Lucy stared in horror at the cage where the wizened Doctor now hung suspended from the ceiling. He was like a gnome, a shrunken troll with huge, heartrending eyes.
"Doctor?" she whispered, brushing her fingers against the bars of the cage.
"You shouldn't be here," he said, his voice cracked and dry.
Lucy shook her head.
"I couldn't be anywhere else. Not with you like this. Does it hurt?"
The Doctor shook his ancient head.
"No. I'm just… tired. So achingly tired."
"I'm sorry," Lucy whispered. And she meant it.
"It's not your fault," the Doctor said, with a sad shake of his head. "I'm glad to see that you've learned compassion."
Lucy grimaced, remembering the Russian operative, and the Doctor's words to her then.
"I think Jack taught it to me," she replied honestly.
"Does this mean you've make your choice?"
"For better or worse," Lucy said, bitterly echoing her words from so long ago.
The door slid open, and Lucy jumped, whirling around. But it was only Luke. He nodded crisply to her, and said nothing.
"The Master won't like you talking to me," the Doctor reminded her.
"I know," Lucy replied, running a hand through her hair.
"Look after yourself," the Doctor whispered.
"I'll be back," Lucy vowed, as she turned to go. She walked to the door with a heavy heart, pushing it open and slipping out into the hallway
------
Jack was secured with a double thickness of chains this time. They weren't taking any chances that he might escape again. Lucy winced to see how tightly the manacles dug into his wrists and ankles.
"I'm surprised they would have you in the same place," she said softly. "I was prepared to have to find out where they'd taken you."
Jack made a face.
"I'll never credit the Master with being very bright," he answered. "He's stopped trying to kill me, but I'm still the prize of his collection, and he doesn't want me to forget it. I'm on display."
"Are they feeding you enough?" Lucy asked, her eyes scanning his ragged form. For a man who had been in shackles and living on scraps for a year, he looked surprisingly good. He was still muscled and toned, his chest still solid. That was probably because his muscles regrew themselves, and didn't waste away, Lucy reasoned. His clothes were dirty rags by this time, ripped and filthy almost beyond recognition. His face was soot-stained and sweat-streaked as well. Everything about him was dirty and frayed, except for his very blue eyes, which shone out of his grimy face and still seemed to have the ability to look straight into Lucy's soul.
Jack shrugged noncommittally, his blue eyes lingering on Lucy's face.
"It's not as good as the food you used to bring me, but it's twice a day, and that's good enough for me."
"I can smuggle you more," Lucy said.
Jack shook his head.
"You have to stay above suspicion, no matter what happens. The Master can't think you're involved in any of this." "He already knows I come to visit you," Lucy said. Her mind instantly went back to the bargain she and Harry had made. She had kept her end of the deal, and so far, Harry had kept his.
"And he doesn't care?'
Lucy gave a hollow chuckle.
"He doesn't much care what I do."
"I guess that's a blessing," Jack said.
"I guess," Lucy replied.
She sighed, and pulled up a rough wooden chair, sitting on it in front of Jack.
"I was thinking about the kitchen," she said. "I think we should do it in yellow."
Jack grinned.
"Back to planning the house, are we?"
Lucy smiled faintly.
"It's a castle in the air that I can escape to when things get bad. So what do you think about yellow for the kitchen?"
------
Lucy walked down the hall, not much caring where she was going. As before, she often wandered the halls of the Valiant, wandering aimlessly to keep herself occupied, and from thinking too much. She passed the doors to the Throne room and considered going in. An image of the shrunken dwarf that was the Doctor flitted through her mind, and she decided against it.
She walked past the doors, her feet taking her down the passageway that lead to her suite.
Around the bend came Harry, flanked by several of his guards. He seized her arm has he passed, and began to pull her along with him, backwards, towards the Throne Room.
"I need you with me, Dearest," Harry said mildly, his kind tone contradicting the tight grip he had on her arm.
Lucy wiggled around in his vice-like grip, turning herself so that she once more faced the Throne Room. Harry offered her his arm, and she took it.
