The mist that had hovered over Maiden's Bay, veiling what happened there from the world, had finally evaporated, and the rain had finally stopped, but mud still caked the Doctor's shoes and his trousers, and one hand was dark with dirt. Ace was covered with mud and her stockings were shredded. Her face was mostly clean except where the Doctor had touched her with his dirty hand, and her tears had made clean streaks even in this.

In the Doctor's eyes, the storm still went raging.

If the Doctor still felt guilt for the things he had said, he didn't speak of it. He led Ace along gently, stopping to help her when she slipped a little in the mud, her period-accurate but unreliable shoes betraying her at last. Silence boiled between them whenever he tried to catch her eye, and she winced whenever he touched her.

Two bodies lay on the floor of the chemical lab. Both were dead, but one had already spent centuries rotting. The Ancient Haemovore lay across Captain Sorin's corpse, resting finally after agelong servitude to the master they shared. Sorin's flesh was sinking by the moment, the poisonous green gas that filled the chamber eating away at his once-handsome face.

Both dead. And that death took on a reality, took form as endings without renewal and pain without respite and terrible, meaningless suffering. It had long ago taken a name. Fenric.

Fenric's last host, Sorin, was dead, useless to its purpose. It would have moved on to the body of the Haemovore, but that ancient vampire was finally dead as well. All the wolves of Fenric were dead, dead or too far away to be reached in time -- without a host and without the flask, the sour safety of a prison, Fenric's clawing grasp on this reality was fading fast.

All but one. Ace, fragile with pain, vulnerable with betrayal, was slipping through the mud outside, nearly slipping away.

But not quite.

She stumbled, leaned on the Doctor's arm, then snatched herself away from him again, cursing them both.

And Fenric lent her strength, helped her to stand on her own. And then it took her, the last of its wolves. The Doctor, looking at Ace in concern, may or may not have noticed the green fire that sparked and grew to life deep in her pupils.

Mrs. Hardaker's little cottage was deserted. Even the old woman's blood-drained body was gone.

The Doctor led Ace by the hand to the couch and left her sitting there. He looked at the empty chair where Mrs. Hardaker had died. "I wouldn't like to speculate," he muttered. Ace didn't respond.

There were only a few very small stains, here and there. Haemovores are not, as a rule, messy eaters. The neat, ordinary ugliness of the room was as horribly pathetic as most places people find for their dying.

The Doctor wandered into the cramped, mercilessly clean kitchen and lit the gas, ran some water. He washed his hands before he started on Ace's tea.

Ace hugged a sofa cushion and stared hard at the rug between her muddy shoes. She wanted a bath, and her own clothes, and her own head back, and to be a thousand miles away from here. Rage seemed more at home in her body than she did, and hate seemed to have more right to be there.

Two voices chased each other around and around inside her skull. The Doctor's, saying the same awful things over and over and over, and another voice, soft and terrible, that kept offering her comfort and strength. Offering, as if she had any choice, when she could already feel it holding her like a claw round her throat.

The Doctor came back from the kitchen holding a steaming cup. "It's still brewing." he said softly, as if that was important. He set the tea down on the table beside the sofa and stood there for a moment, not quite going left or right. He looked at the space beside her on the couch -- small welcome there.

Then there was the chair where the dead woman no longer sat. Could even he rest there?

Still standing, as if caught in indecision, he started talking. "I'm sorry Ace. No matter how often I say it, I can't -- ."

"You used me." Ace's voice. Ace's mind. Fenric merely watched, approving of the pain.

"Yes." he finally sat, heavily, on the arm of the old woman's chair. His voice too, was terribly weighted. "I used you. I betrayed you. I don't blame you --."

"But it wasn't just me, was it? You used everybody. And everybody but me got killed. Why not me too, Doctor? Or is there something even bigger out there you're planning on feeding me to?"

The Doctor studied the books Mrs. Hardaker's little shelf -- Bibles, some Dickens, poetry by Yeats. "I saved your life Ace. Fenric would have used you and destroyed you. I wouldn't let that happen. I -- "

"You what? Care about me? Is that it, Doctor? No you don't! You've never given a toss for anyone your whole life!"

Fenric, whispering the gentlest of suggestions into her mind.

"How many other people have you cared for Doctor? Did they all end up dead?"

The Doctor's right hand clutched, white-knuckled, at the back of the chair, but his left reached toward her, beseechingly. "I put the whole universe at risk, to save you from Fenric's curse. I should have destroyed you as soon as I knew what you were, but I couldn't bear it."

Ace stood up and shoved his hand aside. "Why not? 'Cos you had to save your precious image? 'Cos you're the Doctor, champion of the universe? You didn't care what happened to me; you just wanted to keep your stupid pride, your stupid Doctor-never-loses record. And I bought into it. God, you make me want to vomit."

