A/N: I want to thank Brownbug and Torchwood Cardiff for their reviews on the last chapter. Thank you girls you are the only two reviewers who are still sticking to this story.

Also want to say thank you to Brownbug offering to be my beta now that my original beta is missing, and for being beta for this chapter; also for encouraging me to don't give up on finishing this story.

A/N 2: The lyrics of Test Card's Girl chant don't belong to me; they belong to The Door's song "The End".

Beep…beep…beep…beep….

He was back in that dark place, but this time there was something else in there with him, as opposed to the earlier complete nothing. There was a sound matching his single heartbeat - the steady beep…beep of the medical heart monitor. He tried to stretch his hearing and his senses to hear more, maybe that soft woman's voice that he has heard before when the beeping of the machine starts in his head. He didn't know the woman, but he was sure that Sam knew her and that made him feel safe whenever he heard her voice. But this time there was nothing there except the steady beeping, stretching on endlessly.

He thought of putting his hands up to his ears to block the beeping sound, but he wasn't sure he even had hands in this place. If he had, he couldn't feel or see them. Gradually the beeping subsided from a loud piercing noise into a quieter and more steady one; only then he could hear soft female voice humming some tune quietly to him.

"Do you remember this one Sammy?" the woman asked him, but he couldn't make out what she was humming, or see her. He could hear her voice, but that and the sound of the heart monitor were the only things that broke the dark and the silence around him. "The doctors say they are going to turn off your life support in a few hours, and I agreed. I'm sorry Sammy, but I can't watch you any longer lying here like this. Maybe if you recognise this tune and wake up…" The woman couldn't finish because she started to sob quietly.

The panic on hearing these words struck him like a physical blow. He wanted to scream. If only he had a voice at that moment, he knew he would be screaming blue murder at them. He wanted to shout for them to listen to him, and not to turn off the life support. Desperately, he tried to find his voice to plead with his mother to wait, to tell them that he was still alive, still there, and if they switched off his life support they were going to murder him.

Slowly, the beeping started to fade away and the drum beats started to mix up with the heart monitor's sound. His mother's – no, not his mother's - the woman's voice had faded away too now. He seemed to have been staring at the blackness for so long that he had almost forgotten what it was like to have a physical body. But then the total vacuum of the darkness around him started to dissolve into something resembling grey spots that started to dance before what he thought must be his eyes. He tried to focus on the spots, hoping that they were just a side effect of the darkness inside his brain being blinded by new light gradually filtering through to him. However, they refused to disappear, and the space around him never actually came into view as a lit room. Instead, the spots flew closer and closer and closer, until the strange, blurry objects metamorphosed into several grey metal balls, floating in the air in front of him. The balls started to taunt him in mocking voices, confusing him even further, because somehow he was sure that he shouldn't feel spooked by them.

"Mister Master, don't hide from us…" they were chanting with their children voices. "Where are you? Come out and play with us, Mister Master, please! We are so lonely here. Come on, play with us!"

He tried to tell himself that it wasn't real. It was all in his head, an illusion probably caused either by the drug that the Rani had injected him with, or by some new blow to the head. But they were so close, and looked and sounded so real, that his mind just couldn't get past what he was seeing, couldn't accept what he knew was the logical explanation. He didn't know if he was angry with the human DNA that was intervening with his rational Time Lord mind, or if he was more scared that he seemed to be gradually becoming more and more human, thinking like a little ape rather than a Time Lord. While concentrating on trying to put shields up in this strange place, he almost missed the new sound. The voice was a child's as well, but it was clearly female, unlike the voices of the Toclafane, which he had been unable to distinguish as either male or female.

"Sam, where are you Sammy?" It was the Test Card Girl, if he wasn't mistaken. He wondered who else he would hear. Was this some limbo he was stuck in until he died? A place where his and Sam's horrors would stalk him until he paid for his sins?

"Sam, Sammy, where are you?" the girl sing-songed.

He fancied he could hear his breathing getting ragged, despite being in a non-corporeal place where he didn't really need to breathe. The darkness cleared further and he now could see a single spotlight lighting one place, like a stage spotlight focused on a performer. Accustomed to the darkness in this strange place, the Master was temporally blinded. He blinked several times to clear his vision, wondering why his vision had suddenly returned now, and why wasn't he waking up? When his eyesight returned sufficiently for him to be able to see clearly, he could make out the shape of the Test Card Girl in the centre of the spotlight, hugging her clown doll under one arm. She moved with slow steps, deliberately putting one foot in front of the other, in slow motion. Her steps echoed loudly into the quiet space, drowning out the noises of the heart monitor and the drums. Her every step was followed by a word that she sang to him:

"The killer woke before down, he put his boots on,

He took a face from the ancient gallery,

And he walked on down the hall ."

