25 - "Golden lads and girls all must..."

And here we are, sleeping the sleep of the just... A mental snicker. So are you happy now that you've done the right thing? You're drugged in a cell, guilty until proven innocent, dressed for your own burial – fascinating how your culture associates white with death. Ah well, since you're hardly up to the task, hope you don't mind if I have a few words with your inquisitors.

At a command from beyond, one wall of the cell shimmered and became transparent. Two figures stood in observance – one a woman draped in pure white that oddly contrasted with her obsidian skin, and the second a wraithlike male encased in featureless black. At a gesture from the female, the man removed his gloves to reveal nearly translucent hands, one of which reached up to sketch a series of invisible commands on the wall. A faint hiss could be heard within the cell as a cold mist lashed its inhabitant, jolting her into wide-eyed awareness. The prisoner took quick stock of her quarters with a few short glances, then stared down at herself with an awed smile as if she had never seen something quite so enthralling. "Good god, look at me. The only other place you'd see a chest like this is on bad daytime television..."

The dark-skinned woman coughed chastisingly, muttered, "I do believe you're right. Do you know who you are and where you are?"

"Oh, yeah. I'm Lilith, the Field Agent who annoys the piss out of everyone she comes across. And why is that? I wonder." A quick finger-snap of revelation. "It's because I do what I want and the rules be hanged. I would say it's because I have green hair, but that's hardly the case. Have I wandered too far from the truth, Lady Exarch?" The smile gained a barbed edge as the prisoner watched her interrogator's expression of shock and disgust. "And if my memory serves right, this is a cell. I turned myself in because I had a sudden attack of conscience."

The two figures traded looks, the Exarch rolling her eyes as she murmured, "You sure we've got the right person? This is nothing like I remember her to be..."

"The effects of her mutation have yet to be measured," the Enforcer replied, turning his gaze on the prisoner as if she were a rare insect to be studied. "If it has caused her personality to fracture, it will make this hearing all the more... fascinating."

This brought a shiver from the Exarch, who likewise returned her focus to the young woman in the cell. "Attack of conscience or no, Lilith, we are here to discuss your recent erratic behavior. According to evidence provided by Archivist Malfect of the Earth-Human Office, you are hereby charged with - "

"Oh, let's see." Lilith began ticking items off on fingers which yet bore traces of chipped crimson polish. "Directly interfering in the course of history for a lesser race... having intimate, lewd, adulterous and utterly delectable relations with a completely unhinged hot fox and would-be evil overlord... helping to enslave and strip-mine an entire planet... serving as an accessory to genocide... and did I mention the sex?"

"Twice," said the Exarch, pinching her mouth shut to maintain her composure. "You would say nothing to prove your innocence?"

Lilith let out a loud bark of astonished laughter. "Why? I'm as guilty as sin, and I had a great time doing it. Doesn't that get under your skin and nibble you to death? You have all of these rules and all of your little peons follow them without wondering what life would be like on the other side of the fence." The Exarch gave her companion a pointed glance, and the Enforcer traced another command on the wall. Lilith's hands involuntarily flew to her neck, circled with a clear band that now flared brilliant red under the Enforcer's direction and sent agony stabbing through her flesh. The pain only lasted for a moment, though, and soon the prisoner was all smiles again despite the sweat beading her skin. "You don't like hearing that, do you? I'm your little taboo child, the freak that you can't possibly let others see because it would give them ideas."

Another look from the Exarch and another lash of pain from the collar, this one strong enough to cause each muscle in the prisoner's body to stiffen in reflexive protection against the sensory assault. Instead of a plea for mercy, this only brought a fresh burst of laughter as Lilith gasped, "Your anger proves your guilt, Lady Exarch. But why don't you let your people interfere every once in a while? We have such great power! Why don't you let us use it?"

