Stalemate

Darkness. That was the first thought to run through his head when he woke up. Everything around him was pitch-black. It wasn't just the absence of light, this darkness was aggressive. It swallowed the light, hunted it, leaving nothing its wake. His second thought was the lack of sound. He seemed to be in a sort of dead zone: no light, no sound, no sense of touch. That didn't bode well. He waited for more thoughts to follow.

Nothing. This surprised him more than the silence. There seemed to be nothing in his head, just a silence that seemed to stretch on infinitely. No thought, no memories… nothing. He couldn't remember how he'd gotten here, wherever here was. He couldn't remember what he looked like. He couldn't even remember his name. All he could register in his mind was the silence. A silence that, despite all odds, pleased him more than he could imagine. It seemed like an enormous weight had been lifted off of his shoulders. He didn't know what the weight had been, whether it be guilt, hatred, or anything else. All he knew is that it was gone, and that he was deliriously happy.

"THE SUBJECT HAS AWOKEN." A voice pierced the silence, its grating electronic voice sounding like nails on a chalkboard. He was tempted to call out, shout at the voice to shut up, to return to the glorious silence. No, it was too late. The silence had been ruined.

"THE SUBJECT IS CONSCIOUS," the voice reported, causing him to cringe once again. He knew the voice. He couldn't place it, but he knew that voice. There was no doubt in his fractured mind about it.

"The subject is-"

"Yes, I know. I'm conscious. You can stop telling me that, I think I've figured it out." The words flowed out of his mouth, sounding sharp and bitter. So that's what I sound like. He filed it away for future reference.

The voice was silent for a moment. This time, the silence didn't please him. He was waiting for an answer, waiting to see what was going on. He didn't think he liked waiting.

"WE ARE THE DALEKS."

Daleks. Daaaaaaleks. Daleeeeeeks. Daleks. It took a moment, but the word fit neatly into his head, like a puzzle piece into a frame. The first out of many, hopefully.

"YOU WILL HELP US."

"Oh, I will, will I?" That harsh voice again. After a second, he realized it was his. He wasn't used to it just yet. "Yes, that's brilliant. Makes perfect sense, pepper-pot. Who are you again? Never mind, it doesn't matter. Where am I? No, that doesn't matter either. Let's see…"

He was rambling now, both enjoying and despising his own voice. It would definitely take some getting used to.

"DO YOU KNOW OF THE DOCTOR?"

Doctor. That name slipped into his mind easily. Faces. Lots of faces. Four, nine, twelve, everything in-between. Doctor. The name rang through his head. Was it his name? No, it couldn't be. Could it?

"Hmmm... Doctor… ah yes, of course. I had my monthly checkup last, well, month. Would you like his number?"

Playing for time. Trying to fit as many memories as possible into his head.

"AND OF HIS TIME TRAVEL CAPSULE?"

Time travel capsule. TARDIS. Big blue box.

"Not ringing a Cloister Bell."

"YOU WILL HELP US."

He sighed. "Tell you what. I'll do you a favor. I'll help you out with whatever it is you need to kidnap someone to do."

"YOU WILL-"

"Ah ah ah," he interrupted, clicking his tongue. He attempted to wag his finger, but found he couldn't move. A restraining field. They weren't taking any chances. At least not with him. "You didn't let me finish, cyclops. I'm proposing a deal. I'll help you with your little problem, but for a price. My name."

The voice was silent. Weighing its options, most likely. He wasn't worried about the outcome. If they went into all the trouble of kidnapping him, then they would be willing to give him a name at least.

"YOU ARE OUR GAMEMASTER."

The voice said it so flatly, he was almost sure it was mocking him. Gamemaster. It almost seemed to fit into his brain, but at an angle. He had to twist it into knots to get it in there. No matter. He liked the name. Gamemaster. Yes, that'll do quite nicely.

"YOU WILL ANSWER A QUESTION."

Gamemaster gave a lopsided smile. They couldn't see it in the dark, but he needed to see if he could give the type of smile he pictured in his head: mocking, annoying, and very condescending. He hoped he got it right.

