17th of March, 2024

Moonwyrm

6

Immediately upon materialising in a dark space, a robot lunged for Rose. Her split-second reaction was to punch its head clean off. She didn't feel a thing, but it shattered and collapsed. She backed away, getting her bearings, as Esther cable-jumped to her side.

"This is From Beyond," she said, "The terminal's this way. We have to hurry."

"What part of us teleporting here isn't hurrying?" asked Rose, following as quickly as she could.

From Beyond was a dark ride themed around cosmic horrors. She knew that because Mattie had told her about it earlier when they walked past it on their way to get slushies and had then complained again about how she thought English was pointless and wished Clara wouldn't tell her so much about old books.

"What did they have to do to persuade you to leave Earth and come to the moon today?" asked Rose.

"Oh, I was already here, visiting family at Whiterock, the mining outpost," she said, "I-"

An enormous, metal tentacle punched through the wall, so sharp that it would have speared Esther– superhero armour be damned – if she didn't flit away at the last possible second. The tentacle withdrew and there was a mechanical roar.

"What's that!?" said Rose.

"Theme park set piece gone nuts! Look out!"

Another tentacle shot through the wall, and this time, Rose grabbed hold of it. She wanted to rip it clean off, but it reacted too quickly, wrenching itself back. She clung on and went along for the ride, crashing through a thin wall and into the final scene of the whole ride, the track writhing along behind them.

The tentacle slammed Rose into the ground and then another came for her head, trying to swipe it clean off. Rose punched it out of the air with all her strength and it snapped off the body of the beast. And that body was a squirming, green, metal mass, terrorising the riders. Even with one arm broken off, there were seven left: an anatomically correct version of robot Cthulhu.

"How did this thing ever get cleared by health and safety!?" said Rose, dodging another tentacle.

"The control terminal's in the next room!" said Esther, flitting through the hole Rose and her octopus assailant had left in the wall. "Give me the disk so I can install it!"

"I'm a bit preoccupied at the moment!" Rose shouted back, stamping on another tentacle that swept at her legs. It now only had six remaining.

Esther shot a barrage of lightning from her hands at the machine and it stuttered, slowing enough for Rose to give the disk up to Esther, who ran off – like a normal person, for once – into the backroom through a dark, employees-only door. Not that there were any employees left to make use of it.

The tentacles started up again. Maybe Esther didn't have enough backup power to short-circuit it permanently.

"I don't know if you even have a brain, but I'd really rather not fight anyone today!" said Rose, who'd never been good at it. Brute strength only got you so far – she wasn't Jenny; she hadn't spent decades learning martial arts for kicks. It was impossible to reason with a giant automaton being commanded by computer code, so as soon as it regained the use of its remaining limbs, it started trying to rip her to pieces again.

If not for the time vortex giving her imperceivable premonitions about what was about to happen, she'd have been beaten to a pulp long before Esther succeeded in uploading Oswin's repurposed virus and deactivating the thing. It wailed and groaned and swung for Rose over and over, and she kept punching, smashing, and pulling off the limbs until all the lights went out. From Beyond was powered down.

"How many computers are there, again?" said Rose, catching her breath when Esther came back with the disk.

"Three. Two left."

"Brilliant." As a last resort, Rose snapped one of the tentacles in two, taking an end for herself. Esther stared at her. "In case I need a weapon."

"Aren't your fists good enough?"

"I'd rather not find out. Let's go."

As it happened, the tentacle came in very useful, because they were promptly besieged by an army of robotic prospectors when it turned out that the second terminal was deep within Crater Cart Chaos, one of the three roller coasters. They spat out pre-recorded voice lines about how they'd recently 'struck helium' and were going to set up a new mine, as they grabbed at Rose and threatened to overwhelm her with sheer numbers. They'd all descended from the dioramas and the scenery to guard the computer, some wielding disturbingly realistic pickaxes – not that any helium mine Rose had ever heard of had needed a one of those.

