Author's Note:
Wow, four reviews for the last chapter, how exciting! Thanks very much to Omniac, Strange and Sad Angel, KlinicallyInsaneKoschei and KoscheithePianist, it was just great to hear from you all. Hope you enjoy this chapter too!
CHAPTER 10
It was like falling into a deep, black, never ending well, full of ice and fire and a soulless darkness. The emptiness sucked her down, plummeting into the yawning pit until it felt like she was dropping into a black hole, the bottomless abyss between the stars.
But then she opened her eyes and she was standing in a field of long, red grass, lush and beautiful, waving in the breeze. She looked around her warily. It was Gallifrey and yet not Gallifrey, a haunting, intensified dream-scape, familiar and yet strange, as though drawn from a child's over-embellished memory.
Nearby stood what appeared to be a young boy. He had his back to her, his face turned up to the infinite canopy of orange sky which stretched overhead, his hands palm down, lightly smoothing the blades of grass under his touch. He had short dark hair and was dressed in a black acolyte's robe, reminiscent of her own early days at the Academy on Gallifrey.
"Hello?" she ventured uncertainly.
He turned around slowly and she saw his round, childish face, the wide blue eyes full of frightened tears. With a stab of sudden compassion, she realised that this was the innocent child the Master had been, long ago, before Rassilon's betrayal had crippled and twisted and corrupted his life.
So many things should have been different...so many...
"Koschei?" she said softly. "It's going to be all right, I promise. Take my hands...and don't let go!"
Trustingly, he placed his hands in hers. She grasped them tightly and together they gyred away into the night.
Inexorably, beating like vulture wings around her head, his memories began to attack them, thick and fast.
FEAR...the dark, the long walk, ancient Time Lords both behind and in front of him, supposedly a guard of honour, but really just a guard, to stop him running. Eight years old, taking him for initiation, to stare into the Untempered Schism. He was afraid, so very afraid. He'd heard of the children who went mad when they looked. He didn't want to. He wanted to go home. He wanted to run in the fields of red grass with his friend Theta, calling up at the sky. He wanted his mother. But the Time Lords led him there, stood him in front of the gap in reality and he looked. He saw it, the immense and awesome and terrifying majesty of Time itself. And, within the silence of the stars, he heard it, his own double heartbeat, pounding in his ears, louder and louder, like a drum beat, calling to him, HURTING him...one two three four...one two three four...one two three four...
PAIN...Standing in the Great Hall of his father's manor. His father's face, stern and unrelenting, cold and distant. His mother crying bitterly. His father's voice, "You have brought shame to this house. You are no longer welcome here. I banish you."
Pain twisting his stomach, pain of rejection, pain of loss. Once he had been their greatest hope, the boy with the highest marks ever at the Academy, the boy most likely to be Lord President one day...how had it gone so wrong?
"You are dead to me, Koschei, I no longer have a son!"
Pride coming to his rescue, stiffening his spine, throwing defiance in their faces, the drums pounding relentlessly in his head. "My NAME is...the Master!"
Trying to tune out the mental barrage, Tejana tightened her grip on the small hands and began to pull, backwards through the darkness, doggedly dragging him up to the light.
FEAR...Fighting the Last Great Time War, resurrected by Rassilon to be the perfect warrior, because he knew so well how to kill and kill and kill again, without compunction and without mercy. Entrusted with the defence of the Cruciform, told that if it was lost, Gallifrey was lost also. But the Daleks were so many, thousands upon thousands, always more, no matter how many the Time Lords destroyed. They had no chance, they couldn't win, they had been sent on a suicide mission. He was afraid, so afraid, the gut-wrenching terror curdling in his stomach as the others fell around him, a nightmarish vision of what the Universe was to become. And then the Dalek Emperor came on board. He saw it and knew that he had to run, run like a coward, run so far they would never find him. Never die, never die, never never die...
PAIN...The Chameleon Arch, rewriting his molecular structure. Excruciating agony, the tearing away of the triple strand in his DNA, one of his hearts stopping, shrivelling, disappearing, every cell reforming and changing. Becoming that thing he hated, loathed, despised above all else, becoming human...
The child was becoming heavier, the memories clutching at him, clawing at him like vicious skeletal hands, weighing him down, pulling him back into the abyss. Gritting her teeth, Tejana clung even harder, determined not to let go.
FEAR...Standing on the flight deck of The Valiant, the Doctor levitating above him, upheld by the glowing telepathic field, floating towards him. "No, you can't do this. You can't - it's not FAIR!"
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry...but you know what happens now."
He didn't want to hear it, couldn't bear to hear it, not from the Doctor, not from his old friend Theta – he didn't have the RIGHT...
"No! No! No!"
"Because you wouldn't listen."
