Episode: The Lost Child

Chapter: Memories of Daffodils [1/5]

Summary: Amy and Rory wanted for the TARDIS to get fixed so they could go back home and get married. Torchwood Three wanted to keep Cardiff safe as the Rift stabilized and solve a string of gruesome murders. Jack Harkness wanted to protect his team and talk to the Doctor. The Master wanted for humans to stop poking at things they could never understand. Or the one where old friends and old enemies meet again, new friends and new enemies are made, and something vast stirs in the dark.

Rating: T

It isn't until they are outside and breathing again that Amy explodes.

"What the Hell happened, Raggedy Man?! Did the TARDIS break down? Were we attacked? Was that a temper tantrum?" she questions, talking a mile an hour while pushing her hair out of her face, messing it up even more than it already was.

"The TARDIS throws temper tantrums?" Rory asks, startled, as he pushes away from the wall he had been leaning against, patting himself down to make sure he's still in one piece, which results in tiny puffs of dust flying off of his clothes.

However, Koschei is too busy staring wide-eyed at the locked doors of the TARDIS, smoke swirling behind the window glass as the last echoes of the cloister bell fade away. In one hand he clutches whatever shirt and jacket he took blindly out of the wardrobe in his haste to get back to the control room, while the other holds a pair of shoes he hopes will fit him.

It had been just nine hours and three minutes since they took off from Sicily when Amy and Rory had finally walked into the control room, back into their original outfits. After half a minute of gawking at the overtly cheerful Time Lord grinning genially at them, they had practically shoved him into the corridor with orders to get showered and changed, at the very least!

Well, that had been Amy. Rory had stood behind her awkwardly, fiddling with something in his jacket pocket, before asking if his bruises really were better or if he had simply hidden them away. Once he'd told the humans that no, he really was better, Time Lords heal fast, and no, he wasn't tired, Time Lords don't really need that much sleep, Amy had once more pointed him down the corridor with a no-nonsense look on her face. Koschei had thrown his hands up but turned tail and made for the showers. All calculations and analysis on what little information he had on the cracks were already running, so he told himself he could afford to change out of his tunic and get a snack.

He was in the wardrobe, clad only in black jeans and socks, and considering the assortment of stupid shirts he could put on to embarrass Rory some more at whatever was left of his stag, when the TARDIS shook hard enough to throw him into the wall. A moment later, the cloister bell started tolling on full, and smoke crawled out of any seams and grates it could find as the ship rattled and jerked as if it was being tossed around by a playful kitten.

So, Koschei had grabbed the closest things that looked like a shirt and a jacket, as well as a pair of black shoes that looked about his size, and rushed off towards the control center. No need to go around shirtless once this mess was under control, after all, and especially not if they found themselves away from the TARDIS in their attempts to fix her.

Which is exactly what has happened now.

Amy and Rory don't appear to be hurt, since they were clinging to the handrails for dear life when he'd rushed into the control room and they're moving fine now, so he hopes it's just bruises and shock.

Unfortunately, he'd only managed to stabilize the TARDIS' flight and, once they stumbled into whatever passed for a landing, he'd quickly ushered the two humans out before anything more toxic than smoke could fill the control room.

So, here they are now, stuck outside the TARDIS as she repairs herself, with no idea of what went wrong or where—

Sucking in a sharp breath, Koschei turns around so quickly that he stumbles, eyes widening in horror before they narrow threateningly as he lets out a litany of the foulest curses he knows in half a dozen languages.

Fortunately, the TARDIS is still operational enough—or too damaged to work properly, though he tries not to think about it—to still keep up the parental control, if the startled and confused looks on Amy's and Rory's faces, instead of scandalized ones, are any clue.

"Raggedy Man? What's wrong?" Amy asks once he falls silent, breathing heavily and putting on the t-shirt almost violently as he tries to distract himself.

… Well, he tries to put the t-shirt on, but judging by the way the collar slips halfway down his arm, he might be doing something wrong.

"Skaro ablaze, did I grab a dress instead of a shirt?" he asks aloud, pulling his arms out of what he thinks might be the sleeves, before pulling the neon pink front away from his body to try and see what he's dealing with and what's printed on—

Rose and Jack smile widely as they stretch the pink eyesore between them with a cry of 'souvenir!', and, laughing, cold hands take the shirt from them with an elated 'fantastic!'

