I'm on vacation this week which has allowed me to write faster than normal, just in case y'all haven't noticed!

Fair warning to those of you who are on-alert for a juicy Ten / Martha adventure: this is a bizarre little oneshot, and it's not Ten / Martha. It's my take on Lucy Saxon, and it is the DARKEST thing I've ever written! Just be aware!

I'll get back to writing for my favorite couple soon... it's a promise!

FORGIVENESS

I met him in hospital on the day when my father was given his prognosis. He had eight weeks left; there was nothing more they could do, except make him comfortable.

I'd gone to get a chocolate bar from the machine, and I was crying, and a man tried to comfort me. He said he was there with a friend who had gone in for minor surgery, but he could see that he was needed somewhere more important. Saxon, he said his name was. Harry Saxon.

I realised who he was; he was a very public figure, on the news all the time. It was rumoured that Harold Saxon, Minister of Defence, would be making a bid for the Prime Ministry, if there was an election in the coming year.

But none of that mattered to me, because I was smitten with him. He could have been a mattress salesman for all I cared. From that day, I wanted to spend every possible minute with him. He was handsome and clever, and mostly kind; he treated me like I was stupid sometimes, talked down to me, but everyone did that. But at least he was gentle about it. He made no secret of the fact that he found my virginity backward and childish, but he said he would wait until we were married. Sometimes, he tried to talk to me about sex; I didn't really mind, but I had nothing to say. I didn't know what I liked or wanted, but I knew he would teach me one day.

As he and I grew closer over the next two months, my father's condition worsened. My mother and brothers had accepted Harry as a part of the family almost immediately, though, and he would sit by my father's bedside and read to him, pray with him, or just chat with him about those old American Westerns he loved so much. And when the day came, and my father was taken, Harry made all the arrangements. The funeral was perfect and we buried my father in peace, thanks to Harry.

Our small, quaint wedding was only three weeks later, and my eldest brother Stephen gave me away. I wore a simple white gown and a veil, and my friend Olivia, my matron of honour, wore a blue suit she'd chosen for herself. There was some press there, covering the marriage of a possible future PM, and I had long since made my choice about being Britain's First Lady, the woman behind the man, et cetera.

Olivia and I were in the bridal suite before the ceremony, and she was helping me straighten out my veil. When the door opened, I was certain it must be my mother, come to cry. But it was Harry. I tittered about, giggled and even threw my bouquet at him, insisting it was bad luck to see me before the wedding. But he just kept advancing toward me, and at last he said, "Olivia, will you leave us please?"

She left without a word, and Harry locked the door behind her. He put his arms around my waist and said, "Lucy, there are some things I need to tell you."

When I'd awakened that morning, I'd been a girl about to marry an important politician, and that thought appealed to me. But by the time I walked down the aisle, thirty minutes behind schedule, I was a woman on the cusp of something entirely different, something huge and dangerous. And that thought made me positively ravenous.

For in the bridal suite, Harry had told me the truth. He was not one of us; he was different, alien, ancient, born to a race which wields control over Time itself. Civilisations had fallen at the feet of these men, entire empires had surrendered to their will, armies had turned and run simply at the threat of their intervention.

His story excited me, stirred me within – it was a force I'd never felt before. And something about the words Time Lord attacked me at my very core and drove me insane with desire. The words were lofty and powerful, burning, intoxicating and they changed me like a magic spell. I begged Harry to take me right then, which he did without compunction.

I now realise that this was the reason he came to the suite. It was not to unburden his lie, it was not to make a clean slate. It was to show me that everything I was, my identity and convictions, were no longer my own. I had carefully guarded my virginity for twenty-six long years. I had made it to my wedding day, and he took it from me – made me give it up – just as the last guests were being seated. And for a while, he had me believing it had been my own idea. Really, he was showing me that he would get his way, and that my time to harbour beliefs for myself was over.

And I didn't want to turn back.

That night was the first time I saw the real fire in his eyes, the first time I saw him looking through me, even as he was fucking me, and forcing me to call him Master. That was the very night when I became addicted to the power.

And over the next year, I remained drunk with it, swam in it. Harry rode a tidal wave to the Prime Ministry by being outwardly charming and non-threatening. But I knew he was a threat, and I liked it. He had literally drawn up a plan for world domination, and every night was a step in the countdown. Every night, with hunger he drove through me, used my body, and I wanted it. I did what he demanded, called him whatever he wanted me to, because I loved his power and wanted to feed it.

The night when he won the election, we never made it to dinner. The night we moved into Downing Street, we never slept at all.

