Disclaimer: As much as I would love having The Master's incredibly sexy self tied up in my basement for the rest of forever, I do not own Doctor Who or anything affiliated with it. Except in my head.
This fic is set between "Planet of the Dead" and "Waters of Mars". I love reviews! And the Master!
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"Dad!" she ran at him, then stopped short when she noticed his intense stare. It wasn't a look she had ever seen before, but it was similar to the one she had gotten from him while they were stuck in the prison cell with Donna, when he told her she was nothing more than an echo of a Time Lord. Even if that was true, she was alive right now. She was real, but his look seemed to say otherwise. He looked both young and impossibly old at the same time. She made a mental note to ask him how he did that.
"You're dead, Jenny." His hands were buried in his pockets, as if that would protect him somehow while simultaneously making him look cool.
"No, I'm not!" She took another small step toward him, but he didn't move.
"Yes you are. You died." He said the last word with a strange finality. "You must be some sort of... psychic vision." The non-human telepathic field was stronger down here than up in the building. He could block it out easily enough, but perhaps it was messing with him anyway. Somehow. It had to be.
"No, really, I didn't- well I guess I did, but- It was the terraforming device!" she explained quickly, watching his face turn from impossible to incredible as she talked. "I breathed the gases in while I was dying, Cline said he saw me breathe out a cloud of them when I woke up. It healed me. It's meant to bring life, like you said! Look!" She carefully pulled down the white, button down shirt beneath her suit, just enough so that he could see that the wound was gone, as if it had never been.
"Of course!" he suddenly exploded, hitting himself in the forehead. "I'm thick! Thick thickity thick like molasses on Pluto!"
"Wouldn't that be frozen-"
"The terraforming device could create whole creatures from the gases alone, plants and animals, everything. Repairing an already living, well, already dead organism would have been easy compared to what it was meant to do." He was staring at her now, as if he still couldn't quite believe she was there.
Everything about her was real. She had cut her hair though. It was a bit shorter in the back now, but still in the ponytail. It suited her. She raised her arm. "Here, touch my hand. I'm real, you can feel my hearts beating." There was nothing interfering with his sensory systems. Nothing. He knew that.
The Doctor cautiously raised his hand and matched it to hers. Two hearts. A huge grin suddenly spread across his face and Jenny was promptly swept up in a hug. She laughed and felt herself being spun around. Her feet connected with the floor again, and she almost hit him in the head with her clipboard by accident. "What are you doing here?"
"I stole the ship!" she explained with a grin. "The one on Messaline, the one the humans and Hath came in. I wanted to see other worlds and save people like you do! It's been several months since I left though. Oh, but!" Jenny looked at the watch on her wrist. "We have exactly three minutes, we have to get back upstairs."
"Why, what's in three minutes?"
"Just come on!" She practically dragged him back to the elevator, across the huge, echoing chasm that was L0. "I'll tell you when we get upstairs, I'm on floor seven," she said, pressing the up arrow. It arrived very quickly, almost too quickly, as if that particular up arrow was given special permission to shove the others out of the way, and quite rudely too.
They hopped on and floor seven was reached without incident. Jenny quickly led the Doctor to a cubicle in the middle of the large room, surrounded by many other identical cubicles. She sat in the chair in front of the computer and the Doctor took the chair beside the desk. Jenny started to speak quietly, and in rushed tones.
"Okay, so I've been investigating this place for a while-"
"How long is a while?"
"A few months, but they finally hired me a week and a half ago after I wouldn't leave them alone-"
"That a girl!" he said with a grin.
Jenny beamed. "Thing is, it's weird here. There are tons of departments, lots of floor bosses and things like that, but no one really DOES anything. I mean, occasionally someone needs a file for the boss or they have to put something in the electronic databases, but aside from that, everyone just sits around talking and doing nothing. It's like-"
"Like they're all here for show," the Doctor finished. Jenny nodded and he turned to her computer.
"Internet capabilities, connections to most of the databases and servers in the building, and way too many backgrounds to choose from," she said, before he could ask her anything about the computer. He just grinned. "Thing is, it's not just that no one does anything," she said, lowering her voice even more. "I said I'd been researching this place for the last few months, and I found something weird. This particular office has been losing employees left and right."
"Losing? How do you mean losing?"
"They just disappear. I've spoken to sixteen different families, each family had a member who worked here, and all sixteen have disappeared within the last two months. They get up in the morning, come to work... and never make it back home again."
"Now that's odd. Let's have a look see." The Doctor pulled out his handy dandy sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the computer. The familiar whirring sound made Jenny smile.
She continued to speak while he was working, "The missing people are all humans and everyone who works here is human." The Doctor gave her a funny look. She sighed in exasperation. "Well of course I'M not, but I passed for it through a bit of trickery. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one who isn't. I've been sneaking around the personnel files," she explained. "Once the employees disappear, all trace of them is gone. Their personnel file is completely erased and their work area is given to someone else as soon as possible."
"Now there's something interesting!" he said, putting his glasses on. "There are a few hidden databases inside the system," he changed the setting on the sonic screwdriver and it whirred away again. The databases became visible. Two were very small, as if they were personal private servers, but the third was huge.
Jenny suddenly started talking fast again, as if she suddenly remembered something, "The past week I've been sneaking around the security cameras as well, and I noticed something weird." She paused, trying to see if he was listening or not. He looked at her and motioned for her to continue. "Every day, at the exact same time, for exactly fifteen minutes, all of the guards on L0 vacate the place. When they come back, they have some sort of... cargo transport vehicle, full of... stuff." She couldn't think of any other word. "And it seems as though the President disappears from his office at that same time every day, but no one ever sees him come or go."
"Is that why you were down there?" he asked, fiddling with the computer continuously.
She nodded, "I've been investigating down there the last few days, but there are a lot of hallways, and a huge door I can't get through without a code."
"Bah, codes, who needs codes?" he hit a button on the keyboard and grinned. "There we are! Hidden hard drives galore!" The huge server was laying open in front of them. Folders upon folders of information was at their fingertips. The Doctor chose one labeled "Radiation" and opened it. It was full of charts and graphs depicting what looked like radiation levels from some machine. Each piece of information was disjointed, as if they couldn't possibly combine to form one thing without the user going mad. Perhaps it would have been too frightening to see. He knew this couldn't be good.
"Wait," he suddenly turned to her. "If you've been down there, why haven't they caught you with security cameras and all that?"
"I loop them," she shrugged. "Hacking into their security system is easy."
His grin just got wider. She wasn't running around guns blazing anymore, she used her mind to investigate things now. Another Time Lord... Brilliant.
"I don't know if we can get back down there now though, they're unloading the stuff," she said, casually looking through the revealed files on the computer.
"Can you get into the security system again?" he asked.
"Yeah, sure. I'm guessing you have a plan?" Her eyes twinkled in excitement.
His grin spread to his entire face. "Time to get through that door!"