Cringing away, curled into a terrified ball, huddled against the wall as his enemy came closer and closer and closer. "NO!"
"But you know what I'm going to say now."
Damn the Doctor, why did he have to care so much, why couldn't he hate, why couldn't he make things easier? Didn't the fool realise they couldn't go back, even if they wanted to, it was too late, too late...The drums, eviscerating his head, the Doctor's arms around him, comforting him as yet again his plans fell apart.
"I forgive you."
PAIN...The bullet, Lucy's bullet, deep within his chest, exploding one of his hearts. Fierce agony, radiating through his body, the other heart failing, limping towards death. Gasping for breath, falling to the floor, the Doctor cradling him like a baby. Just like when they were kids, Theta always there to catch him when he fell.
"Always the women."
DEATH...Slipping away, darkness coming, pain and then more pain, resisting the regeneration. Never die, never die...channelling his energy, his essence, into the ring, his one chance, his only chance...
The Doctor howling in his ear, "REGENERATE!"
The drums, the damn drums, always driving him, forcing him to crush, to destroy, to hurt...
"How about that? I win!"
I hurt you, Doctor, and finally I win...wasn't that what it was always about? Winning? Wasn't it?
Vision fading, breathing laboured, the Doctor's tears falling on his face, his old friend's agonised expression the last thing he sees.
"Will it stop now, Doctor? The drumming? Will it stop?"
Heavier and heavier and heavier. Tejana was tiring, the darkness around her leeching away her own light. What she was doing was so wrong, such a grievous offence against him, a complete violation. She had no right to these memories, his most sequestered thoughts. They seemed to literally burn her skin as they slipped past her, swirling endlessly in the fathomless vortex of his consciousness. In saving him, she knew she was morally damning herself, but she had no choice. Redoubling her efforts, she fought harder, straining against the dreadful burden of the child, striving for the light.
Don't let go, Koschei...don't ever let go!
FEAR...Light coruscating, strength infusing his veins, renewing him, his disciples dying around him as he rose again, draining their pitiful essences so that he might live. Lucy, defying him, hating him, wanting him dead, the lethal potion in her hands.
"Lucy, you will obey me!"
Terror, rising within him, as he realised what the potion meant, what it could do to him – she wouldn't do it, couldn't do it, he had chosen her, shaped and formed her, his faithful companion...
"'Til death do us part, Harry!"
An explosion, fire slicing into him, howling agony, his body rending, tearing, ripping wide open, his life energy spilling out into oblivion...
PAIN...Lying on the floor in the Naismith mansion, beside the ruin of the machine he had built to bring the Time Lords to Earth. Awful, bitter realisation that his own people had crippled him, broken him, as a child. Rassilon, whom he had once revered, had done this to him and now was tossing him aside like a piece of diseased garbage. Hatred. Pain. The never-ending beating of the cursed drums. He'd had a home, a family, friends, a future.. now he had nothing, now he WAS nothing, King of the Wasteland...
"You'll die with me, Doctor."
"I know."
One last thing he could do, one thing to make up for all the things that should have been different, one thing to turn back the clock...
"Get out of the way!"
Goodbye, Theta...
"You did this to me...all of my life...you MADE me!"
Pouring his rage, his defiance, his LOATHING, into Rassilon's body, his own life energy, each blast burning him from the inside out, like the scorching heat of a thousand suns...
"One...two...three...FOUR!"
DEATH...Ana had gone, left him to die, spinning eternally through space in Rassilon's old TARDIS, alone and abandoned. Skipped off back to Earth, back to the Doctor, back to Handsome Jack, even though he had saved her, had saved everything. Always the women! So close to death now, can't move, can't see, hardly breathing. No second chances this time, no cunning plan, no pain even, just the encroaching numbness. Even the drums had deserted him, fading into nothingness as Gallifrey had died, the signal forever cancelled, leaving him in a silence he could not even begin to comprehend. Tears on his face, wishing Ana had stayed, at least until he was dead. He wanted to feel her arms around him at the end. He was so tired of being alone. Darkness now, nothing but the cold and the dark and the loneliness...
The last memory nearly broke Tejana, the guilt and the regret and the exhaustion causing her concentration to waver. She could feel the child's hands slipping away, she was losing him.. He would fall back down that long, black shaft, gone forever.
"No!" she screamed. "No, no no!"
She summoned one last effort of will, one last massive wrench, hauling the child backwards, ripping them both out of the writhing wilderness of the Master's mind.
And then she was free. She could feel the hard floor under her knees, his face cradled in her hands, his forehead pressed against hers.
Her eyes opened, desperately searching his face, looking for some expression, some emotion, some sign that he had returned with her. But there was nothing. His features remained as vacant and absent as they had been before.
With sick horror, the defeated realisation twisted through her like the blade of a knife.
She had left him behind...again.