"Okay, a question. I'll take outer planets for two hundred, Alex."

"HOW DO YOU DEFEAT THE DOCTOR?"

Gamemaster bit his tongue, thinking. It didn't take long to formulate an answer. "You simply need to outthink him."

"WE WILL OUTTHINK THE DOCTOR."

Gamemaster laughed. "Really? If memory serves, the Doctor has tromped you time and time again. I don't think you have the mental capacity to outthink the madman."

A bluff, of course. Gamemaster didn't know exactly what part the Daleks played in the Doctor's life. Judging by their silence, though, he had hit pretty close to home.

"YOU WILL OUTTHINK THE DOCTOR."

Gamemaster let out a long, slow, mocking whistle. "Wipe my mind and expect me to outwit a competitor? It's no wonder the Doctor's whipped you."

"WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE?"

"It's simple, really." Gamemaster cleared his throat, as if he were about to give a long, boring lecture. "You have to find somebody who can outwit him."

"WHO DO YOU PROPOSE?"

Gamemaster chuckled. The answer was in plain sight. It was so simple, he couldn't possibly have thought of it if his mind wasn't practically empty.

"Who can outthink the Doctor?" Gamemaster mused, enjoying the plan coming together in his head. "Who can outwit the cleverest man in the room?"

Gamemaster grinned. "Why, himself of course."

Three thousand six hundred and twenty nine years earlier.

Amy lost count of the amount of times Rory had backflipped into her. It might have not been so bad if the backflips had been well-executed. Every time the TARDIS pitched violently, Rory went spinning through the air, arms and legs flailing wildly as he shouted in frustration. Gripping the handrail, Amy ducked quickly, allowing Rory to go flying over her head and slam into the far side of the TARDIS, making a sound similar to that of a potato sack being dropped from a ten-story building. The TARDIS lurched again, going almost horizontal. Rory went spinning once more, falling from one side of the TARDIS to another, bouncing off of the center console as he did.

Amy squeezed the guardrail, trying very hard not to go flying like Rory. "Doctor!" she shouted, as the TARDIS bucked like a rodeo bull.

A burst of smoke from the center console carried the stench of burnt rubber across the room. The Doctor's head poked out from the opposite side of the console, his sonic screwdriver clenched between his teeth. His face was smeared with grease and his bow tie was askew, making him look like a very gentlemanly mechanic.

"Rrm erking ahm ich!" The Doctor spat the screwdriver into his hand, ducking as Rory pinwheeled by. "I said I'm working on it!"

"Would you, ACH, mind working a little, OOF, faster?!" Rory called out, bouncing like a pinball between the TARDIS platforms.

"It's not easy being the only genius in the room," the Doctor grumbled, yanking at the controls on the TARDIS central console. Another burst of smoke erupted from the TARDIS console, dying the Doctor's face black with soot. "No, no, no, don't be like that!" the Doctor pleaded with the TARDIS. "I just fixed you! Temperamental little-"

The TARDIS went into a barrel roll, throwing Rory around the room like a rag doll. The Doctor wrapped his legs around the TARDIS to avoid being thrown to the opposite side of the time machine.

"Okay, I get it, sorry!" the Doctor shouted at the console. The TARDIS beeped almost sullenly, but then righted itself, causing Rory to plummet to the ground, groaning. The Doctor didn't notice, he just stared at the nearest monitor. He moaned, as if the monitor had stabbed him. "This just doesn't make any sense."

Amy got to her feet, still clutching the handrail warily. "What's happening? Did we hit something?"

The Doctor shook his head, doing his best to control the shaking of the TARDIS. "No, that's ridiculous. I never hit anything." The TARDIS bleeped cheerfully. The Doctor sighed. "Okay, maybe a few things. But the Titanic didn't count."

Amy blinked. "You crashed into the Titanic?"

The Doctor shook his head. "No, the Titanic crashed into me. Moving on."

