The Master fought long and hard to jump into this fic, and finally...he won. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
A bit of the life, lifted out of The Year That Never Was.
Characters: The Doctor (Ten) The Brigadier; Martha Jones' sister Tish, mentions of Lucy Saxon and some bizarre little fellow in a shabby black coat and wild hair who does impossible things.
The world is on fire and the Thames is frozen.
Blood-red knives of sunlight are rising over London. There was a time when he liked nothing more than to watch this moment—sunsets and the misty ghostlights are something Scotland truly excels at—but London? London is special when the sun returns.
The Doctor's face is drawn tight from lack of sleep and peace. Winter is cold, bitterly so and that's not unusual for London...what's odd about this winter is the snow. There's simply megatons of it falling all over Europe. For three days it fell in slow-motion, dirty, grey and smelling of atmospheric pollution. After that the snow grew whiter as it ran out of particle interference. The city was now layered like a Rigellian wedding-cake—shades of grey and white and grey and white and now the winds are picking up feathery plumes of granulated ice off the frozen cap of the Thames. It is extremely odd for the residents to see a river like the Thames freeze up. The brine levels alone make this a grand effort of Natural Chemistry and their life spans are too short to remember their last Ice Age.
The good news is it's hampered the Toclofane and they aren't out in this...because to be bald about it, there aren't many chances to find a troublesome citizen to hunt in these conditions. It isn't much fun for them, but they did learn that overhanging icicles were sparkly and loud when you bowled through them like so many ninepins.
Small favors. Somehow, that makes the shivering humans feel a little better as they scrape up their next meal out of anything and everything. Small favors get them through.
Small as they get.
The Doctor is sleep-deprived to the point that his eyes are sore. In this altered form, everything tastes the same. Like nothing. He goes through the motions, and the Master makes sure he eats. He can't risk getting the Master's attention in the wrong area.
It is difficult to live from day to day, because it requires day to day camouflage. The Master isn't stupid. He is a Time Lord. This situation wouldn't stop the Master. The Master's been in even worse situations than this and he's always survived them...so he isn't going to insult the Doctor by thinking he can't. If there's one thing the Master can't stand, it's having an idiot for an enemy.
In a warped sense, what the Doctor feels now is an encapsulated form of what the Master has felt throughout most of their combined lives. The Master had never been a stranger to trouble, but once he went bad (as opposed to the Doctor's rouge), he went bad all the way, and the Doctor had been one of the forces to deal with him. Too often that meant incarceration or leaving him for dead. Again and again he walked away from the Master, mourning him in his mind, and again and again he came back.
So.
If he didn't engineer a small act of rebellion once in a while, the Master would stop being quite so pleased with his successes, and start getting suspicious (never a faraway possibility when your paranoia is at critical mass levels). The Doctor is incapable of being idle or accepting his fate. It is one of the many traits he shares with the Master. Time Lords aren't good with defeat. Even extinct, they still top the Universe's Worst Losers List.
Most of their current relationship took flesh when he was in his third body and the Master was seeing his "last". It was king against king and queen against queen, rook to bishop and knight to rook and it would take a prize dunce to overlook the significance of their board: Earth.
The Master said once in wry bitterness, that it always came down to Earth with the Doctor.
The Master thinks he knows why Earth is so important to the Doctor. The Doctor is perfectly willing to perpetrate the misunderstanding. If there's one thing he's learned from the past, it's that people usually stop looking when they 1) decide what they're looking for, and then 2) find it. No one digs below the bottom of the well.
The Master finds Ten a boring number. Terribly, terribly boring. It's so...nice. It's a perfectly nice number, five, multiplied by two. It's perfect. It's too perfect. It's so perfect it is monotonous in its perfection; it hammers its glorious superior perfection into the imperfect Universe and the Master didn't really like anything associated with Ten. He didn't even like his own tenth incarnation. He hadn't had much luck when he was a Ten. Yes, he's still rather nostalgic about that operatic dandy with the yellow car. It had been so much fun. The best he can do out of respect for those happier, simpler battles is track down the Brigadier and ensure his thorough lockup in his Antarctic Base.
The holidays are coming up, and what's a good holiday without proper tribute? This holiday was in the middle of northern hemisphere's worst weather, cold as a cobblemouse's prospects on the south side of Mount Lung. He was going to celebrate in his own special way, by opening the security cameras and letting the Doctor wish the old Brig a Happy Christmas. Ah, Sir Allistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. Ten syllables of annoyance from the old days. The Master tended to chuckle to himself at odd occasions about that particular bit of mischief, which alarmed Lucy worse than the threat of a beating. She doesn't know what he's laughing at because the Master keeps this little bit of information to himself as a cheerful little secret. He's going to enjoy this moment so very much.
Its his latest campaign of revenge against the number 10.
He picks up the sanitized news of the day and skims it over for anything amusing. That problem with being the total dictator of the world is if there's new news you probably aren't happy about it because it isn't good news. Dictators make their own news. He sniffs because the most interesting report under his gaze is the latest on a billiards tournament (grown more popular since the Master had in a fit of admitted pique, outlawed cricket in tribute to the Fifth Doctor, and billiards because it was bound to irritate the non-cricket crowd. Tomorrow he'll probably outlaw football-just to see if Chile will finally up and rebel. He drops the paper and steps on it on his way to the window. Billiards, pah.