The thin shell of composure maintained by the Exarch failed and shattered, and when she next spoke her words came out in a tone just a fraction short of a snarl. "Lilith, daughter of Cameron, you are guilty as charged. Furthermore, I have judged you to be a menace to society – if you wish to be rebellious and repellent, I shall leave you to it. Think over your actions and taint us no further."

Then came one last wave of pain – the lights flickered and Lilith felt her hearts shudder to a stop for the briefest moment – and then all was dark.

A pounding headache next called Lilith to wakefulness, and with a jolt of panic she sat up and looked around. The austere confines of the cell were familiar enough, and then she remembered why she'd been asleep – they wanted to drug me so that I wouldn't be a threat to anyone before my hearing – and then a chill shot through her when she realized just how alone she was in the silent chamber. "The hearing! Elder, don't tell me I missed my own hearing..."

"You were a little out of it, so I took care of things." The voice came from behind her, and it was all Lilith could do not to scramble away in terror when she turned and saw the Master casually sitting in one corner of the cell, watching her reaction with barely concealed amusement. He still wore the guise of Harold Saxon, complete with the most recent addition of a bullet wound to the torso that colored his otherwise immaculate white dress shirt a nauseating slick red. "You look so surprised to see me, Lilith! I've been here all along, you know."

"Trust me, Harry, I know. Those damn drums of yours haven't given me a moment's rest." She sighed, wiped a hand across her forehead to clean off some of the sweat that had gathered there. "You're dead, though. I shouldn't be able to see this."

An aggrieved eye-roll. "Thank you for stating the obvious. Like I really need to be reminded of that whole mess... No, you're quite right. I'm only here because your wonderful superiors want you to relive each one of your mistakes before you die."

"Before I what?" Lilith stared at the all-too-convincing vision in bafflement. "They just decided to kill me off without letting me have a trial?"

"No no no, there was a trial." Snicker. "As a matter of fact, it was most amusing. Like I said, you were a little bit out of it, so I took the liberty of speaking in your place." Saxon tapped his chin thoughtfully with a finger as he mused over recent events, then gave the now openly glaring Lilith a charming smile. "I told them everything that's been lurking in the back of your brain for some time that you were too afraid to say because you just wanted to fit in. Your wonderful Exarch was most unhappy with you and thought that a rogue element such as you deserved to be erased, so here you are. Death Row, Lilith – welcome."

Anger rose through Lilith's veins in a hissing pulse, and without thinking she lunged at the smirking specter. Her rage only grew when he shimmered and vanished only to reappear next to her, standing with hands in pockets and a frown of polite admonishment on his face. "Tsk tsk, my dear. You can't hurt me now..."

"But why did you help them?" Lilith growled, eyes shining open hatred. "You could have lived on in me. We could have worked together, you know that?"

"No, Lilith, we couldn't have. You still listen to him, and that just wouldn't work. A man cannot serve two masters, after all..." The Master knelt so that he was once more on eye level with Lilith and quietly continued. "You let them kill me off, my dear. I'm simply returning the favor."

"You trapped me down on the surface of the planet, you fuckwit!" Anger now blurred Lilith's vision with its ferocity, amplified by subtle traces of psychotropic substances now filtering through her blood. "What did you want me to do, jump in front of the damn gun and take the shot for you? Well?" But the screaming met with no response as the apparition faded away, leaving Lilith alone once more.

"So what do you think, Cam? No good? I think I might have overdone the chin." Avery turned first one way in front of the mirror and then the other to consider his profile. "I mean, I followed the standard bio-template for humanoid manifestation, but I still feel – I don't know – heavy."

"Compared to some I've seen, you're a dry stalk of grass." Cameron sighed and took a drink from his coffee cup. "What is it with our family's slavish dedication to duty? It killed my wife, made me tear myself apart, landed my daughter in prison, and it's made you into, er, a man."

