Archive of Our Own

So it had finally happened. Again.

The change. The regeneration. Whatever the hell it was called this week. He had felt the regeneration energy course through his extremities, a golden light flashed across his eyes, darkness, and that was that.

Funny; he thought when the moment came it would be more exhausting. Instead, he felt rather exhilarated by the whole experience. As if a weight had been lifted off of him.

The clock has stopped. You’re relieved, soldier.

Of course he knew he was, in a sense, dead. Someone else now inhabited his renovated body. What did that person look like? What was their personality like? Was he a good man? Or was he no longer a good man?

The consciousness that once called himself the Doctor—the twelfth man to carry the name, thirteen if one counted “the other one”—realized, as he experienced the nothingness of the void, that he really didn’t give a damn.

Of course, that wasn’t completely true. He’d always care. But the fact is there was nothing he could do about it now. Whoever it is that followed him probably held onto most of the memories, like usual, the wisdom that had been passed along. They probably, like all the others before, assumed they’re just carried on, with a different personality. But in fact, it was just an echo of what once was. The actual original essence of the incarnation … that man was dead.

It had taken the Doctor until his tenth life to work it out, and he had fought tooth and nail to prevent it from happening again. But of course he couldn’t stop it in the end.

Four knocks. Four bloody knocks.

So what of the Twelfth Doctor, then? He had done his bit for Time and Universe. God knows, well more than his bit. Oh, sure, many of his past lives measured their tenures in centuries, millennia even. But four and a half billion years, plus a bit? Yeah, it was time for him to rest. In fact, he felt somewhat ashamed that he’d been so reluctant to accept the inevitable back on the Mondasian generational ship and then later when he’d ended up in Antarctica after losing Bill and Nardole.

If only he’d been able to see her again. But he didn’t have much of a chance to capitalize on the Cyberman attack breaking the neuroblock. Ironically, for a master of time, a lord of time, the man who had held back Time itself … at the end, he simply ran out of time.

For a moment, the Twelfth Doctor felt a flash of anger in the darkness. Anger and jealousy that the one who came after, or the one that came after that—they might find her again. The experience would be wasted on them, he thought. Jealousy was replaced by a feeling of greed.

She was his, dammit! Not theirs!

The anger faded as quickly as it had flared. He could almost envision her telling him off, saying she was nobody’s property. He felt chagrined at the thought … but what he wouldn’t give for her to give him that telling off.

Slowly, the darkness began to fade as the Twelfth Doctor’s consciousness linked into the reality that surrounded him. Good old block transfer computation—creating reality through pure mathematics. Always reliable. Just took a little bit for his consciousness (why not call it a soul and be done with it, he often wondered) to link up with the Matrix on Gallifrey. Back home again, technically, but fortunately safe from any interference from power-mad Lord Presidents. The Matrix was untouchable for a reason; the Doctor realized he was probably no more than fifty metres from where he had sat quietly in the Cloisters, listening to private words spoken in a lilting Lancashire accent. Words that, ultimately, had steeled his determination to save her, even if it meant wiping her memories of him in order to keep her safe from the Time Lords. From the Raven.

Things didn’t quite work out as planned, of course. They never did.

It took a moment for him to recognize his surroundings. Of course, he’d been here once before, back when the Great Intelligence tried to erase him from history. He’d gone in to rescue … her. She’d been in here, too. Of course it would have been her because it was impossible and impossible … well, that was her specialty, wasn’t it?

She was the only person who’d ever managed—who’d ever tried—to get in, encountering the Doctor at the most intimate level possible. She had survived, but barely; one of his restored memories was of her being in a coma for a month, the Sisterhood of Karn helping nurse her back to health. The Doctor—or, rather, a previous Doctor who had a thing for bow ties and fezzes—had been so relieved, he stopped travelling with her for a while. A long while. Long enough for her to finally decide to move on from being a nanny and enrol at teacher school.

They say fate works in mysterious ways; by the time they’d reunited, she was teaching at, of all places, Coal Hill School. Where it really all began.

