He looked up into wide dark eyes, the anger and frustration he saw there mirroring his own.

Up on the deserted flight deck, deafened by psychic feedback from the agony of the loa, Mathara clutched at the empty air for support. The gears in her old legs had gone into spasm, overloaded by the strength of her shock. Twitching, her slight frame held upright only by the stubborn gears, she saw the Edifice vanish, and the beginnings of an explosion so profoundly destructive it failed even to register on the spectrums of sight. You could see only what wasn't there: no light, no substance of any kind, radiating out, a new bloom replacing the ancient flower.

The nothing was as potent a symbol as anything the Faction had ever embraced. Still Mathara was reaching blindly out to it when she, and the Faction fleet, snapped out of existence for ever.

Final Interlude The time Sunlight pokes him in the eye. Now he knows it all. Everything.

And already he is forgetting why he has come.

He stares at the book accusingly, then drops it to the floor. The thick carpet absorbs the thud of its falling. All this is a trick, one more lie, another deception. He chides himself for coming here, for childishly seeking any kind of absolute. He must leave this place, this trap. Now the future will be coming for him; he has given his location away.

He turns and fades.

He will be missing.

In perfect stasis, protected by security systems that will defend against any living creature, the heavy volume hangs suspended in the sunshine. A closed book, undisturbed.

Chapter Fortyfive.

Aftermath

Fitz emerged into the light with a shout of terror and surprise, staring wildly.

'Shut up.' The voice sounded softly all around him.

'Compassion,' he whispered. 'You broke through whatever they laid on you.' He paused.

'Obviously,' he added.

'No. Old Mother Tarra's control box stopped affecting me, just like that. Bloody good job, too. I was able to fix the damage you that Father Kreiner did to my internal monitor. Hear myself think again.'

Fitz let the details sail over his head. 'Why would it just stop -' He paused, a hope flaring in his twisted guts. 'Could it be something the Doctor did? To Tarra, I mean? But he was ...'

'I don't know what happened.'

'What about Romana and -'

'I told you, Fitz, shut up.'

Fitz nodded, closed his eyes, concentrated on holding himself here, here in the warmth of the familiar room. He felt his mind slowly slithering back from the edge of losing it altogether.

He looked down at himself: soaked, bruised, splattered with blood, but alive.

'You're safe,' he cooed to himself, hugging his body and rocking on his knees. 'For you, Britischer pig, ze var is over.'

Then he keeled over and let the tears out at last.

Fitz was aware of nothing else but the thick, choking sobs for some time. Eventually he found his voice again and was able to ask weakly, 'Where are we going?' He considered again.

'Where can we go? We'll be watching our backs for ever.'

She didn't answer. Distantly, Fitz recognised the sound of her engines shifting up a pitch, preparing to run regardless.

Compassion hiccuped. Fitz knew her well enough to know that this meant she'd materialised, but he was too tired to ask where. He closed his eyes, like a child on the back seat of a car foiling asleep and feeling safe with a grownup behind the wheel. When Compassion's engines started up again shortly afterwards he didn't question it, simply allowed the noise to soothe him to sleep.

When he opened his eyes again, he found that Compassion had decided to switch on the scanner display. It showed a planet, Gallifrey, he assumed, but something was wrong. The planet was losing its form. The dark cloudy red of its surface was scudding away into space, its spherical form twisting into a helix, consuming a nearby moon in a single gulp.

Fitz got up wearily, every muscle aching. He thought back to Kaufima in the cave as he watched Gallifrey go up in smoke through Compassion's eyes. 'That's a burnt orange sky all right,' he muttered.

'The Doctor,' said Compassion. 'He's destroyed the Edifice, the Faction, his own planet.'

'No.' Fitz swallowed hard. 'The Faction destroyed the planet.'

'Have it your own way.'

Fitz shook his head, remembering the Doctor as he'd last seen him on the filthy floor of the Council Chamber. 'Believe me, this isn't my own way.'

For a moment, the whole planet glowed brighter than a sun. Then it was nothing more than a pinprick of light.

The stars began to blink out, one by one.

Compassion's engine note changed, and the darkness of space on the scanner screen drifted into the comforting greys and blues of the bruised vortex.

'I'm free,' Compassion whispered all about him.

'I suppose you are,' he said, staring up into her sparkling depths. He could feel a new power in her, a confidence. He found it made him want to smile, despite all that had happened.

Even so.

'I wish I wish we could've saved the Doctor ...' His voice caught in his throat as a tear that had escaped the previous exodus tried to worm its way out.

'You should go to his room,' came Compassion's voice.

Fitz did as he was told without question. And there, flat out on his bed, bruised, battered but alive, was the sleeping form of the Doctor.

