Author's note: This was written as the first installment of a Christmas present for a good friend, and was inspired by the prompt "Sexy finds herself stolen by the Master. What will she do in order to get back to her madman?" The answer? Anything.
Doctor Who isn't owned by me, but I certainly enjoy writing about it.
The minute his foot crossed her threshold, she knew something was irrevocably wrong. He was wrong. It wasn't her thief. It wasn't one of his strays. She had felt this one's tread before, and every time he entered her doors, catastrophe followed. And surely, catastrophe would follow him again.
The cloister bell started to ring.
In the console room of the TARDIS, the Master looked up at the sound of the bell and started to laugh. A high-pitched, maniacal giggle, his laughter rang in the rafters of the room and echoed back at him, creating a terrifying symphony of crazed glee. Still cackling to himself, he ran his hands over the console and started pulling levers, flicking switches, and generally upsetting the whole internal system and functions of the TARDIS.
The TARDIS did not like this one bit.
Every time she reached out to another one of her systems that could possibly get her in contact with her thief, or anyone who might be able to help, the Master had reached it seconds before and poof! It was gone. The telepathic circuits were offline. The voice interface was offline. The distress signal was offline. Even the tractor beam—much good it could do her—was offline.
This had to stop. Nobody, nobody but her thief and a select few strays who had been specially chosen were allowed to touch her console, much less mess around with her inner workings. And now—what was he doing now?
Oh, this would not stand. He was trying to pilot her! That was the last straw. The TARDIS, enraged, did the only thing she could think of—she shut off all the lights in the console room.
Well, it was a start.
The Master stopped, surprised at the sudden darkness, but grinned a feral grin as he reached out his hand in the dark and pulled one last lever. A familiar grinding noise swelled up, and against her will, the TARDIS dematerialized.
Once in flight, she thought, there were so many things she could do to get him away from her controls. And once away from her controls, she could contain him. But how to do that…
She turned the gravity off.
The Master, suddenly floating around the room in an alarming manner, managed to grab a support beam and pull himself back down until he was close enough to the console to reach out one arm and flick a switch…at which point he came crashing back to the floor. He sprang up and laughed again, shaking his finger at the air. "Now, now, Doctor!" he scolded. "Can't get rid of me that easily!"
The TARDIS was puzzled. Her thief was nowhere to be found. In fact, the Master had abandoned him on the planet's surface when she was forced to dematerialize. Did he think the Doctor was controlling the TARDIS? Slowly, an idea began to take shape. If she had had a mouth, she would have been grinning ear to ear. True, she no longer had control over any of her general or fine motor functions, nor could she do anything in terms of environment control or communication, but there was one thing the Master had overlooked—the TARDIS A/V system.
She could still make holograms. More specifically, she could make a very specific hologram, one that was guaranteed to get the Master out of the control room and into the labyrinthine depths of her corridors. Once there, she could easily trap and contain him.
This was an excellent plan.
Footsteps echoed down a corridor leading to the console room. The Master looked up, surprised, to be confronted with the Doctor standing at the top of the stairs. "You want the TARDIS?" the Doctor asked, shaking his head disapprovingly. "You know she'll only truly respond to me. You'll have to catch me first!" And with his coat-tails flaring out behind him, he turned on his heel and was gone.
The Master dashed up the stairs after him, only catching a glimpse of the Doctor's back as he rounded a corner. A furious chase ensued, with the Doctor fleeing deeper and deeper into the TARDIS and the Master close behind. At last, the Master saw the Doctor vanish into a room at the end of a hallway. As soon as he entered the room, intending to follow the Doctor, the double doors slammed shut behind him. There was a loud thunk as the bolts slid home.
The room was completely empty. There were no other doors. There wasn't even any furniture. And he was alone. The Master threw back his head and howled like a wild animal, frustrated and angry at his failure. "DOCTOR!" he screamed at the ceiling. "WHERE ARE YOU?"
"The Doctor isn't in right now," a female voice said behind him. He spun around to find a woman in a raggedy blue and green dress, with wild brown hair and a very angry expression on her face. With a wordless growl, he lunged at her, only to end up diving headfirst through her body and landing sprawled on the floor. She turned around and looked at him, hands on her hips.
"I'm a hologram, you idiot. So was the Doctor you've been chasing all this time. He's not even inside me right now." She stopped, and glared at him. "But you are. And you've been messing with my systems. I don't like that at all." The Master, puzzled by her use of pronouns, narrowed his eyes.
"Who are you?" he asked. "Are you another one of his…pets?" he spat out, as if the word itself tasted foul. The woman drew herself up, offended yet amused.
"No, stupid. This—" She gestured to her body. "This isn't me. It's a hologram. I'm here." She waved her arms around her head in a seemingly random motion, gesturing all around her. "You're standing in me, you idiot. I'm the TARDIS. Well, I'm not the TARDIS, I'm a hologram and I'm talking for the TARDIS, but I was the TARDIS when I was a real person but I'm not a real person anymore—" She broke off. "Never mind."
The Master, very clearly confused, slowly got to his feet. "What did you do?" he asked warily. "What do you want?" The hologram-TARDIS made a beckoning gesture at the floor, and a section slid back to reveal a control panel, which rose up between them with a pneumatic hiss. It looked like a white box on a pedestal, covered with switches and levers and other devices.
"You've been messing with my circuitry," she stated bluntly. "You're going to fix it, or I'll never let you out of here. And without my help, you will never get out of here. There's no food and there's no water, and I'm not above watching you starve until you fix me." She leaned towards him threateningly. "You took me away from my thief. Nobody steals me but him. You had better give me a good reason to let you stay alive."
The Master had to hold back a shiver at the tone of her words. Despite knowing she was a hologram, the knowledge that there was a very angry and very sentient time-travelling police box on the other end of those words was chilling. "Would putting the TARDIS back on-line and fully operational be a good reason?" he asked hopefully, already manipulating the control box to enable the many systems he had switched off or rerouted.
The hologram pursed her lips, apparently deep in thought. Reluctantly, she muttered, "Perhaps. But you have to fix me first. Otherwise, no."
"Then you're fixed!" he exclaimed, stepping back from the controls. The hologram tipped her head to one side, her brown ringlets of hair cascading over one shoulder, as she tested her many functions one-by-one to make sure he was telling the truth. Her nostrils flared in annoyance as she admitted, "So I am." She fell silent.
After an awkwardly long pause, the Master prompted, "So can I go?" She jerked her head around to stare at him, and he felt oddly intimidated.
While staring at him, she murmured sweetly, "I think I'll let the Doctor decide what to do with you, hmm?"
Then, with a pop, she was gone.
—
The Doctor was standing on the street corner, frantically pacing back and forth as he tried to come to terms with the fact that he was, once again, a madman with a box without a box, and this time he had no idea why. Suddenly, his frenzied movements were interrupted by the familiar and comforting sounds of the TARDIS materializing on the concrete next to him. With a shout of joy, he pushed the doors open and dashed into the console room, only to be confronted by a message pinned to the scanner screen. When he pulled it down, he found it was written in high Gallifreyan, in an elegant yet archaic hand.
Hello thief, it read. We've had a bit of trouble with an attempted hijacking of me, but fortunately I was able to deal with the problem. Everything seems to be back online, but you may want to do a systems check soon. Sorry for making you worry. Love, Sexy.
There was a post script at the bottom. By the way, the Master is currently locked in the Zero Room. I suggest leaving him there.