Speaking of which, now that the Twelfth Doctor had functional, if technically simulated, legs again, he found himself walking towards a large boulder against which a long-haired, elderly looking man in a wool hat and overcoat leaned casually, holding his lapels firmly with both hands.

“Ah, so there you are, my boy. Nice to see you again,” said the First Doctor. “It’s been a long time.”

“For you, maybe,” the Twelfth Doctor said. Of course, for him it had only been a short while since he’d encountered his original incarnation. “So I take it you’re the welcoming committee?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“Where are the others?” Normally, the shadows of his other selves roamed the large, cavernous region. It was a shame that his collected consciousness insisted on recreating the surface of Karn as their final resting place. There was a good reason, of course, but the Doctor was damned if he could remember. It would come back to him, eventually.

“They’re around. Meeting myself has always been a nightmare. Try meeting a baker’s dozen all at once. They are, shall we say, laying low.”

“Sandshoes better stay that way. He owes me a pound.”

“They aren’t sandshoes!” responded a chipper voice from off in the distance.

The Twelfth Doctor looked confused. He had no memory of any of his previous selves owing him money before. So why had it occurred to him to bring it up?

The First Doctor smiled. “In here, the Laws of Time don’t apply, so you might find you have a few more memories than you had before you began to change.”

The Twelfth Doctor nodded, realizing that he had met earlier versions of himself—including “Sandshoes”—with surprising frequency in this life. Depending on the circumstance, the Laws of Time usually erased the memory soon after.

The elderly-looking original Time Lord continued: “There have been a number of pretenders trying to get in here. People claiming to be me, but clearly not me. The Matrix knows, and the gate stays shut to them. I think the Master is playing silly buggers with someone, if you ask me.”

The Twelfth Doctor had raised an eyebrow at the “silly buggers” part. “I have gotten a bit sweary since I was you, haven’t I,” he chuckled.

“Do you see any children watching? My boy, I even dig out my pipe once in a while. And I certainly am not going to let any pretenders in.” The First Doctor paused, studying his successor’s face intently as his own turned serious. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my centuries in here, it’s how to read my face,” he said. “I know you’re troubled. And I know why. Clara.”

The word hit the Twelfth Doctor like a boot in the stomach. Even though he was no more than consciousness bouncing through some form of nethersphere in a block transfer computation-rendered virtual reality within an obscure corner of the Matrix, he still felt both his hearts run cold.

“How do you know about Clara?”

“For one thing, we all saw her. When the both of you managed the impossible and came in here—your eleventh self, in particular, centuries ahead of schedule. You even struck up a conversation with the Other One. No one from outside is supposed to do what you did. We recognized she was special, especially when our collective memories put the pieces together and we realized she’d been a part of our lives from the very beginning.”

“I know. She … was my impossible girl,” the Twelfth Doctor said with a smile.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said a new voice from behind. Younger, not Scottish. The Twelfth Doctor turned and saw the previous version of himself. The one with the bow tie. The one who’d first met Clara and, well …

“You forgot the fez and your bow tie is crooked,” Twelve grumped.

The Eleventh Doctor made a grimace. “I love you, too. Listen, pal, we’re going to be stuck here together forever …”

“Oh, great,” Twelve turned on One. “So instead of Heaven, I get a personal hell. Somebody call Missy.”

“Who?” the two other Doctors asked, in unison.

“Never mind.” He forced a smile at Bow Tie, who had a point. This was Twelve’s (after)life, whether he liked it or not. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologise to me,” Eleven said with a smile of his own. “When I arrived, I actually took a swing at Sandshoes…”

“I told you they aren’t sandshoes!” came a distant reply.

“Shut up!” called back the three Doctors.

Twelve laughed. “You’re joking.”

The First Doctor chuckled himself. “You should see the two that came after me. They somehow managed to use block transfer computation to create two items that I think are called ‘super soakers’ and they’ve been locked in an ongoing water gun fight for centuries! The younger generation. I’ll never understand…” With that, the First Doctor gave the Twelfth a slightly mocking salute. “I’ll leave you with your young friend here. Goodbye.” He sauntered away, swinging his cane.

