A/N: I probably should give a light trigger warning for this and the following chapter, because of rather dark topics...

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"What the..." he muttered against her lips, slowly winding himself out of Roka's memories.

Her breath was heavy, adrenalin still rushed through her veins from both, the painful memories and the heated kiss. Like ice and fire, intertwined and keeping her from being consumed by either one. She leaned forward again, pressed her lips against his, wanted to get lost in the feeling and taste of him, wanted to forget what lay behind her. Forgotten were the snowbound ruins of old, the sound of millions of robots rushing to the death of the last remains of a lost kind.

The Master let his fingers hover over her temples, his thumbs caressing her cheeks. Only faintly did she notice something odd about the way he felt through their mental connection, but right now wasn't the time to pay attention to this. Suddenly he was back in her mind, however evading her memories, this time. Or did he? Sometimes a snipped popped to the forefront, revealed the gruesome things she had tried out after she had recovered from that shot.

A faint heartbeat was in her head, steadily pounding, repeating, like a clockwork, neither slowing, nor speeding. She wondered how his hearts could stay so still while her own was thrumming in her chest so wildly. Somehow the kiss tapered off, the initial heat leaving them, but the connection stayed. She wanted more, wanted to completely vanish, instead of remembering. And for some moments she thought he was wanting the same, until she finally realized her mistake.

There was a sudden tug in her mind and the Master tore out a whole bunch of her newly regained memories at once.

A coincidence. She had imagined it from the shock. The shot hadn't actually hit her, that she was certain of. It couldn't be. What she had seen had only been images, born from a delirium of fear. She lay panting on the ground, hiding in the trees and listened to the fight going on nearby. It didn't bother her any longer what would become of this planet. It wasn't her bloody busyness after all.

She had been wandering this stony desert for way too long. Hunger, thirst and exhaustion made her careless, made her overlook the usually so obvious signs of the creatures living in the stones. Before she could react properly, a large thorn was darting out from a hexagonal hole, pierced right through her middle. She didn't even feel the pain as the poison immediately paralyzed her nerves and sent her into unconsciousness. When she woke up again she found herself in a circle of dried blood. So much of it, it made her sick. It couldn't be hers, there was no wound. She had dreamed this all.

Lightning struck a tree nearby, the purple bolt splitting the trunk right in the middle. Roka tried to hide, find a cave or someplace else to get cover. She ran, stayed in constant movement to evade the electricity that sometimes struck so close that she felt her skin crawl. It wasn't the lightning though, but a falling rock. She only saw how it fell, realized she wouldn't be able to evade. The storm was over when she regained her consciousness, the huge stone right next to her. Luck, she thought to herself. Just luck.

There was a fight. Today she was visible. She had forgotten to check when it would happen next and suddenly found herself in front of a lanky figure, clad in thin clothes that made them quick with their thin sword. She sprang out of the way, dodged the next attack and parried with her knives, danced around the figure and almost landed a hit. Quickly she ducked below one strike, bent out of the way of the next. But her opponent was too fast, caught her off guard eventually and shoved her against the stones, a nasty grin on his lips, his sword moving fast, crashing right through her ribcage and piercing her heart. He ripped the weapon out of her chest, wiped it clean in the grass and strode away.

This time she could not blame it on anything. She saw how it happened, how her body dissolved at the wound and put itself back together again. When it was done she lay in the grass, surrounded by her own blood, tears running down her cheeks as she curled herself to a ball and cried for what felt like hours.

There was no escape. There was a knife on her wrist and she watched, waited. It hurt, but eventually her atoms started to rearrange themselves again. There were several poisons, some of which she could remember. She got careless, found herself on battlefields, in front of creatures and all sorts of dangerous places. She had no idea how exactly it worked, but she always woke up sometime later.

The memories twisted her insides as they flooded her mind. So much pain. Roka had only wanted it to finally be over, her journey to end. There was no point in continuing, all alone and forgotten as she had been, without any hope of this fact ever changing.

The Master stroked his thumps tenderly over her temples, but it strangely didn't calm her this time, his essence feeling just too strange in her mind.

"My, my, you did quite horrible things to yourself," he stated, his voice laced with an unfitting fascination. "And none of it killed you... Not even a scratch..." He chuckled and pressed deeper into her mind, making her gasp at the sudden intrusion. It felt as if he was everywhere at once, frantically searching for something specific.

"Master... what are you..."

It was off. It wasn't right. He chuckled again and this time she heard the slight tinge of madness in it, heard his steady heartbeat... was it a heartbeat? Her head got dizzy, her sight blurred. Roka grabbed his wrists and tried to push him away from her, but his thumbs only pressed harder against her temples, almost painfully now.

"Stop," she whimpered. "You're hurting me."