Rory got to his feet shakily, grumbling. "Are you all right, Rory? Oh, sure, of course I am. Are you sure? You could have died. Oh, it's nice to see you care."

If either Amy or the Doctor noticed Rory's grumbling, they gave no sign. The Doctor snapped his fingers, as if he just thought of something. "That's it!" He turned around to face Rory, who was still grumbling under his breath. "Rory! You were crashing around the TARDIS as it rolled?"

Rory looked up, sort of shocked someone had noticed. "Um, yes, I was kind of rolling around when we were crashing. But I'm all righ-"

"Good." The Doctor turned back to the console, hammering in calculations. "The TARDIS traces impacts, so they can be fixed later. So if we calculate Rory's exact, err, flight pattern, we might be able to figure out where we're being thrown."

Pulling a switch, the Doctor grinned as the walls lit up with pale blue silhouettes. Rory winced, looking around at the many times he had crashed into the walls of the TARDIS. Amy chuckled, elbowing Rory playfully. Rory grinned slightly, laughing a little himself. There is something strangely comical about seeing yourself haphazardly plastered across every wall in the room.

The Doctor whipped a scrap of paper and an indigo Crayola crayon out of his pocket. He began running from one image to another, connecting them into an enormous constellation of injured Rorys and squiggly blue lines. The TARDIS pitched again, and the Doctor had to lean against the guardrail to regain his balance.

"You didn't want to fix the stabilizers," he scolded himself, scribbling calculations onto his scrap of paper. "No, you just ITALICS had STOP to install the swimming pool's glass bottom. That was ITALICS such STOP a waste of time."

The Doctor smiled to himself, tucking the paper into his pocket. "It was pretty cool, though."

The TARDIS did a sudden loop-the-loop, sending both the Doctor and Rory into impromptu backflips. Amy, still tightly gripping the guardrail, had to chuckle as she watched the Doctor and Rory slam into each other in midair. The two crashed to the ground, a tangle mass of limbs and groaning heads.

"Stabilizers," the Doctor wheezed. "Really need to fix those."

"No kidding," Rory groaned, getting to his feet. Noticing the chuckling Amy, he opened his mouth to say something, but then sighed and returned to the guardrail, gripping it as tightly as he could.

The Doctor stumbled back over to the console, gingerly rubbing his rapidly bruising forehead. Checking his paper occasionally, he began punching buttons and flipping switches, muttering to himself as he did so.

"Let's see," he muttered, adjusting the setting on an egg timer, "carry the three, adjust for chronological weight, round up two places…"

The Doctor blinked, staring at the TARDIS's console. "That can't be right," he muttered, punching in the numbers once more. "Okay, all variables are accounted for, double-checking for any extra chronological interference, I definitely carried the three…"

The Doctor stood stock-still at the console, staring at his results. Amy and Rory looked at him, waiting for him say something. After a moment, Amy gave an exasperated sigh.

"Well?" she said, trying to keep her footing as the TARDIS bucked and rolled. "What's going on? Where are we going?"

The Doctor turned around slowly, tucking his paper and crayon back into his pocket. "You two might want to hold on to something," he announced, wrapping a cable around his wrist to attach himself to the TARDIS console, "because it's about to get a hell of a lot worse."

Amy and Rory glanced at each other. Then they did the only reasonable thing. They both clutched the guardrail so tightly their knuckles turned white.

Ninety-eight thousand, four hundred and one years later, and forty-one galaxies away.

"What do you mean, a whirlpool?" Martha called out, staring up at the roof of the TARDIS.

High above her head, the Doctor dangled from the TARDIS roof, clinging to an impromptu handhold not much bigger than a dinner plate. His sonic screwdriver was a few inches above his head, caught on an outcropping far off the ground. The Doctor was struggling to cling to his handhold, sweat dripping off of his forehead.

"That's what's pulling the TARDIS in!" he shouted down, straining his neck to look down at Martha, who was clinging to the center console tightly. "A whirlpool in space! Or possibly time. Well, a space-time whirlpool."

