By Allison E.L. Cleckler
Author's Note: This is based on jmatonak's wonderful fic "Regeneration". He kindly gave me permission to play with his idea as I saw fit. I also admit to taking a hella lot of inspiration from commodoresexual's definitive Saxon series, and from Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi for the physical changes that occur after body swaps. Many thanks to rudenotginger and eclecticmuse for the betas, and kippurbird for tossing around ideas while I was writing.
Strangely, the hardest part had not been enduring the quarantines and interrogations and spin-doctoring that went on after the Valiant was put down on British soil. It was easy---effortless---to continue playing her role, the sad, vacant, near-lifeless doll that had been the wife of the Prime Minister this morning, a year ago. Say nothing, make no eye contact, and the Doctor and his UNIT cronies took at face value the evidence they'd been presented with. Lucy Saxon was the Master's beaten, broken, used-up and forgotten toy. They even forgot her themselves, after half a day. She was looked over by a doctor, the Definite Article spoke with the officials on her behalf, and she was left to wait with the other quarantined souls for permission to leave. No one paid her any attention the entire time.
All quite easy.
No, the hardest part had been pulling the trigger and killing her husband in order to free him.
Surely what she had to do now would be a cakewalk in comparison.
The Master's TARDIS was disguised as a dilapidated outhouse behind the ruined hulk of an old cottage on the grounds of the Cole family estate. The location ensured there was no one around for miles to see Lucy unlock the door and step inside.
She had made three trips that day: to their home in London, to a bluff on the southern coast, and finally to Tarminster. She was exhausted, but there was no time to sleep or think or stop, for even a moment. She had a task to perform first. A plan to set in motion. She could sleep when she was dead.
Not even that brand of morbid thought amused her, these days. Nothing did.
Lucy set the suitcase she had packed in London down next to the inner door and then approached the console with the object she had gone to the coast to retrieve. The Master's signet ring had been cleaned of the soot and fatty oil that had clung to it, ready now to serve its intended purpose. He had gone over the details of the plan with her time and time again:
If by some crazy chance this whole plan goes balls-up and I'm captured, I want you to kill me, Lucy.
Harry, what---
This ring of mine, it's special. You'll like it even more than you do now. I've encoded my biodata into the stone, see? So after you've killed me, whatever happens, make sure you get the ring. And here's what you need to do next...
He'd left a list of instructions taped to the console, just in case. But she didn't need it. She went straight to the correct spot and inserted the ring into a special socket. It clicked into place, and a light surrounding it glowed greenish-blue. Then a pleasant, genderless voice said: Reconstruction initiated.
A hologram suddenly sparked to life beside her, a projection from the ring, and it said with a cheerful wave, "Hello, Lucy, darling!"
Lucy looked at the image of her husband, and felt--not a wrench in the pit of her stomach, not a painful jerk from her heart, but... a vague emptiness. It was rather like the emptiness at the end of the universe. She'd been so empty, for such a long time, in her heart and her mind. He hadn't spoken to her through the mental link they'd shared in months.
"Hello, Master," she replied.
The hologram screwed its face up in a puzzled frown. "Not 'Hello, Harry dear'?" it asked.
That did tug at her heart, just a little. "You haven't been Harry for a long time."
Sadness flickered on the hologram's face, as if her words were some kind of personal betrayal. "Lucy, Lucy, Lucy," it said, reaching out to touch her cheek in a gesture that was achingly familiar. The pixeled fingers passed straight through her skin, but she didn't flinch. "What's happened to you?"
Logically, Lucy knew the stored persona only held her husband's memories up to the moment he'd encoded his biodata into the ring, the morning after they'd taken control of the Valiant. It had no knowledge of what he had become--what they had both become--in the year that never was. But that still didn't stop her from feeling faint stirrings of resentment and pain and even long-suppressed rage at the representation of Harold Saxon hovering in the air in front of her.
"I had a role to play, in your escape plan," she replied tonelessly. "I played it for too long. I played it too well. The actress became her part."
The projection of the hologram skipped, almost like it had aborted some kind of motion. The expression on its face suggested it had thought to take her in its arms, and then thought better of it. "So, everything went balls-up, huh?" it asked.
Lucy nodded.
"Always does, when the Doctor's involved," it muttered. Then it clapped its hands together and put on a bright smile. "But! You succeeded! Our plan worked! TARDIS, how long must I be a boring old picture?"
The same genderless voice said, Reconstruction will take approximately five hundred hours.
