AN: Trigger-warning: major character deaths literally immediately. It took me a long time and a lot of drafts for me to get this storyline right and not shy away from the most heart-breaking parts, but it wouldn't be doing them justice to cut it out.

Nowhere Girl

1

Empty hospital beds waned in and out of focus in front of Matilda Smith-Jones, who was dumbly aware of what their emptiness signified. There was a droning noise incessantly ringing next to her as she slumped against the wall and stared into space. She only cared about what she couldn't hear: she couldn't hear breathing, she couldn't hear the heart-rate monitor, the respiratory machines, just the gut-wrenching silence of death.

"…you can call? …Miss? …Miss." The nurse touched her shoulder and she jerked, startled, like she had only just seen the woman for the first time. She smiled at Matilda with tired and semi-vacant eyes, distracted and thinking about something else, clearly. Like how tired she was, how what she had in the break room for her 3am lunch on the nightshift, counting down the hours until she could go home. Matilda's world may have imploded in that clinical, white room, but nothing had changed for the nurse attempting to talk to her. "I said, is there somebody you can call?" She said nothing. "I'm sorry about your parents. I can't imagine how it must feel to…" Mattie looked at her silently. "Do you want a leaflet? We have a very efficient grief counselling program for under eighteens on the NHS."

"Efficient?"

"Pardon?"

"'Efficient' grief counselling? What makes a counselling service 'efficient'?"

"Patients move through it very quickly."

"Fast-tracked grieving process? Is that healthy?" Now the nurse went quiet. Matilda felt guilty, the nurse was only trying to help her, after all, and was very young and therefore new. Not one of the middle-aged grandmotherly ones who smiled warmly and had a wealth of experience to fall back on… though, she assumed they did teach medical staff about how to talk to recently bereaved youths. Maybe she wasn't particularly empathetic. Mattie didn't apologise. "I'm not interested in any leaflets. Thanks." She didn't mean the 'thanks.'

"…I don't like to tell you this because I understand you're going through a difficult time-" An understatement. "-but there are people who need these beds in the ICU. Are there no grandparents? Aunts? We have leaflets for shelters and can put you in touch with officers from Child Protective Services?"

"She doesn't need Child Protective Services or any shelter." Rose Tyler swept into the room with a sense of purpose and eyes red-raw from crying. Mattie hadn't bothered to wipe her own tears and so they had just left streaks across her face. Rose hugged her tightly; Matilda didn't want her to let go. "I'm so sorry."

"Who are you?" the nurse asked Rose.

"I'm her godmother. Could you give us a minute?"

"The room needs-"

"I know," said Rose. The nurse took her leave, standing up and exiting the room, glancing over her shoulder and closing the door. "Haven't seen her around before," Rose released her hold on Mattie and took the newly-vacated seat by her side.

"I think she's new." Mattie then leant back in her chair and looked up at the ceiling.

"I'm so sorry I wasn't here," Rose said softly, taking her hand as she avoided looking at anybody or anything in particular. The private room was soundproofed and the silence hanging in the air was sickly. "How long's it been?"

"Not even half an hour."

"Half an hour… god, Matts, I…" Emotions welled up and Rose cleared her throat, continuing to talk very quietly, "Jack's sorting everything out." She didn't want to know precisely what 'everything' was, and Rose didn't tell her. "We've got to leave. I'm sorry. There was a car accident, and with the storm outside they're running low on space here." Rose echoed what the nurse had tried to tell her. But what could she say? She couldn't argue. They didn't need the beds in the ICU anymore. "I wish I was here with you when they…" Rose became overwhelmed again and wiped her eyes with a tissue she'd been keeping balled up in a clenched fist. "I didn't get to say goodbye…" Rose looked at the beds like they weren't empty. "We only went to get a coffee…" That had been nearly an hour ago, which was the longer than the usual amount of time Rose and Jack vanished for whenever they'd gone to get something to eat or drink. Then they always brought something back up with them for Matilda, who refused to leave the room. She had practically lived in that hospital room for the last two weeks, going home to poor sleep and constant babysitting from an assortment of people who all assured her that medicine was very good in the 2060s, excellent, and if anything happened…

But in the end, they'd refused anything offered by Mattie's wide, extended family. Any magic medicine, immortality-in-a-bottle, they didn't want it. And now she was alone, and she hated herself for feeling angry about that.

