This was quicker, wasn't it? :) Have the conclusion of The Beast Below and the start of something new.

9 - The Young And The Old

"What are you doing?" Liz asked.

The Doctor had stepped up to a console in the dungeon and was working alone with the switches and wires. His face was uncharacteristically void of expressions.

"The worst thing I'll ever do," he replied without looking at the others. "I'm going to pass an electric current through the Star Whale's brain. Should knock out its higher brain functions and leave it a vegetable. The ship will still fly, but the Star Whale won't feel it."

"But that will be like killing it," Amelia said, but instantly regretted it. She was already on the Doctor's bad side after all this.

"Three options! One, I let the Star Whale continue, in unendurable agony for hundreds of more years. Two, I kill everyone on this ship. Three, I murder a beautiful, innocent creature as painlessly as I can! And then, then I'll find a new name, because I won't be the Doctor anymore!"

He had not meant to shout, but the last part did not come out calmly. Amelia backed off again, devastation spelled over her face. Somewhere inside of him, the Doctor felt bad for making her feel like this, but it was nothing, really nothing, in the bigger picture. Nothing compared to what he was going through right now, what he was about to do, giving up his most fundamental values. Not even the picture of Amy Pond in her wedding dress made him feel any different right now.

The queen received one last bow from Hawthorne before he went away, and she sat down in front of the voting booth, hope wiped completely from her essence. Amelia could see her eyes dart towards the FORGET button.

The ginger girl felt utterly and completely useless. She wanted to go home. She even wanted to forget, until something tapped her shoulder from behind. Turning around, she looked up at the long limb that the beast had reached out from the hole the Doctor had made earlier. The Star Whale's limb, with the stinger at the end. Amelia wouldn't have any chance to dodge or run if it decided to attack.

But it didn't. It just wriggled a bit in the air above her, almost playfully. Could it be...? Time to be brave. She reached up a hand towards it and to her delight, it did not pierce her palm. Instead, it gently bent down to let her fingers stroke the side of the big claw.

The Star Whale would not eat children. The children of Earth had been crying, and the last of the Star Whales had come. The stinger had missed her at the roadblock, even if it could certainly have pierced through her body if it had wanted to. But it didn't. Amelia felt her face crack up into a smile she couldn't contain.

"Doctor!" she called out. "Doctor, stop!"

But the Doctor only shook his head and didn't even look at her. She steeled herself. There was a chance she needed to take now, and she couldn't be sure of the outcome. But she felt no hesitation at all. Letting the Doctor destroy his own soul for them was not an option, after all.

Liz was still sitting in front of the booth, but suddenly a smaller hand grabbed hers.

"Sorry, your majesty, I'm gonna need a hand!" Amelia said and moved them to one of the big, shining buttons before Liz could react.

The Doctor heard her and saw in the corner of his eye what they were about to do.

"No, wait, Amelia, don't!"

Too late. Amelia pressed the queen's hand down on the ABDICATE button, and the Doctor froze in shock. How could she have defied him so?

The electric pulses from the machines into the beast's brain stopped. For a second, nothing happened. Everyone was completely still, even the hooded men and the children in the room. Then, the sound of a thousand metallic bindings releasing, one after one another, reached them, along with an earsplitting growl that was nothing like the shriek of pain they had heard earlier. And Spaceship UK rocked. It was like an earthquake. Lights flickered, stones fell loose from the walls, and Amelia felt two strong arms wrap themselves around her from behind. An angst ridden voice whispered in her ear.

"Pond, what have you done?"

For a split moment, fear struck her. What if they were really dying here? But the rumbling stopped and the growling fell silent, and her resolve returned.

"Nothing," she said and reached up to hug the arms that held her. "Nothing at all!"

"We've increased speed!" Hawthorne said, touching a computer screen.

"Of course we have!" Amelia said and shook the Doctor off as they stood up. "You've stopped torturing the pilot, gotta help!"

The Doctor stepped up to Hawthorne's screen, as if to confirm that he was right.

"It's still here!" the queen breathed. "It didn't leave!"

"Of course not!" Amelia said, crossing her arms over her chest. "The Star Whale didn't come like a miracle all those years ago. It volunteered! You never had to trap it or torture it – it came because it couldn't stand to watch the children cry!"

"My god," Hawthorne gasped, and Liz with him. "If that is true..."

"Think about it!" Amelia continued intensively. "If you were really old, and really kind... And the last of your kind, with no future. What can you do then? You can't just stand watching scared children cry. Can you?"

She was looking at the Doctor, and she saw that he almost couldn't bear looking back.

"It's still here, because it wants to be," Amelia said.

oOo

The next minutes went past the Doctor in a blur, as Liz disappeared with the hooded men to start working on their new society already – a spaceship without secrets – and he and Amelia were led back to London Market and the TARDIS. The queen had offered them a royal dinner and a much needed bath, but the Doctor had politely declined, wanting to get back to the TARDIS as fast as he could.

When they stepped into the glowing console room again, he felt like he could finally breathe. But she was still there behind him. Amelia. Since the queen pressed the button, he had not spoken to the girl, hardly even looked at her. He knew that he was probably worrying her, but he didn't know what to say. Amy Pond had once rendered him speechless, and her younger self had now utterly broken even that record.

He had not even realized that he was leaning heavily against the TARDIS console, when a small hand touched his.

"Amelia."

"Are you still angry?"

"You could have killed everyone on this ship," he blurted out.

A piece of silence, before the girl said: "You could have killed a Star Whale."

He finally looked into her eyes again, her green, bright, already so wise eyes. "And you saved it."