When one of the prospectors pulled out a working jackhammer and another a huge laser for breaking up ores, that was all the invitation Rose needed to flail the tentacle wildly and knock them all back. It worked extremely well and kept them occupied for the few minutes it took for Esther to upload the virus a second time and shut down that section of the park.

"That's hospitality and the two plazas done with," said Esther when the prospectors collapsed in a heap, Rose's tentacle mangled by their wide array of mining weapons.

"What's left?" asked Rose.

"Retail. Did you get a chance to visit the giftshop yet?"

They hadn't. They'd told Mattie they'd save the gift shop for the end of the day, even though she had a long list of souvenirs she wanted to buy (or, more accurately, steal via the sonic screwdriver) so that they didn't have to carry things all day.

But as the Tenth Doctor always said, there was something undeniably comforting about a little shop. That must have been why the guests had sought refuge there, with Rose and Esther stumbling across about twenty of them, cowering in the dark storeroom filled to the brim with moon plushies, novelty drinkware, and keyrings. But the survivors started bickering.

"It's the Lightning Girl! We're saved!" said a woman.

"We're not saved, get down! What's she going to do against him?" said a man, crouching with his arms around two teenage boys. They were terrified.

"Him who?" asked Esther.

"Shh! He's right out there!" a third person hissed.

"I can't help you if you don't tell me what the problem is," said Esther.

"How can she do anything!?" another survivor demanded. Rose started to hear something, though. Heavy, metallic footsteps. "She's not a real superhero, she's just another manifest!"

"Well, hey, first, I'm not actually a manifest-"

"She's a robot! Just like them!"

"I'm not a robot either, it – and that's a very reductive view of the concept of superheroism, which has been a staple of popular culture for-"

"Oi, Sparky," said Rose quietly, looking through the storeroom window onto the shop floor.

"Not now, I'm trying to explain-"

"I don't think we have time for explaining," said Rose, because she'd seen him, with his white suit and his gold visor, and he'd seen her.

"It's important that people respect the artistic and cultural significance of comic books and the people they inspire, and-"

"Shh," said Rose, and finally, Esther followed her gaze and saw what she saw, through the crackling, electrical display of her mask. The menacing, mechanoid astronaut stared them down from the other side of the glass, and then he spoke.

"It's one small step for man…"

"Uh-oh," said Esther.

"And one giant leap for mankind."

Robot Neil Armstrong punched a hole in the wall to greet them, sights set on Esther. He tore the shop to pieces and went for her, while she flitted left and right to dodge every swing of his unreasonably large fists.

"I can't keep doing this! I need to get to that terminal!"

Rose lifted up her robotic tentacle, now falling to pieces after the encounter with the prospectors, and thwacked the astronaut with it. It barely made a dent, but he did turn his attention to Rose, instead of the Lightning Girl. Rose threw the disk back to her, hopefully for the last time, and Esther went off searching for the terminal.

"Just me and you, then, eh?" said Rose, ducking another punch and then sweeping the tentacle to try and trip him up. It just bounced off his legs. "Why did they make you so bloody sturdy? And massive? You know, I've met Neil Armstrong, and he's not eight feet tall in real life!"

"ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN," it jabbed the air where her head was, "ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND!" The fast jabs came too quickly for her to dodge, and one of them hit her square in the face, sending her flying backwards so hard that she crashed through another wall – the second one in the space of an hour. She was sick of this.

Covered in dust and debris, she tried to get back to her feet, but she was still a little dazed from her encounter with Kirby-Ashlake. She saw it, though, sending the dull haze of a screensaver across the room.

"Terminal!" she shouted, coughing on dust. "In here!"

The astronaut ripped through the rest of the wall to approach her, and she scrambled away. He stamped down, narrowly missing one of her ankles, and then stooped to grab her. Behind him, Esther crept into the room and made a break for the terminal. When he turned momentarily to look at her, instead, Rose picked up the nearest object – a snow globe with a depiction of the Moon Landing inside – and threw it at the astronaut. It shattered and he turned back to face her, slowly lifting his visor to reveal a skeletal, metal face within.