Harry opened the door with one smooth push, the door sliding out widely in front of him.
"Tomorrow they launch!" he said jovially.
He was talking about the rockets. Tomorrow they launched the rockets, and waged war on the rest of the galaxy. Untold horrors would be started with the launch of those rockets. Lucy's knees felt weak at the thought, and she clung to Harry's arm to keep herself from falling.
"We're opening the rift into Braccatolian space," Harry continued. "They won't see us coming. Kinda scary!" His grin was huge.
"Then stop," the Doctor croaked.
Harry turned to the Doctor with a start, as if he had forgotten that the cage was there. He walked straight up to the metal prison.
"Once the empire is established and there's a new Gallifrey in the heavens, maybe then… it stops," Harry was so close to the Doctor's cage now that his nose was almost pressed against the bars. "The drumming," he whispered. "The neverending drum beat."
A wild look came into Harry's eyes. It was fevered, manic; the look of a madman. Lucy took an involuntary step backwards.
"Ever since I was a child," Harry continued. "I looked into the vortex. That's when it chose me. The drumming, the call to war. Can't you hear it?" His fingers tapped a frantic beat on the bars of the cage.
Tap tap tap tap
Tap tap tap tap
"Listen, it's there now. Right now. Tell me you can hear it, Doctor. Tell me."
Lucy found herself straining to hear around the beat he was tapping out. It seemed to fill the whole cavernous room and eat down on her ears, until she wanted to cover them and scream to drown out the noise.
"It's only you," the Doctor whispered.
Harry seemed to search the Doctor's wizened face for some answer. Then, he turned away, satisfied with what he found.
"Good," he said.
Behind Lucy, the door slid open. She turned around, and then wished she hadn't. A Toclafane has entered.
"Tomorrow, the war. Tomorrow we rise, never to fall!" it tittered in its baby voice.
"You see?" Harry said, turning away from the Doctor's cage. "I'm doing it for them. You should be grateful! After all, you love them. So very, very much."
The Doctor's face was full of that heart-breaking sadness again. He knew. He knew what the Toclafane really were: humans from the future. This is what they became. Lucy wished she didn't know.
Harry threw himself down at the table, slouching in his chair.
"I took Lucy to Utopia," he said, his eyes still on the Doctor.
Lucy jumped to hear her name. It had been so long since she had heard her name from his lips that she had forgotten what it sounded like.
"A Time Lord and his human companion. I took her to see the stars. Isn't that right, sweetheart?"
"Trillions of years into the future. To the end of the universe." Lucy said, her voice sounding dead in her own years. To think of that place of cold and dark and endless despair – Lucy tried to force her memory to it, but her mind rebelled.
"Tell him what you saw," Harry prompted.
Lucy struggled to comply.
"Dying," she whispered. "Everything dying. The whole of creation falling apart. And I thought… there's no point. No point to anything. Not ever."
Jack's voice filtered back to her from a corner of her memory.
"I was there too. I was there at the end of the universe. And you know what I saw? Hope. I saw the human rice, at the end of everything, still clinging on against all odds, still surviving and living in the hope of Utopia"
Hope, Jack said. He said there was hope there, where she had seen none. And even here, with Harry dominating everything, on the eve of war with the rest of the galaxy, she thought Jack might be right.
"And it's all your fault," Harry taunted. "You should have seen it, Doctor. Furnaces, burning. The last of humanity screaming in the dark. All that human invention that had sustained them across the eons. It all turned inwards. They cannibalized themselves."
"We made ourselves so pretty," the Toclafane chimed in.
Lucy jumped. She had forgotten it was there.
"They regressed themselves into children. But it didn't work. The universe was collapsing around them. So I brought them here, I saved them. Of course, I had a little help."
"That's a paradox," the Doctor said.
Harry grinned manically.
"I know! My masterpiece, Doctor. A living TARDIS strong enough to hold the paradox in place, allowing the past and the future to collide in infinite majesty."
"But you're changing history!" the Doctor protested. "Not just Earth, the entire universe."
"I'm a Time Lord," growled Harry. "I have that right!"
