Everyone was busy, fussing about what was going on. No one noticed Fitz slipthrough the big wooden doors on the far side of the room.

He wandered down the corridors, not quite sure where to go. The console room was the obvious place, the heart of the TARDIS, but that was no good at the moment, being full of people as it was. In the end, he decided on the library. It seemed a very Doctorish sort of place.

With Compassion he’d just sort of talked and she’d heard him. He’d never tried to speak to this TARDIS before. But the Doctor referred to it – her – as a person. It was worth a go. He still felt a bit silly, though.

He stood in the middle of the library, clutching a copy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit for emotional support. He spoke quietly. ‘Um. . . I don’t know if you can hear me. But if you can, I expect you probably. . . well, care about him, like I do. And you mustn’t let him use that machine. Please. Um, that’s all. Thank you.’ Then he went back to the console room.

He took a deep breath in the calm of the corridor before stepping back into the chaos.

*

It seemed he’d missed most of the action. The Doctor and Elizabethan were still hooked up to the Memory Machine – and the TARDIS console. But the Doctor’s eyes were flickering open, and he was sitting up. Fitz spared a glance for the President’s wife, and saw that her lips were opening soundlessly. Words were forming, but he couldn’t tell what she was trying to say. Her husband was kneeling by her side, mumbling incomprehensible sounds of encouragement.He was holding her hand so tightly that her fingertips had turned bright red.

Back to the Doctor, whose eyes were open now. ‘It worked, didn’t it?’ he said, smiling. ‘I could feel it working. Well done, old girl.’ He reached an arm up over his shoulder to pat the central console.

The console spat sparks at him. The Doctor yelped and leapt up, clearly astonished.

‘Something’s going wrong!’ cried Anji – and something certainly was: an electric-blue current streaked down the wires towards the Doctor and Elizabethan. The Doctor yanked the connectors from his head, and dived towards the unconscious woman, but Anji had got there first and grabbed a handful of wires. With a scream she was thrown backwards, hitting her head and lying still. Xernic was by her side in a second.

Fitz was rooted to the spot. ‘I didn’t mean you to hurt anyone,’ he whispered.‘I wanted to stop people being hurt.’

The Doctor was with Elizabethan now, detaching wires from the spasming body. The last one gone, she lay still. And the Memory Machine exploded.

Fitz managed to move this time, throwing himself towards the Doctor, trying to get between the Doctor and the explosion. . . which wasn’t happening.

There was an unexplosion, just as Fitz landed on top of the Doctor.

The Doctor beamed at him. ‘The TARDIS! She’s contained it! The clever old thing.’ Then he glanced ruefully at the imploded shell of the machine. ‘Doesn’t look like I’ll be able to use that again, though.’

‘Oh,’ said Fitz, unable to bring himself to offer any insincere sympathy.

There was a groan from the other side of the room as Anji sat up. Fitz notedthat she automatically shrugged off Xernic’s helping hand, and saw the hurt-puppy-dog look in the boy’s eyes. It could be hard, being a teenager.

‘I’m all right,’ she called across to Fitz and the Doctor, ‘don’t worry about me.’ Fitz thought her tone was unnecessarily sarcastic, and was reminded for one horrible moment of Compassion. He really hoped that Anji was going to be a more amenable travelling companion than the TARDIS bitch queen from hell. Would it hurt the Doctor too much to pick up someone who was sweet and amenable and had good taste in men (i.e. fancied Fitz) once in a while? Surely not.

*

Almost the instant she was back inside the TARDIS, Anji had rushed off. To her adopted room, Fitz reckoned. Probably best to leave her alone for a bit.

Now it was just Fitz and the Doctor again. Less than a week since they’d stood together like this in Compassion’s control room, the Doctor leaping from control panel to control panel, Fitz looking on as always. But the Doctor. . . he’d lived several human lifetimes since then. He still seemed to be the week-ago Doctor, though, in all the ways that mattered. And it was Fitz’s job to make sure he stayed that way.

He took a deep breath. ‘Doctor. . . ’ he said, ‘um, you remember when we went to. . . to Gallifrey. . . ?’

He could sense the Doctor’s mind working 6/8 time. ‘We go to so many places, Fitz,’ he said.

‘But Gallifrey – we could maybe take Anji there? For a holiday?’

‘Oh yes, someday, perhaps. Lovely place for a holiday. Very –’ the Doctor was trying to think of a word that could cover all options, not show that he had no idea, Fitz knew that – ‘very. . . tranquil.’

‘Yes, Doctor. Fair enough, just thought I’d mention it.’

Yes, the Doctor was himself again, and that was good. He wasn’t the wreck he’d been after the destruction of his home planet, Gallifrey, and that was good, too. He didn’t know Fitz was a fake, or that he’d killed the real one, and that was very good. But. . . how fragile was this new-old Doctor? Knowing all these things had all but destroyed his mind in the first place; was he any more fitted to cope with the knowledge now? And knowing that he had to protect the Doctor above all things – however horrified the Doctor would be if he found out Fitz was protecting him – Fitz decided he would have to sacrifice any dreams of going back to Filippa, any hopes of Anji’s of getting home, any hope of comfort from the Doctor for his unreal state, in order to keep this Doctor whole.

Giving things up for the Doctor felt good. He – well, the real Fitz, anyway,but it feltlike it had happened to him – had gone with his mum to see a play of Oscar Wilde’s. Am dram – support the local community and they might begin to like us. There was a lot of keeping secrets for the good of others in that,and the young Fitz had been rather dissatisfied with the ending, because all the secrets were kept and the characters went on, he assumed, to live happily ever after. He’d wanted to see the big dramatic scenes where all the secrets were discovered, and his mum had said he was missing the point. Now, the mature Fitz could see the point: could understand that Oscar Wilde had had the right idea all along. If keeping a secret could make someone else happy, then hey, secrets were a good thing. There might be some weird sense of closure if everything came out in the open, some soap-opera resolution, but happy endings were infinitely preferable.

The Doctor had looked after Fitz – had thought he was looking after Fitz – for years now. Fitz might not be the real Fitz any more, but that was irrelevant.He had a purpose in life now. He was going to look after the Doctor. Whatever it took.