The Master ignores the human game of billiards because of the frequency of 10 in its logistics. Normally the game would amuse him to pieces; it's an elegant slaughter of mathematics, physical skill and tactics and geometry, and despite the sheer braininess of the game the elites occasionally dabble in it when they're playing politics with the other children, but they view it as a commoner's sport and the conceit is ridiculously amusing. The Master has hobnobbed and moonlit his way through smoke-choked dives and hovels where the poorest and roughest of the poor put out every penny they owned over a game between two equally matched wizards in the art. Those undercover escapades are the closest he's come to reliving his reckless youth in Shobogan dens. It's high math and brawny gladiators put together, certainly more hygienic than cockfighting (and better for the planet because only human lives are at stake), and people actually maim and kill each other over the games (another reason to be amused; just last week the Master read, howling with laughter, the juicy details about an international fracas with billiards involving a retired Admiral, his loyal East-Londoners, a troupe of arrogant expatriate Indian colonists, three orphans, and the entire damned crew of the HMS TEAZER). 1 The whole thing reminded him why humans were occasionally worth keeping around: they could attract the most bizarre trouble.
Billiards is an elegant massacre of mathematics and strategy is usually locked within the world of the peasantry, but because of the reliance on the perfection of the triangle of ten balls he finds the game avoidable. He looks elsewhere at tetrahedrals because they are all about the number ten. He grumbles at the sight of close packed hexagonals—who knew humans used cphs so much in architecture? But they are and they are everywhere. Humans should be glad he only destroyed 10% of the population—a decimation, if you were, of a species is an appropriate sacrifice. If one felt like resisting the pun, they wouldn't say, "pay tithe" (a tenth) but the Master has no reason to resist. It's delightful.
He wonders if the Doctor has noticed the pun of his actions—the use of 10 in his culling of the herds. Some of his incarnations would not only notice they would have said something about it—dear little Five could never keep his indignation to himself, which made him all the more amusing (when he wasn't being a tiresome little brat).
The Master busies himself with the latest reports on the work-camps, snickering at how he's grown ahead of schedule for the rocket development and wondering if he should do something about that recently-discovered lump of Delekenium in...Utah? Nevada? Some boring desert. Whatever. It might come in handy. Martha Jones' sister serves him a silent tray of tea as he reads, and he grows so interested in the Dalekenium problem he forgets to throw the remnants at her. He doesn't remember until she's left the room to finish her other chores. Ah, well, mustn't be too predictable. Maybe next time...
The Master scrolls through a final summary of mercury stores, unhappy that there's no way of avoiding the fluid intakes. There had been a time when he'd dreaded space-time travel because of mercury; it was the easiest element for the Time Lords to track. For years the Master couldn't hope to even the rudest of backwaters for a supply run without feeling nervous about his chances. He sometimes wonders how the Doctor avoided the Temporal Gestapo. Or Magnus. Or the Rani, for that matter. Drax didn't bear thinking about. He was probably the only renegade the Time Lords had avoided because of the annoyance factor. The Doctor in his third body had solved the mercury problem, but the Master can't apply Three's wizardry to his rockets; Three was a hardheaded, stubborn old thing, and he'd achieved the impossible by literally convincing his TARDIS to compensate with alcohol instead of mercury.
The Master finished work and tapped a code into his laptop. The security camera instantly pulled up a familiar image: an old, human man grown thin and frail in confinement. The Master insisted on keeping him in his UNIT uniform, and the old soldier had predictably kept good care of himself to keep from dishonoring his badge of office. He was currently seated inside the main room of his guest quarters, patiently working on a paper clock model. His arthritic hands were shaking but he moved slowly to compensate for the loss of dexterity. The Master scowled, because it would severely restrict his plans if the old fossil died on him before he could surprise the Doctor.
With that thought came another. He smirked to himself, half-surprised at his ability to think of something that would upset the Brigadier so much, and wrestled with his conscience. Normally he didn't wrestle with his conscience at all—it had enough sense to stay out of his way, but there was the admitted logistic problem of diverting power...power he should really be using for rocket development.
Oh, why not? One only lived one life at a time!
He giggled to himself, stabbed a few codes into the computer, and laughed out loud when the RECEIVE message popped back. Sometimes he was just so clever. "Stone cold brilliant," The Doctor had said of him. So true. So very, very true. He'd just found another way to make the Doctor and the Brigadier more miserable. Christmas was going to be fun this year. It would light up like neon.
Neon. The element of 10. Rather like the Doctor in his 10th form—flighty, never quite grounded and luminescent.
On a plane more suited to his megalomania, the Master admits there are times when Ten coincides with his tastes very well. Take, for example, The Tenth Verse in that book of superstitious poetry the humans swore by on this part of the world was called The Creation. He likes that ironic parallel to his own actions. Like their mythological God, he called, gathered...and it was good.
The Prime Minister of England lived at 10 Downing Street. The Commoners simply called it "Number 10." He loved that the Tenth Doctor had to take orders from Britain's Number Ten.
