Disclaimer: I don't own "Doctor Who" or "Twilight", and the essential details of the original concept of this fic came from a video posted on YouTube by heroesdwtw- which can be found on YouTube at .com/watch?v=VTuSUBk8fXk- and is used with their permission

Feedback: Much appreciated

AN: For those who haven't read the novel, this takes place after the Wayfarer crew tried to torture their Dalek prisoner, only to fail to get even a sound out of it while the Doctor- and Bella, in this case- were unable to do anything but listen

Prisoner of the Daleks

As I stared at the purplish blob-like creature lying on the ground before me, dimly illuminated by the red glow of what I assumed were the room's emergency lights, I tried to resist the urge to throw up; I hadn't managed to get a good look at it when it was originally extracted from the casing, but what I had seen suggested that it wouldn't have looked much better if it had been unharmed. What looked like a brain was lying on the ground in a manner that reminded me unnerving of a rotted melon, squid-like arms lying both curled around the creature and spread out like dead worms, all kinds of wires and cables hanging out of the Dalek casing behind the creature...

No matter how hard I tried, I was never able to bring myself to completely think of what I saw as having once been a complete organism; it was like...

The best description I can come up with is that a part of me was trying to deny that humanity had reached this point; seeing what vampires and werewolves could do was one thing- I could excuse it to a point as them acting on their new instincts to eliminate a clear threat-, but the idea that humans could reach a point where we would do this to a living creature...

That almost scared me more than the implications of what the crew had said before they'd forced the Doctor and I out of the room.

I'd thought that I'd seen the worst this trip would have to show me when I saw an entire planet being destroyed by what the Doctor and Bowman called the 'Osterhagen Principle' (Some kind of planetary self-destruct that I didn't want to think about; what the Doctor had said about it being invented in my time was more than enough for me), but when I thought about the fact that the Daleks had some other plan going on at the moment, I was starting to feel sick; the sheer scale of what we were dealing with was just... terrifying.

God... I didn't even have the comfort of Edward's voice in my head any more- it was as though the shock of meeting the Doctor and learning that aliens existed had driven him out of my head; I hadn't heard anything from him since I tried jumping off that cliff-, and here I was, centuries and light-years away from my home, while the only people who could get me back to the thing I needed to use to go back there spent their time torturing monsters.

The Doctor might have helped the crew disable as much of the Dalek's weapons and defences as he could, but after everything I'd heard about the Daleks from the Doctor, I'd run out of the room even before Koral had 'opened' the casing, and the subsequent screams I'd heard as they did... whatever... to it hadn't left me feeling comfortable.

I'd felt like I should say something to object to their 'plan'- if you could call brutally torturing a living thing a plan; having been the victim myself once when James was hunting me I didn't see any appear in it myself-, but if even the Doctor couldn't make an impression on the crew, I hadn't seen any point in trying anything myself...

In the end, it seemed like everything humanity did just ended with us hurting people; any thoughts about Edward's belief that vampires were the only 'monsters' was relatively easy to push aside in the face of this kind of evidence.

As the Doctor crouched down to examine the creature, a pair of thick-rimmed glasses on his face as he studied it, I wondered who was going to get stuck with the job of clearing that thing away-

"You're still alive," the Doctor suddenly said, breaking off my train of thought as I almost automatically moved to crouch down beside him, staring incredulously at the Dalek as its eye closed.

"Oh, come on," the Doctor said, looking at the creature with an almost critical manner. "You can't fool me."

For a moment, I almost hoped that the Doctor was wrong- the concept of anything looking like that and still being alive seemed almost more wrong than the torture-, but then the creature's single bulbous eye appeared to move slightly to look in his direction, and I knew that he was correct.

"It's me," the Doctor said. "The Oncoming Storm."

The Dalek's eye opened wider, the creature letting out a faint sickening gurgle as it studied him.

"Or maybe you just know me as the Doctor," my friend said.

The creature's only response was another vague mutter whose tone and content were impossible to make out, although a faint gleam in its eye didn't make me feel any better.

"That's the trouble with jumping the time lines," the Doctor said, sitting down on the floor as he looked at the Dalek. "It's difficult to work out where we're up to. Dalek history was confusing enough before the Time War."

"DOC...TOR..." the creature said, its voice a low gurgle of the voice it had possessed in its casing, the hair on the back of my neck standing up from the disturbing tone of the voice; any thoughts I'd had about asking what had been so complicated about the Daleks' timeline- and how could anyone have a complicated history from a time-traveller's perspective; surely he'd know most of the details anyway?- were forgotten as I stared in horror and disgust at the sight before me.