Fitz stared at him for some time. He couldn't decide whether to start weeping again or to laugh out loud.

'I snatched him from the Edifice, like I snatched you from those Matrix projections,'

Compassion whispered.

Fitz took a shuddering breath. "Thank you. I only wish -'

A long, long pause.

'I only wish we could've saved him before it came to this.'

Compassion said nothing. He felt her presence stealing from the room.

'Maybe you left me in Geneva, Doctor,' Fitz whispered. 'Maybe I left you with the Faction.

But maybe now we can both leave all this shit behind.'

He walked to the door, then paused on the threshold. Thought of the little boy in those Matrix projections, screaming as the spectres melted his face down to the bone. Saw the string of the Doctor's yoyo hanging from out of his torn trouser pocket.

'Life goes on, Doctor,' he murmured, staring at the pale figure wrapped in its evergreen coat.

'And so will you.'

Chapter Fortysix.

Travelling companions

'You're sure about this, Compassion?'

'Obviously.'

Fitz lit up a cigarette with shaking fingers. The time had come at last.

The Doctor remained cold and pale on the couch, a frown slapped on his face as if even taking shallow breaths required Olympian feats of concentration. Compassion was positively glowing. For the first time, she'd provided a holographic version of herself inside the console room. He guessed her bothering to provide a focus for him to talk to was something of a big deal. A goodbye in person or in as much of a person as she could ever be.

Fitz took a big drag on his ciggie, watching as Compassion folded a piece of paper and walked over to the Doctor. 'Can't you make those instructions bigger?' he called. 'What if he loses them? Or doesn't even find them?'

Compassion didn't look up. 'You know him.'

'That's why I'm asking.'

'The first thing he'll do is search his pockets.'

'My pockets, you mean.' Fitz sighed. I'll miss that coat.'

Compassion turned to him, a smile literally flickering on her holographic face. 'As long as you turn up at the right spot in 2001, Fitz, you'll get it back, won't you?'

'You think he's going to be wearing the same coat for more than a hundred years?' Fitz allowed his withering look to soften into something more thoughtful. 'Mind you, I suppose that cut does have a certain timeless quality about it ...'

'Time to go, Fitz.'

How could she say that so casually? He took another mournful puff and tried again. 'You're sure about this?'

'You've got more than enough money there to sort out a new life for yourself ...'

'I mean about him.' Fitz plonked his old trilby on the Doctor's head. 'He still doesn't look too clever.'

'For the hundredth time, he's not Faction any longer. You can see his shadow, can't you? The Edifice jumped the right way. The Doctor was never on Dust ... not now. Causality's been thrown back on course.'

'You make it sound like a football or something.'

Compassion rolled her eyes. 'Well, whatever. The Doctor won't be kicking it for some time.'

'If it never really happened, how come I can remember ...?'

'The memories may still alter.' Compassion waved her hand at him to shut him up. 'I'm not prolonging these proceedings by explaining temporal causality spirals to you.'

Fitz grumbled: 'I guess if I'd blown up the world I wouldn't want to remember it. I can't see it, you know. Him just waiting around, living with that, for a hundred years ...'

'Approximately. Before the TARDIS has reformed itself.'

Hanging around in Gallifrey's ashes, checking the scale of the damage, Compassion had located the only piece of matter larger than an electron in the vicinity. A little black box, about an inch square, shining like wet coal.

'So, it's renewing itself, right?' Fitz said, not convinced. 'Like, that is going to grow policebox size.'

'Eventually,' Compassion said, ignoring his jibe. 'It's healing just as he will. It's going to take some time, that's all. And it needs to be close to the Doctor throughout that time.'

'So you're stuffing his TARDIS in his pocket too, like a snuff box or something?' Fitz jumped up again, agitated. 'Compassion, this will never work. A thousand, a million things could go wrong.'

'I know.' She pursed her lips. 'Follow the Doctor's lead. You'II just have to hope for the best.'

'Right. 'Cause I'm just so lucky that way.'

Fitz felt the ground shift ever so slightly under his feet, the tingling at the back of his neck that told him they'd materialised somewhere new.

'We've landed, Fitz,' Compassion said, her image fading. 'Goodbye.'

So he was on his own, now. Fitz felt like he was six years old again and had lost his mum in Woolworth's. 'Why the rush?' But he was already talking to empty space. 'Hey, don't suppose you could change into something snazzy for me to get out of, a corvette or something, let me impress my new neighbourhood?'

The room remained silent, empty save for him and the Doctor under the tenwatt rays of some lamp she'd forgotten to turn off. He felt suddenly as if he were somehow intruding.

The Doctor still lay on his couch, like a body in state. In a right old state. Fitz took a last draw on the cigarette and prayed he wasn't paying his last respects to his old friend.