"We need to get you home," Rose said, seeing the figure of the nurse looming on the other side of the door. It was at this point that Mattie relented. Rose helped her to her feet like she couldn't walk, but she didn't try to stop her. Besides, she'd been sitting down for so many hours her legs did feel strangely numb, just like the rest of her. The nurse smiled coolly at them as they left, wending through the corridors full of sick people. Rose had to drag her aside to stay out of the way of a trio of porters rushing a blood-drenched car crash victim with his neck in a brace down and right into the room they had just left. "Do you want anything? A drink? Hot chocolate?" Rose tried to distract her. She meekly shook her head. "Are you sure?"

"It's not going to make them come back if I have a hot chocolate."

"You haven't really eaten all day."

"I'm not hungry."

Rose sighed and gave up for the time being. Mattie felt like if she even thought for too long about eating something she might be sick, like it would occupy the empty space inside her, curdle, and be rejected by her grief.

Captain Jack Harkness, whom she generally thought of as an uncle despite him being her godfather, stood sombrely in at the revolving doors out of the building with a folder of documents. Death certificates? Recommended funeral homes? 'Efficient' grief counselling leaflets? She didn't want to know. He met her eyes with a knowing look, not trying to smile but not crying, either. He reminded her of a soldier, bravely continuing on in lieu of tremendous personal loss.

"Accident's bad," Jack told Rose when they approached, "Nobody dead yet, though."

"Would've been a lot worse if nobody stopped the lorry," Rose told him. Mattie felt like they knew more than they were letting on about this accident, especially through the looks they were giving each other.

"I'm just saying-"

"He was drunk and driving on the wrong side of the road, what was I supposed to do?" Rose whispered.

"What did you do?" Matilda interrupted.

"Nothing," both Jack and Rose told her.

"Is that where you went? Is that why you were gone for so long?"

"He was a very reckless driver, I just slowed him down," Rose said cryptically.

"Why will you never tell me the full stories?"

"Because, your-" Rose stopped dead in the middle of the sentence, paused and rephrased what she was going to say, "Because we don't want to influence you to get into trouble. If we tell you, it'll be like we're encouraging you, and I can't think of anything worse than you trying to stop a drunk lorry driver on a motorway in a midnight rainstorm."

"I wouldn't do that. I'm not you."

"And you don't want to be," Rose said. Mattie wasn't sure she knew what that meant. Jack didn't share the contents of his documents as he led them out into the rain. Every night for weeks it had been this way, leaving the hospital for only a handful of hours at a time with Jack and Rose for company. Only this time she wouldn't be coming back, she didn't have the shred of hope that her parents would… that they might…

Tears formed in her eyes as the rain spat down on them.

The car was parked close by and Jack got in the driver's seat. Rose let Mattie sit in the passenger seat and she curled up against the door, straining the seatbelt, looking out of the window into the dark night sky. She didn't know how she was supposed to feel, if what she felt was wrong, if she should be bursting into uncontrollable tears, crying for weeks and months non-stop until magically one day she just… wouldn't. Rose looked more upset than her while Jack kept everything deep inside. Where was she? Somewhere between them?

In the wing mirror she watched the bright lights of St Mary's Hospital glide away into the rainy fog.

"They're still there," she said blankly.

"Yeah," said Jack, "They… made the arrangements. A while ago."

"The 'arrangements,'" she repeated, eyes wide open and glued to the vanishing building.

"You don't have to think about all that."

"What if I want to think about it?"

"Do you?" he asked her. She didn't know the answer, and so said nothing, looking at the envelope of papers Jack had placed on the dashboard in front of him. It wasn't his car, it was her parents' car, but he drove it like he had a claim on it. Or maybe he didn't do that at all and she was just feeling especially sensitive to everything they had ever owned, touched, looked at, thought about.

"Do you want a tissue, Matts?" Rose asked quietly from the seat behind her. Matilda just about managed to nod and took a fresh one from Rose's hand, using it to wipe some snot away from her nose. Her glasses were spattered with rainwater and muck, but she couldn't be bothered to clean them.