10 is the number of the playmaker in English football. That's rather a cute little connection.
One thing those silly little humans got right. They too believed that numbers had souls (either that or Pythagoras stole the concept from another drunken wandering alien. The Master can't understand why ancient Greece was such a fascinating time for Galactic tourists to come calling...the planet's era must have been a fad of some sort). He doesn't give them too much credit for that shared insight with Gallifreyans: broken clocks being right twice and all that, etc., etc.
A flutter of ice clatters against the glass of his office window. The Master looks up and watches the crystals streak slowly down to the frozen sill. The Master is bored. Bored enough that he's even letting his brain wander off without him, and just look where it went. It goes to show you can't turn your back on anything, including yourself.
Ten. He was being annoyed about Ten. Ten is the smallest possible noncototient. It has only three possible divisors: One and Two and Five, which, purely by bizarre happenstance and Pythia-level-spooky-meta-coincidence, just happens to be the numerical values of the three most infuriating of the Doctors' collective lives (Five is adorable when he's angry, but still infuriating).
The First—The Master shudders to remember how that once-creative and interesting thinker collapsed under the weight of his own familial obligations to turn into that dried-up old husk of a boring, pompous old Time Lord (emphasis on the "Lord" half). Centuries—three whole centuries-of screaming at him to wake up, grow up and see the cold, hard Universe as it really was hadn't done a thing to make Thete smarter—oh, no, he had to run headlong into the scandal of that mess with Arkytior to get that far in wisdom. And for what? Jumping planet clean off Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS with an underage child when he was physically a mere century shy before his first regeneration?!
The Master snorted in disbelief when he first heard the scandal, for that plot would have been rejected as rubbish by even the most sensational of fiction writers. A rebel in his elder years? Who would have thought? Stubborn, stubborn...but in so many ways it reminded the Master of what the Doctor was really about: Decisive action, too late. Only a desperate or crazed idiot would have become a fugitive in such an aged body with a toddling child in tow.
Which just goes to show, the Doctor has never been an ordinary crazed, desperate idiot. He had the luck of the idiots with him—there was a quote that Terran poet said about defending stupid and crazy people that applied to him rather neatly.
The Master looks up from his desk for the moment, his quicksilver gaze afixed to the hypnosis of snowfall. This is such a wet, soggy world. The Martians were brain-impaired to even think of taking it over. Stupid green hissers. It would have been nice if the Doctor had settled in the Sahara or the core of the Arctic before the Climate Change. But, no, he liked the mold-culture zones. There were times when he wondered if the rumours about the Doctor's mother really were rumours. At the very least it would provide a logical explanation for his bizarre fondness for humans (one of these days he would have a talk with Jane Goodall and try to get an insight as to her fondness for primates; the two relationships were identical). Honestly, who volunteered to stand up for primates? And ones that hadn't even discovered their true evolutionary roots in Aquatic Africa at that!
There were days when it was a burden to be so superior.
The Master is terribly, terribly bored with his successes. There, he's admitted it. There's nothing much going on, and he could stir up some trouble, or poke a new hole in Canada, but the fact of the matter is, he shouldn't be too predictable of a dictator. The planet's psyched up to expect some sort of attack upon a population here or a country there on a daily basis, and that causes a dangerous level of numbness. Truly desperate people do annoying things like try uprisings and revolts. Besides, it's fun to not do what your cowering populace thinks you're going to do. A reliable factor for the human race is their toxic level of imagination. Every day he doesn't attack something is a day in which they cower all the harder. So he's made the sensible political decision and given himself a day off from the usual routine of killing. That was bearable for all of two hours, but he's seriously getting bored now. Bored enough that he isn't even going to bother looking up Lucy for entertainment. Bored enough that he doesn't even want to plot out his upcoming invasion of the Galaxies.
You know you're bored when even the prospect of harassing the so-called Dominators doesn't appeal.
The Master looks down at his hand, which is stubbornly right-dominant this time around. It's been scrawling glyphs all over his stationary while he was buried in thought. The Master frowns, for a mathematical pyramid isn't normally his idea of a good time. And a pyramid for the number 10 is less of anyone's fun. Ech.
Ten is the divisor of one and two and five.
He must have had five on the brain; look at the number of times he'd written it.
Five.
The Master remembers him easily, and with just a bit of pity. So young on the inside and the outside. He was the personification of the Doctor he remembered in their youth just before their final growth-cycle: the boy that wanted to play, but was too timid to fight for his place in the teams. He wanted to be asked in, because Rassilon knew, Thete couldn't bring himself to go where he wasn't wanted. It was just one of the many things they'd fought about. The Master had fought for his place, fought for respect, and when he was shut out of the teams at school...physically put himself in. Thete never took that route. He preferred to back away quietly, even if the others despised him for his weakness.
The young Thete had fought as hard as Koschei had in just being himself. Harder, perhaps... If anything could make the Master's House feel sympathy to another Gallifreyan, it would be to witness how Thete's own family looked down upon him. One's parents weren't enough when the majority of your House was in dire need of a whipping boy—The Master knew that as a sum truth.