She gripped her clown tighter and rocked slightly on her heels, humming before resuming the sing-song chant.

"This is the end,

Beautiful friend.

This is the end,

My only friend, the end.

It hurts to set you free,

But you will never follow me.

The end of laugher and soft lies,

The end."

When she ended the chant, she was standing face to face with him, the dazzling spotlight blinding him again now, shining straight into his face. The light was too bright, causing him to close his eyes and plunging him into the vacuum of the darkness once again. He wasn't sure what scared him more - the Toclafane and the Girl, or their lack now and the nowhere space of the darkness.

Other voices reached him now, the voices of the medical staff and the girl that he had started to recognise as Rose Tyler. They were arguing over him, Sam - Rassilon this gave him a headache - and the procedure of switching off the life support. There was the whine of machinery and before the awareness left him completely, he heard the Rose girl shout at the medics to turn the life support back on, because she had Rift activity again.

Parallel World, 2006

The medic was starting to look frustrated, trying to once again explain to the blonde Torchwood operative the situation with their patient. The comatose DCI was scheduled for turning off of his life support machines; the doctors had declared him virtually dead. They had managed to finally get the reluctant agreement of his mother, after a lot of persuasion and explanation of how there was nothing they could do for DCI Tyler any more and the only thing was to prolong his coma, keeping him on life support. In the end his mother, Mrs Tyler, gave in and gave her permission to switch his machines off. And that was when Torchwood showed up, demanding that the hospital keep the man alive, with all his medical records to be handed over to them. Agent Tyler might look like a gentle woman, but she could be damn insistent and was more than capable of throwing her weight around.

"Miss Tyler," the medic started, trying once again to reason with her.

"Agent Tyler," the woman corrected him coldly.

"Yes, sorry, Agent Tyler," Doctor Wauchope said curtly, taking the medical chart from Sam's bed and holding it up for Rose Tyler to look at. "He hasn't shown any signs of returning consciousness, or even of any brain activity beyond the basic motor functions, such as twitching from time to time."

Rose took a deep breath, trying to get her nerves under control. She had her instructions from Torchwood. Well, they were actually orders, but everyone preferred to pretend that they were instructions, not being comfortable with giving orders to the daughter of the head of Torchwood. The stubborn resistance of the police chief's medic didn't help matters at all, but she couldn't let them to go through with turning off the life support. She and Torchwood had a lot of tests and work yet to do here.

"I'm telling you that you don't have permission to switch off the life support," Rose Tyler said, barely restraining herself from shoving her credentials at the medic and ordering the ward closed to everybody but Torchwood. The temptation to pull rank to get her way was very strong, but she knew she couldn't do that to Sam's mother. "We need him functioning, even if it's just on the bed, hooked to machines. I don't necessarily need him awake!" she finished, and inwardly felt ashamed of what she was saying, which she knew was a direct result of how hard the work for Torchwood had turned her. Her compassion wasn't totally gone, of course. At the end of the day, Rose Tyler had enough compassion to have some left, despite her job. But she couldn't help but wonder briefly what her Doctor would think of her if he heard her now?

"Agent Tyler, we have the permission of his mother. It will be easier for everyone if we just let him go," the medic argued, hoping to get his point through. "I don't care what Torchwood wants, you can go and do your research and experiments somewhere else. We are a hospital; we care about our patients and try to be as humanitarian as we can. Keeping him in a vegetative state is not helping anyone."

Outwardly, the doctor tried to appear calm and professional, as though his mind was made up and he was quite unprepared to accept any argument to the contrary. In actual fact, he was a little shocked at his own temerity in opposing the demands of an organisation like Torchwood. He had heard a lot of stories about disappearances and covert operations, but he was sure that they wouldn't do something like that just because he stood up to them regarding a patient. Well, he was almost certain. But he had been the one who had been forced to have that hard talk with Mrs Tyler; it had been his gentle arguments that had eventually persuaded the grieving mother to accept that her son was practically dead and that she needed let him go. There was no way he wanted to put her through the whole ordeal again by trying to explain why the hospital had temporarily changed their minds.

"I'm going to come with the head of Torchwood if I have to!" Rose wasn't going to give up and act unprofessionally, personal feelings and morals notwithstanding. "Torchwood is going to treat this as a state of world security threat."