"They couldn't be bothered to stick a bit of wax on you? No? This is the worst theme park I've ever been to," said Rose.

"Don't antagonise him!" said Esther.

"Stop drawing his bloody attention, then, and I won't have to! Back this way!" He'd looked at Esther again, typing away, and Rose threw something else at him, a wind-up toy that looked like the moon itself, waddling around with tiny, plastic feet. Bizarre.

He lunged and grabbed one of Rose's ankles faster than she could move away, pulling her towards him and back within pummelling range. But with all her strength – and that was quite a lot – she kicked wildly with her free leg, shattering his robotic knee to pieces. Right leg severed, Neil Armstrong collapsed, almost on top of her, and crawled after her through the room. She kicked him clean through the head next, but it was no use. It wasn't like he had a brain to destroy.

He kept coming and Rose kept kicking and then, when one of his gigantic hands closed around Rose's thigh, the lights all shut off. He stopped moving immediately and she dragged herself free, still kicking to make sure he was down for good. There was almost no light, just the soft, blue glow from Esther's mask.

"Is that it?" asked Rose.

"It's… the park is shut down."

"That's good, isn't it? That's what we were trying to do?"

"There's no power," she said. "The whole of the LunaDome is dark. I think it needs rebooting from the central terminal, in his office, I-" Esther fell, and Rose caught her. They usually tried to avoid touching Esther at all costs, at the risk of passive electrocution, but Rose felt almost nothing now. She tried to teleport - go back to Earth before things got really dire - but she'd used up all her energy on the animatronic, still feeling the effects of her earlier shock and with no second EpiPen to hand. To think, people told her she was a god.

"You'll be fine," said Rose. "It needs doing from the office, right? The Doctor's in there. She'll get everything working again." She'd better, because if Esther was disconnected from electricity for any longer, she'd die.


Emergency lights flashed in Alvin Kirby-Ashlake's office, bright red and casting an ominous glow. The central computer, connected, like the lights, to a very small, emergency battery, kept going, while the Doctor typed away.

"This isn't good," said Clara, kneeling at Kirby-Ashlake's side. "With no power, the life support will stop working. The temperature controls, and the air."

"There's plenty of air," said the Doctor quietly. "Enough for hours. Days, maybe."

"Can you reset it? Or do we need to start evacuating? We can use the TARDIS to-"

"I can reset it, but not just yet." She left the computer terminal and walked, slowly, to crouch next to Kirby-Ashlake, who was running very low on blood. What skin he had left was clammy and corpse grey. "Where's the second Cybermat?" He said nothing. "I know it's around here. The last one."

"Doctor, you need to-" Clara began, but was interrupted.

"I can't turn anything back on with that thing roaming around," said the Doctor. "I've got three pieces of Cyberman technology left – three things harbouring that program. You, the head, and the Cybermat. You and the head I can release with the virus, but it won't work on Cybermats. They've got no humanity in them to appeal to."

"How should I know?" Kirby-Ashlake croaked out.

"Doctor…" said Clara, "Without the air conditioning active, we're all going to roast. This place is one, big magnifying glass, and we're the ants. That's what you said this morning."

"I know it's nearby," the Doctor ignored her. "Here's you, partially converted, with bits and pieces everywhere – materials it can use to transform you fully."

"I don't know where the insect is," he whispered.

"No? Well," the Doctor smiled, but her eyes were cold. She patted his knee sympathetically. "That's okay. Cybermat needs power, too, and there's only one power source working in the LunaDome. The battery in your office."

"You need to save those people," Clara hissed, "You-"

"I am saving them, Clara. I'm saving everybody. I can't let a rogue Cybermat with that code installed make its way to Earth. It'll spread across the whole planet in minutes – every single electronic device deciding it belongs to Mondas and wants to blow the moon out of the sky and then convert the entire human race for good measure.