"Gonna take us a bit longer to get back with the road closed," Jack said. Without the main road it was only a snaking maze of country lanes to get back to her isolated house way out of the way of Newport's suburbia. The Isle of Wight was one of her least favourite places she had lived, and they had always moved around very frequently after the incident twenty-ish years ago when she was only eighteen. Fifty years old and she had still never been to school and was stuck a recluse in the middle of nowhere, questioning her parents who had both grown up in the heart of London – as had Rose – about why she couldn't live in a big city, too. Where there were actually things to do.

"Dad said he'd teach me how to drive when I was old enough to not get pulled over."

"He said that to me, too," said Rose, "And I still don't have a real license. That's your dad for you."

"Yeah…" she said meekly. If only he could have delayed dying like he was so good at delaying everything else. Why did they both have to go at the same time? The same day? If there was a god or cosmic force somewhere in the universe, she wanted to ask it why it would be so cruel. Although… neither of them had ever seen a second without the other there, too. Maybe that counted for something. Did she want to see her mother grieve her father, or the other way around?

Selfishly, she thought, she would choose that over this. Though she would never be able to pick one of them, if she had to… It was a train of thought she didn't like, she realised when a tree branch knocked against the window of the car and startled her. Nobody was out there trying to make her choose between her parents, so why would she force herself to do it? What would that prove? It wouldn't prove anything. Could she be angry at them for not wanting to live without each other? (And yet, she was. Because there she still was, alone.)

"What happens when you die?" she asked Jack. She had asked him that before, and he had always evaded the question. Would he break the habit?

"It's better than being in pain," he said, "Being dragged back into life? That's the rough part."

"Why didn't they want any medicine?"

"They had lots of medicine, Mattie," Rose said.

"You know what I mean." She had asked them this herself when various people had come offering; the various Doctors with their regeneration energy, Rose with her god-like abilities, Oswin and her nanogene gadgets and miracle cure. They accepted the of-the-time medicines CyTech had developed, but nothing from the future and nothing alien.

"Some people don't want to live forever," Jack said, "I never chose to live forever. Rose never chose it. Time Lords are just… like that by nature."

"But you've never tried to go back."

"I go back and forth," Jack began candidly, keeping his eyes on the road, "Sometimes I hate it with every fibre of my being. Sometimes I'm terrified of what would happen if… well, don't think about that."

"What about Sally Sparrow?"

"That's complicated," said Jack coolly, "It's not like anybody else was consulted on that one."

"Had to be that way," said Rose, "She's got a role to play somewhere. And you can't blame her for begging for her life."

"Since when were you so keen on her?"

"I brought you back to life and she hasn't caused anywhere near as much damage. I can't blame Ravenwood for not wanting to put Esther through it, after Sarah, and her mum," Rose said. Matilda knew that Sarah was Esther Drummond's sister, and Esther had always been one of her more regular babysitters, but she didn't know more than that. "She was dying of cancer and she begged for her life for months."

"I know, I saw," Jack muttered, "I just don't trust vampires, especially not when they make more vampires."

"You're being dramatic, there's only two of them."

"Yeah, and you know whose blood they drink?"

"They drink a synthesised compound Oswin makes," Mattie said, something she did know about despite all their attempts to stop her finding out basically anything about who they actually were. Not that she was entirely in the dark, she was very good at eavesdropping, when Rose wasn't getting magic hints that she was listening in. But she found the synthetic, cloned blood Oswin made, full of all the nutrients a hardy vampire would need, particularly interesting. She even had the formula to make it, though most of the compounds were impossible to come by.

"Yeah, but they used to drink mine," Jack said, "Mine and Clara's. We'd spent whole days together every couple of weeks just bloodletting, and I hate people taking my blood. Anyway, Mattie, the point is that your parents don't want to be vampires." She almost corrected his tense but left it. Why was she so keen to remind him that they were past tense now? It wasn't like he didn't know.

"Immortality is about as scary as dying," Rose said.

"Sorry," Mattie muttered somewhat sourly, "But I don't get it. I've never had a choice to wrestle with. I've just had to get used to it." She knew she was going to live for a very long time. She had also known she was going to outlive her parents, in fact that almost everybody outlived their parents, but that didn't lessen the pain any.

"You're different."

"I'm 'different'," she copied. Rose stopped speaking. "Could've been the three of us forever…"

"Nothing's forever," said Jack.

