DOCTOR: Oh, and be sure to cover your throat. That's very important when going from a warmer clime to a cooler one.

FITZ: Did you get that from some ancient source of Time Lord wisdom?

DOCTOR: No, from David Niven, but it's still good advice.

One of those poppies on Remembrance Sunday will be for me. I wonder if the Doctor and Fitz will ever find my name on some memorial or other. Or Mum and Dad.

No, they won't put my name anywhere. I don't belong here. I'm no one. Suddenly, panic stabbed at her. I shouldn't be here, she thought. This is all wrong. I can't die in World War Two, it's stupid.

DOCTOR: Making things Right is my profession. Cheating Death's just a sort of hobby... But I seem to be rather talented at it.

GARCIA: The problem with cheating Death is that he's a sore loser at the best of times.

DOCTOR: Yes, she is.

SAM: That's enough. Too many bad memories. Take me back. Back down to human levels.

GALASTEL: You're sure? You would turn your back on these powers. You would be... human?

SAM: It's who I am. Who I know. It's who I want to be.

“You said that sometimes we all had to make choices. That's what makes us ourselves, doesn't it? The choices we make? I am... I'm myself, who I ought to be. Might be the best thing I've learned from you.”

'Hello Sarah Jane,' he said.

He wondered if Sarah looked surprised. It was hard to tell, since he could see only her knees from here. Her body was crouched down by his side.

'You,' she said. 'It's you, isn't it?'

“I'm just a Time Lord dreaming he's a man. Or is it the other way around?”

Sarah had been banking on the dog being wrong about that. Who was going to be here? Friends of Sam's? Family even?

Surely not. The Doctor wouldn't have chosen her as a companion if she'd had family. Close family, anyway. He didn't work like that, did he? Even Batman only hired orphans as sidekicks.

Sam was going to leave. Sam wanted to leave. Sam had decided to leave. Not one of those slow, creeping realisations, but an actual big, hard no-backing-out decision. She'd drawn the line in the sand, she'd made up her mind, she'd written it in her diary, and yes, the diary in question contained only one entry and that was it, but it was the thought that counted.

Going. Definitely going. Going going going.

DOCTOR: I could take you forward -

SAM: No. We've figured it out. I'm going to be staying here. Sarah's got a couple of big projects lined up in the next year or so. She's going to need help. And there's a spare room here, so I won't get in the way of... you know. Her private life.

SARAH: I'm hoping there'll be a Nobel Prize in this somewhere.

SAM: Either that or we'll end up bringing down Western civilisation.

“What was madness, anyway, and who was Fitz to make definitions? She had some idea that there was a history of mental illness, as the humans called it, in Fit's past, but Compassion had never cared enough to bother finding out the details. She doubted anything about Fitz could be too interesting. He came from a culture that had only just discovered television, so how smart could he be?”

COMPASSION: Doctor, you're babbling at me.

DOCTOR: I am?

COMPASSION: It happens when you get nervous or overexcited. It's very distracting.

DOCTOR: Babbling? No one else has ever complained.

FITZ: You know, Iris. When I said being with you was the same as being with the Doctor, I was wrong.

IRIS: Oh yes, dear?

FITZ: Being with you is like being in a sodding B movie.

Then she nudged the rumpled Fitz fully awake with the toe of her stacked-heeled boot.

'Get up, Fitz We've been left on the Planet of the bloody Apes.'

Fitz groaned and feigned losing consciousness again. She took his arm and heaved him up onto his shaking legs.

'Let me die,' he groaned. 'Just let me die.'

FITZ: Do you know? Knocking around with you is absolutely no different from hanging around with the Doctor.

IRIS: Well, we both have fantastic adventures. But he's a bit of a wuss, compared to me.

I remember being in San Francisco and it was New Year. I kissed a woman in a park. She was dressed in some satiny stuff and the trees were strung with fairy lights. I kissed her. Quite impulsive for me, jamming my face right into hers, feeling her relax into me. I hardly knew the woman.

I kissed her because she'd just given me back part of my memory. She had restored it to me with just an inadvertent word. I wonder if I could somehow find her again and she could tell me more?

Grace, Grace, Grace, she was called.

He let his eyes open, and touched his palm against the TARDIS with relief.

'This, old girl,' he told it, 'has been one hell of a day.'

'I thought you said it wasn't a person?' muttered Holsred petulantly.

'It isn't,' said Fitz firmly. 'But I tend to go all sentimental when I've just spent most of the day being chased and tortured. I'm odd like that.'

'That isn't very inconspicuous. What sort of TARDIS doesn't even have a working chameleon circuit?'

'A crap one,' snapped Fitz.

'I suppose that fit communicated itself to his colleague who was, er, working on you. Nigh-identical cortical structures you see - almost bound to cause psychic feedback in a confined space.'

'Obvious really,' Fitz said, ironically.

'Oh, was it? I thought it was rather clever!' The Doctor looked downhearted, and Fitz felt he had kicked a puppy before the Doctor winked at him to show it was all a joke.

COMPASSION: Maybe you're a Great Old One on your mother's side. Either that or a lucky guess.

DOCTOR: No, I think it's what I was warning you against. The power of the scenario: It's trying to turn me into an expert narrative voice.

COMPASSION: Obviously, Doctor. I was employing irony.

COMPASSION: Remember that the Doctor isn't perfect, either.

FITZ: I know that.

COMPASSION: You dote on the Doctor, Fitz. You haven't worked it out yet, how he tolerates us. Humans are just the Time Lords' embarrassing relations. Isn't it how you'd feel if you had to travel round with only the inferior species for company?

