My Magician

It had been one thing when the war began and we were cut off from our own history. The time lock covering the past of Gallifrey and Skaro protected everyone. War across limitless time could be endlessly chaotic and destructive. Reality was protected at the cost of certain freedoms. I was able to understand that. I was able to fight and to trust that the High Council’s decisions were in everyone’s best interest. It was going to be the War to End All Wars.

From a linear perspective, I was active in my duties as a soldier for over 300 years. Of course, the fronts that I fought on were speckled through different time periods and planets. For fifty of these years, I was trapped in an alternate timeline that only existed in the fractured reality around the edges of the time lock.

More than once, I found myself being time scooped and resurrected in the seconds after my death by the battle TARDISes with what they called ‘experimental biotechnology’. The fight felt eternal. It became my whole existence.

When the world was burning, the planet itself became locked. I had lost track of my age a long time ago, but I could estimate that I was cresting 1100 years old. I was this age for longer than anyone ever should have been. With the Moment that he had been planning to use to end everything, somehow, the Doctor of War had frozen us. Once again, I was trapped in a timeline that rested in the pocket of reality. The final battle was unwinnable. After everything, the daleks had laid siege to our planet, wreaking indescribable carnage. Trapped in a split second of dying and being resurrected, as millions were, I relived the worst moment of my life on repeat for an eternity.

Over and over again, the horror replayed. I would turn the corner of the stone building, feet pounding against the dirt. I would see them, the four daleks trapped with me in this moment, radiation guns aimed right at me. Then, I would die. I had been running to meet whatever seniority was still alive on the other side of the capital. I never got to my destination. I was met with four glowing eyestalks, instead. All of them fired at me, not waiting for me to speak. Four beams of radiation hit me directly in the chest. I collapsed, just as Arcadia had. Then, again, I was running. I was afraid. I knew I was about to die. I was dead. Running. Fear. Death.

Over, and over, and over again, I lived this scene. All sense of time gone, it could have been months or millenia. Existence became hell.

The final time that I rounded that corner, I panted and finally slowed to a walk. I blinked and looked around, beyond confused. I had forgotten what it was like to exist in any reality other than the one that I’d been stuck in. Every movement I made felt surreal. I looked at the four shells in front of me, marveling at the holes blown in the top section of the casing on each one. Standing in front of them, back facing me, was a short, blonde man, dressed in a black suit.

I couldn’t speak; I wasn’t sure that I remembered how. Putting one foot in front of the other was challenging enough as the weight of my memories settled into a new context. Every timeline slotted itself in place beside the others, my Gallifreyan biology working to keep me sane despite the paradoxical experiences.

The man turned to face me, smirking. I only blinked, blankly at his disturbingly excited expression.

“D’you miss me, Hope?”

It could only be the Master.

He held out his hand to me and I took it without a moment’s hesitation. I was desperate to be anywhere but there, and to do anything differently. He pulled my hand to his opposite wrist with a manic smile, then pressed the control button on what I realized was a vortex manipulator. I was lost for more than one reason but had only milliseconds to spare. He shouldn’t have been able to come into this time through the vortex. We shouldn’t have been able to make it out that way, either. Despite this, my stomach lurched and we were spiraling off.

…

As soon as I was past the initial shock of being disconnected from the rest of the universe for so long, I was able to reflect on the war from outside of it for the first time in centuries. The Master was no help, scheming ways that I could help him take his revenge on the Doctor. He had destroyed everything, the Master claimed. I knew that this had been his plan. I was the last person that the Doctor of War spoke to before he disappeared into the sand wastes. However, when I was living in the bubble that the end of the world had been, it never felt like the end. It felt endless.

The Master explained his theories to me. He thought we had escaped by managing to slip through a crack in the wall of time that had Gallifrey been sealed behind. I didn’t doubt that if anyone was slippery enough to do so, it would be him. However, something about this explanation seemed too simple and clean. I had no alternative hypothesis, so I didn’t contest his opinions, but I privately worried myself over what other powers might be at work.

