Episode: The Lost Child
Chapter: The Naming Game [2/5]
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: M
Warning: Graphic description of corpses
He's pretty sure neither Amy nor Rory have caught his whispered words, but they are still bothered enough by his 'silence' that Rory actually raises his voice with his next casual question, trying way too hard to sound 'normal'. Koschei's standards for the human race aren't exactly high, but Rory has surely broken a record on the how much more pathetic can a species get scale.
"So! What's with the whole 'no names, only titles' thing? I mean, Captain who?"
"That's – Actually, that's a great question," Amy agrees with a more natural curiosity after her initial overtly-enthusiastic response.
Koschei – no, wait, it was Harry, wasn't it? Yes, Harry. Anyway, Harry looks between them for a second, feeling his lips twist into a grin, and, with a what the heck, he finally huffs and chuckles before straightening.
Awkward they may be, but they're still asking good questions.
"Nothing. Just the Captain."
That doesn't mean they're going to get the right answers, though. The pouts and mounting confusion are way more amusing than any expression of understanding. And Harry is going to drag this one out for as long as he can and then some.
Humans don't have the same biology as Time Lords, nor the same understanding of the universe. If Harry ever has to explain the deal behind Gallifreyan names to such an oblivious race as is humanity, he'd better make sure he has a couple weeks free to do it properly. It's going to be all or nothing, there are no half-assed explanations when it comes to names.
Of course, as mentioned, Amy's deadpan look and Rory's deepening frown only make it more likely that Harry won't explain. It's just so fun to lead the humans in circles, watching them scramble around like mice in a maze or, occasionally, headless chickens!
"But what about when she was promoted to General?"
"Just the General."
"But how many generals were there? Didn't it get confusing?"
"Oh, there were many generals, but only one was called the General. There was another who went by Fred," Harry explains with a serene grin, but not even he has enough self-restraint not to cackle when Amy and Rory give him their best deadpan looks in unison.
Alright, so Romana hadn't been a general, but given her insistence on using her full name when speaking, the Master had had to figure out an alternative. Gallifreyan names are spoken easily enough in Gallifreyan or through visual or telepathic communication, but in any other language? Not so much.
Good thing she'd mentioned that the Doctor had given her the alternative of 'Fred' when she had traveled with him in his fourth regeneration. Most of the time, the mere chance to call her that had been the only moment of cheer between periods of fighting.
'Fred' is such an amusing name… He needs to find someone called Fred and call them Romana. Now that will make his day.
However, his actual predicament is more about the grin Amy is directing at him and less about what other amusing expressions Harry can draw out of his companions.
That's the issue of traveling with someone for a while. They learn exactly where to strike, and, knowing the kind of situations Amy has been around for, Harry feels his stomach clench with dread when he sees her open her mouth—
"I think I prefer 'the Master'. That's kinky."
—in case it's something like that.
Kinky is not the worst he's heard about the name he chose, but the way she says it, shuffling her shoulders and wagging her eyebrows, and the way Rory squeaks her name, completely scandalized, still manage to put a blush on Harry's face. He quickly forces it down with ease, of course, but Amy has caught it, what with her eyes never leaving his face.
Now, anyone else would laugh or poke some more at it, but not Amy. Oh, no, not Amy, because Amy is a kissogram, which means she has lost any sense of embarrassment when it comes to making people blush or laugh.
And so, Amy drapes herself over Rory's shoulders, practically melting atop her very flustered fiancé, and, aware of Harry's keen hearing, actually proceeds to demonstrate just how kinky she thinks his name is by whispering in Rory's ear.
"Oh, Master, please…"
"Regenerate. Just regenerate. Please. Please! Just regenerate. Come on."
Warm arms that should feel cool, one heart gone and the other filling his chest with blood, time feelers clinging to his so tightly that he thinks it should hurt.
"Please, don't be sad. Don't let this bring you down, because I'm not really gone. Remember? There's no getting rid of me, I'll pester you until the end of the universe and time itself. … At the time I'm recording this message, you've already taken control of some operations, and you are great, Koschei. You are fantastic, magnificent, and you know it. So, don't forget it, please? You're beautiful, Koschei. And no matter what happened to me, how we left things. I forgive you. I thank you. And I want you to know you can still be beautiful, even if I'm not there anymore."
A hologram in the TARDIS control room, smiling sadly yet proudly from a face he hadn't seen in centuries but that is fresher than most recent ones.
Harry shakes his head and it's Cardiff all around, bustling cheerfully, while Amy still hangs off of her very flustered fiancé's shoulders.
"A-Amy, what are you—?!"
"Master, please, let me help you…"
"I could help you. Please, let me help."
A phone call in 10 Downing Street, drums beating insistently inside his head, and, for a moment, he feels as if his plan is not as important as answering with a 'yes'.
"Please, let me help. You're burning up your own life force."
A wasteland, a chase, a challenge, the drumbeat chanting run-run-run-run—
Harry wipes a hand down his face this time, scowling, and Cardiff fills his senses once more, along the thundering of Rory's heart, so loud in his embarrassment that Harry doesn't need to be leaning on him like Amy is doing to hear it clearly.
"Amy, seriously, this is not the place—"
"Master, I'm begging you!"
"Open the door, please! I'm begging you, Professor. Please, listen to me. Just open the door, please."
The drums, the drums, only the drums and the Doctor and he needs to get away, study the situation, formulate a plan, and what better way than to let the Futurekind distract his best enemy?
"I'm begging you. Everything's changed! It's only the two of us! We're the only ones left! Just let me in!"
Nonsense through a steel door, half-deadlocked, and he dismisses the words almost as soon as he hears them, because the TARDIS is his, he just needs to take the power cable out and the whole of space and time will be in his grasp.