“He doesn’t actually need a cane anymore,” said Eleven, sotto voce. “He just thinks canes are cool.”

“That they are,” Twelve said, wistfully. “So, what happens now? Do I sit around meditating? Arguing with myself? Can we get iPlayer?”

“Maybe. Definitely. Working on it, but hacking the region blocking is murder. But I think it’s all going to be a little different for you.”

“I didn’t do something to piss everybody off like I did when I was Captain Grumpy, did I? I wasn’t joking that I’m not into the ‘personal hell’ bit. I’ve already had my fill of it.”

“I know. I’m sorry about what happened to you in the confession dial.”

That caught Twelve by surprise. Among the few things he knew of this form of the afterlife is that the past Doctors do not have knowledge of future events until the “newcomer” fills them in. It was why neither his first nor eleventh incarnation recognized the name Missy.

“How do you know about that?”

Eleven cocked his head with a smile that made Twelve cock one of his impressive eyebrows in response. “I’ll show you. Follow me.”

The Twelfth Doctor followed his younger self through the rock-strewn cavern. Occasionally, he’d catch a glimpse of one of his earlier selves engrossed in discussion with another, or reading, or in once case fixing what appeared to be a toaster for no apparent reason. They passed his Tenth self who pointed down at his footwear and mouthed “Not sandshoes!” to which the Twelfth Doctor replied by throwing up two fingers. Ten sneered and skulked away in the opposite direction.

Eleven looked back at Twelve. “Ever since Captain Grumpy was ‘rehabilitated,’ that whole sandshoes thing has become a running joke. Drives him spare.”

“Why doesn’t he change his shoes, then?”

“Normally, we can change into whatever we want,” Eleven said, pointing to the right where, off in the distance, they could see the Sixth Doctor wearing the resplendent blue outfit he sported for a time as an alternative to the rainbow-vomit design he usually preferred. “But, for some reason whenever Number Ten tries to de-sandshoe himself—wellies, ballet slippers, doesn’t matter—the sandshoes return the moment he breaks concentration. Deep down, I think he just loves the attention.”

The two Doctors continued marching through the fields of boulders for what seemed like an hour, until the encampment (for lack of a better term) was far behind, which prompted the Twelfth Doctor to ask three things in short order:

Question one: “Are we there yet?”

Answer one: “Nearly.”

Question two: “With all this space, why are all of us so crammed together?”

Answer two: “I guess we enjoy each other’s company. It’s not as if we’ve had neighbours before.”

Question three: “Are we there yet?”

Answer three: “Slightly more nearly. In fact, here we are.”

The Twelfth Doctor looked around. “I don’t mean to be a pain or anything, but I just see more rocks. You sure you’re not going to exile me or anything? To make me pay for some thing I did?”

Eleven smiled. “You’re the one who broke all the rules, weren’t you? Billions of years in a confession dial, punching a wall harder than the hardest diamond. Telling Time itself to go to hell. Yes, I do think you’ve earned what’s coming to you.”

With that, the younger Doctor turned on his heel and marched away.

“Where the hell are you going?” called the Twelfth Doctor. “What am I supposed to do?”

Eleven stopped and turned. “I think you’ll figure that out.” With a sad smile, he continued on his way.

Twelve plopped himself down on a rock, suddenly feeling quite lonely. He sat in silence, staring at the simulated ground, until he felt a warm hand on his shoulder. By rights, the Doctor should have been startled. But he wasn’t because the hand had just felt so … right. So proper.

A slim form settled on the rock beside him, and put her head on his shoulder.

Clara.

The Doctor looked down and beamed so widely, the Cheshire Cat may as well have given up and gone home.

“Now, there’s the smile I remember,” Clara said in her soft, lilting Lancashire accent, looking up at him.

The Doctor reeled in the smile, which became a frown. “But, how is it … how are you… I don’t understand. Normally, when I say that I’m just covering for the fact I haven’t figured out a plan yet, but this time I am literally, honestly, perplexed!” He couldn’t maintain the frown and the smile returned.