"Like that helps. Nothing's forever."

The rest of the journey home, another twenty minutes, was in silence. She didn't like them talking but she didn't like the quiet. Maybe she would like them more if they said anything helpful, but they were – quite frankly – being useless. Didn't they know some solution? Something to make her feel better, apart from trying to make her drink hot chocolate? What good was so many years doing whatever-it-was they did if they didn't…

She didn't know where she was going with that train of thought. Didn't necessarily know where she was going with anything. Jack pulled the car into the dark road and drove them towards the old groundskeeper house that was theirs, bought after the private estate had been sold off. The house was pitch black, not a light on inside, full of things nobody had any use for any more. Her parents' things.

Crossing the threshold into that house was unimaginably difficult. Her mum and dad may not have set foot in there for nigh on two weeks, ever since her mother's cough had gotten so bad she could hardly breathe, and her father had had a bad fall while hurrying to help her, but now it felt emptier. There was no promise of return now, no 'maybe they'll be okay', because they weren't okay. And they were never going to see their home again. Every time had been a last time for them and they hadn't even known it…

Mattie froze by the door into the living room and looked at Mickey's favourite arm chair in the living room.

"Hey," Rose came up behind her, "You should try and sleep. You've barely slept the last few weeks."

"I'm not tired. Are you going to sleep?" Rose had made up the spare room to stay in a while ago, while Jack always seemed to lurk. Mattie wasn't sure he ever slept.

"I… don't know yet."

"Then why do I have to go to bed? I'm not a kid." Rose didn't appear convinced by this statement. "I'm fifty."

"Not in maturity levels."

"So now I'm immature?"

"Matilda…" Rose said, "You need to try and sleep. You'll feel better."

"I won't," she said defiantly. Why was she trying to defy Rose's suggestion to help her, though? Now she felt guilty. She didn't even know if she wanted to stay awake, or what that would gain. But it would add more and more hours between the last time she had ever seen or talked to her parents, and she didn't want that. She didn't want the gap to grow wider. She didn't care about the people who said it would get better eventually, because she didn't want that vast expanse of hollowness inside her to grow.

"Mattie," Jack put his hands on her shoulders and spoke firmly, "They'd want you to look after yourself." And she knew he was right. So she gave up.

"…I'll just get a glass of water," she mumbled. They let her do this, at least, putting some time at least before she would have go up those dark steps into the crushing loneliness of her bedroom. Jack and Rose watched her do this, clearly waiting to have a private conversation among themselves which would undoubtedly concern her. Why couldn't she be involved in their talks about her?

"Let us know if you need anything," Rose called after her as she set foot on the first step, "Anything, no matter how small."

"…Okay. Thanks…"

Rose managed to smile, "You know we love you." She could only nod once and disappear upstairs.

It was a hard journey. Watching the nurses wheel them away had been hard; leaving the hospital had been hard; entering the house had been hard. Just breathing and keeping composure seemed hard, and she couldn't even work out why she cared about her composure at all. But the hardest thing yet was walking past their bedroom. True, this house didn't have any special meaning to her, they hadn't lived there for long and she was good at not getting attached to places, but that was their room. Their room that was something else they'd never see again.

Tentatively she touched the door handle. Usually when it was quiet in there it was because they were sleeping, and she wouldn't want to wake them. For some reason it was the same behaviour she employed down, turning the handle as quietly as possible and then seeing the messy bed. Nobody had been around to make it after taking them to the hospital, it was just like they had left it, Jack and Rose and she herself leaving it utterly undisturbed. In that moment, the only thing that seemed logical to Matilda, the only thing that she thought might make her feel better, was kicking off her shoes and crawling into the sheets that still smelled of Mickey Smith and Martha Jones. They were ice cold but she imagined vividly that they were warm, still remembering when she was much, much younger and would sleep in with them if she had a bad dream or was homesick for the last place they had moved from. Or the night many years ago when her grandma Francine had died, which had struck her and her mum very hard indeed.

But the bed was still empty no matter how fond the memories were. She didn't care about her glass of water and clutched the tissue Rose had given her tightly in her hand, curling into a ball and finally feeling overcome with emotion. If she had thought she had felt nothing before, now she felt the crushing weight of everything, and the fact that they were gone, and she would never see either of them again. It was the thoughts of her parents that made her shake as she sobbed, burying her face in her mother's pillow without even remembering to take her glasses off first. The world had come to an end, and Matilda cried herself into a dark, dreamless sleep.