But all their lives, Thete had been something and someone the Master had needed to know.
"Have you tried to understand?" Thete had argued in class over and over at his other classmates, and also their own teachers. "An equation is not a solution! An equation is a map! How can you solve a problem if you don't understand it?"
Very well, Doctor, but you never tried to understand me, did you?
The Master has hammered this question into his own brain so long that he believes this to be true. Hids memory has eroded a bit with time, but thankfully he doesn't forget things in his regenerations like the Doctor.
The Doctor's memory losses are—were-rare for a Time Lord, but it explained his different personalities. There was simply less bleedover from the past into the present. And without the Doctor's family to bolster his identity (or decide which bits and pieces he should retain), he lost memory with each regeneration. Most of these memories can only be excavated with great effort and detail. The good news is it leads to great entertainment value. Five could not have been Five if he'd remembered his past clearly. Watching him rant about the value of life was like their Academy days. Thete had managed to alienate most of their class with his values—not because they were false, but because he could not keep out of the cardinal sin of separation. Thete couldn't avoid his personal investment in an issue and that left him unclean. He never understood that. Never. Poor naive, silly fellow. Entertaining, but silly. And the way he placed his enemies' lives upon his own head? Oh, tut. So noble and self-sacrificing. Such a non-wonder that he burnt out like a star from the weight of his own responsibility. A young form and an ancient soul.
One's equation: "If one is oppressed all others are oppressed."
Five's equation was twofold: The five virtues of Japan: Loyalty, compassion, justice, honor, and respect. In their absence was Five's Five worst qualities: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (The Fifth Doctor accepting his fate? Oh, ugh).
1
/ \
5 2
The Master scowled at his scribbles. In all the Galaxies, 2 was the first number of discord; the first number for division, the first number to stand as rival to the first number in creation. The first Paradox. The first freedom from rules.
Two's equation: The first number to replicate One, and thus simultaneously creating the first harmony and the first contradiction at the same time: for two was both the first unity and mental division. Silly little, foolish, contradictory Two. Two was the number of Pandora's Box. Two was the genie in the bottle. Two was the 'after' in the 'happily ever after' and the Master, who thought of the ragged little tramp as being the only Universal Inconstant, was frequently annoyed at mathematically parsing him.
Everyone knew one's first regeneration was...flawed.
The fact that he'd survived his first change by himself said something about the character of will (and again, reminded the Master that he didn't pick unworthy adversaries. Even the flawed, broken versions of the Doctor were worthy in their own way). But the Doctor's new self had resembled less a regeneration and more like one of those old mythological TARDIS renewals. There was a very good reason why the Time Lords chose to separate themselves from those obsolete craft; the longer they were in those strange old Timeships the greater the chance that the ship would change them. You never saw anyone with a scrap of self-respect piloting a Type 40. Just look at Ushas; if there had been any redeeming value to the old models she would have said so.
The Master had blessedly little experience with the Doctor in his second form. Just his fashion nonsense was enough reason to stay away. Had the man no pride? The Doctor in that form simply hadn't understood. Socially awkward. Inept. Crazed, possibly. The Master flattered himself with his expertise on crazy. It was as though every stifled impulse Thete had locked down in his youth had jumped out upon his Change.
Two's infuriating habit of playing the clown when he was far from a clown...what a cosmic joke. The Master's lip twisted in recollective distaste. All that energy and cleverness, wasted yet again on his high-handed morals. He wouldn't have been caught and force-regenerated without them.
The Master frowned as an ancient memory flickered up. It was old; more than 500 years if you went by the old Gallifreyan clock. He rose to his feet with his frown still glued to his young face. It made him look as deadly as he really was. He left the office and walked to the holding area.
The Doctor was slumped in his corner, frail skull pressed to the floor with his eyes half-shut. When the Master drew close, he made the effort to lift his head. His arms trembled from the strain.
"You never heard the drums, did you." The Master bent to whisper into the closest ear.
The Doctor never blinked, because they'd already had this conversation. "No."
"What do you hear, when you're alone?"
The Doctor blinked, uncomprehending.
"Do you hear the War? The Other War? The Galactic War?"
The Galactic War? The Master could read the confusion in the wizened up face without telepathy. "...no."
Not sure to be relieved or disappointed, the Master returned to his office. The Doctor's filmy eyes studied holes inside his spine the entire way.
Well, that was pointless. The Master scowled at himself. What was it about the Doctor, that even getting a straightforward answer wasn't satisfying?
He leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled together in deep thought. The security screen across the desk showed the Doctor was staying put exactly where he'd been left. Wise of him. He was due for another escape attempt soon...must remember to let him get a little further this time. Good for morale.
The Master's lips quirked up as a familiar figure crossed the pixelated images. Martha Jones' little sister. She was worth keeping around just for the amusement value; she hated him so much. But it was also feeding time at the zoo. This might be good for a few chuckles. He set the cameras to track them both and settled back, feet propped on his papers.
"Doctor?"
The Doctor has already lifted his head once today, and doesn't really want to do it again, but Tish is there and she's kneeling at his side and she is worried. She's a lovely girl, even if she doesn't know it. Tish glows like a flame under carnelian. "Doctor, I've got you some soup today. It's miso. Do you like it?"