The hologram hmm-ed, the same noise Harry would make when he was impatient or annoyed. "Can't be helped. Oh, well." Suddenly beaming at her, it said, "My clever, clever girl. We'll be together again before you know it."
She didn't meet the hologram's eyes. In her mind, the emptiness howled with the stench of the furnaces and her Harry had long since been replaced by the Master. There was no intimacy, no love, no anything. The pain and rage had already died away. "I want to go to sleep."
There was a long silence before it replied. "The TARDIS will show you to a room."
Lucy turned and drifted away, picking up the suitcase before opening the inner door. She left without looking back or saying good night.
The hologram stared after her for a long time before winking out, the lights in the control room dimming away to darkness.
The room the TARDIS led her to had been a striking facsimile of the stateroom she and Harry had shared on the Valiant. Lucy looked at the bed with its cream-colored Egyptian cotton sheets, and chose to sleep on the floor.
When she awoke, the room had reconfigured itself to look like her childhood bedroom at Tarminster. Vaguely, she wondered if the Harry in the reconstruction program had anything to do with the change. She really had no idea how much, if at all, the program was interconnected with the TARDIS' systems.
She asked the TARDIS if she was needed to assist with the reconstruction process in any way. The bland voice replied that she was not at the present time, but as the program operator, she would be notified immediately if the process hit any unexpected snags. Otherwise, until she was required to give the final authorization to complete the program, she was free to do as she wished.
It was two days, using her fitful sleep cycle as estimation, before Lucy gave in to the loneliness in her head and returned to the control room.
The lights brightened and the hologram came to life as she entered. "Good afternoon, darling!"
"Good afternoon, dear," she replied automatically, without inflection. It had long ago become instinct to reply with whatever he wished to hear, or simply not speak at all. "Exterior view."
A panel slid back on the wall to show a late afternoon sun turning the fields outside the TARDIS to burnished gold. The old, loved sight brought a ghost of a smile to Lucy's face. It was the first time she'd smiled with any real emotion in months.
"That's more like it," the hologram said encouragingly. When she turned, it seemed to be watching her carefully. "I've missed you these past few days."
"Oh," was all Lucy said.
Deep frown lines appeared on the hologram's forehead. "Oh? Oh? Is that all you have to say?" When she said nothing, it continued, "Well, is it? No 'I missed you too'? Not even a 'bugger off, Harry'? Where's Lucy Saxon gone?"
"You killed her," she said, and was a little surprised to hear the reply in her thoughts made reality with her voice.
Harry's image blinked. "What?"
"You killed her," Lucy repeated, and the rage she'd kept restrained to the tiniest cinder for all those long months, through the roleplaying and the creeping numbness and the baiting games, suddenly erupted into an all-consuming bonfire. "You broke her and you tossed her aside--"
"--what the fuck are you talking about--"
Lucy flew at the hologram, nails reaching to gouge at its eyes, forgetting in her fury that it was not actually Harry and stumbling through the projection. She was already whirling back around to face it before it could react to her attack, eyes as wide in surprise as if she'd actually struck it.
"How could you?!" she screamed. "How could you hit me, make me watch you fuck those women, make me fuck those women--"
The hologram seemed to be shrinking into itself.
"--I'm your wife! Your wife, your companion, your partner." The words took on a little insane singsong before she was back to screaming, voice growing ragged. "Not one of the servants, not one of your minions, not the Doctor, not Martha fucking Jones! Lucy Saxon, Lady Cole of Tarminster, and your wife!"
Her hand was hovering over the signet ring, thrumming with energy in its socket on the console. "I could rip this out," she threatened, breathing hard, eyes wild yet strangely empty. "I could rip it out right now and end the program and you'd be back to nothing and wouldn't that just be good, Harry? Wouldn't it?"
Even though the image watching her was just that, an image, it seemed to be standing very still, and watching her with an unreadable expression in its eyes. "Maybe it's what I deserve," it said quietly.
Lucy's heart skipped a beat in surprise.
"Go on," the hologram said, "if you hate me so much. Kill me again. Kill me for good."
She stared at the image of her husband for a long moment before she fell to her knees, the rage draining away as quickly as it had come, to be replaced by tears and the shards of her heart stabbing at her lungs. "I can't," she sobbed. "I can't. All of that and I still love you. I know it's not fair to blame you--"
"Sure it is," he replied. "I can take the blame for my own actions. Except when I want to blame them on other people. It can be so much fun." And he laughed.