She didn't know how long it was from the point when she had crashed to when she later awoke and did not initially realise that she had even managed to fall asleep. The two moments blurred together in a haze of tears, but the tissue she had been given by Rose had dried again in her hand, as had the pillowcase. She still felt her eyes burning though, but possibly from tiredness more than anything else. When she opened her eyes she saw her dad's old watch that hadn't found its way to the hospital with him. The watch said it was seven in the morning and she'd barely been asleep for four hours, but she could hear voices downstairs. For half a second of madness induced by her still being half-asleep, she had the fleeting thought it was her parents. She may as well have been punched in the gut when full awareness returned to her.

With half a mind to tell them to be quiet, she eventually pulled herself out of the bed and crept back out onto the landing, at which point the voices became crisp and clear. Bizarrely, she could swear it was Clara Oswald down there with Rose and Jack, who was now warning them to be quiet or else they would wake Matilda. It was almost entirely Rose who was being loud, though.

"Rose, calm down," another interloper advised. The Tenth Doctor. Mattie began to sneak down the stairs and listen.

"I'm calm," Rose argued, "I'm just confused." She didn't sound calm at all. "I don't understand why it's her."

"We haven't been colluding," an American accent not belonging to Jack hissed. Thirteen. What kind of meeting were they having? Aside from a very loud one.

"It doesn't make sense. You never see her. Something's clearly going on, I don't know. Maybe they didn't think it through, maybe – maybe they weren't in their right-"

"Now," Jack cut across her sharply, anger in his voice, "That's not something you should be suggesting, Rose. It was revised last week, with doctors for witnesses. Don't start accusing them of-"

"I'm not. It's just ridiculous! They're not even family!"

"Neither are you, technically," said Ten.

"How can you say that!? She's my goddaughter. And I care about her as if she was my own daughter. And I thought – and I talked to them, and – they never said-" Mattie snuck down the stairs and listened to Rose burst into tears. "Am I in there at all?"

"Yes," said Jack coolly, "Mickey left you his mug with a space invader on it."

There was a long pause, until Rose meekly said, "I bought him that for his birthday the first year we were going out…" And then her tears increased. Matilda had never known her dad's old space invader mug was so significant and capable of sparking such a poignant response from Rose.

"…What about Tish?" Thirteen asked after a few moments. Mattie continued to creep until she was balanced right on the bottom step and just out of sight from the living room. A shadow paced back and forth in front of the doorway, but she couldn't tell who it was.

"So, what? You don't even want the responsibility?"

"Nobody's saying that, Rose," Clara said quietly. She was the only one who sounded genuinely calm. Rose didn't argue.

"She has cousins," Thirteen continued.

"Martha left them a photo album. Mattie never sees her cousins, anyway. They don't really know about her," Jack explained, "Sending her to Tish would be stranger than sending her to Clara and the Doctor." Finally, Matilda understood what the conflict was, and she lost her grip on the bannister and nearly fell, stumbling. Silence fell in the room.

"Matts?" Rose called. She gritted her teeth and stepped into the living room, faced with the five of them: Jack, Rose, Ten, Clara and Thirteen. It was Thirteen who had been pacing, Clara and Jack both sitting down. Rose had turned to cry into Ten's arms and he was holding her tightly. Rose sniffed, "Sorry, did we wake you? Were you asleep?" She nodded slowly.

"…Why do mum and dad want me to live with Clara?"

"We don't know, sweetheart," Clara said softly, "We're just talking about it. Don't worry, nobody's going to make you do anything you don't want to do."

"Is that the Wills?" she pointed at Jack, who was reading over various pieces of paper in his lap, "Where did you get those?"

"They were in the glove compartment of the car, I'm the Executor," he explained, "They have… they have funeral instructions. I need to read over them. Look, we really don't have to do this now. You can go back to bed, and-"

"No," said Mattie, "I want to know what it says." Why wouldn't they have told her about this? She had always assumed… well, she didn't know what she had assumed. Rose lived on the TARDIS, Jack travelled constantly with Ianto Jones, and she knew her parents had always tried their hardest to keep her away from all that.