"But even then, why come all this way just to destroy?"
The Doctor really didn't understand, Lucy realized. He had been enemies with Harry for so many hundreds of years and he still didn't understand. Why did Harry come to destroy and pillage? Because he wanted to, there was no other reason. Destruction for its own sake.
"… to build a brand new empire lasting 100 trillion years," the Toclafane giggled.
"With me as their master. Time Lord and human combined," Harry's eyes slid over Lucy in a way that made her skin crawl. "Haven't you always dreamt of that, Doctor?"
Harry sprang out of his chair, and walked back over to the Doctor's cage.
"The human race," he said. "Greatest monsters of them all. Night- night!"
He held out his hand to Lucy, and she forced herself to go to him, to let him wrap his arm around her and lead her out of the room. The Toclafane followed.
-----
As soon as they were back in their own suite, Harry threw off his jacket.
"What a day!" he exclaimed, throwing himself onto a white chair.
Lucy settled into her favorite chair by the window.
"You must be tired," she said, in an empty voice. She could care less.
Harry sat up, and flashed her a cocky grin.
"You know me. I don't need as much sleep as you pathetic apes. My body doesn't need anything so weak as sleep."
Lucy didn't answer. She turned her head towards the window, looking out at the endless blue. Below them, a heavy mantle of cloud blanketed the ground, hiding it from sight.
Harry slumped in his chair again, his fingers beginning their restless drumming once again.
Tap tap tap tap
Tap tap tap tap
Tap tap tap tap
Lucy thought back to what Harry had said before, to the Doctor.
"Have you really heard it ever since you were a child? The drumming?"
Harry looked up at her. For once his face held no malice or manic energy.
"Yes," he said. "Ever since I looked into the Untempered Schism, I've heard it in my mind. The incessant drumming."
Emboldened by his response, Lucy dared to ask another question.
"Can't you do anything to stop it?"
"I tried," said Harry. "When I was young, I tried to drown it out. But eventually I realized it wasn't something to be avoided. It was a call to arms. Now I march to that drummer's beat. Where it leads me, I go."
His words chilled Lucy. They were the words of a madman. And looking into his face at that moment, she knew that he was mad. In fact, she realized that she had never truly known it until that moment. She had, somewhere deep down, always thought that there must have been a scrap of humanity in Harry, some spark of compassion and mercy buried within him. But he wasn't human, and there was no compassion, only insanity.
Harry sprang up from his seat.
"Do you hear it, Dearest? Do you hear the drumming?"
His eyes were wild, his voice excited and agitated.
Lucy shook her head.
"I don't hear it," she whispered.
Harry grabbed her hand and tugged her to her feet. His hands were a vice grip on her arm.
"Don't you?" he demanded. "Don't you hear that wild, heady beat? Answer me!!" he shook her violently.
Lucy felt her teeth rattling in her head. Fear, corrosive and bitter, rose up in her throat. There was no telling what this madman would do; his actions were in no way predictable. A tear slipped from her eye and rolled down her cheek.
"No, Harry," she whispered, "No. I don't hear it."
She didn't know what would have happened in that moment, what Harry would have done next, had there not been a knock at the door to the suite.
Harry let his hands drop, and immediately his previous persona snapped back. It was as if, for a moment, the mask has slipped, and Lucy had seen the real Harry for the first time. She had seen her first real look at the Master in that second. But now the calm, collected mask was back in place as if it had never left.
"Come in," he said.
A guardsman stepped into the room.
"Sir," he said, his voice crisp and military. "I have something very important to report."
"What is it?" Harry asked.
"We've found Martha Jones."
Author's Note: This chapter's a little shorter than usual, and I'm sorry. There's not a lot of wiggle room for extra material when it comes to the script of the episode, and I wanted to have the part with Martha in a separate chapter.
It's been challenging, but fun trying to fit Lucy's thoughts into the structure of the episode. When I was watching it, I couldn't help but wonder what she was thinking, and itch to write it out. There's so much more to her (I like to think) that just what was shown onscreen.