For the space of a breath the Doctor's features betrayed a bottomless sorrow. Then he nodded, and took a deep breath, as though steeling himself, and his face went hard and unreadable as a mask. "I shouldn't have wasted my time." he growled. "Anyone with the least intelligence would have known that business in the lab was a ploy, but a few unkind words and you crumpled like paper. You're pathetic. I should have killed you and saved myself the trouble."

Ace flew at him, knocking him back into the dead woman's chair. She slammed the back of her hand across his face, leaving a dark mark over one cheekbone. Then she punched him, and again, trying to knock the cruelty out of his face.

Eyes shut tight, lips pulled back, the Doctor swept his umbrella out with all his strength, knocking Ace away from him. Ace flew across the room with a scream of rage and crashed into a table. She went down hard, and before she could get up again, the Doctor's hand impacted the side of her neck with a neat, precise strike.

She crumpled into an unconscious heap while the Doctor looked at the hand that had administered the blow. It was shaking.

"Oh, Ace." He dragged her gently to the couch and laid her there. Her face was marked with tears and pale with exhaustion. "All for nothing," he whispered, "I've hurt you so, and all for nothing."

Sighing, tired, and determined, the Doctor left the cottage -- an old man going for a walk in the night.

Fenric was laughing. And, in Ace's dreaming mind, it whispered.

It had started to rain again, turning drying ground back into thick, sucking, slimy mud. It rained on the Doctor, who had forgotten his hat, and, by the time he got back to the cottage, his hair was soaked.

And by the time he got back to the cottage, new eyes were looking out of Ace's body.

"Well, welcome back, Professor." Fenric said. She was smiling, a pretty, gentle smile that the Doctor looked away from as though it hurt him.

"So, you survived."

"Like that's a surprise; I always do," She patted the cushion on the couch next to her. "Sit. We've got lots to talk about."

"Why didn't you die?" And maybe, behind the words: Why don't things like you ever die?

"Don't be dim." It might have been Ace speaking, except for the distant way the voice deepened with the hardness in it, a strange, unearthly vibrato sneaking into the tone. "You destroyed a few of my wolves, a few bodies, sure. But I still had this one left. Best of the lot, really, considering."

"This has gone far enough. The game is over; I'm taking my pieces and I'm going home. I don't want to play anymore."

"Too late now."

"I no longer give you permission to use Ace. Get out of her body and give her back, now."

Fenric stood up and walked toward him. "Ace is mine, Doctor, body and soul, right from the start. I created her, her DNA, her whole bloodline . . . and her personality. I knew what you'd like, what you needed in a companion. I pushed her to become all that . . . to become yours." She paused with a poisonous smile that never should have shaped Ace's soft cheeks. "For a little while."

"Ace has changed in her time with me. I pulled her away from your control. I took her to Gabriel Chase, chained the wolf. I have the right -- "

"Oh, give it a rest, for god's sake. What right? What right do you have over anybody, old man? How many people have you got killed? Adric, Lytton, Peri, not to mention a bunch of Silurians stupid enough to trust you"

The Doctor looked away from the ghastly glow in the eyes that had once been Ace's. His hands clutched at air. "Peri isn't dead."

"The Master lied, Doctor, doesn't he always? He probably planned to use this against you eventually; he's almost as good at setting traps as you. But I beat him to it. Peri died. She not a warrior queen with a happy bloodthirsty family. She's a corpse, a rotting, stinking, sludgy pile of decay. And you left her that way."

The Doctor backed stumbling away from Fenric; his face was lit for a moment by lightning through the window. His lips were pursed tight, holding in any words, any cry.

"Get out of her body." he whispered at last, his voice emotionless and hard.

"And end the game? Do you know what Ace thought of you before you brought her here? She respected you. She loved you." Thunder cracked like gunfire. "Well, three guesses how she feels about you now."

The Doctor dug into his pocket and pulled out the ancient white flask. The rim was cracked and the handle broken off, but the structure was still intact. "Get out of that body." he repeated.

Surprise, almost respect in those stolen eyes. "So you did guess."

The Doctor sneered. "You thought you could out-maneuver me. It was a good try, very clever, very nice, attacking me with Ace. And this lie about Peri too. Very elegant."

"You're a sentimental, sad fool, Doctor. That was Ace, acting on her own. She hates you now, Doctor, she attacked you all by herself. I only provided the strength."

The Doctor's expression didn't change. "This has gone far enough, Fenric. I'm offering you another game. If you lose, you go back in the bottle like a good genie."

