No sacrifice
Summary: Should Jenny commit murder and change history? Or walk away and allow her father to suffer? M for Jenny/Master references.
Disclaimers: I own neither Doctor Who nor, alas, John Simm…
A/N: My first DW fic for many, many years. Please review!
She eases herself from beneath the unconscious arm and creeps carefully from the tousled bed. She is exhausted; but he is more so, curled up at last in sweat-sheened rest, hand flung across the pillow, lips parted slightly in deep, dreamless sleep. She has worked hard and sacrificed much to gain his trust, and he is completely open to her. As the pale gold of early morning light caresses his face, he seems almost innocent.
Now is the time to kill him.
She silently dresses, battle fatigues for a soldier on active duty. She wants protection from those penetrating eyes, even in sleep, and she will need to leave quickly after his death. The clothes fit snugly, favouring her lithe body but never designed for anything other than work, and she feels invincible. She reminds herself that she is not. The man on the bed: he is the one who thinks he is invincible.
She draws the knife from its hiding place.
It is smooth and sensuous, silky like his touch. For someone with so much power and evil in him he has been tender and kind, stroking her as if she were gossamer, running his tongue within her secret places as though she were spiders' webs. She smiles, but even her young and beautiful face cannot lighten the expression. She is his spider and he, lured fly-like to her lair, is about to answer for his past and future crimes.
Cool metal presses down against his beating artery.
She knows how it will be: the crimson arc across the wall, the sudden impotent gasp, eyes springing open, staring in a futile reflex action. She will be the last thing he sees, this traveller across universes, this manipulator of infant through to geriatric time, this seer of sights so awful and so wonderful that she can but imagine them. Then the centuries-old light will die, fading into lifelessness with this final incarnation: there will not be another.
She stares down at her greatest enemy.
This man is cruel and bitter: someone who destroys for pleasure, not for purpose. But he is also weak and transient, gazing into the terrible abyss and not emerging whole. He is strong and clever, a fierce and urgent lover; but he is also fragile and beautiful, his mouth soft and yielding, touchingly anxious to meet her needs. He is two men at constant war, his drum-beaten mind forever torn apart, suffering an eternal nightmare of endless conflict.
And puts the knife away.
Perhaps it would be kind to end it now, to bring his misery to a quiet close, to take his future suffering madness from him. To save mankind from his descent into hell. Or perhaps he deserves his perpetual torment of self-inflicted mediocrity. Perhaps death would be too kind. This is one moral dilemma she won't share with Dad, though he would know the answer. She feels heavy, burdened by this strange responsibility.
He murmurs in his sleep. "Forgive me."
And, like her father after her, she does.