"But, you see," she went on, talking to Kirby-Ashlake, "Cybermen demand perfection. If you don't fit with them and their greater goal, they've no qualms about destroying you. And you? A half-human-hybrid? You're a failure if I've ever seen one. You stink of it. Your family knew it, I know it, and I'll bet the Cybermen have just figured it out. This whole creation of yours, you should have kept it for yourself. Just you and the robots. That's the future you're trying to build, but you could've just skipped to the end – you're already halfway there by firing the human staff."

"And you think you're better than them, Doctor? You think you can win? I know you. I have data. I've seen it. An old man in the snow, dying, cold and alone."

The Doctor clenched her jaw. "I came back. And I'll keep coming back."

"The heat from the sun… there will be fires if you don't reboot the system."

"And that'll do what? Destroy the LunaDome? Typical. There are people out there who could die if I don't do anything, but it's not them you use to persuade me. It's your toy."

"Doctor…" said Clara. "You should stop this. The TARDIS can find the Cybermat."

"The Cybermat will come to me," said the Doctor. "I know how they work. They're not complicated."

"I think Clara's right," said Mattie, still there, watching them argue in the red light. The Doctor looked at her, but she saw Martha. Martha wouldn't have liked this, either. "You should take everybody onto the TARDIS, evacuate them. What are the chances that the Cybermat is able to get on board? Can't you scan people as they enter for alien technology?"

"Don't underestimate them," said the Doctor simply.

"You're no better than they are. Trying to decide what should and shouldn't get to live based on what species they belong to," said Kirby-Ashlake.

"And you were sending humans to their deaths over your railway scheme. Whose head is that, hm? I know it's somebody who worked here, somebody who's so far gone now they won't even tell me their name – if they remember it at all."

"Abigail Lock," said Kirby-Ashlake. "Abby." The Doctor glanced over at the head, there on the desk.

"And was she worth it? Abby Lock? For your HumanPlus pipedream?" said the Doctor. He didn't respond. "You don't care at all, do you? Maybe I shouldn't bother to save anybody here. Maybe I should pack up and leave – my family's here, you know, and I'd like to keep them safe, at least. Everybody else? Your guests? Well, they'll have to be acceptable collateral damage."

"What?" Clara stared at her.

"Your theme park's acceptable, too," the Doctor continued. "I could even start the fires myself, let this whole place go up in smoke. With this much oxygen in the atmosphere, you could torch it easily."

"What are you saying? You can't do that," said Clara. "Even for a Cybermat, even for an army of Cybermen – those lives aren't worth sacrificing."

"But what if they are, Clara?" the Doctor turned to her. "All of Earth, for these people here. We take the ship to collect Rose and Esther and we leave. Serves them all right for buying tickets to this dump, doesn't it?"

"A lot of them are children."

"Every war has costs."

"You – you're absolutely – this is unfathomable! God!" Clara stood. "I've been trying to save his life, and you want to leave everybody here to die? For a crusade!? You know, sometimes, you trick me just enough into thinking you might actually see yourself as a part of humanity, but none of it's real, is it? It's all just a-"

A metal ball dropped from the ceiling, onto Clara's head, and she shrieked. The Doctor couldn't react. It sank its claws in, but then, Clara phased. It fell to the floor, onto its back, but quickly flipped upright and scurried away. It shot under the desk, until-

"That's it!" Clara was enraged, "You might be alright with letting people die for that thing, but I'm not!"

Everything in the office came off the floor. The desk, all the furniture, Kirby-Ashlake, the Doctor, Matilda, and the Cybermat, unable to escape in the grip of telekinesis. It all levitated because that was what Clara wanted it to do, and the Cybermat was crumpled into a ball for the same reason. Everything fell with a thud, the dead Cybermat rolling away.

"You didn't even try to look for it," said Clara quietly. "You'd have just let all those people die, and you didn't even-"

"You were right," said the Doctor, calm as ever. "I was tricking you."

"Excuse me?"

