine had come on in a split second, and she was left feeling woozy and concussed. The painted scooters all uniformly turned the next corner beneath the impossible sunset and the Doctor instinctively tried to follow them.

She staggered out into the otherwise empty street in pursuit, with a very confused Clara on her heels, no longer hearing the shouts of the youth gang chasing them. She held a hand to her head as if wounded and fell against the wall of an old brick building with her mind fixated on those scooters that had come out of nowhere. However, it was a fruitless pursuit; she looked around the corner and saw they were gone. The sound of the scooter engines had disappeared completely, leaving barely a residual echo. At the same moment the skies parted above and the afternoon sunlight she was used to poured down onto them again, but they remained around the corner and out of sight of the hoodlums on their heels.

"In here," Clara whispered, phasing them through the brick wall the Doctor was leaning against. They found themselves in an old and boarded up pub, full of dust and dirt and upturned chairs. "Get down, get down." They crouched and hid in the corner, out of sight through the gaps in the wooden boards over all the windows and listened to the sounds of the gang members outside.

"How do people just disappear like that?" one of them said angrily.

"I think they went this way," said another, his voice getting quieter. They were heading off in the wrong direction while Clara and the Doctor cowered in an abandoned building.

"This is the Travellers Rest," Clara breathed a minute later, while the Doctor held her head in her hands.

"Huh?"

"Our local pub. Where we go with people from work sometimes. Only it's empty, too… are you okay? What happened just then? With those bikes, and the sky?"

"Temporal shift," she answered as her headache began to subside. "Messed me up. My head. Time's unravelling here but we're the only time travellers who actually notice it. Like, we're at the eye of the storm, nobody else knows something is wrong, so the temporal fluctuations are attaching themselves to us."

"We're just going to get pulled to random points in time?"

"No, no – that's where we need to be. Wherever we were for a second just now, that's where the change happened. A fixed point in time gets altered and time becomes sort of like a big knot. It's already kind of a knot, but now it's tangled up and doesn't know what to do with itself, so the Reapers come out to cut the knot away like they're cauterising a wound. Then the knot's removed, leaving this gap to sew itself together, only we're in the gap so we're going to get cleared out."

"So what do we do? Sit around and hope one of those shifts happens and takes us back to the exact moment everything changed?"

"No," said Thirteen, unzipping the backpack to dig around in it and find something sugary. "The shifts will get longer and longer and longer, and we'll keep jumping between them, but the Reapers will still find us. And it's no good being stuck back in time somewhere if we still don't know what we're looking for. Imagine we get stuck, and there's, say, two hours to go until whatever change we have to prevent, but we don't know what that change is. We don't have the resources to find out." She found a paper bag of Jelly Babies, much to her overwhelming joy, buried deep in the bag. Sticking a fistful of them into her mouth she resumed her explanation with some difficulty over all the chewing. "If we work out what time period the shifts are originating from, it'll be easier to work out what we have to do. But the reality that we remember is collapsing in order to make way for this new one and if the Reapers get their way we're going to be destroyed in the process. Like we never even existed."

"Okay. So, we know it was raining, or had rained recently, and some people had some scooters. Do you know what model they were?"

"No, I didn't get a good enough look, with my head screwing up. Maybe we'll get lucky and find a shift with a convenient newspaper right in front of us, but I wouldn't hold my breath." She regressed to stuffing her face with as many sugary Jelly Babies as possible, while Clara pulled her knees towards her chest in the corner of the room. They were nestled together in the dirty corner of the old pub, a few beams of sunlight penetrating the wooden boards. Recognition of the Travellers Rest only came back to her slowly, but she could just about pick out the area where they and the other teachers sat whenever she and Clara actually made it to the pub. Many of the teachers were there multiple times a week, but they often went on Fridays, which happened to be date night. And Thirteen was very dedicated to keeping date night the way it was and not spending it getting drunk in a pub. Luckily, Clara often agreed, because if there was one thing that could get Clara Oswald to resist the allure of alcohol it was the allure of sex. The Doctor never stopped using this to her advantage.

Clara rested her head on the Doctor's shoulder.

"Are you okay?" Thirteen asked when she had swallowed her latest handful of sweets.

"It's 2064 and we're in Brighton and some twat who's not even twenty just called me a homophobic slur and chased my wife and I out of our own house. If we were in the 1940s, or something, I'd just brush it off and say it's just a product of the time. Things will get better. But this is the time when things are supposed to be better. They were better. Being away from Earth for so long made me forget that there are people out there who will always think that there's something wrong with me." The Doctor looked at her as she sank down against the grimy wall of the derelict Travellers Rest.