"Oh, don't worry," he said happily. "It won't kill you, after all, right?"

She groaned and had to close her eyes to endure the sensation of his energy coursing through her head like a sharp knife.

"This is good. This is fantastic!" he muttered to himself. "Oh, you nasty little human. Hiding something like that from me..."

"I didn't hide anything. What the hell are you..."

A sudden sharp pain jolted through her head, would have make her double over if the Master wouldn't still be pressing her against the machine. He was digging deeper, far deeper than she could really endure. It hurt. For the first time it actually hurt, physically, and she cried out, clutching his hands, whimpering his name.

"The things I've done to keep myself alive. You have no idea to what lengths I went!" Another chuckle escaped him as he dropped his forehead against hers. "And here you are, holding this little secret."

Roka wanted to protest, wanted to tell him he was wrong, but whatever he did paralyzed her too much to speak and he ignored what she was thinking, if he even paid attention to it.

"Let me have it," he demanded, a mad grin spreading on his face. "Come on, little crow, let me have it!"

Her knees became weak, she even had trouble breathing now. It felt as if he was dissecting her brain, dismantling her very being into bits. She had to stop him, had to tell him. But all she could do was letting out another whimper and finally he let go of her, abruptly slipping out of her mind and leaving her behind as a shaky mess.

Without his hold she slithered down to her knees, feeling sick to the stomach, her head aching worse than ever before in her life. Panting she managed to raise her head, seeing the Master standing above her with a thoughtful, but cold look. He squatted down in front of her, put a finger under her chin to make her look up.

It was then that she saw what was so wrong about him. She had seen it before, so many times, so long ago. The madness clouding his gaze, the barely noticeable twitching of his eyes here and there. Roka glared at him, panic rising in her throat.

It wasn't possible.

She refused to accept even the thought of it, but the longer this moment lasted, the surer she got.

"Master," she whispered and stretched out her hand.

He took it into his own, pressed a kiss to her palm and grinned. "I need it," he uttered. "I need to know how it works. Don't you get it, Roka? I'd be unstoppable!" A mad grin split his lips. "And I'm sure it would fix it! It would finally, finally fix it!" He chuckled again, then lowered his head and dug his fingers into his hair, the laugh dying down to a whimper.

"You killed me," Roka breathed out. "It doesn't work anymore."

"No!" His head snapped up again. "I didn't! You're still here! Like in all your memories! You just came back!"

"But the glitch... reality ripping open and all that. This never happened all those times before." She scuttled towards him a little, lay her hands on his shoulders. "Master, listen to me. You stopped it! You-"

"No!" he shouted, slapped her hands away and sprang to his feet. His finger pointed down at her, eyes boring into Roka's. "The paradox got resolved because I was supposed to do it! It never fixed your body!" He reached down, grabbed her wrists and tore her up to him, while pulling off her gloves to reveal her hands, showing the floating matter around her fingers, too loose to stay in place any longer. Without his interference it would have spread to her whole body one day. "I only stopped it from getting worse."

Roka gulped, glaring at her hands. It couldn't be true. It simply couldn't. It made no sense.

Or did it?

Tears sprang to her eyes as she continued to glare at her hands, then at the Master's nasty grin. He tapped against her head, tilting his own a little.

"I can't find it in your mind. The secret to your immortality."

"I... I'm not..."

He ignored her, cradled her head in his hands. "It must be hidden still. Somewhere in that precious mind of yours. I just need to wait for it to wake up, like the rest of it. Or... awaken it myself..."

"Wha-"

"Ohh... yes, of course!" He let go and tugged down Roka's shirt to reveal the still slightly glowing veins there. "The crystal's energy did it. And it was only such a tiny piece. I need to bring you down, right to the source!"

Roka took a step back, wide eyed and suddenly scared. Something was missing, something important. It had to do with the crystal, but she was certain it wasn't what the Master was expecting. And it was obvious he wouldn't listen right now. He was all wrong, mad and obsessed, but somehow still too clear. Much clearer than he had been in the past and still so out of his mind.

"We'll jump back. I need to get you there, before the crystal deactivates again."

"B... but you said, we can't!" She didn't like the wicket grin on his face. At all.

"You can't." He pointed at her. "But it doesn't matter. Might hurt a little. That's all."

He chuckled to himself and already pulled up her sleeve to grab the Vortex Manipulator from it. Roka tried to struggle, tried to keep him away, but a Time Lord's strength was too much for her. Already he had it strapped to his own wrist, had grabbed her hand and threw them right into the Time Vortex to be tossed around and spit out at the desired location.