"It appoints Clara and the Twelfth Doctor your legal guardians provided they still live in Brighton. Both Wills do, they're nearly identical except for more instructions about what your mother wants Tish to have. It just doesn't say why. We all thought it would be Rose. Apart from that, all their possessions become your property when you turn sixty in short-years and eighteen in long-years." Feeling the numbness returning to her, Mattie shuffled towards the unoccupied sofa and sat down. Still, she held Rose's tissue. At the moment, she was fifty in short-years and roughly fifteen in long-years. Jack sighed, "There is one thing that might explain it. There was a letter."

"What?"

"It's addressed to you. I haven't opened it. If you don't want to read it now, though, that's fine. It'll be hard."

"…Where?" she asked. The instability of her immediate and potentially also her long-term future was panicking her a great deal. How could she do anything if she didn't even know where she was meant to live? Who with, and how? Jack took out an envelope from his stack of documents and showed it to her. She held out her hand, "Can I see?"

"Are you sure?"

"No. But…" she kept her hand outstretched, "More time won't make it easier…" He gave it to her. Her mother's handwriting: Matilda, the front read. She opened it very carefully so that she didn't accidentally tear the paper within. She unfolded it gingerly, and began to read:

Dear Mattie,

It breaks my heart to know that soon you'll be reading these words as much as your heart must be broken now without us. But no parent wants to outlive their child, so if you're in the world on your own it means we did something right and we kept you safe. You're our whole universe, but I know you'll be angry at us for not being there. Eternal life and eternal youth aren't for everybody, and sometimes parts of your humanity can be lost in the process. Neither of us want that to happen, and it's our choice not to be brought back, and we're trusting you to make sure nobody has the idea to resurrect us. We don't want that, and we're sorry, but I know you'll be okay.

You'll want to know why our Wills, which were revised just before I'm writing this for you now, name Clara as your legal guardian and not Rose. The reason is because they'll offer you stability and a safe home. We don't want you on the TARDIS until you're old enough to make the decision for yourself, if that's what you want, and you know this already. They'll take care of you in Brighton, we trust them, and Earth is the best place for you. With them in the school, you could even get your qualifications and become a surgeon. If Clara takes care of you as well as she takes care of her own Echoes, I know she'll do anything to keep you safe. Make sure that Rose knows she's the best godmother to you we could ever wish for.

You're going to be wonderful and whatever you do, we'll always be proud of you, and you're always going to be out little girl no matter where we are. We love you with all our hearts, but like the Doctor says, everything has its time, and everything ends. The Doctor was right. Clara and Rose have forever just like you, though, and the Doctor knows how to take care of a Time Lord. Try not to remember us being weak and sick; your dad keeps all his digital home videos on a flash drive in our room if you ever need help. I'm too weak to write any more but I hope you understand the decisions we've made, all with you in the centre.

All our love until the end of time,

Mum & Dad XOXO

It was hard for Mattie to stop her tears from dripping down and ruining the paper, which she now thought was the most fragile and valuable thing in the world. She dropped the page on the sofa next to her and covered her eyes with her hands.

"Can I read it, Matilda?" Jack asked in hardly more than a whisper. She mumbled something and heard him lean over and take the page, the ghost of her mother's voice reading those words echoing in her head.

"Here, take these," Rose sat next to her and gave her a fistful of new tissues before pulling her close again.

"They wanted you to know," she tried to say through her tears, "That you're the best godmother that they could have wished for. That's what it says." Rose hugged her warmly, the most significant constant in her life outside of Mickey and Martha. They were right, Rose would always be there, she would never have to say goodbye to her godparents. Maybe that was something she could cling to.

"She only wrote this a few days ago," Jack said after reading it carefully, then he asked her, "Is it okay to show it to Clara?" Clara looked up at mention of her name, and Mattie got the impression she felt like she didn't belong somehow.

"Yeah." Clara walked across the room to see the letter next, but she didn't look at it for more than a few seconds.

"This seems private," she said, "I'm not sure-"

"Mum says she trusts you to look after me," Mattie explained. It was quite personal, her mother's real last words and possibly some of her last coherent thoughts.