"Yes?" the Doctor said after a pause.

"ONLY... AT... THE END... DO YOU COME..." the Dalek said, its voice quivering from the apparent effort. "TO GLOAT."

"No," the Doctor said, shaking his head. "No, I'm not gloating."

"THEN... KILL... ME...."

"I can't," the Doctor said.

Even as a part of me couldn't help but wonder how any part of the Doctor could make him not want to kill the thing before us, the rest of me had to admire my friend's resolve; after everything the Daleks had done to him, making that kind of choice couldn't have been easy...

"COWARD," was all that the Dalek had to say to that.

"There's no need to fight me," the Doctor said.

"THEN... WHY HAVE YOU COME?" the Dalek asked.

"I'm not here for that," the Doctor said, shaking his head in an almost pitying manner as he looked at the hideous creature before us. "You're finished. Even you must admit that."

"DALEKS... NEVER... CAPITULATE..."

"That's your problem," the Doctor said, sighing as he leant back against the wall, shaking his head in exasperation. "There's no reasoning with you. You've all got one-track minds. I bet if you could fire your gun now you'd exterminate me on the spot."

"YES!"

"You're serious?" I said, unable to restrain my incredulity as I looked at the mess of flesh and pulp that had once been a living being. "Killing the Doctor won't get you anything; if you just tried asking for some mercy maybe people would give it to you-!"

"DALEKS DO NOT PLEAD," was all that the creature had to say to my effort.

"I know," the Doctor said grimly, holding out an arm to push me back slightly so that the Dalek was focused on him rather than me once more. "But you could have saved yourself a lot of bother if you'd spoken up sooner. Bowman only wanted to talk."

"BOWMAN...?"

"The man who was... interrogating you," the Doctor said, clearly trying to avoid actually saying the word 'torture' due to the obvious implications of the word on its own even without the sight before us (I was trying to avoid thinking about that myself; I was uncomfortable enough with Bowman without giving myself a reason to hate him).

"HE FAILED," the Dalek said, a hint of triumph in its voice as it spoke. "I SHOULD NOT... HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF... TO BE CAPTURED. BUT HIS FAILURE... WAS THE GREATER. NO MATTER WHAT HE DID TO ME... I WOULD NOT TALK."

"Very impressive, I'm sure," the Doctor said dismissively

"HUMANS DO NOT UNDERSTAND TORTURE."

"Oh, I think they do," the Doctor said, looking over apologetically at me as he spoke, as though he wanted to make sure that I knew he wasn't talking about me when he said this. "It's not one of their more endearing traits, but they do know how to inflict pain and suffering, I'll give you that."

"I EXPECTED NOTHING LESS."

"No," the Doctor said, shifting slightly as he spoke, as though his personal discomfort about this topic was extending to physical discomfort as well. "That's wrong. Humans are capable of love and mercy as well. And generosity and charity too. There is no limit to the good they can do- or that they are capable of."

Despite the uncertainty of our situation, the fact that the Doctor was able to say that about humanity even with evidence of how he could be wrong did a lot to make me feel better about my humanity in a way that I hadn't felt since Edward had left me.

"Not like you," the Doctor continued, his eyes narrowing slightly as he looked at the Dalek. "All you know is pain and suffering."

"AND THAT IS WHY WE WILL SUCCEED," the Dalek said simply. "WE UNDERSTAND PAIN. HUMANS DO NOT."

Looking at the twisted Dalek casing that I'd seen earlier, and remembering what the Doctor had told me about the Daleks in the intervening time- their entire race, mutated by a prolonged war, left with no other apparent choice but to literally connect themselves into that 'travel machine' to get around-, I couldn't help but think for a moment that it had a point; anything that could endure something like that definitely had a point about it understanding pain better than us...

"BUT THE HUMAN RACE WILL BE DEFEATED," the Dalek continued. "ALL HUMANS WILL CEASE TO EXIST. THE DALEKS WILL ERADICTE THEM FROM THE UNIVERSE!"

"Never," the Doctor said in response, with such cold certainty that I would have believed him even if I didn't know that we were in his past right now.

"THE DALEKS WILL TRIUMPH! THERE IS NOTHING THAT CAN STOP US FROM CHANGING THE PATH OF HISTORY- NOT EVEN YOU, DOC-TOR!"

"You're delirious," the Doctor responded, scorn clear in his tone.