And the night when the Master's plan came to fruition, as he possessed me over and over, and I climaxed again and again until I couldn't breathe, in my mind, I saw the President die, and the gasp of shock as Harry claimed responsibility. I saw the other Time Lord, the Doctor, by all accounts a formidable, powerful man himself, forced to his knees at Harry's feet. I saw the maniacal conviction in Harry's eyes as he killed the Doctor's companion with the touch of a button, and it all turned me into a fiend.

But Harry transformed into The Master overnight, and he became megalomaniacal and perverse. He began making me wear the slinky dresses straight away, but it was a month or two before I began to notice a real change to his behaviour. But then, I was never very bright.

So much of the Master's desire for domination seemed to be aimed at spiting the Doctor. For a year, he kept the Doctor, and the Doctor's friends, including the family of the sainted Martha Jones, in bondage.

One day when Tish Jones was cleaning up the afternoon tea, she spilled a few drops upon the onyx table, and didn't notice. Harry asked her menacingly what she thought she was doing, leaving him to wallow in the filth she'd left behind. She looked at him with genuine confusion, and he grabbed the back of her neck and bent her at the waist, forcing her face into the little puddle of tea. The tray she was carrying went crashing loudly to the floor, and he began to scream at her, and all she could do was cry. Her mother stood nearby and trembled, and the Doctor took a stance as though he were ready to pounce, though Harry had seen to it that the Doctor would be moving nowhere quickly.

Then, Harry let up on some of the pressure against Tish's neck and said, "Lick it up." She obeyed, and as she did, Harry moved behind her and lifted up her skirt, pressing his groin against her backside. He let out a disgusting groan, Tish squeaked in shock, and Francine Jones made a move toward him. The guards grabbed her.

"Master, stop," the Doctor's said shakily from where he stood. "Just stop."

No pontificating, no speech, no argument. Just a steely gaze from the weak, elderly Doctor, and a firm directive to just stop.

Harry seemed to bite his bottom lip as though he'd forgotten the Doctor was there. He relented and moved away from Tish, angrily kicking the broken pieces of teacup out of his way. The Doctor moved to comfort her, and the last thing I saw before being yanked out of the room by my upper arm, was Tish crying on the Doctor's shoulder.

I suppose that for a while, I'd been wondering where my threshold was, or if I even had one. The question was answered. This was the day when Harry's power stopped being fun.

He threw open the door to his office and pushed me inside, locking it. He bent me over the large wooden desk, holding my head down, pressing my temple and cheek against the spread-out game of solitaire he had abandoned, and knocking over a forgotten glass of wine. With his other hand, he unzipped his trousers and pulled up my dress. It took him about sixty seconds to grunt and come, and when he was finished, he zipped up, pulled me upright and threw me down onto the sofa. There was red wine in my hair, matted to the side of my face, and a playing card sticking to my cheek. I looked at him with utter shock as he adjusted his belt, tie and shirt in a startlingly civilised way.

He turned and looked at me, and said, "Clean that up, will you? And do something with your hair."

I'm sure that the Jones women, and all of the women surrounding us, had no idea that any little defiance or transgression on their part not only led to a show of anger and violence from the Master, but led to a much grimmer scene for me.

The violations out of rage were always quick and messy, and continually caught me off-guard. He'd drag me somewhere and either hold me down, bend me over something or force me to my knees, and then he'd groan for a minute or so, come, and then leave me to clean up. Sometimes this was in front of the guards, sometimes not.

The looks the Doctor gave me as time went on betrayed that he knew everything – and was sorry.

Eventually, I was made to pay for others' mistakes so often, that Harry's appetites began to change altogether. At night when the bedroom door was shut, he couldn't get off unless he was holding my face aside with his elbow, or making me contort until it hurt, or gagging me, or some other hideous quirk. His madness had distilled, and for my trouble, I received humiliation and bruises.

In retrospect I suppose it was a mercy. He could have raped and beaten all the women on board, but he didn't. I told myself that I was taking it for the team. Maybe I was feeling the need to be benevolent as a penance for my behaviour in the previous months.

As a result, I began to realise, however, what sort of impact on him the Doctor's presence was having. The broken old man who lived in a tent in the conference room was perhaps the only being in existence who could make the Master stand down. Something in his eyes that day had made Harry back away and leave Tish alone, contain his rage. In spite of Harry's taunting, the Doctor continued to insist that he had only one thing to say to him, which seemed to send Harry reeling into dread.

Something in the Doctor utterly terrified the Master. Fascinating.

I'd seen the Doctor briefly before Harry had aged him – not bad to look at. Given this, and the simple power he wielded with his eyes, the old me should have been very impressed with this Doctor; but for better or for worse, the new me was too exhausted and dead inside.

I've mentioned that I'm not that bright. But even I know that I'm at least half to blame for all of this. I got reeled in, and I played the game knowing that I was dealing with a very dangerous man.