"You didn't trust me," Amelia said in a blaming tone.

The Doctor chuckled, making the girl smile in relief as well. "I'm sorry, Amelia. I'm so, so sorry. I think... Maybe it's time we started trusting each other. I mean, if you can. If you want to."

Amelia eyed him curiously. "I'll trust you, Doctor, on one condition."

"And which condition would that be?"

"Don't take me back home."

Her words were more serious than she wanted them to be, he noticed. The crack in her wall was cured, but still she did not want to go home. To be honest, he would like a chance to explore her strange house further... But there was no rush, was there? They had a time machine.

"Okay. Not home. Tell you what, I'll show you a place without starships instead. You see, we can travel back in time as well! Ready?"

"No, wait!"

The Doctor was left hanging over a lever with a quizzical look on his face. "What now then?"

"I just think I really need a bath. And clothes."

"A human kid who actually wants a bath? Are you sure you are not actually an alien sent to trick me and spy on me?" Amelia giggled and the Doctor gave in. "Ah, alright then. As a matter of fact, I have a bathroom on board. Well, several actually."

He took the girl's hand and started strolling towards the doorway opposite of the front doors, where he had disappeared to before, to fetch his long scarf.

"And a wardrobe?"

"The biggest wardrobe you've ever seen! Mind you, I haven't had many kids on board before, so you might have to grow a few sizes to find something that fits you..."

oOo

And so, Amelia Pond walked the corridors of the TARDIS for the first time. She marveled already at the softly glowing coral walls, but when they reached the actual rooms, she was breath-taken.

"Oh, nice," the Doctor grunted when they turned around a corner and found themselves in a much more open space. "Show her the library the first thing you do, it won't be overwhelming at all!" he shouted up to the endless rows of bookshelves that stretched out before them.

Amelia only gaped and walked up to lean out from the balcony they had found themselves on. There were several floors beneath them - and above - with books after books. The architecture was more like a temple from the roman age or something, than the organic looking design of the control room.

"Are we still in the TARDIS? Did we land somewhere?"

"We're still inside her. She just wants to show off, for some reason," the Doctor sighed, leaning over the marble fence himself. "Curious, that. Usually she's slow to warm up to new people." He glanced at her, and found the girl smiling widely. Still not broken yet, then.

"Her - you mean your ship?"

"Sentient machine, a machine with a heart and soul if you like. Breathing time itself."

"And a lot bigger on the inside."

"A lot! Once, I got lost in here after a particularly nasty regeneration. It was already bad that I half didn't know who I was at the time, but the TARDIS wasn't exactly kind enough to make the room I was looking for appear when I needed it-"

"Regeneration?" Amelia said and gave him a look of confusion. "What's that mean?"

"Uh..." Right. Trying to explain to her that he sometimes changed his appearance and personality around might not really be a reassuring thing now that they were going to try and trust each other. Then again, he didn't want to lie to her either. She had proven that she was wiser than her years already. "Can we talk about that some other time? It's not really important right now. We're trying to find a bathroom, remember?"

"Okay," Amelia gave in, thankfully interested enough in the TARDIS to inquire further at this point.

The time machine seemed to keep wanting to show off, though, as it took them far longer than the Doctor expected to find what they were searching for. They encountered a swimming pool, a soccer field, ten bedrooms that were completely new to the Doctor, and something that must be the kitchen, only the Doctor had never seen it like this before. The TARDIS had created a big, hexagonal room with four doorways and the walls crammed with benches, appliances, shelves and cabinets. The center of the room had a dinner table for two, just beside a couple of armchairs and a sofa with matching coffee tables and something that looked like an artificial fire near one of the walls for coziness. The architecture was again ancient roman looking rather than coral patterned. Nothing like the little room where Rose Tyler used to make tea in the mornings for them...

"Trying to bury old memories, are you?" the Doctor mumbled as he lingered for a while before following the eager Amelia out through one of the doorways.

"I found it!" the girl's voice came from ahead of him.

She was standing with a blissful smile next to a large, luxurious bathtub in a room that seemed to have everything she could need to make herself feel like a human again, instead of something a Star Whale had barfed up. The Doctor left her to clean up in private, and strolled back to the sofa in the dining hall.

What a day. He had saved worlds before, seen stars blow up and people die. But letting a young human girl join him in the TARDIS and see her outsmart himself at a critical, historical moment... And she was not scared and wanting to go home, she just seemed to want more. More of this life, more of his life. He couldn't refuse. Of course, one reason was what Amy Pond had told him; this had already happened, so he would cause a paradox if he did not travel with Amelia for at least a bit. But he would also cause a paradox if he let her die, and that really was not impossible in this life of his. He was not meant to be a baby sitter. He was the last of the Time Lords, he had ended a war and he had infinite shame and blood on his hands. Rose... Time could be rewritten. Timelines could split up. He could lose Amelia just like he lost Rose. Suddenly. Painfully.

No, it wasn't the same. Rose had her family, Amelia had no one. The right thing to do would be to keep investigating her strange house and seemingly scrambled memory, and find a safe way for her to become the woman he had first met. He clenched his hand around the sofa's armrest as his resolve strengthened.

"Doctor?"

Little Amelia had walked up to him from behind, wrapped in a huge, fluffy towel, fresh smells enveloping her. The investigation could wait, still.

"Where's the wardrobe, then?"

The Doctor smiled and jumped back up. "She didn't show you? Maybe she doesn't like you at all," he joked.

"She totally does!" Amelia puffed as she followed him back into the corridors again.

Yes, she totally did, the Doctor thought, and couldn't help but wondering what the TARDIS was seeing in their future.