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“Elephas!” the Doctor announces when Amy and Rory make their way through to the console room that morning. He has been excitable even by his standards over the past few days, and Amy isn’t actually sure that he slept at all last night. Not that he really needs as much sleep as humans anyway, and when he does, its erratically. “Moon of Dreams! I think that’s what we all need a bit of right now, don’t you?”
Amy pushes her hair out of her eyes and takes a long gulp from the mug of coffee that the TARDIS had helpfully deposited by the bed she shares with Rory when she woke. “I don’t suppose it can be any worse than that swamp you landed us in last time.”
“Ah,” the Doctor says, pouting, “well it isn’t a swamp for half of the year, we just happened to land during the monsoon season. Complete accident, won’t happen again.”
“The insects were as big as my head,” Amy replies. “Good thing I don’t scare easily. Now Rory on the other hand...”
“Hey!”
She gives him a look. Clearly everyone is just meant to forget all the high-pitched screaming and flailing around in the mud.
“No, no icky insects here,” the Doctor promises, whirling around the console pressing buttons and pulling levers and doing other typically mysterious things that piloting the ship involves. “The entire atmosphere is just bubbling with a mildly telepathic, gaseous race. They’ve built an entire tourism industry around reading dreams and desires and creating fantasy worlds for their guests. As long as you can imagine it, they can make it.”
“That does sound like it would be fun,” Rory says. “But we’ll probably end up next to a volcano or something.”
“Nonsense! Just a few little course errors recently, but I’ve got them all ironed out now, just you wait and see.”
----
Predictably, the errors are not in fact ‘all ironed out’. Not that this is immediately apparent. When the TARDIS has stopped its whirring, the Doctor opens the door and they walk out into a bustling city under a sky the colour of beaten copper. The buildings are tall and bulbous and ever so slightly phallic to Amy’s mind, and when she turns around she sees the balcony behind them looks out onto nothing but clouds. Wherever they are, this place is floating, and she can’t see the ground.
“So far I’m impressed,” she says, making the Doctor look absurdly proud of himself. “But I’m sure the moment we turn a corner we’ll run into some sort of trouble.”
“You’re very pessimistic today, the both of you,” the Doctor says. “Is this a human thing? Maybe it’s nutritional. Have you been getting enough yellow star light exposure?”
“We’re really just extrapolating on previous experience,” Rory replies.
“Tosh.” He strides off into the crowds, confident that they’ll follow. Which they do. Only to be stopped short very quickly by what appears to be a large glass sphere half encased in armour and filled with a dark, smoky gas. It, much like the city, is also floating.
“Off-worlder, we have detected the presence of a Class 5 falsification device on your person,” the sphere says.
The Doctor looks around in the way – apparently common to a significant number of species – of someone not entirely sure that somebody is speaking to them. “Who, me?” he says, then pulls the psychic paper out of his jacket pocket. “Do you mean this?”
“No. That is a Class 2 falsification device permitted under permits for the communication needs of certain races. Do you have a permit for that device?”
“I think we might just have landed on the wrong moon,” the Doctor says, holding up his hands in a placating sort of gesture. “This isn’t Elephas, is it?”
“This is Keras. The Moon of Truth.”
“Riiight. Well, we’ll just be going then, if that’s alright with you...”
“Usage of a Class 5 falsification device cannot be permitted on Keras,” the sphere says, sternly. “We will remove its effects from you now.”
“Oh, wait, no,” the Doctor says, and then he shimmers like bad video footage or a hologram, and something very... strange... is where he used to be. Amy stares. There’s not really any other way to react.
The thing is like looking at something reflected in a broken mirror. A hundred fragments of colour and shape and motion. The sense of weird limbs that shift in and out of three dimensions when they move. She feels as though every time she focuses on a particular spot it slips away like oil, like its shy of being seen. It’s making her head hurt.
“Doctor?” she asks the air uncertainly.
The fractal creature turns in the air like a very complicated mobile, something that ought to be hanging in a modern art museum. The emotion of annoyance is suddenly very clear in her mind, yet unmistakably foreign. She’s seen enough on her travels through space and time to recognise telepathy. Amy had been almost sure of the truth before, but now she is definite.
“This is like those vampire fish things isn’t it,” she says, now with an annoyance that is entirely her own. They have always been aware that the Doctor has a lot of secrets, and that even for the amount of time they have spent in each other’s company, neither she nor Rory know him well enough to expect to be party to all of them. But this is a pretty big thing to just forget to mention. “You’ve been wearing some kind of projection filter all this time, haven’t you?”
The Doctor pushes a sort of stroppy embarrassment into her mind. She wonders if he has ever been speaking out loud, and if not, why she can’t hear his voice now, just emotions. Perhaps it has something to do with the TARDIS. Or something inbuilt into the perception filter? Perhaps without it he’s just not used to communicating with humans like this.