Doctor Wauchope looked back at her with contempt, his lips pressed into thin line, clearly showing his displeasure and what he thought of Torchwood and their approach to sensitive cases like this.

"This is not one of your alien invasions, Miss Tyler! This is a human life, someone's son dying on a hospital bed." Doctor Wauchope turned to the door, effectively dismissing her.

"This patient still has some sort of connection to the continued rift activity, which is a threat to this planet," Rose said, following the doctor out of the room. "I'm going to stop you from doing this, even if I have to close the ward and put it under Torchwood jurisdiction. Now I'm going to have my lunch. Good day, Doctor Wauchope."

Manchester CID, 1973.

Gene looked at the credentials that this so-called 'Doctor' flashed at him and couldn't argue even if he wanted to. The only thing he could do was to grump out a barely audible, "Bloody Torchwood," and close the interrogation. No one knew what exactly Torchwood was supposed to be, but every high-ranking police officer knew that they were important and out of the CID's league. Some people, like Litton, liked to think that they were the UK version of the CIA In fact, Gene wouldn't be surprised if Litton wasn't hoping to get noticed by them.

"First UNIT, now Torchwood - my life just gets better and better," Gene complained, standing up and readying himself to leave the 'Lost and found' room. "So what is it then? Yer CIA lot are going to try and take my case? 'Cose that's not gonna happen, not in my city."

"We are not the CIA," the Doctor said, shaking his head and barely restraining himself from rolling his eyes. "There are some things here that are way out of your league, and DI Tyler is one of them."

Hunt snorted and looked back at the Doctor with a thunderous face that promised pain for whoever wasn't careful enough until he calmed down. He had heard that Torchwood were supposed to deal with crazy things, but he never heard that being a member of Torchwood required you to actually be crazy. However, this man was starting to make him wonder!

He turned on his heel sharply and stalked back to the Doctor, pulling him up from the chair and holding him close to himself.

"I don't know what your problem with DI Tyler is, but he's been the best bloody copper I've worked with for a long time now," Gene spat in the Doctor's face. "So unless I catch 'im into doing something criminal, dangerous or obscuring the case, I advise you to keep your problems to yourself. If someone from your spooky CIA agency so much as touches 'im, I'm gonna tear yer asses up. Understood?"

The Doctor just nodded, stunned, and Gene released him back into the chair nodding his approval and taking the Doctor's shocked silence for agreement to leave his DI alone.

"One more thing," Gene said, before opening the door and leaving the room. "Don't ever tell 'im what I just said."

The Doctor stood there long after Gene Hunt had left the lost property room, amazed at how much loyalty the Master had inspired in the man. Gene might have seemed like a brute at first and a bit of a gruff, as well as just forceful, but the Doctor was sure that his heart was in the right place and he was able to be really loyal. Whether the Master had used hypnosis to convince Gene, the Doctor wasn't sure, but he promised himself he would find out.

He exited the room to find the CID main room in total uproar. The police officer with the moustache, who was guarding him in the car at the crime scene, was arguing quietly with DCI Hunt, but stopped when he saw the Doctor leaving the room.

"So we don't have suspect again?" the man asked, annoyed. "What are you, some fancy secret agent? UNIT weren't enough?"

The Doctor just shrugged and ignored the man, not wanting to get himself into a pointless argument. Besides he had done already enough damage using Torchwood's name, no one was supposed to know about the organisation. And he was sure that the DCI was not going to keep it from his team who they were dealing with.

Ray was clearly going to say something else but at that moment Chris Skelton entered the room in a tearing hurry and came to a sharp stop, right into the Guv's personal space, something he would never do in normal circumstances. This more than anything disrupted the argument and gained Gene's attention.

"Guv, the Boss is missing," Chris said breathlessly, cutting right to the matter at hand without bothering to greet anyone present. "He went after some lead and he hasn't reported since then. No one has seen him, and he won't answer his radio."

The Doctor took sharp breath letting it out through his nose. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and leaned into the desk behind him, trying for nonchalant. He was so tempted to tell Gene Hunt, I told you so, but however talented he usually was at getting himself into trouble, he still had some instincts for self-preservation. He was sure that the Master probably had what he wanted and now he'd disappeared. Oh well, he would have to track him down again and then he could find out how it was that he was alive.

At the edge of his vision the Doctor saw Gene snatching a radio from one of the team and turning it on.

"DI Tyler, report," Hunt demanded. After a few charged moments in which no response came through, Gene tried again. "Dammit, Tyler I said, report! What's the point in you taking yer radio with you if you're not going to answer it?"