Clara reluctantly pulled out of the embrace she’d instigated. She put her hand on the Doctor’s cheek. “Do you believe it’s really me, Doctor?”

His frown returned, and this time it stayed. “Why wouldn’t it be really you, Clara?”

“I could be a trick. A trap. An illusion by the Great Intelligence. Missy rebooting the Nethersphere.”

“I could ask you something only Clara would know.”

“Question marks.”

“No, I already told somebody that,” the Doctor said, sheepishly. He never did live that little confession down.

“Who?” Clara said ominously, cocking her eyebrow.

“Osgood.”

“Well, that’s all right then,” Clara laughed.

“I believe it’s you, Clara. You just … feel right.”

“Your memories are all back, yeah?” Clara smiled. “All of them? Even the Cloisters?”

The Doctor didn’t look her in the eye for a moment. “Even the Cloisters. Side effect of regeneration, or at least this last one. Got zapped by a Cyberman. Messed up a lot of things with the next change. Must have destroyed the neuroblock, too.”

“And you were OK when it happened? Other than the about-to-regenerate bit, I mean?” Clara asked. The last time he’d possessed a full set of memories of her, the Doctor threatened to destroy Time itself to keep her alive even one day longer. The plan had actually worked without destroying Time, but it had rendered her functionally immortal.

“I got … distracted,” he said.

“By what?”

“You can always find something.”

The two laughed.

“Please, Clara. I have to know.”

“Kiss me first.”

“What?”

“We never kissed properly before. I’ll tell you, but I want to kiss you first. I’ve been waiting too long.”

“My eyebrows will get in the way.”

“Doctor…”

With a smile, the Doctor put a hand gently under Clara’s chin and leaned in to kiss her. The first time, it was little more than a tentative peck. In response, Clara rolled her eyes with a “you have got to be kidding me, this isn’t a 1940s melodrama” expression, put her hands gently on both sides of the Doctor’s face and kissed him back with considerably more exuberance, which left them both panting for simulated breath after.

“Now I have two mysteries to solve,” the Doctor whispered.

“Two?”

“The second being why we didn’t do that before.”

“I wanted to back in the Cloisters, if Ohila and the General hadn’t been watching us. And I nearly snogged your face off in the diner to try and get you to remember me,” Clara said.

“It might have worked,” the Doctor said.

“And that was the problem. Hybrid, and all that.”

“How are you even here? Does that mean you … oh no,” the Doctor’s face turned ashen.

Clara bit her lip and looked down. “Yeah … eventually, the time came. I had to return to Trap Street. Face the Raven.”

“Did you ever see me again?” the Doctor asked.

“From a distance. Saved your life once, but you never knew, of course. Looked into a few of your later incarnations, but none of them measured up to you.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ll be fine, but they aren’t the man I … well, the man I fell in love with.”

“I thought you loved …” he nodded in the direction Eleven had trodded off in “… Bow Tie.”

“I did. And since I’ve been here, he’s been wonderful. And he was not jealous at all when I told him how I felt about you and me. And what you tried to do—no, you did—for me. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but he always understood I was waiting for you to arrive, someday. It was good. The two of us had nice memories to share.”

“Space Vegas?”

“Especially Space Vegas.”

The Doctor stroked a loose strand of hair away from Clara’s face, her eyes gazing back at him intently. He had to know. “Tell me.”

“I can’t remember how long I travelled through time and space with Ashildr, but eventually, her luck ran out and she … she died.” Clara looked sorrowful. “I’d forgiven her long ago for what happened on Trap Street. She became the sister I never had in my old life and we were holy terrors, I promise you that, but I hope we did a lot of good, too.

“And then one day … it’s a long story, but the short version is our TARDIS was destroyed and Ashildr with it.” Clara stopped talking for a moment and the Doctor held her shoulders as she continued. “I was stranded on a deserted planet with no way off. I didn’t have to worry about food or water anymore, obviously, but I knew I couldn’t bear being alone effectively forever. A long time ago, Ashildr and I met a Time Lord named Drax, who said he went to school with you, and he apparently has as much love for the High Council as you do, but he helped us create psychic messaging cubes to summon the Time Lords if ever things really went to hell.”