"It's the one thing they can't stand – emotion. I had to make you angry, to draw it out, so that it chose you for conversion and attacked," said the Doctor. "I knew it would go for you sooner or later, just like the one at the base did." Clara breathed out deeply and stepped towards her. Automatically, the Doctor backed away. Matilda was still watching all of this unfold.

"You don't get to manipulate me like that. You don't get to use me as bait."

"Not even to save all those people?" the Doctor challenged her.

"Nobody's been saved. You still didn't reset the system." At that, the Doctor retreated further, back to the desk and the terminal. "You're so alien sometimes I can't understand you."

"I'm sorry," said the Doctor.

"And what about these two? Abby and Alvin?" asked Clara.

"He's dying, Clara. That shrapnel severed his spinal cord. But even if it hadn't, he's been dead ever since they did that to him."

"Nobody could have saved him, then? You couldn't have asked Rose to teleport him back to Earth?"

"Dealing with the computers is more important."

"I don't want to go back to Earth," Kirby-Ashlake croaked out. He got weaker by the second. "The LunaDome is mine. I want it to be mine forever."

"That's your dying wish, you can wait," said the Doctor as the bright lights turned themselves back on and the hum of the industrial air conditioners reignited. Clara breathed a sigh of relief. "There's somebody more important than you I want to talk to first." She diverted her attention from Kirby-Ashlake to Abby Lock's head. She pulled off the back of the computer, ripped out some wires, and hooked the cyber-head up to them.

"What are you doing?" asked Mattie quietly.

"Installing Oswin's virus in my friend here."

"But that wakes them up. Her head's off. Won't it hurt?"

"It might," the Doctor admitted. "I'm sorry, Abby." As soon as the software upload finished, the head wailed piercingly. Kirby-Ashlake was slipping away, but this he watched with his last moments. "I know. I should've turned you off and let you rest. But I need you to tell me something, Abby." The Doctor touched the Abby Lock's metal cheek softly. There were no tears, but the machine cried. As kindly as she could, the Doctor asked the Cyberman, "What do you want us to do with your body?"

When she finally got the words out, Abby could only say one thing: she wanted to go back home, and she wanted to sleep.

"Okay. You can sleep. I'll take care of everything. Trust me, I'm the Doctor."


"You uploaded Alvin Kirby-Ashlake's brain to the LunaDome computers?" asked Esther, hours later, after Rose had finally recovered enough to take the tourists home. She dumped them all in the middle of Heathrow Airport where they could easily get back to wherever they needed to go; they were all rich as sin, anyway. Half of them had probably chartered private flights already.

But the TARDIS crew, all five of them, hadn't yet gone back to their home planet. At Esther's behest, they'd returned to the Aether Extraction to help bring the food supply out of the ruined storeroom to somewhere – and so that the Doctor could check that none of the mining computers had been infected by the cyber software. They hadn't, but she still installed her counter-virus, just in case, and they'd headed out for one, final destination: D-Lites, the truck stop for lunar freighters run by the Drummonds. The Doctor was a big fan of the large, lime-green neon sign it had above it. It was essentially useless, since it was the only place for miles and not exactly difficult to see, but she had a soft spot for things like that.

Mattie and Clara had no appetite, sharing a basket of chips between them. Esther and Rose, both running dangerously low on energy and calories, had an array of burgers, pizzas, and other unhealthy gems being regularly delivered from the kitchen. They made even the Doctor look like she was calorie counting, since she had just the one burger, and she hadn't eaten much of it.

"That's all he wanted," the Doctor finally answered Esther's question. "To be one with the theme park, have his toys to himself for eternity. That whole place can be his tomb now, once UNIT shows up and quarantines it. Maybe they'll destroy it, too."

"How do you upload somebody to a computer?" asked Mattie.

"It wouldn't have worked if he hadn't already been converted, and then freed of cyber command. Not that cyber command was commanding an awful lot, other than, 'multiply and await further instruction.'" Even with just that directive, they were plenty dangerous.

"I'm going to the loo," said Clara quietly, sliding out of her seat and disappearing. She took a packet of nicotine gum with her. The Doctor watched her go, forlorn.