I stayed with the Master, in his TARDIS, for a sizable period of time. I aimed to recover my mind in the only piece of home that seemed to exist anymore. He plotted out a dangerous course of action that involved a 400 mile long ship, a black hole, and a fake beard. I didn’t pay much attention and, to my savior’s severe disappointment, I had no real interest in tracking down the Doctor to exact my revenge. I told the Master, in no uncertain terms, that I had no desire to see that man, whatsoever.

In a fit of petty rage, he dumped me out his front doors in front of the Time Agency on Earth in the 51st century. I was grateful that, although his fuse was short and his emotions were passionate, he’d not left me stranded in one temporal location. As someone who had been traveling time for nearly my entire life, it was another type of hell to be grounded. Even during the war, I was constantly jumping through time and space, always trying to gain a strategic upper hand against the Daleks.

The agents inside had records of my affiliations with the ancient Earth agencies like UNIT, and they were quick to make an exception to the rule for me. Typically, only humans were able to become time agents. I ignored the xenophobic attitude and applied, anyway. A board of directors were called for a vote and, within a few weeks, I had been promoted to a ranking position within their organization.

It was as a time agent that I started to find a sense of normalcy, once again. The war that I spent centuries fighting was lost, but I’d survived at the hands of a madman. I was a soldier with nothing left to fight for. Though my leash was short, I was free to travel wherever small changes needed to be made. As long as I remained untraceable, undetectable, and invisible, I was allowed my freedom. I couldn’t help that this reminded me of my own people’s code to watch without interfering. Leaving an effect with no evidence of the cause was difficult. However, I enjoyed being under the radar.

I knew that if the Doctor learned of my survival, he would be looking for me. The Master had told me the state he’d been in the last time they’d met. Apparently, in their most recent ‘final’ confrontation, that man had dropped in through a glass ceiling to stop the Master from returning Gallifrey to its original reality. The Voice of Rassilon had told them that he would return and initiate the Final Sanction. It would have ripped the vortex apart and ended time, leaving only the ascended. It made sense to me that this was why the Doctor had decided to destroy us. He was always so sanctimonious; he wouldn’t have been able to commit an atrocity without feeling justified.

He told me that the Doctor had been pushed to a murderous rage, waving a gun about the place, poised to shoot anyone at the slightest provocation. It was disappointing to think that the war may have destroyed the man that he was before it. He was a good man before all the fighting. He was a moral man who fought against the cruel and the cowardly. I had loved that man with every part of me. Despite knowing that he survived, I mourned him.

Beyond that, the Master told me about his own adventures. He had asked the Time Lords to allow him to ascend with them but he informed me that they denied him. They’d called him diseased. He told me it had been their desperate effort to escape that placed the maddening rhythm into his mind, all those centuries ago. I was outraged to learn they’d broken their own laws to reach the Master as a child, from the war. In the end, the Doctor, who had come to kill, chose not to shoot him. In order to avoid a feeling of debt, he told me, he’d then elected to be pulled back to Gallifrey, in the Doctor’s place. Upon arriving home, finding himself in the safest point in the capital, where the High President was being kept, he escaped the Council’s custody to find me. He told me I was the person he’d figured would most likely share his resentment. I wondered if any of that was the whole truth.

…

I was successful in my avoidance. It was decades before I saw any of my own people again.

My team and I were celebrating a successful extraction when she came to me. Everything had gone smoothly, aside from Sub-Lieutenant Cooke losing a toe. We had saved a small group of children that included a future President, though, so I was willing to call it a worthy sacrifice and take the win. The others passed around an electronic equivalent of a ‘get well soon’ card. The thought that I should remember to sign my name at some point in the night was blown away like a pile of dust when I saw her.

In the doorway of our offices, dressed like a storybook character from eons in my relative past, was a Time Lady. I knew as soon as our eyes met that she was like me. My mind raced as I tried to figure out which Time Lady she could be. Friends I’d had for years fell from my mind like strangers when she gestured me out into the hallway with her. Cautiously, I followed, my instincts telling me that I knew her.

“Captain?” one of the newer recruits, Lawson, called after me.

“Back in a second,” I told him, without looking away from her.

As soon as we were alone, the woman turned to me, hands on her hips. She raised an eyebrow and gave me an expectant look.