"A temporary change in the name of research." Avery stepped back, stretched experimentally, then lashed out in a series of kicks and hand-slashes as if pummeling a phantom opponent. "Muscle tone – good. Range, excellent... balance needs some work, but it'll have to do." In response to Cameron's nonplussed stare of disbelief, the professor grinned and explained, "Just a little something I picked up while interning on Rektaan Seven, somewhere between Krav Maga and savate – a nasty little way of solving disputes on an equally nasty little planet." He squinted to the wall just beyond Cameron's shoulder, read the text displayed there, and nodded. "I don't think I'll need to twist his arm that hard, but the man is notoriously stubborn. Later, Cameron."

Time had passed, although Lilith was not sure how long as she lay curled in a tight ball on the hard floor of the cell. She took a deep breath of the air, noted how it seemed somehow thicker than usual with a bizarre chemical tang, then closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

"Don't you think you're going to get a second's worth of peace in this place!" A sharp kick to the lower back snapped Lilith back into awareness, gasping in pain at the pointed impact in the tender flesh below the protective sheath of her ribcage. She carefully sat up, massaging the rapidly bruising skin and wondered just who had been sent in to torture her. "They've done you a favor in collaring you, because that's the only thing preventing me from choking the life out of you for being such a stupid little twat." Strong hands hooked under her arms and lifted her to her feet, then threw her against the wall with concussive force. "The whole thing with a client dying was unfortunate, true, but no need to make a martyr out of yourself about it. Marius was right – you could have started over and made a new name for yourself without anyone here being the wiser for it – but then you just had to go and turn yourself over to the men in black! And now here you are, all 'woe-is-me, I'm such a mess, just put me out of my misery...'"

One of the hands grabbed Lilith by the chin, forced her to meet their eyes, and she could not suppress a frightened whimper when she realized that they were her own. "You want to beat yourself up for being an idiot? Well here I am, and here you go!" The hand disengaged, and Lilith only had a second's pause before its twin slammed across her face in iron punishment. Agony sparkled Lilith's sight with gruesome cheer, peppering her field of vision with hallucinatory confetti that she had to blink several times to clear. "Yes, dear, that's right. I'm you, and it's time we had a nice little heart-to-heart – or would it be hearts-to-hearts? The whole genetic mixup gives me a headache, but that's beyond the point!"

The air turned dark and foggy as Lilith slouched floorwards once more, coughing up a weak trickle of blood from the forcible blow delivered to her cheek. She frowned when she realized that the texture of the ground had changed from rough cement to plush softness, then wondered just how hard she'd been hit when the fog cleared and she realized that she now lay on the thick plush carpet of the office of the late Harry Saxon. "What'm I doing here?"

"Simple enough! I brought you back to the scene of your most humiliating defeat. This is the place where you turned Benedict on your dearest Doctor, all but jumping into the arms of his worst enemy because it felt good. It's all quite bitter, isn't it?" A creak as someone rose from the desk chair, muted footfalls in the carpet as the chair's erstwhile occupant moved to face the felled Field Agent. "You mean well and it all goes wrong, and when you mean wrong... it gets worse. You just have the worst of luck, don't you?"

"I... I still don't get it. Why did you bring me here?" Lilith stared up into the face of her mirror image, chilled by the glitter of something askew behind the frosty blue eyes. "To gloat? To kill me? What? And further more, just what are you?"

"I told you already – I'm you! Well, the part of you influenced by the part of him still lodged in your mind when he chose to die. It's pure genius! Despite everyone's best efforts to the contrary, the Master once again survives!" Dark-Lilith tapped her finger against her lips as she thought, an unconscious four-beat rhythm that made the real woman shudder. "No, dear, I'm not here to gloat. It's fun for a while, but it gets old. And how could I kill you? Frighten you to death? That would be amusing as well, but counter-productive. No, my lovely woman, I want you to surrender."

"Surrender – you mean, take over my body?" Lilith fought off any remaining pangs of dizziness and staggered to her feet. "Like hell you will."