"Someone I know went to Raxa—Raxacori—coricori-co… Ra-xa-co-ri-co-fa-lla-pa-to-rius and all I got was this lousy t-shirt," Amy reads as best as she can with a confused frown, while Rory looks more resigned than surprised. "They have this kind of thing on other planets too? Why didn't you get one in your size? Or were you ever that big in another of your faces?"

"It was a present," Koschei answers absentmindedly, fiddling with the hem of the Raxacoricofallapatorian size small t-shirt, carefully poking at the echo of the shirt's last seconds before it had been hung up in the wardrobe, and blinking again at Rose's bright smile, the Captain's young face and the Doctor's glee and a hint of mischief as he'd accepted his companions' joke present as if it was actually a serious one. "Rose and Jack got it as a joke," he adds softly, looking at the other item of clothing he picked up to see if it's another shirt or sweater he could swap this one for.

This shirt was a present for the Doctor. Regardless of what he'd planned to do with it, it's the Doctor's, in a way that's far more personal than any of the other clothes in the wardrobe. Most of them had belonged to previous companions, or had been bought for a specific occasion or 'just in case'. Sure, Koschei had used the Kolpashan coat the Doctor had worn for much of his sixth regeneration as part of his costume to fetch Rory from his stag, but that was borrowing and this was claiming.

Even if it is an 'outfit of the day' claim and he'll never put it on again, it still means the memories imprinted on the cloth will wash away, replaced by whichever ones Koschei makes, and another tiny piece of the Doctor will be lost.

But here and now, a shirtless man will attract more attention than one in a long pink shirt, and that's exactly what Koschei doesn't need. So, with a sigh, he focuses on the other item he grabbed, a well-worn leather jacket, and puts it on, hoping it'll help disguise him by covering most of the neon pink of the—

Rose hovers, worried and in denial, while an older woman offers her tea and babbles nonsensically, so it falls to Mickey to cautiously strip the leather jacket off the now lither form of the Doctor, passed out on the bed—

Koschei feels sick, clinging to the leather jacket now covering his shoulders, and grimacing when he realizes that, no matter how much he wants to, he can't seem to make himself pull it off.

This was the favored jacket of the Doctor's ninth regeneration. Even more than the souvenir shirt, this jacket is a part of the Doctor.

But Koschei needs the disguise now, for about twelve hours if they're lucky, or twenty-four if the damage is that bad. Unlike the shirt, this jacket carries more memories—Rose cheering loudly as she gives him as tight a hug as she can, Jack tripping him when he decides he wants to lead the next dance, the slap of a protective mother, a pat to Mickey's shoulder that almost makes him trip in surprise, the power of the Vortex rushing all around—and so one day covering Koschei's shoulders instead won't have that much of an impact.

Survive. Figure out what happened to the TARDIS, and fix her. Avoid the threat. Blend in.

So, huffing out a sigh, Koschei lets go of the jacket and puts on the black shoes that are, fortunately, in his size.

"Raggedy Man? What happened? Where are we?" Amy asks again, calmer this time, as both she and Rory give him intense looks.

He has worried them, Koschei realizes. Spacing out like that while checking over his clothes, and who knows what kind of faces he had been making, he had worried Amy and Rory. Amy knows him well enough by now to realize when he's hiding some sore aspect of his past, and while Rory is fairly new at this, he has good instincts and, moreover, he's a trained nurse. Knowing when his patients are hiding something has to be second nature for him.

Part of him bristles at the idea of having 'babysitters'. Regardless of how much he jokes with Amy about that, he has never seriously considered her to be anything more than his guest—maybe perhaps a friend, part of his mind whispers, but he immediately pushes it away because he has no friends, his friends are dead—and while it's alright for Amy to bother him about what she considers bad habits, it's not alright for her to take his health as her own responsibility. Adding Rory to that is even more of an insult. He's a Time Lord, over 1350 years old, and this isn't even his first body, regeneration notwithstanding.

… Alright, maybe the fact he has already burnt through a whole regeneration cycle, and with his being alive now being the result of him 'cheating', could be a cause of concern, but still!

However, the part of Koschei that isn't bristling in annoyance feels oddly warm yet guilty at the same time. He hasn't felt anything this contradicting since—

"You're a genius. You're stone cold brilliant, you are. I swear, you really are. But you could be so much more. You could be beautiful. With a mind like that, we could travel the stars. It would be my honor. Because you don't need to own the universe, just see it. To have the privilege of seeing the whole of time and space. That's ownership enough."

No, not going there, nope, not now, not later, not ever.

So, instead, the Mast—Koschei focuses all of his attention back on Amy and Rory and their question.