"I suppose." He agrees faintly. She doesn't know it all tastes like ash. He'll accept it and smile. "I can't remember when I had it last."
"Oh. Well, neither can I." Tish smiles feebly. The Master makes a point of feeding her family better than anyone else. It fosters resentment with the other prisoners and doubles their shame. She is aware of the Doctor's diminished strength, and fills the soup cup one-third of the way. He can bear that weight, and cradles the cup in both of his hands, letting the warmth ease the induced arthritis. He sips slowly.
The girl hasn't slept properly in months. Small wonder. She's worried for her parents and terrified for her sister. Her labor is grueling for its mental strain. And it saddens him that there's enough room in her heart to worry about him.
"I think I remember now." He said slowly. "Yes. Reminds me of the Thames."
Tish is surprised into a giggle. "Miso isn't the Thames."
"Well you get seaweed in both, don't you?" He asks innocently. "But that's not what I meant."
"I don't understand."
"It's the color." He tips the almost-empty mug to show her the broth. Like all good miso, it is cloudy with bits and tofu. "Reminds me of the last time I got caught in it. The Thames, I mean. Not the miso."
"You were in the Thames?" Tish is amazed, impressed, and sympathetic. The Thames is not something one seeks to join.
"Well, not on purpose. It was an accident. I was much clumsier back when I was younger." He took one last drink. "Much, much younger. Really much younger. Not as young as you, but as far as my people go, I was still a sprat. Hadn't even met my prime."
"How old were you?"
"Let's see...according to myself back then, I was 451 years old. Embarrassing when you think about it."
"That doesn't sound young to me."
"Age is just a number, Tish. Age is also how you behave."
"Are you saying you were acting like a child back then?"
"I'm sure I was. I don't remember everything about that time, but that was because I was paying more attention to what was going on around me, rather than pay attention to myself."
Tish is a younger, softer version of Martha. She's also rawer in her youth; her softer face burns with a need to be. She'll follow orders and do as she's told because she loves her family that much. She might be unhappy at being the child of flawed parents, but she loves them all the same and that's why she's mostly boring to the Master. It amuses him that the Doctor behaves out of fear for the girl's safety. His worry for her never leaves his wrinkled face. His milky eyes watch her quietly when she serves the Master his tea and whatever else he demands.
"I've nearly died in London more than any other place in the Galaxy, actually." The Doctor rasps. His voice gives out for a moment, and he coughs. Tish hands him a soft cloth and he uses it to catch his breath. "I shouldn't love it if you think about that. But I do. She's got a hold over me."
"Did it happen all at once?" Tish asks him.
The Master is rather surprised at the question. Pesky Humans. They're not predictable enough to be completely tiresome, like say, the Martians or Sontarans or Cybermen or Daleks. Their potential for violence is just as high, but they aren't evolved enough to fit among the other threats.
"No...no it didn't. But one day I came closer to death than I ever have...and it was here. Down in the depths." He took a deep breath. "When I came out of that, I was different. I remember that. I don't remember everything about my second life, but I remember that."
You don't remember being the shabby little tramp? The Master grins and leans closer to the screen. I don't blame you. Nothing but bad fashion choices. I did admire his improvisation. That kept things interesting, you know. He knew how to be random. Random is something I've learned.
"Martha said you...change your body when it wears out." Tish said slowly.
The Doctor smiled at her. "Yes."
"It sounds like reincarnation without the dying."
"It is, actually...but...you see, I do die. Each person I become...I'm still me, but I'm also different."
"Oh, that's ok." Tish shrugged. "My best friend's like you."
"She is?"
"Ajita. Her mum's Nepali. She remembers her past lives pretty well." Tish crunched on a carrot stick matter-of-factly, unaware that she had managed to rile up the interest of two superior beings. "When she was a kid it was nothin' but trouble, you know?"
"Trouble?" The Doctor asked. It was exactly what the Master had been thinking.
"Yeah. She remembered her childhood in other lives, so, well, she hated the food at school. Kept asking for things they didn't have. Her mum and my mum had to practically go on a Crusade to find yak's butter that tasted "real" to her. It's a little hard to get." Tish had finished her carrot. "It got easier after she grew up a little. She went to veg because it was easier, but she's not against eating meat so long as she kills it herself."
"Ah..."
"She called growing out of those memories, 'letting the past go to sleep so she could wake up.' This was who she needed to be, and who she wanted to be." Tish catches herself, and flushes. "Rambling. Sorry." She hasn't talked to anyone besides her folks in weeks.
"Well, I don't have problems like that. Mostly it's a case of remembering what I need to remember." The Doctor was smiling a little. Ajita. That means "a winner..."
"That's right!" Tish was frog-eyed, she was so impressed. "How'd you know that?"
"I've been to Nepal." He told her. "Several times." He frowned slightly. "Come to think of it, I was in my Second body all the times...I suppose I can remember a bit more than I thought. They gave me a name...but I can't remember it."
Tish looked puzzled. "You're supposed to be smarter than us. You and the Master."