"Oh, I did hope I wouldn't have to resort to violence, seeing as whatever damage I cause to you in here will be reflected in your physical body. But drastic measures must be taken, I suppose..." A clenching of one fist, shadows gathering into a writhing mass of fell energy as dark-Lilith's face folded into a scowl. Then, before true-Lilith could prepare, she opened her palm and slammed it against her foe's chest. The impact sent her target flying, the reinforced wooden panels of the office door splintering as a body punched through it with brutal force.

Instead of landing in the carpeted hall beyond, Lilith was stunned to taste dirt in her mouth as she plowed a furrow in freshly charred turf. Weakly spitting the debris away, she forced herself to her feet once more as her mirror-self appeared. "Where is this now? I don't recognize it."

Dark-Lilith grinned impishly, spun around with arms extended as if to claim the surroundings for her own. "This is New Gallifrey, seat of the reborn Time Lord Empire. As you can see, we aren't quite done with the landscaping yet, but won't it be glorious?" Her face clouded once more as she strode over to true-Lilith and yanked her up by the collar. "Or it would have been, had you not killed it in the birthing. You and your precious Doctor."

"Killed it?" Lilith wrenched herself away from the tight grip of white-knuckled fingers, stepped back and tried to assess her advantages in this situation. "It was an abomination that had no right to life in the first place! While I may have fallen, I did my best to redeem myself by helping him in the end!"

"And who are you to arbitrate what is right and what is wrong? You cower behind your false righteousness and refuse to let true power take its course." This time the immediate area around dark-Lilith seemed to shimmer with the evil energy, turning the air leaden with a negative charge that true-Lilith could almost taste. "And that is why you must surrender – only the strong survive! Your pitiful weakness has no right to exist and must be destroyed."

Instead of the forceful strike that true-Lilith had come to expect, the release this time was deceptively simple. Raising one glossy crimson-nailed hand, dark-Lilith snapped the fingers together and then stood back to watch her target's reaction. The atmosphere came alive around Lilith, howling with dark wind that threatened to consume her. Then she began to hear the voices, naming themselves in the gusting fury: Jacqueline Tyler. Ricky Smith. Yvonne Hartman. John Lumic. You killed us. Your actions brought our death – why, Lilith? You killed us, and now we'll kill you. We'll tear you apart!

Then the agony struck her, physical pressure on her skin that turned to piercing lances of pain as if invisible fingers dug into the flesh and began to pull. It was all Lilith could do to focus her mind and bring her arms up in a shielding motion, letting out a gasp of relief when the sensations stopped. When she opened her eyes, she saw a strange luminescent barrier keeping the shadows at bay. She trembled, though, when she looked down and saw that her skin was slick with blood – but at least I'm alone!

"For a moment, anyway." The barrier shimmered briefly as dark-Lilith stepped through, glancing over her alternate form with a smirk of satisfaction. "A nice little skill, but hardly on par with what you could have with me in control. You see, I'm not afraid of my abilities... and I've inherited ambition from our wonderful Master! We could go so far, you and me... and him. He does deserve some of the credit, you know."

"What, for turning you into an evil, manipulative whore? I told you I'll have no part in this!"

All traces of mirth vanished from dark-Lilith as she stepped forward once more. "Words, all of it, empty words! But I'll have my way in the end... which, by the way, is now." She lifted her hands up to the roof of the barrier. "I learned my lesson from watching the Doctor deal with the Carrionites, and that is the power of words. How doubly ironic that a passage from the Bard should mark your defeat!" The light of the barrier began to flicker and fade as dark-Lilith closed her eyes and began to chant. "Fear no more the heat o' the sun, nor the furious winter's rages; thou thy worldly task hast done, home art gone, and ta'en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust!" With these final words, she punched her hands upward and shattered Lilith's shield against the darkness. Twilight fell, and with the screams of the angry dead, so did Lilith.

Note, 01March: The Shakespeare passage comes from "Cymbeline." My heartfelt apologies for the Abridged Yugioh reference. That's all I'm gonna say about this one...