“Well?” she posed, as if I were the one who had come to her. I was sure my baffled look spoke volumes. “Ugh,” she sighed, her whole body slumping with the noise, “You really don’t recognize me?” She pouted. Almost like she was dancing, she spun around in front of me as if the view would help me to know her identity. “What do you think of the new model?” She struck a few ridiculous poses before winking at me, “Teensy bit sexy, right?”

“Master?” I was shocked. He had never been a woman before. In fact, he’d often been a bit prejudiced as a man. Something seemed different in the way she carried herself, but I couldn’t put my finger on what else had changed.

“Please,” she scoffed, “Mistress…” I was sure my eyes were at risk of falling out of my head.

“Mistress?” My tone betrayed my disbelief.

“Oh, Missy for you, dear.” She pursed her lips at me, like she was blowing me a kiss. I was beyond confused by this incarnation of her. She was very different from the man who had left me here, in this life. I shook my head as I tried to clear my thoughts.

“Why are you here?” The first question that I could contrive dribbled out of my mouth, without thought. Her playful face switched quickly to grave. Her glare was sharp and suddenly I could recognize her. I saw her. She reached into a pocket in her dress and rummaged around for a moment. She produced a golden disk and held it up between us. I knew it to be a confession dial from the Gallifreyan markings carved into the side. My breath caught at the implication of what she showed me. “You’re dying?” Her mouth went wide in indignant shock.

“No,” she inflected her voice to an American accent as she mocked me, “I’m not dying. And if I were dying I wouldn’t be giving my confession dial to you.” Once again, I was confused.

“Then whose is it?” The only other living Time Lords, to my knowledge, were the Doctor and the Monk. Although, there had been reports during King Henry VIII’s reign of a woman threatening and possibly killing a man who called himself simply ‘the Monk’. Those stories seemed to make more sense with the context that Missy added to the picture.

“It’s the Doctor’s,” she told me, simply. I took a deep breath in, trying not to contemplate what that meant too vividly. I reached out a hand, thinking that she had been assigned with the task of bringing it to me. She stared at me, blinking slowly, like I was the most idiotic creature she’d ever laid eyes on. “He doesn’t know you’re alive, Hope,” she reminded me, dragging out her words as she used that ridiculous nickname, “You were the one who insisted on that. He sent it to me.”

“Right,” I accepted, with a sigh, “So why are you even telling me?” She scrunched up her face like she’d bitten into a lemon.

“I want to find him.” I just shook my head at her. “I want to find him before he dies,” she clarified, reluctantly.

“And?”

“And!?” She was starting to get riled up. “And… the easiest way to do that would be to infiltrate UNIT and use their resources to triangulate his exact coordinates.”

“Then you’ve overshot it by more than a few centuries,” I responded, easily. She groaned and looked to the ceiling, closing her eyes as if she were in prayer.

“You’re being impossible,” she told me. “Fine!” she put her hands up, “I admit it! I may have dropped the little, blonde Lethbridge-Stewart girl out of a plane.” My eyebrows shot up at her confession. “In my defense, I’m fairly certain she was alive, for some heartwarming reason, at the end of it all.” She waved her hands about like she was speaking on a subject she didn’t understand. “Besides,” she concluded with a manic smile, “If I need the Doctor to come out from under a rock, all I’d have to do is dangle you around a little bit.” I wanted to disagree but I was reminded, vividly, of the many times the Master had done something ridiculous like kidnap me just to get the Doctor’s attention.

“So, what?” I finally posed, “You expect me to just drop everything that I built for myself here, be your spy, and help you track him down?”

“Of course not,” she said too quickly. I looked her up and down, suspiciously. “That’s why my vortex manipulator has been corrupting yours by proximity,” she spoke quickly, smirking. “Gotta love bluetooth, baby!” she added, in that terrible American accent. I quickly raised my wrist to look at the screen, eyes going wide as I tried to understand the unfamiliar code playing across it. “It's a slave to mine, now, dear,” she still had that smirk, “Let’s do this thang!” Then, before I could do anything to stop her, she’d slammed down on her own wrist and we were both ripped from that time and place.