The Doctor blinks tiredly. "That somehow reminds me...someday I should ask the Master if he had anything to do with my trip into the Necropolis."
Nec—no. The Master tilts his head to one side. Can't say I recall that.
"Do you think he'd tell you?" Tish asked him.
"Probably not. Pity. It was...clever." The Doctor said ruefully. "Dangerous, too. Sort of the thing he could scheme up. Clever and dangerous and...gruesome."
Oh? Tell me more. The Master leaned forward and just ever so slightly, adjusted the sound. This was much more interesting than watching the surviving Aleutians build reclamation camps for the surviving Japanese.
"I was in the Underground after the—oh, that's too much explaining. I was in the Underground helping the Brigadier mop up the traces of a Cyberman Invasion." The Doctor stopped and took a deep breath. "I remember getting separated from the others...knowing me, I saw something interesting, or maybe I was chasing a white rabbit with a pocket-watch. I was just that sort of fellow back then." His rueful voice made Tish chuckle under her breath.
"I can't imagine you chasing after a white rabbit."
"What? Well, I probably wouldn't. Given a choice I'd run after a grey rabbit, or a black rabbit, or one of those bunnies with the silly ears all floppy-loppy. Maybe I wouldn't chase the black rabbit...isn't that the God of Death for rabbits?"
"Uh..." Tish stalled out, but she wasn't stupid, and she, like many British children, had been forced to endure the agony of WATERSHIP DOWN in her formative years. And also like most British children, owed her first 'serial nightmares' to the animated film. "It's a rational and fictionalised account of rabbit mythology." She assured him. "We don't really know what rabbits believe in."
The Master applauded loudly at the save. Young people learned so quickly, and she'd learned that most important lesson: When the Doctor rambles, ramble back.
"Oh. That makes sense. Well, London's simply layered with history. And unlike a lot of old cities, those layers are clear. It might be why I like it so much. The Timelines are usually linear over here—not at all like Scotland."
"Scotland?" Tish asked weakly, as though she knew she might regret this but was going to ask anyway.
"Yes. Scotland's very non-linear. Be careful walking around the Highlands on the deosil. Especially when the geothermals are bubbling. The dimensional wyverns get all cross."
"I...I...I'll...try to remember that."
"The trouble was, I walked bang into another layer of Time without knowing it. That doesn't happen to me much...probably why I remembered it." The Doctor gave back his empty mug and laid back on the floor, closing his eyes against the strain. Tish refilled it. "One minute I was in the Underground hoping to scour out the last bits of Cybermen. The next minute, as fast as one step to the next, I was out of the tunnel and into an old underground culvert with rude Latin graffiti chalked over the bricks. Horrid place to be. Ice was clotted all over the sides and even though it was so cold you could see your breath freeze, the smell was just awful. Like raw, rotting pig's intestines and hooves and blood. Bones everywhere."
"Yuck!" Tish exclaimed, which the Master found impressive. He would have thought the brat had been completely desensitized to horrors by now, but Humans were vulnerable to smell. It was probably why they didn't have that many olfactory organs. They'd probably shut down or go mad if they could smell half as well as Time Lords (note to self: investigate use of scent for mind control later; might be fun).
"I'd stepped completely into the Roman era, back when London was Londinium, the necropolis for the Romano-Celtic dead." The Doctor shrugged lightly; his wrinkled face was twisted in an odd way. "I didn't realize that at first, but the cold was a clue. Winters were a job back then and the Thames was a lot smaller." The Doctor slowly picked up the mug, but he rests its weight on his bony leg, gathering his strength before he pulls it to his lips. "Profoundly one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. And I was terrified quite a lot in those days. Rabbity."
"How could it be Roman if there were bones? They burned their dead." Tish spoke with the finality of the educated youth. "How could that happen?" she persisted. "I used to read up on unexplained phenomenon, but...well, even the Crop Circles were explained by science. I never heard of walking into a past event in London."
"Those events tend to be very one-way." The Doctor told her grimly. "Especially when you walk into a den like I did." She paled. "Yes. Well." He took another slow drink of soup. "I never did find out who engineered that...like I said, it was clever. It was a natural phenomenon, but it was tweaked by some other agency. An alien mind. I remember brushing against it just a bit. Very odd...very...cold." He took one last swallow and thought hard. "Hungry." He said at last. "It was hungry, whatever it was."
"Hungry for...you?" Tish looked like she didn't want to ask that question at all, but she'd hate herself for not doing it.
"Oh, yes." The Doctor said quietly. "It was hungry for me."
"How did you get away?"
"I panicked. It saved my life. I followed the time-eddy on instinct and it led me straight out of the tunnel and onto the frozen ice of the Thames. Whatever was in the tunnel was chasing after me; I heard its claws. I fell right out of the culvert and onto a solid sheet of ice; skidded a good twenty metres on my chest..." He grimaced and rubbed at his ribs in an old memory. "That ice was filthy," he said in wonder. "Gives whole new meaning to the phrase, 'black ice,' you know? But whatever it was, it couldn't come outside. Maybe it couldn't walk in sunlight. I didn't have time to ask it questions, I just got to my feet and kept running, kept following that time-eddy. There was no warning at all; all of a sudden the ice was gone and I was back in summery old London-" The Doctor made a splashing sound with his lips. "It was cleaner back in the 1960's. I'll give it that, but it was still filthy. Visibility was worse than Loch Ness. I'll never go swimming there again."
