Author's Note: Thank you all so much for your continuous support and love for this ongoing story. Not long left now in this one, but fear not! More 12th Doctor and Clara stories will be coming ASAP! So watch this space! (Never saying that again.) I'd like to thank, for this chapter in particular, the beautiful short comic book 'Fade Away' written by Paul Hanley for inspiration and copying! Thank you all again!

The idiosyncratic whirr of the TARDIS filled the well-trimmed courtyard it materialised into. Trees bustled, flower beds trembled and cobblestones shook. But after a flickering moment. Silence once more. The familiar Blue Box now stood in a quaintly pruned distinctively English, courtyard. The Doctor could tell by the potent odour as he abandoned the threshold of the machine. The gardens were equipped with glossy white benches, well-maintained timber bandstands and flower beds dotted in four corners, although, the actual perimeter of the place was no larger than a house.

He crossed the marble footpath to the building that beheld the garden, pondering constantly why the TARDIS had brought him here.

Reaching the door to the building, the Doctor knocked sheepishly but in an intriguing pattern to entertain himself while he waited.

In less than seconds, the door opened, a hand dragged him through, pushed him down carpeted, white walled corridors and halted him calmly outside a door. Having no time to look around, study his surroundings drastically or even catch a glimpse at the owner of the hand the Doctor did what he does best, and improvised. He opened the door and stepped inside.

It took the Doctor seconds to comprehend the man inside.

"Well this is just getting ridiculous," Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart said as the Doctor stood gawking. He was sat on a cream armchair by a large window to the left, he adjusted his stance in the chair and reached out a hand for the Doctor to take, "Hello Doctor." He intoned, smiling at the Time Lord reminiscently.

The Doctor gladly took it, smiling himself. He took an identical chair opposite the Brigadier and flicked his coat open for comfort. "How did you know it was me?" The Doctor catechized looking intently about the spacious room, eyebrows raised. He could tell the Brig was being looked after well. The bed to their right had been recently made and the furniture and adornments polished vigorously. The décor itself was not the Doctor's taste however, a blend of creams and pinks, doyleys lay atop most furnishings and floral landscape paintings were scattered abysmally about the walls.

"Oh. You know, Officers eye for detail and all that," He answered, immediately noticing the Doctor's wandering glances, "I know. It's hideous, but they treat me well. And I'm at peace. No more field work for me if that's what you're after." He chuckled softly, though in seconds it distorted into a hoarse cough. The Brigadier let the ordeal play out and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief once it had subsided

He peered upward to find the Doctor gazing anxiously. He chuckled again, "Old age Doctor, it comes to the best of us." He spurted.

The Doctor didn't know how to reply, so simply nodded his head in agreement. They sat in comfortable silence for minutes listening to the birds outside. The Doctor looking sympathetically at the Brigadier while stroking his chin, and the Brigadier simply looking intently out the window at the blossoming pink trees and growing dandelion patches.

The Doctor understood why the TARDIS had brought him here. He took the loss of the Brigadier hard in his last incarnation, and rightly so, but now he was sitting in front of the same man. A man he saw as dead, the curse of a Time Lord panning out once more. This was his opportunity to have once last talk with one his closest friends, and he wouldn't pass it up. When he heard of the news, he had no time to mourn, or time to even accept the loss. At least this time Alistair wouldn't pour an undrunk glass of brandy waiting for his arrival. No more loose ends, no more lost visits to friends. Old and new.

"You wouldn't just pop in Doctor, what do you need?" The Brigadier's gaze was still fixed on the scenery below

"Advice."

"Advice?"

"How do I express regret...? Compensate for a mistake?"

The Brigadier shifted his incessant gaze to the alien in front of him. He couldn't identify if the Doctor was being frivolous or genuinely serious. But he answered earnestly all the same, "You accept the mistake."

"Dark times ahead, Brigadier." The Doctor admitted inhaling, letting Alistair's answer filter through, but not answering it directly.

"You're impossibly frustrating. Do you realise that...? But you know what I think," He adjusted his flat cap and ruffled his beard as he thought of his reply, "I think you're going to come through it. Whatever it is. Like you always do. Although that's not why you're here tonight," the Doctor didn't acknowledge what he was referring to, so he carried swiftly on, "I know a firing squad when I see one."

"What?" The Time Lord fiddled ceaselessly with his new grey locks, still unable to accept its shortness in length.

"You know, you broke Ms. Grant's heart. You were everything to her. And 40 years later, she's still waiting for the tiniest bit of acknowledgement from you." Alistair slid slowly up in his chair and indicated a hand to the wall behind the Doctor. A wall the Time Lord hadn't noticed previously. It was covered in black and white photos of friends from the past. Mostly from the Doctor's UNIT days, landscape photos of the Doctor and Jo, one of Benton, Sarah Jane and Harry Sullivan. All framed, and neat. The Brigadier continued as if on a vendetta, "You should take a look at this wall sometime. Harry, Liz, Benton, you abandon us. And, this is my turn isn't it?" He paused for air, clearly struggling for it, "One day, it'll be poor Sarah Jane's turn. And whatever, poor, unfortunate youngster you have travelling with you now… One day, it'll be their turn too."

"You'll see me again." The Doctor lied, fruitlessly, aiming to redeem himself. Pathetically.

"But you won't see me. I'm not a complete dunderhead Doctor- I understood you perfectly. From where you're sitting, all our days are in the past… And damn you, I just don't understand why!" He barked the final words like he was commanding orders to UNIT soldiers. It took the Doctor aback significantly. But he was right, Spot on in fact.

"Neither do I, Brigadier." The Doctor rebounded adjusting his Crombie, obviously accepting his friend's rowdy, but honest analysis.

Overlooking the Doctor, the Brigadier carried on upon his unintentional monologue, "You're not that long-lived. You can spend every day of your life in every one of ours. You don't have to be so pathetically lonely you know… You have friends Doctor. And do you know something… You're the very best of mine."

The Doctor noticed Alistair's hip flask laid on its side on the table across from him. He'd been drinking. "No more for you. Okay?" His attack eyebrows elevated aggressively, but his smirking smile out shone them.

They sat in another silence, this one a little less comfortable as the Doctor tried desperately to figure out his response. After minutes he found it, now he had to release the words into a coherent sentence not an incoherent blabber. "Alistair… You are one of my…" Oh. Good start. "What I mean is-"

"You're not going to try saluting me like you did with that Warkeeper's Crown business are you? Because if you are, I'd rather just die now." The two laughed together, like they would on the not-so-rare occasion in the past. Then, the Doctor rose, left his chair, and accepted what to do with Clara.

The Brigadier understood the Doctor always had somewhere to go, and people to see, but he did ever so wish this meeting could go on for so much longer.

The Doctor bowed his head to the Brigadier as he got to the door and he looked into his friends eyes for what he knew, would be the last time. And part of him knew that the Brigadier understood that too. "Goodbye, Brigadier." The Doctor said, doing the top button on his coat.

"Cheers." Alistair said, raising a wrinkled, frail hand to his head, in as close to a salute as he could manage. And on that, the Doctor slipped away, out the door, past the woman he supposed dragged him in, and out the entrance. Out across the garden and then finally to the TARDIS, and inevitably… Clara. He took one last glance at the window he guessed was the Brigadiers and then… He left. In silence.

"Till the next time. Doctor."