FITZ: You make us sound like pets. Is that your big idea, Compassion? We're the Doctor's pets?

COMPASSION: Yes. But it's like the difference between cats and dogs. A dog thinks, My owner loves me and feeds me and takes care of me, so he must be god. A cat thinks, My owner loves me and feeds me and takes care of me so I must be god. He's got you to sit up and beg, like a well-trained dog. Well, he won't change me.

“He likes you, and he needs you. We both do. You can... see the big picture. The Doctor's off at so many tangents. And I think he gets lost in the detail.”

FITZ: What's the bloody point? You can knock it off with the concerned-friend routine, too. You don't need me. You can find the Doctor without me. Leave me here to rot with Ellis. I can find out if he smells better once he's been dead for a while.

COMPASSION: Of course we need you, Fitz. You don't think the Doctor would leave you here anyway, do you? The Doctor trusts you, he doesn't trust me.

FITZ: You don't really need me. Why are you waiting for me?

COMPASSION: It's the right thing to do.

FITZ: You're starting to sound like the Doctor.

COMPASSION: You make that sound like an insult.

The Doctor grinned even wider, and noticed that the rubber lips around the robot's speech loudspeaker were doing the same. 'Fascinating. I suppose that's to reduce the common fear that people have of robots, the lack of empathy and expression. You're able to imitate people!'

The robot stood facing him, arms akimbo, its face a picture of mechanical amazement. 'Am I?' it said with a wide-eyed grin. It slapped its forehead again with a tinny clank.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'But don't overdo it.'

DOCTOR: We should go and investigate. Identify what's disturbing your concentration, Compassion. Prevent you walking into the furniture. Then we can all stop worrying about you.

COMPASSION: I don't care whether or not you worry about me.

DOCTOR: Good. So you won't care if we do something about it.

“The Doctor slumped on the leather seat, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Fitz stared, unsure what else to say. The hunched shape looked so vulnerable that Fitz wanted to stoop down and hug him until the pain went away, until the shaking stopped and the real Doctor returned.”

DOCTOR: If I knew exactly what the problem was, I would have fixed it by now.

FITZ: Doesn't this TARDIS have some sort of self-diagnostic system? A "fault locator" or something?

DOCTOR: It does.

FITZ: So why not use that to tell you what's wrong?

DOCTOR: It's faulty.

“You're torturing sentient beings to test their telepathic abilities? And you call them creatures? You label them evil? It never fails to amaze me just how conceited, egotistical and downright thoughtless human beings can be. You have such unparalleled capacity for... caring... yet you seem totally inept at putting it into practice.”

Her head turned towards him. 'Your blood smells funny.'

The Doctor was beginning to feel more and more light-hearted. 'That's because my blood is funny. Two leucocytes walk into a bar. The first one says "Do you serve subpoenas here?"' He trailed off. 'That joke doesn't even make sense,' he said worriedly.

ANJI: It spooks me when he gets like that.

FITZ: Yeah.

ANJI: You know why he does, don't you. Why he forgot. What he forgot.

FITZ: There's so much I don't know, Anj. He had decades on him before I met him. Maybe centuries. Probably centuries.

“I scramble. I shoot. On occasion, I scurry. But I never scoot. Appearances must be preserved.”

DUPRE: You're not scared?

DOCTOR: I scare very, very easily. Budgies unnerve me. Gerbils throw me into a state of panic. Don't even mention rabbits.

FITZ: I don't think the Doctor quite gets evil, not really, no matter how much he's fought it. Basically, it just doesn't make sense to him. He's an innocent. And that's scary, it gives him a blind spot.

ANJI: Do you really think he's good?

FITZ: (nods emphatically) Bloody awful sometimes. But always good.

DUPRE: Have you travelled the universe?

DOCTOR: The universe, the obverse, the reverse. The inverse, where everything has to rhyme. The freeverse, where nothing ever does. I'm well versed.

“If I were a demon, you'd have been in pieces ten minutes ago. I'm an alien. Not of this earth. Oh come on, you've seen the movies. We're not pre-Spielberg, are we? Wasn't Close Encounters in the seventies? This is your close encounter, Dupre. Welcome to the mysteries.”

“'He can take care of himself,' Fitz muttered, starting for the kitchen. He always had, after all, for hundreds of years. Still, at some point his luck was bound to run out. But please not today, Fitz thought, as he grasped the pantry door handle. Please never, as long as I'm with him.”

“It's always hard to know with him. You overreact, and then he walks in after a three-day hunt for the perfect jelly baby and you feel like a right git. So next time he's gone, you tell yourself it's just him being disorganised and forgetful, and find out he's been locked in a dungeon by something with tentacles.”

RUST: How long since you lost your memory?

DOCTOR: About a hundred years.

RUST: You hardly seem forty. Can you even die?

DOCTOR: Yes.

RUST: You don't sound certain.

DOCTOR: I am, though. I'm as certain as if I'd died once already. Isn't that strange?

“Me? I'm chance. The role of the dice that comes up seven. The straight flush. The fifth bingo number. Also, I'm from another planet. Don't ask me which planet. I've forgotten.”

ANJI: Do you think he's different? Since New Orleans, I mean.

FITZ: Different how?

ANJI: I don't know. Calmer. A bit more at peace.

FITZ: Maybe. Yeah, actually. It's subtle, but it's there. Like he's resolved something.

ANJI: What, do you think?

FITZ: No idea. And no sense speculating. That way madness lies.

ANJI: Why does he inspire such loyalty? Why do we think we ought to be helping him and looking out for him?

FITZ: Because he's good. He's bigger than we are, somehow. More full of life.