…

We landed hard on the marbled floor. Something was clearly corrupted within Missy’s vortex manipulator, but the woman only laughed at the particularly nasty trip. I doubled over, holding my stomach as the initial nausea passed. As I recovered, I looked around to figure out where she’d brought me. Clearly, we were in some type of government building; the height of the ceiling told me. We had to be in one of the lower, more restricted levels, I knew. I could feel the pressure that came with being so far underground. However, we seemed to be tucked into a generously sized supply closet.

“Right-o,” Missy sobered, pounding new coordinates into the manipulator already.

“Whoa, hold on,” I stopped her, placing a hand on her arm. Her eyes met mine at the sudden contact. “Where are you going now?”

“If they see you with me, honey, they’ll shoot first,” she spoke, casually, “Now just go out there, play the concerned wife,” I balked at her statement, but she gave me no chance to interrupt, “And be the hero-type. I’ll pop in when it’s time for a villain.”

“Missy-” I had so much hesitation to express. She easily removed my hand from her arm and pressed the button on her wrist. She vanished in front of my eyes, leaving me alone in a new environment for the second time in a row.

I sighed, staring at the only door in front of me. She really hadn’t given me any choice in this. I didn’t even want to find the Doctor. I was content to leave him to his death, somewhere far out of sight and out of mind. I imagined it would be much easier to pretend he didn’t exist, then.

As soon as I opened the door and stepped out, over a dozen pairs of eyes were locked on me. There was a moment of heavy silence as we stared at each other, all a bit surprised. Then, as soon as the feeling settled, the same number of guns were pointed my way and cocked.

“Hi there,” I said, putting my hands up to appear as non-threatening as possible, “Is Kate Lethbridge-Stewart around?” The UNIT employees glanced at each other, clearly unsure of what the company policy was in the case of an apparating woman falling out of a closet, asking to see their superior. “If we could just call her down,” I suggested, “I’m sure she and I could clear this up…”

…

Kate didn’t recognize me on sight. It made sense. The last time that I had seen her, she was a little girl, and I was an old woman. In my latest incarnation, I appeared younger than she currently was, by human standards. However, when I identified myself by the name that I had called myself for the first three quarters of my life, the Sapphire, she quickly remembered me. When I traveled with the Doctor, her father and I had been very close. I was only a few hundred years old when I first met him. It made sense that she would have grown up hearing stories of the Doctor and I, inspiring her to become the powerful woman that stood before me.

She surprised me by pulling me into a tight hug when she knew my identity. Thankfully, this signaled the last few nervous people who had guns on me to put them down. I was able to let out a small sigh of relief.

Quickly, she pulled away from me and took my hand, reminding me too much of the Doctor for it to be a coincidence. She had gotten involved in his world; it was clear. In a rush, she started pulling me after her, briskly walking me to another part of the building.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she told me as we made our way into an elevator where she finally let go of my hand. “We’ve been trying to contact the Doctor but we’re getting no response. It’s like he’s just disappeared.” I was reassured to know there was no chance of seeing him, here, at least. “We contacted his current companion, Clara Oswald,” I sorted that name into a file in my brain, “She should be arriving any second now.” I nodded, as if I was in total understanding.

“Right,” I agreed, “And she’s aware of the crisis?” I had no idea what the crisis was, myself, but if I was going to learn anything I needed her to talk.

“I imagine so, she’s a bright girl,” the woman clarified nothing. I nodded, anyway, like I knew this was a good thing.

The elevator dinged and we stepped out, together, into the hallway. I matched her brisk pace and urgency, knowing that I needed to appear in control of the situation. Finally, we entered the room she’d been leading me to. There were large monitors against the walls and transparent screens with a map of the Earth’s continents. The map was littered with little red dots that I figured each represented some catastrophic thing, from the way everyone was skittering about.

Kate rushed off to answer a phone as soon as we were in, so I approached the screens, trying to figure out what I could from the monitors. I evened my steps and stiffened my face, not allowing anyone to see how confused I was. Eventually, it was listening to Kate’s phone call that clued me in.

“The planes aren’t responding,” she told someone, “No, none of them.” I considered what that could mean. The dots on the screen weren’t moving or shifting, so either the planes had all been frozen in some sort of time stop or they had all crashed. Knowing that they attempted to contact the planes told me that they figured the people inside were still alive. Just a basic time stop, I guessed. That would have been a parlor trick on Gallifrey. This must have been what Missy meant when she told me she was going to be playing the villain. “I’ve got to go,” Kate hung up the phone as new footsteps made their way in, “Tell the president I’ll call him back.” She practically ran to the Doctor’s companion. “He’s not answering us, have you tried?”