"Hey, hey," she lifted up her arm and wrapped it around Clara, pulling her close, "Do I really have to tell my seventy-four-year-old bisexual wife that there's nothing wrong with being gay?"

"Maybe there is. It doesn't make sense, from an evolutionary perspective."

"There's a type of fish called a sunfish, they're these gigantic, wonky, weird-looking things. They're lopsided and huge, but to maintain their size they have to eat a ridiculous amount of food. Except all they eat is tiny sea jellies. So they eat tons of these jellies, just so they can stay so bulky. The biggest bony fish on planet Earth. And guess what else? They have no natural predators. They're huge but they contain absolutely no nutritional value. They can't hunt but nothing hunts them, either, so they just float through the ocean syphoning up as much krill as possible and they haven't died out just because nothing wants to eat them. As far as your 'evolutionary perspective' is concerned, I think that sunfish are a lot more ridiculous than gay people.

"Besides, maybe evolution is cleverer than we give it credit for. Maybe species evolve to be gay in order to be surrogate parents for babies that get left behind? Queer penguin couples, or swan couples, or whatever couples – they've all been known to adopt babies that wouldn't survive otherwise."

"Mmm, but we haven't adopted anybody. We're pointless."

"I've got a little girl of my own, remember? You've got your Echoes. Our substitutes for our inability to reproduce with one another. Anyway, looking at life through a lens of reproduction is pretty basic. You can contribute to society without making more people to be corrupted by it. Don't let them get in your head, Coo, that's what they want. To make you doubt yourself."

"Yeah…"

"Didn't you have this when you were growing up?"

"Have what?"

"Like… worries about homophobia. Fifty years I've known you and never thought to talk about this… I guess I take it for granted. Since I've never worried about it."

"I mean, Blackpool in 2004 isn't necessarily the worst time or place to come out as gay. Not that I ever really 'came out', per se."

"Oh yeah?"

"You get caught in bed with one girl by your parents and suddenly everybody knows you swing both ways."

"Were they mad?"

Clara laughed now, shook her head. "No. A week and a half before they caught me in bed with Wade Sawyer-"

"Eurgh, don't remind me that you slept with that creep."

"-and that was when I got the lectures all about contraception and STIs and teen pregnancy, and how I better have used a condom, and mum takes me to the doctors a week later to get a prescription for the pill. And then they caught me with Melanie. Completely different. They burst into my room because they heard things, she's trying to hide in the sheets, they're just about to yell at me for sleeping with another boy – then they see it's a girl. Dad didn't know what to say."

"What about Ellie?"

"Mum was like, 'I'm just about to make bacon and eggs – do you want any?' And then she stayed for breakfast. I think they were a bit disappointed when I started really putting it about instead of getting a nice, stable girlfriend. Although the sleeping around definitely got worse after mum died. So did the drinking and the smoking. I count myself lucky that I never quite resorted to drugs back when I was in sixth form. Miracle I passed my A Levels, I was a state. Lucky I had you to make an honest woman out of me."

"That's a first, me making somebody else honest."

"Five decades and I've only shagged the one person."

"I did regenerate."

"The one-and-a-half person, then. Not quite two. And everyone said it couldn't be done."

"They say the same stuff about me. I'm sure some of the history books call me a womaniser, too."

"You are a womaniser."

"Gee, thanks."

"I'm a woman and I feel womanised. Bet Marilyn Monroe felt plenty womanised, too. And Elizabeth I. The virgin queen."

"She wasn't a virgin, I can tell you that for a fact."

"You harlot. You're so much worse than me just for the sheer audacity of your conquests. I don't even know the names of most of mine. I don't even know your name."

"Ah, you wouldn't be able to pronounce it even if I did tell you what it is. Even if I could really remember what it is." Clara smiled and nuzzled against the Doctor. "We've been in tougher scrapes than this, wifey. This isn't even us against the world. It's just us against Brighton. We can take this poxy town."

"Optimistic of you to say, while we cower in a mucky old bar. Hiding out in squats like this as though it's the 1960s and not the 2060s."

"The Stonewall Inn is a historic monument these days. Even though the gentrification of Greenwich Village is capitalist exploitation at its finest. Oppression of the minorities becomes a tourist attraction – isn't that always the way?"

"I love it when you moan about capitalism. Or just when you moan in general."

"I bet you do."

"Urgh. We were gonna spend the whole afternoon and evening in bed together, too, if none of this had happened. These dickheads are really gonna pay for making me miss out on hours of mind-blowing sex with my hot squeeze."

"Have you shaken your little bout of internalised homophobia, then?"