But this knowledge did not lessen the imact of the abuse. By the end of a year, I was all but catatonic. All pretence had been dispensed with – everyone knew who and what I was to him, and I didn't care. I was a rag doll, limp and inanimate, tossed about on his whims, abused, dressed, discarded or taken to bed whenever it suited him.

But when Martha Jones came back, marching stridantly into the conference room staring down the Master, God help me, I began to have hope. I read triumph on Martha's face, and for the first time ever, I allowed myself to feel real anger at Harry and everything he'd done to me. He'd tricked me, used me, humiliated me, and made me want to die. At long last, I felt the rage, the desire not just to make it stop, but to give Harry what he deserved. I wanted him beaten and bruised and used and tossed like a tissue. I wanted him to hurt and be disgraced and to pay, really pay for taking away everything that was me. I would atone for my own sins later on, but only after Harold Saxon's bloodied, still living, body was chucked into the gutter and left there.

By now, the Doctor was eight inches tall and living in a bird cage, but he could still get under Harry's skin. Martha began to reveal what she'd been doing over the past year, and the light at the end of the tunnel became clear. Like everyone on Earth, I put my hope in the Doctor, the one man I had ever seen who could handle Harry, who wasn't afraid of him, who could make the Master nervous and get into his head.

For the first time in far too long, real joy welled up in me as the Doctor stood to his full height, and gradually the years melted away and revealed the Time Lord beneath. But even better than that, Harry was cowering in fear, literally curled up on the floor, hiding his face and trembling. He was begging, no no no, and I watched and wound up for the fatal blow. The Doctor would vindicate me, vindicate us all, punish the Master, make Harry pay.

The Doctor advanced on him, repeating once again that he had only one thing to say. And then he knelt, put his arms around Harry, and said, "I forgive you."

Until that day, I had never allowed myself to indulge in the kind of out-of-control anger that drives people to violence.

But now, I understood it. It had been released in me when I saw Martha return, and there was no going back. Only now, it wasn't just Harry I wanted to hurt.

The Doctor forgave the bastard.

He was forgiving on behalf of a human race who would soon not even remember the evils of the Master. He was forgiving on behalf of Martha Jones who had trekked across the world as a warrior, a crusader for the cult of the Doctor, and had come out stronger for it.

He was forgiving on behalf of himself, the Time Lord from whom so much had been taken over the past year. All very well and good for a nine-hundred-year-old who can regenerate…

…but I have only one life. I do not get to start with a clean slate after this body and soul are all used up – this is all I have, and I am ruined. Forever. I cannot escape this body or this mind or this soul or personality. Harold Saxon has trapped me forever in the prison of my own existence! I am rotten on the inside and the outside, and I can never be right again.

So what the fuck did he mean, "I forgive you?" What gave him the right? Where was the fire and brimstone, the swift and blinding vengeance wanted by all mankind, that the Master deserved? I wanted to fly at the Doctor, pound on him until he could see what I saw, how bloody easy it was for him to forgive! In my mind, I was screaming in his ear. How could you? Aren't you the good guy, the one who fights for those who can't fight for themselves, and always wins? How can you not fight for us now? Fight for me, Doctor! Don't let what he did to me be forgotten in the junk heap of the Master's atrocities! Please, fight!

But no. The best that bloody Doctor could do was offer to take Harry on as a ward. Fucking hell, what kind of a comeuppance was that? The Master deserved to burn for all eternity as far as I was concerned, not to be 'cared for,' no matter how odious the prospect seemed to him. The rage was bubbling, bubbling, and the longer I waited, the easier it was becoming…

Fortunately Francine Jones distracted most of the room. He had taken part of her life too, another human being who would never forget nor shed the taint of that year. No-one blamed her for training a gun on the Master, but no-one would let her pull the trigger either.

So I did. A burst of hate and fury rang out in that shot, and Harry fell. And typically, so typically, no-one saw it coming – not from me. It was not the violent, painful revenge I'd hoped for, but it was all I had, given the environment and circumstances.

And leave it to the ever-benevolent Doctor to catch and then cradle and cry over the body of a truly evil man. I was confused by this, disgusted and utterly finished with the whole damn drama. The Doctor was very, very lucky to have his friend Jack nearby, or I might have turned the weapon on the Last of the Time Lords, and then myself.

I have taken the Master, now what of the Doctor?

Just as well that I am rotting in prison for murdering my husband, Prime Minister Harold Saxon, though I would honestly rather be dead. I am a dangerous woman. The Doctor forgave the Master, but I have never forgiven either one of them. The Master took my life, and the Doctor robbed me of my right to see him suffer. In a way, both of them stole my hope, and the storm inside me.

So with no hope, no storm, no forgiveness, who am I now?