I watched Clara as she came into the room, giving her a quick once over.

“We don’t know enough yet,” the girl stated, firmly, “He doesn’t appreciate gossip.” I smirked when I realized she was lying. She couldn’t get in contact with him either, then.

“Gossip?” Kate muttered as she led Clara over to where I was standing.

“How many planes?” she asked, without sparing me a glance.

“4,165 aircrafts are currently airborne,” a woman sitting in front of a computer read out.

“That’s a lot of passengers,” Kate commented.

“That’s a lot of fuel,” Clara countered.

“Oh, dear God, yes, it is,” Kate’s voice became panicked. I resisted the urge to shake my head. The humans were getting themselves into a panic over what was clearly a harmless trick to get their attention.

“Okay, so,” Clara catastrophized, “What could you do with 4,000 flying bombs?” The computer girl unhelpfully listed the number of nuclear power stations she thought could be affected. The humans panicked themselves about fault lines and earthquakes for a moment longer, before I finally cut in.

“Is it an attack or an advertisement?” I tried to steer the paranoid children without giving away the answer. Their eyes turned, quickly, to me.

“I’m sorry,” Clara glanced around, “Who is this?”

“I’m an old friend of the Doctor,” I told her before anyone else could say anything about our relationship, “You can call me Sapphire.”

“Old friend?” Her eyebrows drew together. “You look about my age.” She was quick.

“Looks can be deceiving,” I sped her through whatever conclusion she was coming to, “Now, why show someone what you can do without actually hurting anyone? Why not just kill them all?” The girl looked at me like I’d just given her a challenge.

“What’s actually happened to the planes?” she asked, turning to the computer girl. I resisted the temptation to smile. Now she was getting it.

“The planes haven’t stopped, they’re actually frozen. Like, frozen in time. Pardon my sci-fi, but this is beyond any human technology.” I rolled my eyes at the statement. Obviously.

“Okay, so we need the Doctor,” Kate concluded. I had thought that my eyes couldn’t go further back into my skull, but I was proven wrong.

“We absolutely do not need the Doctor,” I insisted. I earned myself a side-eye from Clara, with this comment.

“We can’t just phone him and bleat,” she agreed with me, anyway, “He’ll go Scottish.” I wondered what that could mean. “Come on, what have we got? What do we know?” I was glad that this companion had confidence that we could handle this ourselves. I knew that she would be useful.

“If it’s not an attack,” I glanced at her as I said this, “It’s not an invasion either, so…”

“Somebody needs our attention,” she realized. I grinned at how quickly she’d caught on.

“Somebody who wants to put a gun to our heads and make us listen,” I agreed.

“Oh!” her brown eyes went impossibly wide.

“Oh?” Kate was behind.

Across the room, some man called out, “We have a message coming through! On the Doctor channel!”

“Sorry, what?” Clara’s confusion rivaled my dread. It had been so long since he’d used that channel, I assured myself, there was no way that it could be him.

“He never uses it,” I mumbled.

“I doubt he remembers it even exists,” Kate agreed, but the three of us rushed over to the screen, regardless. Texts started to come through on the monitor and we watched as a decryption program took over to figure out what they said.

“Texting?” Clara shook her head, “Definitely not the Doctor.” I felt my shoulders relax.

The messages began spelling out parody song lyrics with Missy’s name incorporated into them. I had to hold back the laughter that tried to bubble up. She always claimed that the Doctor was the dramatic one, between the two of them.

“Today I shall be talking to you out of…” The Time Lady’s face appeared on the screen, in front of us. Using her innately acute psychic abilities, Missy projected herself into the minds of the humans as three dimensional. I watched them all move away as if she could get them while I stood, unflinching. “The square window.” The others began to panic. Clearly, they had already met this face and knew exactly who she was. “Okay, cutting to the chase, not dead, back, big surprise, never mind.” I couldn’t help the small chuckle I gave that. She had always been something of a cockroach and some things would never change. Clara was looking at me, again, though. “I’m in a lovely little square in one of your, oh, I don’t know, hot countries, and there’s a light breeze coming from the east,” she rambled, “And this coffee’s a buzz monster in my brain and I’m gonna need eight snipers.”