He suddenly snorted. "The Brigadier was absolutely furious with me." He finished. "Maybe someday he'll explain why."
Maybe sooner than you think, Doctor. The Master smiles to himself. It's October. Christmas will be here before one knows it...
He watches absently, as Tish puts a third cup of miso into the Doctor, and her parents finish cleaning the Viewing Office. His thoughts are wandering again. Boredom will do that; he's never been lazy and this inactivity is perilously close to being idle. Soon the Doctor's beloved Earth will be ready for invading, and oh, how it will gall the Doctor that his pets are such participants in death and destruction.
It will gall him; it will hurt him.
The Master hopes this will finally break him.
He needs to break the Doctor, because fair is fair and he owes the Doctor this. He must. The Doctor broke him, and more than once. Each battle they endured, each defeat he suffered at the Doctor's hands was still not a complete defeat if he could reap some small victory from his opponent.
He flips back to the original coding, and his deep, dark eyes sink into the image before him. He remembers when that brittle old man was young and healthy, flush with the arrogance of youth and military confidence. A part of the Master still can't believe the Doctor humiliated himself to ally with that human and his beloved UNIT.
At least he had the satisfaction of disbanding UNIT and sending each UNITeer into the death-camps. He particularly liked showing the Brigadier the films of his proteges as they died making weapons of death and destruction. Radiation poisoning was always a dramatic way to leave one's body.
A pity the Brigadier hadn't been as satisfying an audience.
"Just out of curiosity," the old man said in a voice of stone, "would begging for their lives spare them, or would you prefer some other form of humiliation on my part?"
"Ooh, that's a nice one!" The Master clapped. "Well done! But to answer your question...no, I'm afraid not." He affected a sad voice and sad expression as he patted the old man's shoulder. "But I'll give you credit for cutting through the nonsense and getting to the real question. How about a nice cup of tea to go with your bread and water?"
The Brigadier looked at him with a face to match his voice. It was a face that almost stopped the Master for a moment, for it was a look he'd seen on the Doctor in his nightmares.
It was the look that said, "You cannot touch me."
Then the Brigadier looked away, as if his eyes were unable to stand the sullying sensation of looking at the Master any further.
The Master's face drew tight. "Toclafane," he said into the intercom, "Kill UNIT."
The Brigadier watched the entire thing and never turned a hair. His face never changed. The Master watched him the whole time (the executions were taped so he could watch them any time). But through it all, the Brigadier never moved.
And when it was over, he silently hobbled to his new prison, leaving the Master still steaming in his own rage that the Brigadier never responded.
"The Doctor would have said something, Brigadier!" He shouted after the old man.
The Brigadier never halted his crippled walk to his fate.
"Well, Brigadier? Have you nothing to say?"
The Brigadier paused, his posture swaying for he was unsteady without his cane, and needed to tolerate the touch of the guards to get around. Carefully, he turned around and his face was still dry of tears.
"Would the Prime Minister like me to say something?"
The Master snarled. "Are you a coward after all?"
"If I ever gave you that impression, that was not my intention. Not at all. Merely unimpressed with death. It happens." The Brigadier's voice never reflected anything more than a tired, simple fact. "I am human, and an old one at that. My wife is dead and you are killing my world for no more reason than that you can."
"And I should have left your men alive. Just to watch you beg for them." The Master can't remember being this angry since...since he last fought the Doctor.
"They were already dying, Saxon. But you just killed them all so their lives are no longer toys at your whim."
The Master's eyes grew wide, unbelieving, but the glint was unmistakably there in those old brown eyes. "Oh," he breathed. "Well played, Sir Alistair. Well played indeed. Worthy of Alexander himself."
"Hmn." The Brigadier was remote again, but they both knew he had won. UNIT was dead; his life gone and the Master was bored with threatening good behavior with generic lives. It was so dull to hold up random hostages for good behavior compared to the thrill of pitting friends against friends, family against family.
"You think you'll join them? Not for a long time, Sir Alistair. Not for a very long time."
"Time will tell. It always does, doesn't it?"
"Yes it does." The Master whispered. And by this time tomorrow, the Brigadier would understand what it meant to live past one's natural lifespan.
Angry at his memories, the Master made a short day of it, ignored everyone, screamed at Lucy until she went into hiding, and blew up a few buildings with some of the newer solarifles. It wasn't the cure for his mood, but it was diverting. Then it was the usual getting-on-the-intranet-and-scaring-surviving-Eart hers. That took up his usual three hours and when he was finished he jumped back into his project plans. Nothing like concentrating on utter mayhem to get your attention off things.
When dawn rose over London, it was to the end of the snowstorm. The Toclafane would like that. He made a mental list of things they could destroy—and scowled at a small alarm chiming on his phone.
"What?" He snapped.