"We're in one of the worst places we could have landed in, and the only reason it isn't the worst is because it's 2006," he answers, snarling, before he catches himself and shakes his head in an attempt to clear it. "At least he's on the other side of town," he grumbles under his breath, glaring towards where he can feel the wrongness, the distortion that's making time warp grotesquely around it, twisting in ways it should never do, creating an area of uncertainty where nothing and everything is possible.

"One of the—Is it worse than alien snakes? Or Prisoner Zero? Or—Oh, it's another alien invasion, isn't it?" Rory bemoans, grimacing even as, cautiously, he follows Amy to the entrance of the alley the TARDIS landed in.

Shifting his screwdriver and the psychic paper from his jeans' pockets to the jacket's inner ones mostly out of habit—the jacket's habit, it feels empty without something in its inner pockets—Koschei scowls but follows after them.

"And how come it looks like Cardiff?" Amy asks as he joins them, frowning as her eyes dart from the people walking without a worry down the street, and signs in both English and Welsh on shops and street corners.

"That would be because it is Cardiff."

"Cardiff, Wales?" Rory asks, rubbing his eyes before looking at the street again, and Koschei scoffs.

"No, Cardiff, Mars. Of course it's Wales," he answers with an eyeroll, earning a pointed look from Amy and a hesitant one from Rory.

"There's a Cardiff in Mars?"

"… There'll be, but that's not the point," he tells them with a huff, slipping his hands in the jacket's pockets to pull it closer to his chest and hide more of the pink shirt, before he walks out into the street and follows the smell of pancakes to what he hopes will be someplace good. "The TARDIS is repairing and I'd rather we avoid trouble until she's done. So, let's get breakfast or dinner or whatever while we wait. You're paying, Nurse Boy."

"I am?"

"Yes, you are."

"Yes, I am. Why am I not surprised?" Rory asks aloud, though obviously to himself, so Koschei turns to Amy instead when he feels her eyes on him.

"What happened to the TARDIS?" she asks once she has his attention, and Koschei can't help but glare again at that spot of wrongness they're slowly leaving behind.

"There's a time rift in Cardiff, and some idiots who fancy themselves alien experts poke at it every now and then. Something happened here not long ago and the Rift is restless. The TARDIS got caught in a wave of temporal anomaly, pushing her out of her flight path and damaging her. Fortunately, the Rift radiation is an excellent fuel source, so she'll be back to fully operational status in twelve to twenty-four hours," he explains with a tired sigh, letting his shoulders drop and forcing his scowl into something less menacing that, judging by Amy's grin, probably looks a lot like a pout.

"Aw, don't look like that, Raggedy Man. Just think of all the Welsh food we can try now that we're here," she jokes, bumping her shoulder against his, while Rory scrunches his nose.

"Hey, we're talking about my wallet and I've seen him eat. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, especially if we need to book a hotel for the night," he tells them, lifting his hands in the universal 'stop' gesture.

"Cheer up, Nurse Boy. Making the TARDIS habitable for humans is always quite high on the list of repairs, so we might be able to spend the night there. Once I've got a place to put you in, I can help with the repairs, so it will go faster then," he explains with a grin, and, despite rolling his eyes, Rory nods in acceptance.

"What do you mean, someplace to put us in? You are the one who gets in trouble, Raggedy Man!" Amy protests with a grin, poking his nose with a finger that Koschei almost manages to swat away before she pulls back.

"That's because I'm trying to keep you safe. And quit calling me that, call me Harry," he huffs with a scowl, straightening self-assuredly and refusing to think about whether Amy had a point with her last statement.

"Harry? As in Harold Saxon?" Amy asks, wide-eyed in surprise while Rory looks more curious than anything.

"No, as in Harriet Jones," Harry answers with a growing smirk, excited to finally tell someone about this, because the wizened Doctor had only given him a judgmental look when he'd explained about his reasoning during the Year that Never Was, instead of the shock and horror he had been expecting. "She was supposed to usher in a new Golden Age for the United Kingdom, but she messed with the Doctor."

And that said, Harry—Koschei likes 'Harry', far better than any other name he's chosen so far, maybe he'll keep it—falls silent and lets his words sink in, waiting for the shock and the horror as the puny humans realize their precious Doctor is actually not as much of a saint as they thought he was.

A second later, Amy gawks and Rory leans so far away from him that he's forced to take a stumbling step to keep his balance, so Harry's grin grows, pleased.

"Oh my God. You blew up her house," Rory stammers, pointing a finger at Harry more in disbelief than accusation, and all the pride he'd felt turns to confusion.