Fenric reached out with Ace's hands and caught the Doctor's sleeves, then took both his hands. She looked at him with Ace's eyes, smiled that too-adult smile with Ace's lips. "And if you lose, Doctor." She bent her head and kissed his knuckles, looked back up into his frozen face. "I'll eat your heart." Fenric laughed Ace's laugh.

The Doctor shook her hands away, visibly forcing his face into calm, into easy amusement. "Noughts and crosses?" The Doctor offered. He pulled out a pen and a piece of white paper from his pocket.

Fenric snatched them both away and drew a large grid, three by three boxes.

The Doctor took the pen and drew a fat O in the center of the grid.

Fenric drew a fancy X in the right top corner.

Six more moves. Naughts and Crosses. Nothings and symbols.

The Doctor lost.

Their eyes met across the paper. "I win." Fenric whispered. And she licked her lips.

The Doctor smiled back. "No, Ace does." He flipped the paper over to reveal a photograph of an innocent, a baby, a mother. Tiny Audrey smiled toothlessly up at them.

"Mum!"

Fenric collapsed, shrieking.

The flask glowed with a wild light and the Doctor let exactly twelve seconds pass, and then jammed the cork back into it.

Breathing heavily, he picked up the long-forgotten teacup and drank from it. The tea was cold and foully bitter and probably just war ration. But oh, from the look on his face, it tasted of victory.

Ace woke up in Phyllis' bed, though she didn't know it. Phyllis, little girl who was dead, and dead again, and gone to dust.

She cried for a little while, because she remembered everything, and it hurt too much. When the first clutch of it let go she cleaned her face on the sheet and then looked around. The Doctor was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching over her.

When their eyes met, he smiled with great tenderness and took her hand. "Forgive me." was all he said. No explanations, no excuses.

"What about Fenric?" Things couldn't be as easy as he'd like.

"I've taken the flask far away, to a safe place."

She sat up, and shifted to lean back against the headboard. "All right, then. Tell me everything. Tell me everything now."

"I knew what you were at once." No preamble, and still no excuses, just the truth at last. "At first I thought I could destroy you, save the universe from Fenric at the cost of one life. But Fenric knew me too well, you were the perfect key to the trap, because I couldn't bear to kill you."

He continued in the same quiet, tired voice. It might have been rough with emotion, or Ace might have imagined that. "Maybe I should have, but I couldn't. The only other way was to be sure you had a will of your own, to change you. That's why I took you to Gabriel Chase. I exorcised a few of your demons, all I could. And then it was time."

"But Fenric controlled me anyway, didn't he?" Bitter, but too tired to be unkind, she didn't look at him. "When I realized what the winning move to that chess game was, I ran right back to the lab. I had to tell. Deep down, I knew Sorin was already taken over. I helped him win."

"But you still retained yourself, Ace. Even when Fenric took you over, you were still Ace enough that Audrey could reach you."

"Yeah. Too stubborn to die." She rubbed her belly. "You hit me."

He looked away, shamefaced. "I thought you were being controlled then. I hoped I could surprise Fenric into betraying itself."

"You just can't believe anybody could hate you all on their own, can you?"

"I don't like to, no. Will you . . . " He leaned forward. "Forgive me?"

She shrugged, and then a small smile she didn't want curled at her mouth. "Hell. Probably. I guess we hurt each other enough."

"Yes. Fenric told me some terrible things, lies, just as I did to you. There's been enough pain." He started to stand, "I'll put on some breakfast, mm? You rest, and I'll bring it in."

She could let it sit there. She could let him feel that false little satisfaction. God, no. Don't let there be lies. No more lies. "Fenric wasn't lying, Doctor. Not about any of it." She had seen through Fenric's eyes just how terrible and important this was. He deserved to know the truth.

The Doctor staggered almost imperceptibly, and then sat down on the edge of the bed again, his head bowed. "Oh. I -- " but he got no farther than that for a while.

Ace climbed out from under the covers and put an arm around him.

"Are you . . . sure?" He whispered, faintly.

"Yes." Hit it now, was what Ace told herself. Hit it hard or he'd be wondering and wondering and that would be her fault, and not Fenric's. And she could almost, almost be sure that it wasn't at all because she still wanted to hurt him. "I saw it. I saw it in my mind when Fenric was there." She could see it there now, meaningless death that laughed a stinking laugh, eating a friend of the Doctor's, somewhere far away.

Dawn bloomed warm through the windowpane, and the Doctor sat there, saying nothing.

"Come on, Professor. Come on." She pulled at his arm, frightened by his quiet. "Let's go swimming, all right? I want to go swimming."

"Hmm? Yes, of course. I believe the weather's clear. Swimming." He touched her hair. "Swimming. "