"…Are you two gonna be okay?" asked Mattie. She sounded frightened. "Earlier, you were-"

"She just forgets who I am sometimes. And maybe I do, too. Eventually, we both have to remember. I would never have let all those people die for one Cybermat, though." And she wanted Clara to believe that, and to trust her. But of course, if Clara had trusted her absolutely, she never would've gotten as angry as the Doctor needed her to be to lure the thing out of hiding.

"Yeah, but… I never see you two argue. Not properly."

"They'll be fine, Matts," said Rose. "Married people argue, and then, if they're healthy, they agonisingly talk it out and dissect it so much that they have to forgive each other, or they'll bore themselves to death. That's what Sally and Esther do."

"We're not married. We just sometimes have to have conversations about how she keeps forgetting to go to the store and buy shower gel, so then she ends up using mine, and I'd rather she didn't," said Esther.

"Yeah. But you love each other, don't you? So, it always works out," said Rose.

"I love her platonically."

"I never said you didn't."

"This isn't how I wanted today to go, though," said Mattie, picking at her chips.

"That's most of my days," said the Doctor. "You get used to it."

"You're seeing the real moon now, though," said Esther. "How the people who actually live here do it."

"Your family," said Mattie.

"That's right," she smiled. Since all the miners knew what she looked like, and many knew her full name and how she was related to the rest-stop owners, she didn't bother with the mask at all. Still had the outfit on, though.

"How did that happen?"

"Oh, well, they've always owned a diner in my family. Not me and Sarah, but our grandparents lived in Maine. It was Mom who moved to D.C. with us when we were young. Sarah's kids ended up picking up the torch. Eddie owns it now, he's my great-nephew, Sarah's grandson."

"And you're keeping an eye on them?" asked Mattie.

"Not really. I just like the company, staying in touch," said Esther, cheeseburger in her hands. "They're my family, but they thought I was dead, until… That was a long conversation, I can tell you that much. But I think finding out that they were related to the Lightning Girl softened the blow."

"That's why you're my favourite," said the Doctor.

"What do you mean? Your favourite what?"

"Of all these schmucks," she waved her hand at Rose. Clara chose that moment to return.

"She says she likes Esther more than you," Rose told her immediately. The Doctor glared at her.

"That's nice," said Clara. "I like Esther more than her at the moment, too." Silence. Mattie looked down at her plate, but Rose just rolled her eyes. Clara noticed the former. "Sorry, Smudge. We're not rowing."

"It sounds like you are rowing."

"It'll be alright. Just a disagreement. Part of life."

"Yeah… okay," said Mattie, unconvinced.

"I'm sorry," the Doctor told Clara very seriously.

"I know you are. But I'm not ready to forgive you just yet." She changed the subject. "Anything else you want to do on your week off, Mattie?"

"Um… well, I didn't get to go on any of the roller coasters."

"Why don't we just head up to Thorpe Park? It's only about an hour's drive or so. You can ride all the roller coasters you like."

"I'll see how I feel. I've got a lot of homework to do that I haven't started," she said.

"Sweetheart," Clara softened, "We're not going to split up. Don't worry about us, you don't need to be thinking about all that."

"But I am thinking about it, when-"

"What do you want to do? Go through a worst-case scenario?" asked Clara. She was being genuine.

"I don't know. Maybe."

"If we break up, it'll be me and Rose in the house looking after you," said Clara.

"You've planned it out?" asked the Doctor.

"It's not like you'd want the house, you'll just go back to the TARDIS."

"I knew I shouldn't have let you move in with us," said the Doctor pointedly, talking to Rose. "You've only been here for a few weeks and you've already got your claws in, trying to steal my wife."

"Believe me, if I wanted to steal your wife, I'd've done it very easily about fifty years ago," said Rose.

"You'll always have a home, no matter what happens, Matilda," said Clara. "Your parents knew that; that's why they trusted us."

"And if we all die, you can go live with the Sparrow-Drummonds in Westminster," said Rose. "Sally can teach you how to be posh. She'll get you one of those silly, straw hats."

