A.N.: So, in the Doctor's personal timeline, this is set pre-Rose; in the Master's personal timeline, this is set after Utopia but before The Sound of Drums.
Spoilers for: Utopia, The Sound of Drums, The Last of the Time Lords, The End of Time Part 2
Warnings: Description of mental illness
Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who
They had always been there: the drums. For as long as he could remember, they had been there. He knew that there had been a time, long ago, when he had been free from their constant beating against the inside of his skull, but that time was far too long ago, and had been far too short, to have any real significance.
Yet their intensity fluctuated throughout time; there were days when he almost thought himself free, that they had finally left him alone. On those days, when the outside world had been louder than the noise in his head, he could smile, and laugh, and... function. He could almost pretend that the low, quiet, muffled and hushed drumbeat in the back of his mind was only a mere memory of that torment, a memory that he would soon forget, and, once he did, he would be able to get on with his life, to live out a bright new future without the constant sound of drums.
But then, the noise outside would die down, and he would be left with the quiet, the silence, the drumbeat. He thought himself foolish to hang on to the hope that one day, one wonderful day, they would stop and leave him alone. The prospect enthralled him as much as it frightened him – after all, the drums were a part of who he was; they had been since he was eight years old. What would he be without them? Would he revert to that scared, innocent little boy, a Peter Pan version of himself that would never – could never – grow up?
He was terrified of the drums leaving him, for only then would he be truly alone. Honestly and truly, he would not want to give them up; the only time he had ever entertained such an idea was on the bad days, when the beat of the drums was louder than anything outside his head, when all he could hear was that sound, that noise, repeated over and over, overwhelming all of his senses until he couldn't move, until he could barely breathe, when he fell to the floor and couldn't get up, and could only lay there, gasping for air, praying that it would stop, just please, stop!
It was on a bad day that he saw the Doctor again.
It had been a month since he had stolen the TARDIS in the year 100 trillion, but he knew she didn't mind; after all, she was probably rather used to being nicked by now. He knew what the Doctor had done when he watched the consoles explode in a fizz of sparks as he tried to leave the Doctor and his two companions behind to fend for themselves against the Futurekind. He knew that he would only ever be able to go to two places in all of space and time, give or take 18 months.
He had been lucky, he realised, when he arrived in London and he just knew that he had enough time to make his plan work. It would take careful preparation, and he needed to research the nuances of 21st Century London in more detail than he ever had before, but it would be possible, and the drumbeat would only egg him on.
He had spent this first month researching, getting to know this London and all its quirks and eccentricities, and what better way to do that than to live as a Londoner? After all, Harold Saxon couldn't just appear from nowhere; he would need a backstory, something that cemented him in the recent history of this place.
So he'd got a job - or, rather, he'd pretended to get a job. If one were to Google – or whatever it's called – the name 'Harold Saxon', they would find that he worked for a small-scale political party with its premises in the centre of London. He pretended to go there every day, he even got the train with the humans and observed their desires, their wants, their needs, everything he might need to make his Archangel Network work to brainwash them into ticking the right box come Election Day.
The train was fun; he liked the train. There was a girl who got the same train as him – Lucy, he believed her name was – who always smiled and was polite, always willing to chat during the twenty or so minutes that they hurtled underground in the same metal box. In a couple of weeks, he planned on asking her if she wanted to see the stars, and he was confident that she would say 'yes'.
He wondered if she would be worried about him, if she would be thinking about where he was on that morning, for he hadn't made it to the train station to make his daily commute. Perhaps she would think that he was running late, that he was on the next train, having missed the one that he loved so much, the one where he could talk for twenty minutes to a beautiful girl with innocent, wide eyes and a soft, calm voice. Perhaps she thought that he was on another carriage, that he had simply missed her by inches and that he was there – somewhere – so close and yet so far away. Perhaps, still, she thought that he was ill, too under the weather to make it into work that day. And, if she chose to harbour under this last particular delusion, she would be the closest to the truth that she would ever know.
He was only around the corner from his flat when it happened, the intensifying of the noise. The flat was comfortable, not too expensive but not too downtrodden – in other words, perfectly average, perfectly inconspicuous. No one would notice him until he was ready to be noticed, until he could force his way onto their television screens, onto the news feeds on their smart phones, and into their heads via fifteen satellites orbiting their planet.
None of his neighbours knew who he was; he was just the man who had bought the flat the month before, who went out to work every morning and came home from work every evening. No one paid him much attention, which was just what he needed in his stage of his plan. They were too busy going about their own lives, doing their own things, to realise that the man they saw every morning and every evening had stumbled down a short alley clutching the sides of his head and trying desperately not to scream as he sank to his knees.