"Maybe…" she sighed, "What's our next move?"

"Oh, god," she groaned and leant her head back against the wall, "Uh, tracking spasmodic temporal shifts, here we go… do you know if the timey-wimey detector is in this bag?" She began rifling through the backpack again. It was transdimensional but had been packed a while ago and she couldn't be sure of its exact contents any longer.

"You gave it to Jenny," Clara said.

"Did I?"

"Yeah, you said that she'd probably need it more than you, when you handed over the TARDIS as well. You were like, 'I'm not gonna need to track down weird, spacey stuff in Brighton,'" Clara copied her accent.

"Is that true?"

"Yes, it's true," Clara said, Clara and her infinite patience for the Doctor's amnesiac tendencies. Thirteen never even realised what things she had forgotten until Clara said something offhand and her memory was foggy.

"I'm lucky to have you," she sighed, "I wouldn't be able to remember anything otherwise."

"Well, without me, you would never have jumped into Belfast harbour trying to be impressive and heroic, so you never would have drowned and spent two weeks down there before finally being dredged up."

"You're right. I should've shaken you when I had the chance. Too darn clingy and too darn cute. Now, then… timey-wimey detector… I wonder if I can whip one up out of some of the junk in here?"

But in reality, the Doctor was grossly overestimating the amount of junk there would be available in a burned out, old pub suitable for the construction of complicated machines. With Clara's help, she had searched it from top to bottom and only managed to find very few items. It was filthy and anything of substance had been robbed years ago. As well as that, she suspected that the cellar was used as a drug den on occasion, obvious by the number of syringes, plastic baggies, and burned up joints and cigarette butts littering the floor. Unless she was planning to build a device to scan for intertemporal anomalies out of broken chair legs, they were screwed – and while the Doctor was good, she wasn't quite that good.

Hours dragged by. The May heat persisted outside despite the dwindling light as the sun disappeared from view. The Travellers Rest looked much more orderly by the time she had worked up a sweat and wiled away her evening searching it, wedging table legs into place and balancing them in the middle of the main room. She thought it must be after nine at night when she finally found something to make their time on the lam a little less painful: a radio. It was just the kind of thing she had been looking for, and triumphantly carried it downstairs to show it off to Clara. By that point, Clara was exhausted and still nursing her upset after what had happened earlier with the boys. Thirteen couldn't blame her, it was her house too and she also didn't enjoy being on the receiving end of any abuse, even if she was a lot better at ignoring it.

Back in the front room Clara sat at the bar and scrolled lethargically through various websites on her tablet, still trying to pinpoint exactly what had gone wrong. Thirteen walked around to the other side of the bar as though she worked there and leant on it with her arms crossed, setting the radio down next to her. Only at this point did Clara look up and meet her smile.

"What'll you have?" she asked jokingly.

"Pint of wife beater, if you've got it," Clara quipped.

"Ha, ha. I don't know why you call it that."

"You seemed more upset the time I said I'd 'love a taste of Stella', so I thought it's safer to stick to wife beater. It's just a name."

"Here you are, complaining about those dirt-bags and their old-fashioned values, while you're spewing these normalisations of domestic abuse. Hypocrite." Clara turned her attention back on her tablet, obviously not in the mood for those kinds of jokes. The Doctor knew she only called Stella 'wife beater' to annoy her, anyway. "Hey?"

"Mm?"

"Look what I found," she indicated the radio.

"Does it work?"

The Doctor dug her sonic screwdriver out of the pocket of her jeans and aimed it at the radio. It didn't take more than a few seconds for the speakers to spring to life, serenading them in that static-y way transistor radios often did. She twisted the dials to focus it a bit more and discovered they were tuned into what was mostly a talk station, BBC Sussex, with some modern song just closing to give-way to the evening news bulletins. Hearing this, Clara turned off the display on her tablet and leant her elbows on the top of the bar, listening and watching the radio intently.

"The main headline this week is the murder of Police Constable Daniel Murray of Hove, who was stabbed to death on Tuesday night outside what is allegedly a popular rave location for much of the area's youth. According to the status updates given to fellow officers over PC Murray's walkie-talkie the area in which he was stabbed was densely populated with as many as two-dozen witnesses during an ongoing party, though nobody has come forward to give a statement to Brighton & Hove's waning police force.

"In a related matter, Superintendent Bridget Hartnell called an emergency press conference at six-thirty PM earlier and announced her early retirement from the force. Aged forty-three, the news that Hartnell is stepping down comes as a shock to many, as she ascended to the position just eighteen months ago and promised to make a dent in Brighton & Hove's high crime rate. Hartnell is the sixth high-ranking police official in the township to step down in the last four years.