The TARDIS groaned and rolled, pitching the sonic screwdriver off of its ledge and down onto the main platform. The Doctor looked down at the screwdriver far below, sighing. "Martha, on the center console, pull the third switch next to the green line, and press the Monopoly thimble piece. Oh, and hold on tight."

Martha nodded, following the instructions quickly. The TARDIS screeched, then began a barrel roll, allowing the Doctor to drop down onto a wall and begin running along it, chasing his screwdriver as it skittered around the TARDIS. After a diving catch, the Doctor managed to snatch the screwdriver out of midair before crashing down violently next to Martha.

Martha stared down at the Doctor, raising an eyebrow. "You know," she pointed out, "you could have just had me pick up the sonic, instead of you having to chase it around this entire place."

The Doctor stared up at her, the dust settling on his blue suit. "That," he said, using the blue tip of screwdriver as a pointer, "probably would have been smart."

The TARDIS pitched violently, causing the Doctor to slide across the floor and slam into one of the coral-tinged support columns. The Doctor staggered to his feet, shaking his head to clear the stars that had suddenly appeared in his vision. "Right. Screwdriver. Whirlpool. Concussion. Where was I?"

Martha glanced over at him from the center console, using it as an anchor to keep herself from sliding everywhere. "The space-time whirlpool."

The Doctor nodded, using the support column to steady himself. "Right. Well, as you know, whirlpools pull things in by nature. This one is no different. But what this one is doing, though, is that it's pulling every corner of time and space. It's not natural. Someone's using it to pull in something."

Martha clutched the console tightly, trying not to get motion sick from the constant pitching of the TARDIS. "Wouldn't a whirlpool pull in everything? Why isn't it destroying everything in space?"

The Doctor grinned, pulling himself back towards the center console. "That's the brilliant part. The whirlpool's huge, but it's incredibly weak. It can only pull in whatever's not anchored in either time or space. Everything else can't be budged."

"So it's pulling in us," Martha guessed, trying to stay on her feet as the TARDIS rocked like a ship in a storm.

The Doctor nodded. "You got it. The only thing I don't get is why it's so big. If it's targeting us, then why does it need such a large field? You don't catch a minnow with a whaling net."

"Maybe they don't know where, um, when we are," Martha suggested, trying not to vomit as the TARDIS pitched again wildly.

The Doctor shrugged, which is difficult to do when you're anchoring yourself to the center console. "Whatever it is, we're caught in it. It's going to pull us in, wherever it's centered."

A sly grin spread across the Doctor's face. "Well, if we're going in anyway..." His fingers crept to one of the nearest levers.

Martha grinned, clutching the console tightly. "Go as fast as you want. I'm game."

The Doctor smiled. Grabbing the lever, he yanked it as far as it would go. The TARDIS lurched, then spun like a top, plummeting downwards.

"You do realize if we hit something, we're dead?" Martha shouted over the ear-piercing shriek of the TARDIS.

The Doctor grinned, clutching the console tightly. "Don't worry! I never hit anything!"

Then he bit his lip, glancing over his shoulder. "Usually," he added quietly.

Exactly two hundred yards away, two minutes earlier.

"The next time I get in a time-traveling box with a lunatic, I'm going to make sure he can drive it first," Rose grumbled, clinging to one of the TARDIS columns to keep herself from being thrown around the bucking TARDIS. A wire exploded overhead, showering her with bright blue sparks. Rose quickly patted out the flames that sprung up on her jacket, glancing over at the center console.

"Doctor!" she shouted, ducking her head to avoid the swinging of a loose pipe filled with dangerous-looking glowing liquid. "Please tell me that you can get us out of here!"

From the steaming center console, the Doctor glanced over at Rose, struggling to balance a pile of random spare parts in one hand and manipulate the controls of the TARDIS in the other. His leather jacket was dotted with grease stains and electrical burns, and his face wasn't looking much better.

"I told you, it's a vortex!" he shouted, cramming what looked like a wind-up robot toy into the smoking center console. "And for the third time, no, I have no idea how I'm going to get us out of here!"