Is he even a he? Do broken-disco-ball aliens have a concept of gender? And why does his fake humanoid body have two hearts? Seems like a design flaw if you’re going to go around looking like a human.
“So,” Rory says. “This is awkward.”
The gas-sphere policeman thing addresses them again. “Because it is a true statement that you arrived on this world accidentally off-worlders, the usual penalty for dishonesty on Keras will be suspended. You may remain here – no longer ignorant of the law – on the condition that no other falsehoods arise from your persons. The telepath is permitted to keep their communication device provided they apply to the government offices in Grid-Reference-Six-Seven-Alpha-Alpha-Open-Place-Of-Social-Meeting by the end of the current rotation cycle.”
It bobs off, leaving them.
The Doctor reaches out with a limb that wasn’t there before for the dropped psychic paper lying on the ground, moving in a way that doesn’t quite obey the laws of physics or space. He tosses it to Amy, who catches it easily.
“This moon is the opposite of fun,” the paper says. “Anti-Fun. A No Fun Zone. It’s boring here. I’m bored. Aren’t you bored? Let’s go back to the TARDIS.”
Amy tilts it so that Rory can see. “Rule One, the Doctor always lies,” she recites. “Bet that makes you Public Enemy Number One on this planet, hmm?”
“Moon. It’s a moon. Don’t they teach geology in Scotland?” the psychic paper tells them. “Also yes, very criminal. Better not stay here then, you two tend to get angry with me when we end up in jail.”
“I think you’re just embarrassed we saw you when you’re all...” she gestures at him vaguely, “pointy and sparkly.”
“Yes well you humans are all squishy and four-dimensional and you don’t hear me pointing that out do you?”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve called us squishy before,” Rory says. “Also thick, and un-evolved, and jumped up hairless monkeys that one time we went to Santraginus V and you drank three Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters and couldn’t remember how limbs worked. Which makes a lot more sense now, come to think of it.”
“Having limbs that don’t change shape is a bit of a design flaw though isn’t it? No adaptability whatsoever. Also all this linear time business.”
The Doctor moves towards them, which is more than a little brain-melting to watch, since it doesn’t actually happen in an entirely logical order. Sharp shards of him extrude themselves and make crowding sort of motions, trying to get them moving back in the general direction of the TARDIS. Amy gives in, at least partly because she’s not entirely sure she wants to feel what a non-filtered Doctor feels like to human skin.
Probably very, very weird.
“All right, fine,” she tells him. “But don’t think you can just slip that projection filter back on and call it a day mister. You owe us an explanation.”
----
“Fine,” the Doctor says, once he’s back to looking like his normal self. He fidgets with his bow-tie, and Amy wonders just what that actually translates to. “Fine. I’m a scary alien that exists in more dimensions than you have teeth and I wear a filter so that I can walk around on Earth without people screaming and calling the government and generally making a fuss. Okay, good story. The end.”
“That’s reasonable, but why bother with it when we aren’t on Earth?” Rory asks. “If we can handle planets full of strange-looking aliens, I think we can handle travelling with one.”
“Maybe I’m just being nice,” the Doctor says, sound aggrieved. “Trying to set you at ease.”
“You shouldn’t have to hide just to make us feel better,” Amy says. “And you aren’t exactly a hiding sort of person anyway. Just look at all the barging into top-secret installations and alien plots and other people’s spaceships we do.”
“That’s true, yes, but that’s beside the point.” It is in his nature to use levity as a defence mechanism, but get past that and he’s capable of being deadly serious. She sees a little of that now. “I don’t. Want. To discuss it.”
It’s final in a way that’s unfamiliar, but she knows better than to push. This is the dangerous side to him, the side that has seen alien armies burn, has brought low kings and emperors. She and Rory have stumbled onto something deadly private, and it looks like it will have to stay that way.
“Okay,” she says softly. “Okay. So... what about Elephas then? I believe you promised me a Moon of Dreams, and I have a few dreams I would like to see fulfilled.”
She winks at Rory, exaggerating flirtation, and just like that, everything is back to how it always was.
----
He passes by a mirror in the corridors of the TARDIS later, and pauses a moment. The reflection staring back at him is alien, a mask. An imperfect copy of his favourite species, because perfection would be a little too suspicious. But humans are essentially narcissistic. It never seems odd to them that the alien with the blue box that’s bigger on the inside looks so much like them.
He is the last one of his kind.
The others have been erased from existence, wiped from all the corners of the universe by actions he set in motion. It changed him.
To look upon himself is to look upon the ugliness of genocide. To look upon a war criminal, a mass murderer, a thing that should not exist.
Is it any wonder he prefers the disguise?