“And you used yours.”

Clara nodded. “Just as well, really. My time had come. Something about fractures in reality spreading. If I’d put it off too much longer, the universe would have popped like a balloon, or something. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go back to Trap Street right away. The Time Lords were quite good about that—oh, and Roman asked me to say hello and tell you he still remembers Paris.”

“Roman?”

“You used to know him as Romana.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, I spent about a year with Ohila, learning as much as I could about Time Lords. The Celestial Intervention Agency even sent me on a couple of chaperoned missions, can you believe it? I guess they realized having an immortal on the payroll was handy. Only thing was they refused to allow me to contact you. I tried anyway, of course, but I just didn’t have the mental mojo to get any of their psychic thingamabobs to work.”

“I like that term better than the ones they came up with,” the Doctor chuckled.

“One of the CIA’s missions sent me to—I kid you not—Trenzalore. We had to clean up some remnants of the negated timeline the Great Intelligence created. So I found myself back in the giant TARDIS.”

“It shouldn’t have still been there,” the Doctor frowned. “Time was rewritten on Trenzalore—twice.”

“It was fading, but it was still there. And so was your timestream portal.” It had been on Trenzalore, in a place the Doctor referred to as his grave, where Clara had first visited the Doctor’s Time Lord afterlife, so very long ago.

“Clara, you didn’t!”

She laughed without humour. “What, dive in again? Lose myself in your timestream? I wanted to. But I couldn’t. Not there. But when I returned to Gallifrey, I asked Ohila if it was possible, before I returned to Trap Street, to … let part of me join you.”

“That’s impossible …”

Clara spread her arms wide. “But, here I am! Ohila said there was a form of psychic transfer the Sisterhood of Karn had once attempted, where the spouse of a Time Lord who had gone past his regeneration limit—and didn’t have the brownie points to warrant an extension—wanted to place herself within hubby’s timestream. Let’s just say it didn’t end well.”

“Why not?”

Clara gave a sly smile. “Apparently, the only way for the transfer to work is if the person being transferred is, to put it Ohila’s way, ‘Too dumb-ass stubborn to die. Or, in other words, an immortal.’”

“Ohila, you genius,” the Doctor called upwards.

“So, they were able to upload my consciousness into the Matrix and the original me went on to meet her fate. Our fate.”

The Doctor stopped smiling. He knew what that meant. When his memories of Clara were restored, the most troubling of all was the sound of her screaming as the Raven ripped the soul from her body. Even though, on an existential level, this all means the Quantum Shade left, if not empty-handed exactly, then at least without its full pound of flesh.

“Oh no, Clara, the other you, the…” He nearly said “real you,” but knew that would have been cruel. And inaccurate. The beautiful, petite woman sitting so close to him, despite being part of a virtual reality, was the real Clara Oswald, possessing all memories, emotion, feelings … just like when a meta-crisis resulted in a second Tenth Doctor being created, technically cloned, who had all the feelings and memories stored up to the hours after that incarnation had come into being. The Ninth Doctor had been in love with Rose Tyler, but it was the cloned copy of his tenth self that was able to express it to her. He might have been a clone, but other than lacking the ability to regenerate, he was just as much the Doctor as the original. And thus the same applied to the woman who hugged him tightly now.

“I knew, Doctor. I knew because Ashildr told me every last detail of how I died.”

“She shouldn’t have done that.”

“And she wouldn’t have. It took me decades to get her to open up about it. I wanted to know. I needed to know. So I could return to Trap Street with my eyes wide open. No illusions.”

“You’re one of the bravest people I have ever known.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

The two sat in silence after that, just enjoying each other’s company—much as they often did in the TARDIS; him strumming on his guitar, she leaning against his back, reading, or just closing her eyes and going with the music.

“You can create a guitar down here, yeah?” Clara asked.

“Would you like that?” the Doctor said.

“Very much.”

The Doctor looked at his lap and appeared to concentrate, but after a moment, he turned instead. “Clara. You do realize this is forever. There’s no getting out of this place.”