“Eight what?” Kate was gaping at the screen.

“Three for each heart and two for my brain stems,” Missy clarified, “You’ll have to switch me off fast, before I can regenerate. How fast can you get here?” She met my eyes through the screen.

“Why do you need snipers?” Kate pressed.

“Because it’s the only way they’ll feel safe enough to talk to me,” she clearly meant Clara and I. She was quick to build the narrative that she and I stood on opposite sides and I was too far in to do anything but play along. “Shall we say four o’clock?”

…

We pulled into the square in the government issued vehicle at exactly four. Clara was boiling over with questions, I could see it in her eyes, but she was resisting the urge to ask. She wanted to play with the big kids. The snipers were all in place, surrounding Missy who sat, innocently sipping her tea.

Clara and I approached the table together, walking in step with each other. Missy sat comfortably, giving me a smirk as I took the seat next to her. Clara took the one that sat across from the other Time Lady, hesitantly. She seemed to not trust Missy but she was also willing to follow my example. That was good.

“How’s your boyfriend?” Missy asked her, drawing her lips too tightly to call it a smile. “Still tremendously dead, I expect.” I glanced at Clara when she made this comment. I hadn’t even noticed the grief until Missy said something but it was palpable now that I was paying attention.

“Still dead, yeah,” Clara responded, remaining remarkably calm, “How come you’re still alive?”

“Death is for other people, dear,” she answered, simply. “Would you like to sit in the shade? I know how you humans burn…” With a few buttons pressed on her handheld device, the Time Lady moved a nearby plane the few moments in time that it needed to pass through in order to be directly above our heads. “Better?” she grinned, proudly.

“They can’t contact him,” I cut in before Clara could respond to the negging. “They’ve been trying.”

“I can’t find him either,” she told me, as if it were new information, “No one can.”

Clara looked cautious. “That happens now and then,” she tried.

“Not like this,” Missy insisted, pulling out the gold disk and placing it on the table between the three of us.

“It’s a confession dial,” I told Clara, knowing that she never would have seen one before.

“A what?”

“In your terms, a will,” I explained.

“The last Will and Testament of the Time Lord known as the Doctor,” Missy clarified, “To be delivered, according to ancient tradition, to his closest living friend on the eve of his final day.” There was a pregnant pause as this information hung in the air between us. Clara looked like she was considering whether she believed us.

Before we could stop her, she reached out to touch it, giving herself a small electric shock that caused her to jump back.

“Ah ah!” Missy tutted at her, “What are you doing?”

“You said…” Clara glanced between the two of us, “I thought…”

“No, no, no, no, no!” Missy looked offended, “It was delivered to me because he thinks she’s dead.” She nodded to me as she said this.

“You?” Clara was looking at me.

“Well, of course it was sent to one of us,” Missy interrupted, “What have you got to do with it? We’re his friends. You’re just…”

“I’m just what?” Clara challenged.

“See that couple, over there?” Missy pointed to two elderly people walking a tiny white dog down the sidewalk on the other side of the square. She gave Clara a small glare, “You’re the puppy.” The girl had already been suspicious, but Missy just essentially confirmed that I wasn’t human. Clara was staring me down more intently than she ever had.

“Since when do you care about the Doctor?” she asked Missy, instead of addressing this comment.

“Since always,” Missy said, “Since the Cloister Wars. Since the night he stole the moon and the president’s wife. Since he was a little girl.” I laughed at that, wondering how she knew that last one. She was farther from my future than I’d thought, apparently. Looking content with herself, she asked Clara, “One of those was a lie. Can you guess which one?”

“It was actually the president’s daughter,” I leaned into the young girl, as I told her this, as if it were gossip. Although she clearly got our point– we knew the Doctor well– she still looked hesitant to buy the story.

“He’s not your friend,” she told Missy, “You keep trying to kill him.”