"--no, this, this you," Lucy amended, wiping at her eyes and staring at the floor. "You don't know what you became. You imprinted yourself on the ring before you... began to change. Even then... it was the stress and the drums, and the Doctor and Martha Jones, and it was just too much. And I had my role to play, making myself invisible in case I had to act to free you... and I was too good at it. I couldn't take the mask off when we were alone. You started playing games just to make me react. You started taking the games too far, and I couldn't take the mask off to stop you..."
She watched her tears falling onto her knees. "We broke ourselves, Harry. We killed each other."
His voice said, "Look at me, Lucy."
She lifted her head and forced herself to meet his eyes. Dimly, she realized that somewhere in the midst of her tirade, she'd stopped thinking of the hologram as it and begun thinking of it as him.
His image was kneeling in front of her, the serious expression on his face so very similar to the one he'd worn the night before their wedding, when he'd told her who and what he really was. "You are my wife, Lucy Cole Saxon," he said. "And I am so very, very proud of you. My beautiful, clever wife. My loyal and faithful companion."
"For better or for worse," she whispered. "Until death do us part."
Harry laughed again. "That's such a silly vow. Even death can't take me away from you." He stood, and after a moment, Lucy followed suit, brushing a little awkwardly at her clothes. Her carefully crafted detachment had shattered, but she was still a long way from returning to the woman she used to be, both mentally and emotionally. And, perhaps, she never would be again.
The hologram stepped in close to her, and though he was intangible, his proximity still made her shiver. That much had never really changed. "You're bringing me back to life," Harry said, love and gratitude and a touch of his wicked humor lacing through his voice. "So why don't I bring you back. What do you think about that, Lucy dearest?"
Harry's hologram was unable to leave the control room, and Lucy, though she wasn't required to be there, decided she would rather stay than spend the length of the program's run time wandering alone. She'd been alone too long. And even if she wasn't fully comfortable with her husband anymore, she would much rather bear that vague discomfort than the lingering nightmare of Utopia, always whispering in the darkest corners of her mind, but strongest when she was alone.
The morning after her breakdown, she returned to the control room to find the TARDIS had moved a cushy settee next to the console, so she wouldn't have to sit on the floor grating. That had been the impetus for her first truly genuine smile since losing herself to Harry's grand plan, and his image laughed to see it.
It took a few more days for her to be able to smile the same way at him again. Lucy suspected he'd been making the truly outrageous and raunchy jokes he had with that sole aim in mind. After the first smile, it was an entire week before she responded with a joke of her own. It was a pale imitation of the banter they'd shared in the past, but it was still another step towards becoming her old self again, and the hologram proclaimed he could "kiss you right now. With tongue. In front of that old bat who owns the property behind ours. Actually I'd just take you right there in the grass if it meant getting to see her wrinkly old head explode."
"You could always make it literally explode," Lucy attempted, and a shadow of a wicked grin crossed her lips. "Surely the laser screwdriver has a setting for that."
"That's my girl," Harry crowed in delight, and she felt a little more of herself fit back into place.
They couldn't share much more than light talk, in the beginning; the reconstruction program was restoring his memories along with his genetic code, so the Harry being projected was little more than a basic template of the man she'd known and loved. But as the days passed and the program did its work, they were able to hold more involved and personal conversations.
And so it went, for three weeks. The reconstruction program restored more and more of Harry's memories and persona, and the hologram slowly began to appear more corporeal. They talked, and listened in turns. The bland voice of the TARDIS computer reminded Lucy when it was time to sleep or eat, and Harry periodically encouraged her to take walks outside.
"You should get some air. Work on your tan," he said suggestively, a playful leer--if a leer could ever be described as such--on the image of his face. "Only," and the smile became an exaggerated frown, "I don't think I've got any bikinis on the TARDIS, do I?"
Lucy took his suggestion anyway, and left the TARDIS door open so he could keep her company. She could sense his eyes roving hungrily over her bare skin when she wasn't looking at him, and delighted in feeling sexy, wanton, and wanted rather than full of the great void of nothingness that had nearly destroyed her on the Valiant.
Every day, the program brought Harry that much more closer to life, and Harry, with his scolding and teasing and lewd insinuating and promises to hurt her the way she liked it, helped give Lucy just a little more of her own life back.
Five hundred and four hours into the program sequence, the TARDIS computer announced, Reconstruction complete. Operator authorization to finalize required.
Lucy was dozing, curled up on the settee. She'd stayed up late, discussing plans for the future with Harry, ignoring the prompt from the computer to retire to bed, and had drifted off somewhere in the middle of musing on what planet she'd most like to visit first for a second honeymoon. When the now-familiar genderless voice of the computer spoke, she jerked awake, rubbing at her eyes, and pushed the blanket covering her legs away.