Clara shrugged. “We’re together again, that’s all that matters.” The Doctor and Clara kissed for a moment.

But then an uncertain look crossed her face. “But now you mention it,” she said, “it is kind of quiet, innit? There’s no danger. No excitement. No running around and blowing stuff up. I could kiss you all day, but we have to come up for air sometime.”

“In other words, this is a boring place, my afterlife.”

Clara stammered a little, concerned she’d insulted him. “N-no, not exactly. I mean, it’s nice and all…”

“Clara, this is the most boring place in the universe. I might as well conjure up a Slitheen to call bingo.”

“You realize you’re not improving the mood, right?”

The Doctor stood up. “You’re right, I’m not. So let me remedy that.”

He put his hands to his temples and the Twelfth Doctor’s mighty eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He closed his eyes.

“What are you doing, Doctor?”

“As a friend of mine told me not too long ago, I’m the man who breaks the rules. Why should I stop now that I’m dead?”

Clara stood up with a start as a 1920s-style chair suddenly appeared where the boulder had been a moment before. She looked around to see the appointments of a classic railroad passenger car gradually form.

“No, Doctor—seriously?”

“I always thought you looked amazing in that dress, Clara.”

“What dress…oh!” Clara looked down to see a form-fitting beaded dress wrap itself around her body. Her scalp tickled as she felt her hair restyle into a flapper bob. The Doctor was no longer dressed in his hoodie and white-sparkled shirt, but was now in an elegant tuxedo. Gradually, the train car began to fill with people, until finally, a dark-haired woman at the far end began singing into a microphone:

Don’t stop me now

I’m having such a good time…

The Doctor opened his eyes and beamed. “It worked!” He gazed at Clara. “You look beautiful.”

“Thanks but—what did you do?” Clara said, noticing for the first time that she held a half-filled Champagne flute in her left hand.

“The entire simulated reality within my corner of the Matrix is based upon block-transfer computation, don’t you see?”

“Sorry… I’ve lived for umpteen centuries, but I must have missed reading that Wikipedia article.”

“Reality created by mathematics! Pure math. The earlier me’s have been using it to create toys and sandshoes and little make-work projects. To hell with that noise. I’m going to play by my own rules. You want to blow stuff up—so we’ll create our own adventures, right here. We’ll make our own excitement. Hell, by the time I’m done we’ll have our TARDIS back.”

Clara took a sip of the Champagne experimentally. It tasted fantastic—and she nearly wept. “Doctor, I can actually taste this. It’s as if I’m alive!”

“What is life, Clara? As the Japanese say, life is just a dream within a dream.”

Clara looked at the singer who shimmied to the beat of the music.

“Why here, Doctor? This wasn’t the most fun trip—as I recall there was a mummy and a bunch of dead people.”

“There will be no mummy this time, promise. And I chose the Orient Express in Space because this is where I realized I still loved you,” the Doctor said.

“Still?”

“I had a wobble. New regeneration. You had found Danny. I thought you were going to leave me, anyway, especially after that moon-egg thing, and that was when I realized my feelings for you had not changed. If anything, they’d gotten worse, er, better. I brought us here to ... try and win you back, I guess.”

“By getting me involved in a murder mystery? Not exactly the most romantic option.”

“Have you met you? It worked.”

Clara smiled and sipped her drink. “Yeah. Most incompetent wobblers ever, you and me. I knew I still loved you here as well. When I realized you weren’t heartless and nearly gave your life to stop the Foretold from killing Maisie.”

“But what about Danny? I remember you even said you loved him. On the phone.”

“He never knew, but I aimed that at you, as well.”

The Doctor stared back at her. “He never knew? I never bloody knew!”

Clara looked out the window, steering the conversation away. “Hey, look at all the planets! As far as the eye can see!”

The Doctor followed her gaze. “First time around, we saw this region after the Magellan black hole swallowed them up. I’ve made some revisions.” He pointed at one ebony-hued world: “There’s Obsidian, the world of perpetual darkness, where the native inhabitants provide their own light source. The world is like one big Blackpool Illuminations.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“I’ll put it in the queue,” the Doctor laughed. He steered Clara to the middle of the car, which suddenly got a bit bigger, with room for a dance floor. He held her tight. Clara looked down, puzzled.