"THE DALEKS WILL CONQUER AND DESTROY," the Dalek said; despite the fact that it still looked like something that a larger animal had thrown up- or at least partly chewed-, it actually sounded stronger now than it had done earlier. "WE WILL ELIMINATE ALL HUMAN LIFE FROM ITS VERY BEGINNINGS! WE WILL CONQUER TIME AND SPACE! THE FUTURE WILL BELONG TO THE DALEKS!"

"Oh yeah?" the Doctor said, leaning over to glare angrily at the Dalek, his patience with the creature lost. "Well, get this: I've seen the future. You lot are going to end up so hungry and mad for power that you bite off more than you can chew. And the whole conquest of time and space thing is going to blow up in your faces."

As he continued speaking, he moved in so close to the lump of flesh in front of him that I wondered how he could even stand the smell of it; somehow I couldn't imagine that thing smelling any better when it was healthy, never mind in its current state. "You're all going to burn and no matter how much you try to come back, or which of you remain, I'm always gonna be there to stop you. So just remember; there's a storm coming!"

For a moment, the Dalek seemed to shrink back slightly at the Doctor's words, but any retreat it made was only a brief one as it quickly regained its composure.

"YOU THREATEN ME WHEN I CANNOT FIGHT BACK," the thing said with a perverted satisfaction in its tone. "YOU HAVE ONLY COME TO WATCH ME DIE. BUT THE DALEKS WILL TRIUMPH! THE DALEKS WILL ALWAYS SURVIVE! WE WILL BE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE!"

As though that was all that it had the strength to say, the creature groaned, convulsed in a disturbing manner, and then seemed to deflate like a balloon that had lost all its air, the eye closing as it fell into silence at last.

"Oh God..." I whispered, holding a hand up to my mouth to stop myself giving into the urge to throw up. "That was just..."

I wasn't sure what term could effectively describe the sheer disgust I felt at the sight before me; the Dalek's speech about its superiority may not exactly have done much to endear it to me, but that didn't mean I liked to think about what it must have gone through physically before its demise...

"Of course!" the Doctor suddenly yelled, leaping to his feet and smacking his forehead with his hand. "That's what they were doing on Hurala!"

"What?" I asked, looking at him in confusion. "That's what who were doing on Hurala?"

"The Daleks!" the Doctor explained, looking urgently at me. "They couldn't have known that we were there- TARDISes were shielded from Dalek sensors long ago; they'd never find the old girl unless they were actively looking for her, and even then it would take everything one of their ships just to get through the defences and figure out where I was-, so the only reason they were at Hurala was to raid its databanks!"

"Uh... Doctor, you're not making any sense," I said, hoping that the man I needed to get home hadn't snapped on me. "What could Hurala have that the Daleks would want? I mean... well, it was a dump..."

"Oh, it's a dump now, but the Lodestar station on Hurala was 'the gateway to the stars' in its heyday; what it didn't have about the various planets in the area wasn't worth knowing," the Doctor said, his tone momentarily dismissive before his expression became more urgent. "And one of those worlds that would have been in its databanks was Arkheon..."

"Arkheon?" I asked.

"Located near the Crab Nebula, just past the Pleiades and left at the Blue Star Worlds, but that's not important right now," the Doctor answered, waving a hand dismissively as he looked intently at me. "What is important is that it's the home of the Arkheon Threshold, an interesting little temporal rift that gave it a reputation as the 'Planet of Ghosts'-"

"Ghosts?" I repeated uncertainly; it was a bit of a stretch, but I'd once thought that about the existence of vampires and werewolves.

"Well, actually, they were quasi-temporal personality echoes generated by the rift reaching back and forth through time, but the 'Planet of Quasi-Temporal Personality Echoes' lacks the same ring to it, doesn't it?" the Doctor said, shaking his head before he continued. "The important thing is that there's a small chronic schism at the heart of the planet, creating a tear in time and space; if the Daleks manage to find that threshold, their science and engineering, combined with their thirst for power and conquest and the untapped potential of a time/space anomaly could give them a foothold in time that they can use to destroy humanity."

For a moment, I could only stare silently at the man before me, hoping that he'd inform me that he'd just been joking; the concept of being stuck in the future was bad enough, but the idea of us having to deal with a plot to destroy the human race itself...

"Is that... possible?" I asked, looking apprehensively at him after he'd shown no signs of changing his explanation. "I mean, destroying humanity... you already said they didn't do that..."

"History can change," the Doctor said grimly. "We have to ensure that it doesn't change the way the Daleks want it to."

I didn't bother arguing with that; after everything I'd seen of them so far, and after the Doctor's last 'conversation' with that Dalek, there was no way that anything they wanted could be a good thing.

I didn't know what I could do to help the Doctor right now, but I did know that I couldn't let the Daleks win...