"They want her to carry on living on Earth in a stable home environment," Jack said, "Where she can get some formal qualifications and stay protected at school. And more specifically, Clara, that she puts her faith in you after seeing how you protect your duplicates." Then he turned to Rose, and the silent Ten behind her (the Doctors were both being very quiet), "They wouldn't want to make you two start a new life on Earth."

"But, Matts, it's really up to you," Clara interjected, "You can take some time to think about it."

"What are you saying? You don't want her?" Rose argued.

"I'm completely sure I speak for both of us when I say we're honoured to be her legal guardians."

"Of course we are," Thirteen confirmed, still pacing, "She's more than welcome, if that's what she wants." Mattie didn't know what she wanted.

Actually, that was a lie: she wanted her parents. Outside of that… everything was blurry. The world was a radio she couldn't quite tune to the right band, leaving everything muffled. People pressed her for her thoughts and opinions, and while she heard them, she couldn't bring herself to listen.

Clara spoke to her again, "The important thing, darling, is that nobody's going to rush you. We all want what's best for you, I promise, so take as much time as you need." Them trying not to pressure her into thinking about her options somehow felt worse than if they were desperate for an immediate answer. She felt as though she were stuck between a rock and a hard place. She didn't reply to Clara, who shortly went and sat back down in her arm chair, brushing Thirteen's arm on the way past and whispering something about how she should try not to pace as much. Thirteen crossed her arms tightly and perched on the armrest of the chair, bouncing her foot up and down instead.

"Maybe you should go back upstairs," Jack advised, "Get some more sleep."

"What are the funeral instructions?" Mattie asked thickly, feeling the snot building up in her nose after so much crying and trying not to cry. Rose, whose shoulder she was still leaning on, was the same.

"You don't have to-" Jack began.

"I want to," she cut him off. She didn't want to, but she also didn't like them telling her how she was feeling. 'You don't have to' translated, in Matilda's mind, to 'we don't want you to,' or 'we don't think you can handle it,' or 'you're not grown-up enough.' But her parents were already gone and she had been there in the room when it happened, suddenly alone; how much more bubble-wrap did they want to cushion her in?

"The service is going to be at a church in London," Jack explained after some hesitation. She knew they had never much liked Newport.

"They're… I mean, they… they wanted to be cremated. Dad said to me before, a while ago."

"Yeah, that's what it says. We're going to honour their wishes, don't worry. Down to the letter." Their wishes were that Matilda go try to continue to live a 'normal' life in on the mainland, not that her life of constantly travelling, hiding, and trying not to interact with anybody outside of her parents' immediate social circle of pseudo-immortals was what she would consider normal. But it wasn't like she didn't remember the events of her eighteenth birthday, which had proven to her – resentful as she sometimes was – the necessity of all their precautions. "It'll be your decision what to do with the ashes. Your father also asked me, last week, to do the eulogy." Mattie wished they had shared more of their preparations with her, if they had been making them. Couldn't mum have told her in person about the decision regarding living arrangements? But then, they probably didn't want her to entertain the prospect that they might not leave the hospital.

"Don't make it too sad. They wouldn't want everybody to be sad."

"Sure," Jack managed a smile, "There's plenty of good things to talk about, don't worry."

"I… might go back upstairs." There were unanimous mumbles from all the adults that they thought that was a very good idea. She didn't have anything else to say to them, anyway, and she didn't want to think anymore. It was probably good that Jack was taking care of funeral arrangements, that it was all already organised. She left Rose's side with her new, fresher tissues, and for the second time trudged upstairs.

This time, however, she went to her own room first and finally managed to change into pyjamas. Peeling away her clothes felt like shedding a layer of skin, like she was giving something up by performing this arbitrary action. Dad would tell her she was being ridiculous, though, and that she couldn't wear the same clothes forever just for the artificial sense of feeling closer to them. She still couldn't bring herself to put them in the laundry basket and instead folded up the dirty garments and left them on the edge of her own bed, at which point she crept across the landing to go back to the other room. At least she remembered to take her glasses off this time.

AN: This is more or less the saddest chapter of this storyline (which, like "Brighton Rock", has 6 chapters), and there will be some actual monster-of-the-week stuff, in case anyone's worried I've written 40,000 words of mundane and depressing funeral planning. Finally, please forgive me for killing off Mickey & Martha, I do love them both and Martha especially so it was all quite upsetting to write as well as to read!