"In exclusive comments made to reporters from the Fletcher Tribune, current Mayor Travis Sutton has repeatedly denied Brighton & Hove's high crime rate, maintaining that there is no more violence than in any other large city in Europe. He has declined to be interviewed for any other publications throughout the duration of his political career. Sutton has also repeatedly denied one investigative journalist's accusations that his bank statements reveal suspect transactions to local MPs and police officials, as well as incoming transactions paid by accounts which have been linked to organised crime groups, however a super-injunction passed two months ago means no further comments are able to be made.

"In other news, farmer Bill Hannigan of the East Sussex area was recently awarded the world record for the biggest organically-grown marrow, offering some celebrity to an otherwise anonymous village…" The news stopped being relevant at that point.

"Good on Bill Hannigan and his marrow," the Doctor muttered.

"I don't recognise any of those names he said there," Clara said, frowning at the radio. Then she met Thirteen's eyes, "And I keep up with local politics, you know. Six police officials stepping down in four years? Accusations of the current mayor being involved with criminals?"

"Makes sense," shrugged the Doctor, "When the Five Families were big, every senator in New York state was on their payroll. Friends in high places, and all that jazz." Still not succeeding at improving Clara's low-mood, the Doctor then took it upon herself to change the station, remembering the channel for Clara's personal favourite station, Nought But Noughties (she thought the name was tacky.) She herself was thrilled when 'Grace Kelly' by Mika came on. "Oh my god. This is my jam. Style icon." Clara laughed.

"Who, Mika?"

"No, Gracie," she joined in the singing for just a moment when the pre-chorus drifted on, "'I wanna be like Grace Kelly, but all her looks were too sad…' I've never met her, y'know. I wonder if she'd like this song… I don't think she ever looked too sad."

"I don't know, you look sad sometimes, and there's a passing resemblance."

"A passing resemblance?"

"All I'm saying is that when you made us watch The Country Girl I was convinced that was you making a cameo."

"Nah. She's taller than me. You know, they play this stuff in retirement homes now. For all the old people who sit there with their catheters and their heart medication listening to One Direction. This is old-timey-music."

"It's hardly Scott Joplin," Clara remarked.

"God, I wish there was a piano in here, so you could give us a bit of the old 'Maple Leaf.'"

"Are you trying to cheer me up?"

She sighed, "Trying to."

"No luck trying to build another timey-wimey detector? You can't use this radio for anything?"

"Not much, save for listening to music. Guess it's down to us. We'll have to put our heads together and come up with something more tangible… I've really gotta start carrying more machines around with us since crazy things keep happening. I sometimes wish trouble didn't follow me everywhere."

"Really? You're not loving the thrill of time being irreparably damaged and we're the only ones who can save it?"

"Maybe if saving it was squaring up to be a little damn easier. The odds are way against us. Why don't you try the internet again? Google some of those names we just heard? Sounds to me like this Daniel Murray cop was killed by one of those gangsters, otherwise at least one of those witnesses would have come forward. Especially since the police must be looking for them."

"Something's got everybody here scared out of their wits," Clara sighed, opening her tablet again.

"Look up the phoney mayor."

"Travis Sutton…" Clara mumbled to herself as she typed his name into the search engine, a string of blue website links and advertisements appearing. "Hah. Travis Sutton is an international man of mystery. He's taken out nearly a dozen super-injunctions and has been accused of financially backing various gagging orders. NDAs about all his personal information, including the information of his aides, his family, anybody he knows… seems to be a habit most of Brighton & Hove's mayors have shared for decades. None of whom I know."

"Okay, so, politicians are corrupt. That's hardly news."

"In Brighton? Our actual mayor was at the centre of a scandal last year because she accidentally put her recycling in the main bin – it made the papers. Now a police officer gets murdered on duty with twenty witnesses and nobody talks? It's just a bulletin? One death out of many?"

"You're right. This is Commissioner Loeb level corruption. And we're Jim Gordon."

"Urgh, this is no use. There's barely any information out there. Nobody cares enough about what's happening in Brighton to go against its political elite and risk getting censored like all these other publications. I mean, for god's sake, The Argus closed down in the 1990s it says here, but I was reading articles from The Argus just this morning before we went out about that moody councillor's prospective education reforms. This is a bloody nightmare!" she exclaimed suddenly. Clara put her head in her hands.

"Hey, hey," the Doctor cooed, taking her wrists, "It's gonna be okay. We're gonna fix it. I'm gonna fix it. I can't stand by and watch my wife be upset."