He often forgot how bad it could get sometimes. When he was in a relatively 'good' phase, he still had the memories of the bad days, the days when the noise became unbearable. Yet his mind would never allow him to remember fully just how awful it felt, as though there was something inside his head protecting him from having that sensation again, if only for a moment in remembrance. Each time it struck again, he was surprised by the intensity of it; surely it hadn't been this bad last time? Surely it couldn't have been, he would have remembered it. Yet each time he forgot, and the memory he had of it was only a mere reflection of the true thing, the thing that made his knees buckle and his back slam into the ground, that made his limbs immovable and his breathing ragged.
He wasn't sure how long he had been lying there when he heard it: the sound of thick, leather boots on the concrete ground. They were approaching him, but they sounded so far away, lost under the constant, the unbearable, the drumbeat in his head.
He had no wish for anyone else to see him like this. He had, so far, been able to wait out the bad times in private, with no one disturbing him and no one checking on him. He wanted it to stay that way; this was his greatest, his only, weakness, and he was determined to keep it a secret. Yet he couldn't articulate that to the stranger who now knelt by his side, for he was gasping for air, unable to talk.
The stranger asked him if he was alright, and as soon as that voice reached his ears, a low frequency that climbed underneath the blanket of the drumbeat covering him and reached him cowering in the corner of his mind, he knew instantly that this was no stranger. This was the only one who could help him: the healer, the one who makes people better, the Doctor.
But it was not the same Doctor from whom he had stolen the TARDIS. That Doctor had not worn leather boots; he had been wearing trainers, he was sure of it. And that voice, it was not the voice of the one from the future, it was a lower voice, a more troubled voice.
A different incarnation.
He wondered if this incarnation was before or after the one from the future; if this version would recognise him in this body. He didn't appear to; he was not saying anything clever and coded that hid the fact that he knew exactly who was lying before him. He could only guess that it was a past incarnation, one who did not know that one day his best friend and enemy would become the man now lying on the ground in an alleyway in 21st Century London, gasping for air and trembling from head to toe, the weight of the drumbeat pressing down on his chest like an anvil.
He forced himself to look away from the blue sky above him, to turn to his left as much as he could, and look his fellow in the face. At first, he was unsure that he had moved at all; the blue of the sky above was still there – sharper and brighter – but still there. Then he realised that he had met a pair of eyes, so different from the brown of the one he had met in the future. These eyes were like storm clouds, rumbling with the grief of the troubled spirit behind them.
This Doctor was broken, fresh from the Time War and the destruction of Gallifrey, still trying to come to terms with what he had done, with the knowledge that he was the only one left – the Last of the Time Lords.
If he could, he would have laughed at that, for the man beside him surely thought that he was the Last, the only one not to have perished at his hand. Little did he know that the man before him, the injured and broken and insane man before him, had two hearts in his chest, beating to the same tune as his own.
It seemed unfair, that he couldn't say anything to this man, that he wouldn't find out until much later in his own timeline. He wasn't sure why he wanted to tell him, why he wished to let him know early – far too early – that he wasn't alone, that he wasn't the Last. Maybe he couldn't bear to be alone himself. Maybe he needed that reassurance that there was someone, anyone, out there who knew what he was going through, who could understand.
Maybe he needed a Doctor.
He had never seen those eyes before – and he was certain that he never would again – but he would recognise them anywhere. As he was lifted from the ground and cradled to his chest, he was all of a sudden seven years old once more, having tripped over and scraped his knees on the red grass.
The Doctor had been there then, before he had become the Doctor, holding out a hand to him as he rolled over on the ground, offering to help him up. He had accepted his help and allowed his good friend – his best friend – to take him back to civilisation, where his cracked, broken and bleeding skin could be fixed.
It didn't seem right that they were now enemies, when they had been such good friends before – several lifetimes ago. Now, he couldn't even ask for help, he couldn't even reveal his identity.
The drumbeat was still strong in his head, still pounding, still impossibly loud, still unbearable and overwhelming, but there were a pair of arms around him now, wrapped around his shaking form like a blanket, so warm and soft and comforting. He could still hear the drumbeat, the soft rhythm against the side of his head. He lifted his hand to the chest he was being held against, and he felt the drums beneath his palms, external to him, and much, much softer than before.
It was not the same drumbeat that he had heard all those years: not one that drove him insane, but one that kept him grounded in sanity, a lullaby against his skin that drove the malicious noise away. Not the one that made him hurt, but one that soothed him: not just the heartbeat of a Time Lord, but the heartbeat of another Time Lord.
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