"What? No, she was simply deposed. What are you talking about?" he asks, confused, as he looks between Amy and Rory, stopping in their walk as he loses the trail of the pancakes, taking just a second to ubicate something better than Chinese takeover before he steers them towards the mouth-watering scent of roasted chicken.

"Well, her house blew up last year. It was in the news. They said it was a gas leak," Rory explains with a shrug, calmer now that he knows Harry didn't have any part in the late Prime Minister's death.

However, something in Rory's statement makes Harry tense and look at him with narrowed eyes.

"When was that?" he asks, remembering Amy's complete lack of recognition upon seeing the Daleks.

That was last year too, and a 'gas leak' seems an awfully convenient way to cover up 'death by extermination'. Or, if what he suspects is the case here, 'death by unknown alien activity'.

Rory frowns, looking to Amy for help in answering Harry's question, but she looks just as lost as her fiancé.

I hate it when I'm right. … Alright, no, I don't, but I hate it this once.

"Okay, then maybe it was my fault," he groans as he rubs his face, grimacing as the treacherous thought of how Dalek Caan broke through the time lock comes back from the dark corner he'd shoved it into.

How else could anything get into as strong a time lock as that around the Time War, if not by using the one moment in time when it was weakened by Gallifrey being pulled out of it?

And how did Gallifrey get pulled out of the time lock? With an idiot who thought putting a nonstop beat into the head of one of his people to drive him into madness, to the point he would be desperate enough to break the Time War's time lock and destroy the whole of time to get rid of said beat.

If you weren't dead, Rassilon, I'd kill you again.

"How could that maybe be your fault?" Amy asks softly, frowning in confusion but with no judgement in her eyes, while Rory's whole face is scrunched into something that's both wary and totally uncomprehending at the same time.

"There might have been an invasion and planet-napping that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't tried something utterly stupid that one time," he answers vaguely, waving a hand in a nondescript gesture even as his shoulders pull up to his ears against his will.

He is not ashamed of what he did with the Immortality Gate, he had wanted to get rid of the accursed drums and, when he realized they were a link to Gallifrey, he wanted his planet back. It was inconsequential whether Rassilon had been pulling the strings all along, Gallifrey was the Master's home, estranged as he was, and he wanted it back. Once it was back, he could then decide to just ignore it and go about his business if he wanted, but Gallifrey would still be there.

However, he is ashamed of…

"We're the only two left. There's no one else. I-I'll do it! I'll come with you, spend the rest of my life in the TARDIS, locked away. I'll do it! Regenerate!"

He couldn't save him.

"Get out of the way."

After giving up everything for him, he still couldn't save him.

"I can bring you back!"

But that's going to change now.

He has a way to fix things, and no one will stop him this time. No Dalek, Rassilon or—

"—Hell? We were invaded? How come we didn't hear about that?" Rory asks, wide-eyed and mouth hanging open in disbelief. "How many times have we been invaded?"

Harry can't help it. Looking at his surprise, and Amy's astonishment, the only thing he can do is laugh.

"You humans with your primitive brains. You are so oblivious! There have been so many invasion attempts right in your faces and you never even noticed. Remember that time with the daffodils?" he asks them with a huge grin, but at their lost expressions, Harry realizes he forgot about one tiny detail of that misadventure. "Ah, no, wait. You hadn't been born that far back."

"… Daffodils tried to invade the planet?" Rory asks in disbelief, gawking, while Amy analyzes Koschei in an attempt to see if he's trying to trick them.

"Of course not," Harry scoffs, giving Rory his best disappointed look. "A plastic hive mind tried to invade the planet with plastic daffodils."

Daffodils invading Earth. Please, what a ridiculous thought.

"Who looks at plastic daffodils and thinks hey, this would be an excellent weapon?!" Amy questions with something that can either be confusion or disgust, though it's probably both.

And Koschei beams at her. Little Amelia Pond, asking the right questions! Sure, the attitude is not the best, but she's proven to be a quick learner, and Koschei's willing to work with that. Rory's a hard-worker with an open mind, so, when Koschei gestures grandly as he answers, he makes sure to include him too.

"Exactly! It's genius! The one thing they never suspected!" he tells them, and while Amy still looks skeptical, Rory blinks before tilting his head with a lift of his eyebrows that's a blatant well, that's a good point. "Of course, the Nestene then decided that it would be easier to just kill everyone, so there we were, the Master and the Doctor fighting side by side one more time!"