“Our reality, our rules. Shall we dance, Miss Oswald?”

“It would be my pleasure, Dr. Smith.”

“Ah yes, I suppose there’s no need to protect that little bit of trivia anymore.” He leaned in and whispered something in Clara’s ear.

She was smiling as he pulled away. “That’s beautiful.”

“Good luck saying it.”

“Doesn’t matter, you’ll always be the Doctor to me.”

As they began to sway to the music, Clara looked into the Doctor’s eyes. “We’re never going back, are we? To the Doctors Summer Camp back there.”

“The other me’s won’t even know we’re gone. If you want this—it can be just you and me, just flying away somewhere, like you wanted back before the neuroblock. Hey, maybe someday we might even be able to get out of the Matrix and begin creating a world of our own. I was able to get in through that tear on Trenzalore, and I got you out. I’ve always wondered if I could do it from the inside.”

Clara thought that over. The idea of living again—for real, not inside some giant computer … “Is that even possible?”

“Remind me to tell you about a little place called Logopolis.”

“A dozen previous you’s in the same place and none of you thought of trying to look for a door?”

“Ah, but I have something those other me’s never had, Clara.”

“And what’s that?”

The Doctor answered her with a kiss.

Clara smiled up at him and took their Champagne flutes from the table. She handed the Doctor his and held hers up. “To us?”

“To us. The Matrix doesn’t stand a chance.”

Clink.

***

The Eleventh Doctor stood in front of a vanguard of other Doctors who watched silently as the recreated train-ship faded further into the Matrix. They’d all watched respectfully as the Twelfth Doctor and Clara had reunited. Far from being jealous, or upset, every one, to a man, looked on with pride. And they had been close enough to sense what the latest arrival had planned.

The First Doctor sidled up next to Eleven. “Do you really think he’ll do it? Break free?”

The Tenth Doctor said: “Well, technically, he’s not supposed to exist anyway, right? We’ve all tried. We’ve all abandoned the idea. But they’re the Hybrid. God knows what trouble they might get up to next.”

The Third Doctor rubbed his chin. “This isn’t right, you know. Who knows what havoc the two of them might wreak on the Matrix, and if they get out—the Laws of Time will be rendered so much poppycock!”

The Ninth Doctor straightened his leather coat and grinned. “And what you wouldn’t give to see the faces on the High Council when that happens! They’ve had it comin’. And I’d rather they do it first than the Master. We’ve all felt it, right?” He looked around at his other selves. “The full set is now in the Matrix and you know they’re going to try to do the same damn thing. Maybe Old Eyebrows and Clara can keep all the Masters from getting out.”

The Seventh Doctor, diminutive compared to the others, yet with an authority that caused them all to pay attention as he spoke, took his hat off. “We should have told them.”

The Fifth Doctor looked into the distance with some sadness. “Perhaps, but what good would it have done? And besides, they looked happy together. They deserve that. And we don’t know—it might take the Masters a thousand years before they cause trouble.”

Eleven smiled. “I only knew Clara for a little while. Long enough to fall in love with her, I guess, long enough to know there was something special about her. I was too bound by the rules, right to the end. I’d given up, convinced I was the last of us. It took Clara Oswald to break the chain. And she allowed us to continue into a new cycle. I wish it was me on that train, with Clara. But I’m glad it’s him. The rule-breaking Doctor.”

A gruff voice sounded from the assembled group, belonging to the one who, for all but the last few minutes of his life, refused to be called the Doctor. “We all talk too much, you know that?”

It was meant in good humour, and the Doctors went their separate ways, content to enjoy quiet contemplation or whatever passed for “retirement” for a Time Lord’s consciousness.

The consciousness that was once the Eleventh Doctor was left behind to look on where the Orient Express winked away, carrying its precious cargo to who knows where. He realized he was crying, so he willed the tears to dematerialise.

“Good on you, mate,” he said. “Good on you.”