"I'm just tired…" she relaxed somewhat. Thirteen lifted up one of Clara's hands properly and kissed the back of it.

"We'll figure this out, Coo. All we have to do is… look out for clues."

"But there haven't been any clues."

"Not yet, but… I… we…"

Clara raised her eyebrows expectantly, but the Doctor's attention was waning as the radio buzzed and hissed with static, "Yes…?"

"Listen," she picked up the old radio with her free hand, twisting the dial to turn the volume up. "C'mere, c'mon," she tugged on Clara's arm to force her out of her seat and then vaulted spryly over the bar, "We're dancing."

"Dancing? At a time like this?"

"Times like this are the best times to dance, Oswald. It's a quick one, I promise," she put her arms on Clara's waist while Clara's went around the Doctor's shoulders, never one to turn down the opportunity for an impromptu slow-dance.

"There was a love, I knew before; She broke my heart, left me unsure; Juliet, don't forget; The promise you made…" the radio crooned.

"This is the Four Pennies," the Doctor explained as the slow, melodic guitar riff continued to permeate the high volume of static within the device.

"You gave me, sweet memories; Things you do reminiscent of you…"

"Are you sure this is the best use of our time?"

"If Reapers are going to come and eat us, then absolutely," the Doctor attempted to stay light-hearted about the very real threats facing them. But for moment, it didn't feel like those threats were real, because she had Clara Oswald in her arms, her dearest companion of all. And who cared if they were in a dystopic, corrupt, crime-ridden Brighton? Who cared if it was awash with old-school, offensive values and jumped-up, youthful gangland-wannabes? Who cared if they had been thrown aggressively out of their own house, into the streets, and had been holed up in a derelict squat of a pub for more hours than there were in the day? Who even cared that at that moment she didn't have a clue what to do to fix their situation? Suddenly, the Doctor did not. A port in a storm.

"Could be our last ever dance together."

"Then what a fitting song. 'Juliet.' This same week in May 1964, this was top of the British charts. Exactly a century ago, in one of my favourite decades on your tiny, little planet." Clara rested her head on Thirteen's shoulder as they swayed, hardly dancing legitimately at all, the song continuing on in the background.

"Throwback," she murmured.

"Well, exactly." She grew slightly concerned that Clara was going to fall asleep on her while upright, though that was unlikely as Clara was a notoriously light-sleeper and wasn't improving in her old age. Couldn't sleep without complete silence and pitch darkness, which had led to a fair few arguments before about how bright the screen display on the Doctor's original, silver Nintendo DS was.

"Oh my Juliet, Julie oh Julie; Oh my Juliet… fades…" The song tapered off into the buzzing quiet of the radio's background noise and the Doctor and her wife remained standing in the centre of the empty, run-down room. After a few seconds another jingle started playing.

"Caroline, Caroline…" the old music rang.

"Kind of strange choices for Nought But Noughties," Clara said quietly. And she was absolutely right. The Doctor stopped moving completely, still holding Clara's hips, listening.

"This is Radio Caroline on 199, your all-day music station. We're on the air all day from six in the morning to six at night. This is Christopher Moore and you just heard 'Juliet' by the Four Pennies, the current number one in Great Britain. But now it's time for-" It completely cut off, hummed for a few seconds, and then resumed halfway through 'Shake It' by Metro Station.

"That was weird," Clara frowned, "Is there something wrong with that radio?" The Doctor didn't say a word, she was thinking, her mind whirring at a million miles an hour. Clara sounded very distant by comparison to the dead Radio Caroline jingle. Her thoughts raced as an epiphany dawned on her, all of the answers they needed in order to progress and restore Brighton's history to the way it was supposed to be. "Sweetheart? You okay?" Her eyes snapped back to meet Clara's, and without warning the Doctor kissed her deeply on her mouth for a long few seconds, completely taking her breath away.

Hands on Clara's cheeks, she pulled away and grinned: "Have I ever told you you're the most beautiful thing I've seen?"

"No. I mean, not today. What's this in aid of?"

"Come on, we're leaving." She stepped away from Clara to turn off the radio, shoving it back into their emergency supply backpack. "You're a genius, you worked it all out."

"I'm not sure I've worked anything out-"

"It's the newspapers – come on, we have to take off. We're going to my favourite place in the world."

"Don't think I want you in my knickers right now, not when you've been touching all the dirty old stuff in here."

"The library, Clara. Not your pants. Contrary to popular belief, I am capable of complex thought above wondering what you've got going on downstairs. Now, get your head out from between your legs and hurry up – we have a gay seaside resort to save. And we're gonna do it analogue-style."