The Doctor pointed a finger at Rose, as if accusing her of doubting him. "But I will. A plan's going to come to me any second now. Just not right now."

The clang of an old-fashioned alarm clock sounded from the console, which the Doctor hurriedly smacked before cramming in one more flashlight battery into the console. Forcing the lid of the compartment shut, he quickly glanced over at Rose. "Okay, now this might have a two percent chance of working. Switch those wires. Just don't, whatever you do, reverse the polarity. It's not a miracle solution."

"Why on earth," Rose muttered, yanking two wires out of the wall and plugging them into the opposite ports, "would I ever even consider reversing the polarity? I mean, how would that help?"

As soon as Rose pressed the second wire into the slot, the TARDIS lurched once more, then righted itself, slowing down until the earthquake was only a minor tremor.

The Doctor chuckled, wiping his brow and grinning. "Blew out the stabilizers for sure, but at least I got the TARDIS balanced."

Rose let go of the column warily, still trying to stay relatively close to it. "So what now? Can you pull out of the whirlpool?"

The Doctor held up a finger, his brow furrowing. "Vortex, not whirlpool. A whirlpool refers to a body of water, and is completely irrelevant in this scenari-"

"Doctor," Rose interrupted, giving him a sideways look. "Can you get us out of here or not?"

The Doctor turned back to the TARDIS console, frowning. "I think so. I managed to stop us from being pulled in, at least. As long as we move slowly, and don't get forced out of position, we should be able to yank ourselves out of here."

Rose nodded. "Okay, no sudden moves. How hard can-"

Suddenly the TARDIS exploded with noise, an enormous BLAM sending the ship crashing around again. Both the Doctor and Rose went flying, crashing into a wall on the far side of the TARDIS as the time machine returned to its previous earthquake-like motion.

"What in God's name was that?" Rose shouted, struggling to her feet.

"No idea," the Doctor grumbled, bouncing to his feet. "Something hit us at very, very high speed. Knocked us out of alignment, and now we're back where we started."

The TARDIS lurched again, throwing the Doctor and Rose against the center console. The Doctor growled with exasperation. "What kind of idiot goes charging into a vortex?"

Two seconds later, two feet below.

"What kind of idiot stands around in the middle of a whirlpool?" the Doctor shouted, trying to untangle his blue suit from the top of the console, dangling several feet above the ground. The force of the collision had knocked him several yards into the air, before be got snagged on top of the TARDIS.

Martha squeezed herself out from beneath the center console, trying not to twist her ankle as she did. "Probably the same kind of idiots who go charging into them."

The Doctor frowned, yanking at his suit. "No one calls me an idiot."

With one final tug, the Doctor managed to yank his suit off of the catch on top of the TARDIS. This second of victory, however, was quickly replaced by a plummet down to the ground, smashing into the floor with a painful clang of a belly-flop.

The Doctor looked up sheepishly, sprawled across the TARDIS floor. "Okay. That counts as idiotic. Nothing else, though."

Before Martha could respond, the damaged TARDIS shuddered one last time, and then went still. There was silence for a moment.

Martha turned to the Doctor wearily. "Where do you think we-"

Her question was suddenly interrupted by a screechy voice blasting over the TARDIS's intercom.

"GREETINGS, DOCTOR."

The Doctor swore in Gallifreyan under his breath. "Daleks," he muttered. "Can't I go ten or so years without running into one of these tin-plated little…"

Martha looked up at the intercom, brow creased in concern. "What do you think they want?"

As if in response, the intercom crackled on again.

"BEFORE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS HAVE PASSED…" the Dalek's voice was like claws on a chalkboard, made even tinnier by the speakers in the TARDIS.

"YOU ALL SHALL BE EXTERMINATED."

There was silence for a moment. Then the Doctor glanced at Martha.

"Okay, maybe we shouldn't have dove into this headfirst," he said quietly.

(Note: I do not own Doctor Who) Thank you to anyone reading this. I hope you enjoy.