Roka knew how it felt - how it was supposed to feel - to travel via Vortex Manipulator. This was different, all wrong and twisted, as if she was at several places and times at once, fluttering in and out of possibility. Somehow she opened her eyes, saw herself standing in the keleperians' dwelling again, but also not. Each time she moved it was as if she existed a hundred times at once, each of her selves moving just a tiny little bit out of synch to the others, creating a sickening afterimage effect. In front of her was the Master, only one step away, but right now it was a chasm of eternity. Roka moved, set one foot before the other, dragged herself towards him.

And then it stopped.

All the afterimages collapsed into a single reality, time resumed in its normal way and Roka stumbled forwards, felt something twist inside of her and crashed to her knees, unable to keep herself standing. She could hardly breathe, retched and coughed. Blood, there was blood on the ground, gagged out and splayed below her.

"Sorry for the pain," the Master said in such a casual tone that it would have made her feel sick if she wouldn't already. "I'll make up for it later."

"You..." She coughed again, tried to ignore the pain that twisted her insides. "... bloody, stupid bastard of an arsehole," she ground out, not having the mind for more elaborate curses right now.

"Roka!" It was River's voice, ripping into her perception. The woman ran towards them and knelt down. "Oh my god, what happened to you?"

"She'll survive." The Master giggled madly and fumbled around with the Vortex Manipulator. "But why didn't it bring us all the way down? I need to get there."

"What have you done to her?!" River called out and sprang up, closing in on him and stabbing a finger at his chest. "I knew it! I knew you're a bastard! Pretending to be all soft and nice around this girl. But you only used her!"

A little perplex he blinked at her, then slapped her hand away and stated matter-of-factly, "Of course I did. It's not as if she wouldn't know that."

Oh, Roka knew indeed. She hadn't awaited him to harm her in this way, though. Not after being so annoyingly overprotective with her all the time. Carefully she got into a sitting position, breathing slow and controlled.

"River," she called out meekly.

The curly woman spun around, not without shooting a last venomous glance at the Master, who was striding away now. She crouched down next to Roka, her look turning concerned and a little softer.

"You have a scanner, don't you?" Roka enquired and groaned when something in her chest stung. "Can you take a look at me? I think something's a little messed up."

"A little messed up," River repeated with a snort and took out her scanner to wave it over Roka. "Well, there's some minor internal bleedings. Guess it hurts a lot, but if you don't move around too much, it won't kill you. Nothing broken. Geeze, what the hell did he do to you?"

"River, you have to get out of here," Roka stated, totally ignoring the question. "The crawlers are on their way here and the barrier around this settlement is gone."

"What? How do you...? And absolutely no!" She shot to her feet and glanced around the still smoking remains of the previous attack. "I can't leave them on their own."

Extremely carefully Roka stood up, swayed a little and finally got grabbed by River, who held her arm. "It's no use. Leave."

"Oh, just because you give up on them-"

"River, listen!" Roka demanded, not even entirely sure why she felt the need to warn her at all. It just felt right. "You can't help them. There's millions, maybe even billions of those robots heading this way. It can't take too long and they will completely overrun this place." She coughed up more blood and cursed at the Master, while holding tight to River's arm. "I saw and heard them. There are so many..." River's eyes widened in terror as she spoke and Roka shook her head, let her eyes wander over the settlement, almost whispering, "They are all dead already."

Because of me.

But that she kept to herself.

The Master came back into sight, fiddling with the Vortex Manipulator and his tablet, scanning the surroundings for whatever was on his mind. His gaze fell on her and she saw in his eyes that he was still held captive by the frenzy that had overtook him. There he was again, the Master she had met so many years ago, the one that was driven to constant action, so eager to finally make her afraid of him.

Well, now he managed. Although her fear was of a different nature than what he would enjoy.

"We have to leave," Roka pleaded and stumbled towards him, hoping she was wrong and it was only this place that messed with his head.

"Leave?" The Master laughed out and closed the remaining distance. "I'm holding the key to a never ending life in my hands now." He put his hand under her chin to make her look up. "You know, oh you know how badly I want it! Always wanted it!" The grin got madder, his voice a little high pitched. His eyes twitched again. "Don't complain, little crow. It means you won't ever be lonely again. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"Not like this," she uttered back.

"She's got internal bleedings," River tossed in. "If Roka doesn't get medical attention, and fast, I'm not sure she will..."

"She will. Now I need to murder a certain intruder, if you excuse me." He snickered, took a step back and dramatically widened his arms. "If that's out of the way I can bring you down and wake up your memories. Doesn't that sound nice?"

His hand was already at the button of the Vortex Manipulator when Roka lunched herself forwards, grabbing the Master's arm as tightly as she could. The last thing she saw was his perplex expression, then the Vortex swallowed them once more, again feeling wrong, again ripping her body to shreds, leaving her as endless possibilities and endless times, only to finally collapse and spit them out near the crystal.

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