"Sir," The Antarctic Warden's voice quivered like custard in an earthquake. "Sir, there's been a breach in security." In the background the sirens were screaming.
"Shut it, you fool! Did you think to secure the channel?" Just for having to ask, the Master should kill him.
"Sir, yes, sir. Completely scrambled."
"Right, then. What's the security breach?"
"We don't have the full reports yet, but prisoner #10-4-5 escaped."
The Master felt his body, independent of his mind, grow completely still.
"He what."
"He's gone, sir. Without authorisation. The cameras are out and the database is wiped."
"When was the last time you saw the Brigadier, you fool?" The Master kept his voice calm and soothing. Future corpses weren't helpful with intelligence when they were gibbering slabs.
"I saw him personally back to his cell after his treatment; right on schedule, 2304 hours."
"Did he complete his treatment?"
"Yes, sir. I apologize if the report didn't reach you. The weather-"
The Master glanced to the computer. There it was. "Never mind about the report for now." He'd read it later. "What was his status when he finished the procedure?"
"As projected, sir."
"Do I have to tell you that when you post his WANTED posters all over the globe, you need to use UNIT's old images from the 1960's?"
"Sir, no, but our UNIT databases on our side were wiped too."
The Master closed his eyes. This was starting to sound terribly familiar. "How were they wiped, you fool?" He asked patiently.
"We don't know sir. There was a magnetic atmospheric storm all night and-"
Magnetic storm?
The Master flicked on the Main camera, and was assured to see the Doctor was still in his usual spot. More than that, the Master could feel him, Time Lord to Time Lord. Whoever the mad genius was who broke the Brigadier out of his prison wasn't the Doctor.
Or was he?
"Was anyone out of place seen at the base within the past 36 hours, Warden?"
"Sir, I personally saw no one; I'll have to ask the checkpoint guards. There was a supply-hover just before the storm."
The Master waited with the patience of a glacier, but it must be confessed, his hearts were beating a little bit more as the Warden's whining rose and fell with the sirens.
"Sir, we have a report; Sgt. Hawkins was on break in the mess hall when they brought the new prisoners in for their first rations. He thought there was something peculiar about one of themn...he wasn't in prison uniform and he was told he'd been 'grabbed up too fast for the usual processing.'"
Well, that did happen... "Did he give a likeness?"
"Better than that, sir. He sketched a good likeness of him. I'm sending the attachment right now."
"Good. What was the prisoner's name?"
"Dr. John Smith, Sir. He had an old library card on him for an ID; pre-Saxon: Address 76 Totter's Lane, Shoreditch, London."
"You. Don't. Say."
Ping. The attachment came through.
The Master's thumb slipped over the slick pad, but he finally opened the file.
For a long time, the Master simply regarded the sketch. It was well done, he had to admit. This was a very familiar face and designed for caricature and exaggeration but the sergeant had looked beyond that to the actual features. The face was smiling, which probably got the guard's attention in the first place. People didn't smile when they were sent off to slave labor in Siberia's Siberia. That particular Doctor was a consummate actor, but he couldn't hold a smile in any more than the Master could nail freon to a tree.
He looked old, the Master thought. He didn't have regenerative memory loss, but he did recall that the Time Lords had forced him to change out of that face when he was still young. Was it a clone? A cloned Time Lord could explain why he didn't feel the appropriate shifts in the temporal timestream.
But that only begged the question as to who would be desperate enough to clone that particular model of the Doctor.
"Stand by to receive a better likeness," he said carefully, his mind racing. "The Brigadier is to be found and returned at all costs. This second fellow, Smith...have him posted as an Enemy of the World. Shoot to kill, shoot on sight.
"But not," he said icily, "if it means killing the Brigadier. Alive at all costs, you idiot. Do I make myself clear?"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
The Master coldly disconnected, made a mental note to have the fool executed after this was over, and went to his personal database. It took a few minutes. [Doctor+Cybermen+London+196CE+] gave him a useful close-up...
"Hmn, that will do," he muttered to himself, wondering who this Isobel Watkins photographer was2. The Doctor had always hated the capture of his likeness, but he was clearly posing for her. The Master shook his head at the incongruous sight of the wild-haired little man in his ill-fitting clothes, sitting on the side of a street curb while behind him, the backs of UNIT and the Brigadier reduced a Cyberman to a cloud of single-minded electronic dust and plastic. Normally that Doctor wouldn't turn his back on anything cybernetic; his hatred of the mechanical men bordered on psychosis.
Image loaded; images sent across the world. He also included a search for the Doctor's TARDIS, making it sound as though it were a pirated copy of the one he kept onship. The Archangel Network hadn't detected anything like a stray Temporal stream. Ergo, it was most likely a clone. Clones might have the cleverness of their parents, but they were short-lived and the longer they thought for themselves the greater their chance of diverging and making mistakes.
"Pity." He said softly, wistfully. He would have liked to see a clone of Doctor Three. Would have kept him, to be honest. Just for the sake of old times and the occasional fencing match. But the Master wasn't stupid. It would be quite stupid to collect the only model of the Doctor that was crazier than himself.
1Is this a tribute to Ben and Polly? Gosh, whatever gave you that idea?
2The Invasion