The hologram flickered back on just as she was sitting up. Harry looked bouncy and excited, jogging a lap around the console and whistling a victory march. "This is it, Lucy, this is it!" he cried gleefully. "I'm almost back, oh, I can't wait! The places I'm going to go... the things I'm going to do... the things I'm going to do to you..."
He smiled wickedly at her, and Lucy felt a delicious thrill run up her spine. She was ready as well--ready, waiting, and impatient. The emptiness and the cold would always be there, in the back of her head, but she was sure that once Harry was made flesh and blood, being able to touch him again would warm her just as she could dampen the drums for a time.
"We still need a body, Harry," she reminded him.
"Oh." He paused in his third lap around the console, and pouted at her. "Couldn't I just use yours? Then I wouldn't have to wait."
Lucy smirked as she stood and rounded the console to meet him. She wanted so very badly to run a finger along his jaw, breathe her words into his ear; the hologram looked so very real now and it was hard to remind herself that he was still only a three-dimensional image. "You won't," she said in a low voice. "Because then you couldn't do all those things to me."
The hologram actually shuddered. "Right. Yes. So!" He bounced away from her, then back, vigorously rubbing his hands together. "Are you ready to enact the final part of this glorious plan, darling wife of mine, you evil, evil bitch?"
She'd come up with the particular idea they were going to use for procuring a host body, and she knew he was praising her for it, and she matched his grin, insanity for insanity. "Oh, yes," she practically purred, feeling the rush that accompanied being bad beginning to sweep like fire along her nerves. "Though it just won't be the same without you there."
After everything she'd seen, done, and experienced, it was child's play for Lucy to dress herself up in the old disguise she'd loved so much and go club-hopping for a suitable host body candidate. Fortunately, it didn't take her very long to find one--young but not too young, small like Harry, well-toned, with faintly similar features. She turned on the charm, but kept away from the alcohol, and went to work. Forty-five minutes later she was dragging him out into the back alley for a quickie. He was so busy putting his hands up her shirt that he never noticed her slip a needle from her belt, and he didn't have time to react to the jab in his back. A handful of seconds, and the man--she'd never bothered to ask his name--was slumped on the ground, unconscious.
Lucy flicked the used hypodermic away and proceeded to drag the body into the trash container they'd just been about to shag up against. Working chameleon circuits were so handy.
Harry was waiting by the console, chameleon arch deployed and ready, chuckling to himself. "I heard something outside?" he asked innocently.
"Must have been your imagination," Lucy replied breezily, shutting the TARDIS door with her foot and lugging the man over to the settee. Harry made a show of pretending not to look at her cleavage as she propped the man into place and adjusted the arch over his head. Then she stepped back, and looked at Harry, who was now studying the man thoughtfully.
"Not bad, not bad," he said, as though he were inspecting livestock at auction. "Excellent taste in men, as always. Scotty, that'll be one to beam up." She could practically hear the hologram thrumming in anticipation.
Lucy took a deep breath. "TARDIS, you are authorized to finalize the reconstruction."
Reconstruction finalizing.
The explosion of light and sound and vibration on frequencies so low it jarred her bones was too much for Lucy to take head on, and she curled down into a protective ball for the duration of the onslaught. The silence was ringing in her ears before she dared to look again.
The man on the settee was slipping out and away from the chameleon arch as she got to her knees, turning his hands over and over as if he'd never seen them before. Then he looked up at her, and grinned Harry's manic grin, and said in Harry's voice, "Lucy, darling, have you missed me?"
She clambered the rest of the way to her feet, her mirroring grin feeling like it would break her face, and ran to him. Up close, she could see his eyes were now the same shade as they had been in Harry's old body, and knew that before too long, he would have the same hair. He'd explained that he would never look quite the same as he had done once he was in a new body, but over time his features would shift to a close approximation. It was more than enough for her.
"I'll take that for a yes," Harry replied, finding himself suddenly pinned back down to the settee. "Oh, look... your makeup got ruined while you were out having fun without me. Let me fix it." His thumb went to the corner of her mouth and slowly, deliberately smeared her dark red lipstick down to her jaw line.
"Don't bother," Lucy breathed against his ear--finally, finally, he was whole again and so was she, or at least as much as they would ever be--hands roaming everywhere at once. "You've already ruined all of me."
He laughed the dark, deep laugh she loved so much, had missed so much, and crushed his lips against hers.