A police car rushes past with its siren wailing loudly, but the noise quickly lowers to match the whines of the Beacon Hill Telescope control room echoing all around them, muting yet matching the Nestene transfer via earthen telescope that the Master had managed to rig and is now trying to figure out how to stop – or, rather, how to defeat the Nestene or slow them down long enough to run back to his TARDIS, reinstall the dematerialization circuit, and get off of this doomed planet.

But then the Doctor reaches for him, talking about preventing the Nestene's arrival with polarity changes that he would have never considered because changing the polarity whilst the transfer shift is still open, risking blowing us up alongside the telescope and the Nestene isn't exactly what he had in mind, even with as many changes he has had to make to the plan – but when he turns to say that, the Doctor's time feelers brush against his, pleading for him to help with the frequencies and transmitter wavelengths because he doesn't know how to, and there's no time for him to figure it out and keep everything stable while he takes care of the polarity change.

And while the Master voices his doubt about the plan, he still reaches back when he feels the tremors in the Doctor's feelers, wraps his own reassuringly around them like the old times, and he finally sees it.

No matter how much the Master enjoys matching wits with the Doctor across a battlefield, or how he'll keep trying to kill him—actually, to force him to regenerate, but no one will hear him say that aloud because it doesn't have the same impact death has—regardless of what happens now. The only thing the Master enjoys even more than fighting against the Doctor is fighting alongside him.

So, he agrees to the plan, and, though they don't look at each other again, they never break their feelers' contact, exchanging the minutiae that they have no time to speak aloud as they work to keep the signal and power levels stable for the polarity switch. And, underneath all that, there's an undertone of electricity, of excitement as they face this new enemy, the pale formless creature slowly taking shape—

"The Master?"

And he's suddenly in the middle of a street, surrounded by humans, no sign of the Doctor or Lethbridge-Stewart or the Nestene—

"What? Where—?" he asks, looking around quickly and taking in all the details—there are Welsh words on a shop sign and Koschei immediately remembers they're on Cardiff, 2006. "Right, sorry. I got lost in thought," he tells Amy with a scowl, rubbing his face with a hand before taking in a deep breath and turning a corner to keep en route for the pancake place.

"We noticed," Amy answers with a grin, though her amusement soon turns to hesitation. "I thought those were some of your old names. The Master and the Captain…"

"Oh, Skaro, no!" he hurries to tell her as he scrunches his nose, shuddering mostly for show, but also because the wind turned and now, he can only smell boiled Brussels sprouts instead of roasted chicken. "The Captain was our instructor, back when we first started as Time Lords. She got promoted not long after and took up the name the General."

"And what about the Master?" Amy asks after a nod, and while she's curious, Rory is frowning in confusion by her side.

"He said 'the Master and the Doctor', Amy. Of course he wasn't the Master," Rory tells her, though Koschei stays silent, listening to the words that sound muted somehow, as if he was underwater.

He remembers that awful night all alone in the infirmary, limbs sore and face and chest aflame where the knife had cut. He remembers the anger fueling the drums after the Captain's scolding, how unmerited it was because they had been careful, it was the Captain's fault for not telling them more about the threat they were there to track and incapacitate. He remembers the flash of hot embarrassment as he'd heard the whispers of the rest of the squad, how he had needed saving and how pathetic he'd been, getting captured by such primitive aliens. He remembers the fear when he'd come to his senses only to find himself strapped down, with someone leaning hungrily over him, blade in hand, and the satisfaction of blowing his captor's head off as soon as Theta had incapacitated the guards.

He remembers how all those feelings had festered in his chest that night in the infirmary, after Theta had been sent away, and the promise he'd made himself. No more humiliation or shame. No more pain or fear. He would never again let panic take over him when the drums beat too quickly, and he would never again let his temper cloud his judgement when the drums beat too loudly. From then on, Koschei would be the Master of his own destiny.

He had thought he'd only stumbled along the way, running away too early at times, not thinking as deeply as he should have some others, but after the Christmas of 2009…

"You are diseased, albeit a disease of our own making."

"No. I never was," he whispers with a soft sigh, shoulders drooping under what feels like the combined weight of all the planets in Kasterborous.

The Master. The Master of what? He had never had any control, no matter how much he tried, how far he strayed. In the end, he was always fated to antagonize the Doctor, to end up on Earth that fateful Christmas of 2009, in such a pathetic state that he would do anything at that point to get some semblance of control over his life.

Even breaking the time lock around the worst war the universe would ever see.