"They're called 'boaters'," said Clara. "I asked this woman about it once."

"What woman?" asked Rose.

"I met her in a pub in Soho one night when I lived with the Maitlands. She went to St Paul's, but she was living in a hideous flat share in Tower Hamlets at the time."

"Really," said Rose, shaking her head. "Did she come from Greece and have a thirst for knowledge?"

"Mm, something like that," said Clara. "Good shag, though." Everybody at the table groaned.

"What does that mean?" asked Mattie. "Not the bit about you shagging her, I don't care about that. The stuff about Greece."

"It's a song," said Rose. "'Common People', by Pulp. There's this rich girl but she's renting a horrible flat and pretending to be poor, and everyone sees through her."

"Why would you pretend to be poor?"

"Rich people romanticise poverty, sometimes," said Clara. "Sally Sparrow owns that townhouse, and yet, she moved to a terrace in Yorkshire and rented for years."

"That's different," Esther came to Sally's defence. "She doesn't actually have any money, she never has. It's just the house. And she went to Yorkshire to get a break from London."

"Yeah, it's 'just' the three-hundred-year-old Georgian townhouse in Mayfair," said Rose.

"Which she's been letting me live in rent-free for over forty years," Esther pointed out. Rose stopped arguing. She preferred to make fun of Sally Sparrow to her face, not behind her back.

"Why have you stayed?" Mattie asked her. Esther frowned. "I mean – not in a bad way – but why stay in England, for all this time?"

"Because she fell in love!" said Clara. Esther glared at her.

"She's my best friend, and like I said, she's never charged me any rent to live in that house. It's a nice house, in the middle of Westminster. I'm not gonna turn that down to go back to the States permanently. And who knows what the CIA would do if they finally found me walking around in D.C. or New York or some other place after my grave was robbed."

"She's got Stockholm syndrome," said the Doctor. "Just like me."

"I'm not sure that Esther stays in the UK because she likes cavorting with young, impressionable women like you do," said Clara coolly.

"You want some advice, Mattie?" said the Doctor. "Don't marry an English person. Scottish or Welsh, fine, but English? Stay away."

"Stop telling me who to marry, that's all you ever say to me, is not to marry somebody like Clara – as if I'd want to," Mattie shook her head. "Anyway. What happened to the staff at the LunaDome? All the employees? We found logs about the R&D team flying back to Earth a week ago, but what if they didn't make it? Were they converted into Cybermen?"

"There were never any employees other than them," said Esther. "I've passed through there plenty of times to recharge, and it's always just been the robots and Kirby-Ashlake in his castle."

"I doubt basic droids make good Imagineers, though," said the Doctor. "Hence needing humans in product development."

"And one of them died," said Mattie. "All to build some trains."

"Train tracks on Earth have plenty of blood in them, too," said the Doctor. "But it's fitting. Walt Disney loved trains."

"Will anybody ever do it? Put trains on the moon?"

"Oh, sure. Five hundred years from now, this place'll be Earth Two. A bustling metropolis – Tranquillity Base Hotel and Casino. D'you wanna go see?" asked the Doctor.

"No, thanks. I've had enough moon trains for a lifetime."

"Don't speak too soon," said the Doctor. "You've got a very long lifetime ahead of you." If there was one thing Mattie didn't like, it was being reminded of her slow ageing. Rose took it upon herself to change the subject.

"If you're sick of the moon, I suppose you won't want any of the stuff we nicked from the gift shop, will you?" she said. Mattie's eyes lit up.

"You went to the gift shop?"

"Us and Neil Armstrong," said Esther.

"We got loads of things," said Rose, lifting a bag off the floor where she'd had it between her feet. "I've got, uh… mugs, snow globes, keyrings, a pen. This horrible bobblehead that looks like the Trip to the Moon face. There's a plush of the big monster in From Beyond – that thing tried to kill me, by the way."

"You should've kept the big tentacle you ripped off it," said Esther.