“He keeps trying to kill me,” she countered, “It’s sort of our texting. We’ve been at it for ages.” I found something so comical about the way she described their relationship. She wasn’t wrong, by any means, but they had been in denial of their friendship for so many years. They always seemed to revert to the role of enemies. I wondered what else had changed.

“Oh, must be love,” Clara commented, sarcastically.

“Oh, don’t be disgusting. We’re Time Lords, not animals!” She straightened her back as she said this, but the human’s eyes were on me, again. “Try, nano-brain, to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain and contemplate friendship.”

“We’ve both known him for longer than your civilization has existed,” I tried to explain our perspective more gently than Missy had, “Our relationships are infinitely more complex after all we’ve been through.” Clara nodded at this, though she looked like she was having trouble digesting it.

“So you two are the Doctor’s bezzie mates and I’m supposed to believe that Missy has turned good?”

“Good?” I dreaded that tone in Missy’s voice. She turned, instantly disintegrating the man that had been standing closest to her. Clara stood, as if she would be able to do anything about it. “By the ring on his finger, he was married,” she taunted, “And I think I detected some baby leakage on his jacket, so he had a family.” Going Scottish, she concluded, “No, I’ve not turned good.” She killed the next closest man, just as quickly. Tears welled in Clara’s eyes. “Oh, wow, I’m on a roll. Thanks for bringing spares.”

“Missy, stop it,” I told her. She was pushing the young girl’s buttons too hard. At this point, she was risking losing the help that we had come here for.

“Oi, you, sweaty one,” she ignored me, gesturing to another man in a suit, “On your knees. Let’s have a goodbye selfie for your kids.”

“Missy,” I said, more firmly, “That’s enough.” She finally met my eyes, as the man lowered himself to his knees.

“Say something nice,” she asked me, with a pout. I rolled my eyes, knowing Clara was watching my every movement.

“No,” I responded, simply.

“I’ll kill everyone in this square,” she bluffed.

“Start with me,” Clara told her, stepping back over to the table, “Then what? You came here for my help.”

“Because the Doctor is in danger,” Missy agreed, leaning across the table, intensity shining in her eyes.

“Make me believe you,” Clara begged.

“How?”

“Release the planes.” It was a smart move. I admired the strategy.

“The planes are keeping me alive.”

“Your best friend is in danger,” Clara posed, “Show me you care. Make me believe.”

Missy looked beyond indignant as she gave in to the girl’s demand. In an instant the plane that had been above us began drifting off and resumed normal flight. A moment of silence hung in the air as the plane disappeared from view. Clara was looking between the two of us, emotions still clouding her eyes.

“What does it say?” she was looking at the confession dial, again, now.

“It will only open when he’s dead,” I informed her.

“Then it won’t open, will it?” she spoke, firmly, finally retaking her seat.

“Question,” Missy posed, working her way back into the conversation, “If the Doctor has one last night to live, if he is certain he’s facing the end of his life, where, in all of space and time would he go?”
“Here.” It wasn’t even a question.

“Yes, Earth, obviously,” she agreed. I waved down the security agent who had a laptop that could connect us to Kate and resources at the UNIT base.

“But where and when?” I asked, rhetorically. The humans explained that they were using an algorithm to determine places that he might be, using a system of keywords and crisis points. Missy and I glanced at each other, silently noting that it wasn’t a bad system for a group of humans. Unfortunately, the map lit up with possibilities and it would be hard to narrow that down. They were right that the Doctor made a lot of noise and he wasn’t ever hard to spot.

“How’s a Time Lord supposed to die?” Clara asked, suddenly.

“Meditation,” Missy responded, instantly, “Repentance and acceptance. Contemplation of the absolute.”

“Great, thanks!” I watched as her hands flew across the keyboard, editing the specifics of the algorithm. “Eliminate the crisis points,” Clara insisted to the UNIT women through the screen, “Where is the Doctor making the most noise, but there isn’t any crisis?” I clapped Clara on the shoulder as I realized what she was doing.

“A party,” I acknowledged with a smile. Quickly, the dots on the map began to dissipate until we were left with only one possible time and location.

“‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’” Clara quoted.

“You go, girl!” Missy cheered, reaching down and slapping a third vortex manipulator onto Clara’s wrist. Neither of us had time to prepare ourselves before we were transported, again.