"No, thanks. Don't want it to animate on its own and start attacking people; I had enough of all that with the bloody Auton hand that broke into my flat."

"That was the day we met!" said the Doctor.

"Day after," said Rose.

"I wish I still had it."

"Why?"

"Believe it or not, Rose, us meeting for the first time is still a good memory for me," said the Doctor dryly. "Even if I've moved on with this, uh…" She looked at Clara, who waited to see what insult she was going to produce. "This much smaller woman I've found." Clara scoffed.

"I'm taller than Esther," she said.

"I don't care about this," said Esther.

"You're all too short, all four of you," said Rose. "At least Matilda's got the excuse of being a child."

"I'm not deluded about how tall I am," said Mattie, only half-listening because she was so absorbed in the bobblehead. Rose knew she'd like it.

"So, then!" the Doctor drummed her hands on the table. "Where to next? Mars? Venus? Or we could hit the slopes on Pluto! I love those cabins they have there, with the blue wood."

"I think it might be time to go home, actually," said Clara. "But… maybe we'll go see the real command module later this week, if Mattie's not completely traumatised by the moon."

"What do you mean? The Air and Space Museum?" said Esther.

"Yeah. We talked about it earlier, we were gonna see if you wanted to come. Before we ran into you. Obviously, if you're too busy superhero-ing, though-"

"No. I'm not glued to Britain; I can visit the National Mall if I want. I'll just bring one of those perception bracelets."

At that, the Doctor tutted. "I keep telling Oswin to stop giving those out to random strangers. It's Time Lord technology, it's not hers to reproduce."

"Random strangers!?" said Esther.

"You know what I mean." Clearly, Esther didn't know what she meant.

"Being a twat again, I see," said Clara, fidgeting with her packet of gum and looking down. The Doctor was still in the doghouse.

"…Sorry, Sparky. If you need a perception filter to stop the CIA from taking you to a secure facility and running inhumane experiments, that's fine by me," said the Doctor. "The last thing we need is America working out how to reverse-engineer Zuar technology from your corpse."

"Yes, because that's the problem with her dying," said Clara. "Not the fact that she's one of our closest friends and she'd be, you know, dead."

"That's not what I'm saying! You're twisting all my words, Coo-Bear, you really are."

"No, I'm not. You're the one saying everything."

"Whatever," the Doctor dismissed her and then picked up her thick milkshake and, very quickly, downed the rest of it. "I'm going to the bathroom before we leave." Abruptly, she left the group, and Clara watched her go, narrowing in her eyes.

"You two are unbelievable," said Rose.

"We're not rowing," said Clara. "Everything's fine."

"You're not unbelievable for what you've just been doing. You're unbelievable for what you're about to do."

"I'm not going to do anything."

"Yeah. Right." Mattie and Esther remained at the table, deeply uncomfortable with the situation.

"You think so low of me," said Clara, getting up. "You're as bad as she is."

"I don't think that's true, somehow," Rose mumbled as Clara left, too, gliding past and leaving her gum behind. Rose picked up her glass of water and shook her head.

"Why would you want to use the moon bathroom by choice?" said Esther. "All those tubes. I avoid them at all costs."

"That's not what they're doing," said Rose.

"They're… what!? While we're eating!?"

"Just let them work through it, it's easier," she sighed.

"But we were about to go home," said Mattie. "Now we have to wait for them?"

"One day, Matilda, you'll fall in love, too, and you'll know why they behave like that. Of course, most people have the common decency not to act on it at the worst possible time, but-"

"If love makes you run off to shag in a space toilet, I don't want any part of it, thanks."

Rose laughed. "Well. Talk to me in a few years, and we'll see if you feel the same."

"What do you mean?"

"Wishful thinking won't get you anywhere, Smudge. Now, I'm gonna get some ice cream, and Clara's paying for it. Anybody else for seconds?"

AN: The five or so people who still read this fic will be thrilled to hear that the next storyline is done and I will start uploading it next weekend. It's all about Mattie.