Another police car rushes past, startling him back to the streets of Cardiff, but the drums are in his head, hammering in time with his hearts—
"Alright, I'm stopping now."
"Right, thank you. … Why are you smiling like that?"
"Oh, you know, you're just so adorable when you blush…"
"Amy, why are you smiling?"
"I just wanted to say sorry, Master."
"Anyway, why don't we stop and have a nice little chat while I tell you all my plans and you can work out a way to stop me? I don't think so."
"I'm asking you really properly. Just stop. Just think!"
"Use my name."
"Master. I'm sorry."
"Tough!"
The TARDIS whooshes around him, confused as to why they are leaving without the Doctor, but that immediately changes to sputtering and sparks and oh, no, you don't!
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"You can't do this. You can't do it. It's not fair!"
But the vengeful Archangel doesn't care, he knows there is no fair, there's only death, and Gallifrey is gone and won't ever come back, but it's alright because they're together at last, the only two left, and he understands the Master had to try because the emptiness hurts so much—
"It hurts. Doctor, the noise. The noise in my head, Doctor. One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four. Stronger than ever before. Can't you hear it?"
"I'm sorry."
But he hadn't gone away, hadn't left him alone, had staid and had listened when, out of options and in too much pain to think about what in blazing Skaro he was about to do, the Master had let the Doctor into his head because I don't know what to do, I'm scared, please help—
"Koschei. Hello. I know what you're going to say, this is not the message you were supposed to record. Well, when have you known me to do things as I was told? Oh, quit laughing! Or, well, I hope I managed to make you laugh. I doubt it though. After all, if you are watching this, it means I'm dead. Missing or killed in action, I know, but I know you, Koschei. And I know you wouldn't let me be 'missing', I know you would rip apart the whole of creation if necessary to find me, and that you would refuse to listen to this until you knew for a fact that I was dead. I'm sorry, Koschei. I hope you know I would never leave you voluntarily, and that I tried everything I could before it came to this. I'll miss you."
Cars rush past, people talk on their phones, a baby is crying across the street, pigeons coo over their heads—and the man groans at his fiancée's latest pun while she laughs—
"Enough!" Koschei roars, whipping around to glare the two humans into stillness, flaring within the allowed limits, and the other primitives around them immediately jerk away with startled shrieks and lots of tripping. "The next one to mock my best friend is going to have their tongue shoved so far down their throat that they'll taste their—"
Amy is shaking in Rory's arms with fear in her eyes, while Rory tries to hide her as much as possible with his body while not taking his panicked gaze off of Koschei.
Amy and Rory.
Amy and Rory.
What am I doing?
Yes, they were making fun of his name—Amy was, actually, Rory just suffered it, literally—but he's dealt with that kind of stuff before, and even worse. All in all, especially with Rory being the 'victim', this situation should have been amusing! Koschei can't just snap at them because he got lost in his own head—
Short temper. Light temporal drift. Headache – though that can be from the echo of his heartsbeat, still drumming loudly in his skull, and which he's trying really hard to ignore. General discomfort, as if a thousand ants were crawling all over his skin – which, once again, might be because of the jacket, but…
Coincidences don't exist. Add those symptoms to when and where they are, and what lies under their feet…
"Paradox sickness. Mild, still building, but there so much potential here—Skaro ablaze, Harkness, what have you done now?" he hisses, glaring towards the wrongness lazily making his way across Cardiff, still comfortably far from them. "Right, sorry about that, you two. Torchwood messed the Rift up and they haven't fixed it yet," he tells Amy and Rory, who, by now, have separated and are hovering worriedly around him, with some passerby giving them strange looks but returning to whatever they were doing before Koschei exploded.
"Uh, no worries, I guess. Who's Harkness? And what's Torchwood?" Rory asks, trying to inconspicuously return a small kit back to the jacket pocket he'd taken it from.
"It's alright, Raggedy Man. And I am the one who is sorry. If I'd known he was your—"
Something surges a couple streets away, the very fabric of reality twisting, fraying the timeline and rippling through as much of the whole of Cardiff's timeline as he can feel before it settles down into something that is too full of holes and rips and tears to stay stable much longer.
"—arry, Harry! Can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me," Rory is saying, and Koschei finally realizes he has closed his eyes and there's a hand on his shoulder that is not his, because one of his own is pressing against his temple while the other is holding onto a warmer hand much like the one on his shoulder.
Taking a deep breath and returning his focus to the here and now, Koschei retracts his time feelers further from the environment to try to slow down the paradox sickness caused by the mess that is Cardiff currently. And then, with a calmer breath, he opens his eyes.
Amy smiles in relief, hovering over Rory's shoulder, but the man himself is still all business, moving the hand on Koschei's shoulder to his chin, so that he can tilt his head here and there as he checks his eyes.
"Rory, I'm fine now, you won't find any issues with pupil dilation," Koschei tells him, taking his hand out of Rory's grip and jerking his head free as he takes a step back. "Something is really wrong here. Whatever they did to the Rift has damaged the timeline badly, and there are some aftershocks that are doing nothing to fix it. I don't know what Torchwood is doing, but it's clearly not enough," he explains, this time glaring in the direction of the surge a second before he starts to walk towards it. "I want to take a look at it, make sure it really is on the mend, and then we can go get dinner."
"Is it really going to take that long? I mean, it's just past eleven," Rory asks Amy, but Koschei is too focused on the timeline to decipher whatever she answers.
Captain Jack Harkness is slowly making his way towards them, but he's still far enough that they don't have to worry – plus, it's 2006, three cheers for anonymity!
Cardiff is stretched thin, creasing and cracking so badly around the Rift that it's almost as if the Rift itself was trying to expand. Judging by the way this last anomaly falls in the pattern of small injuries scratching at the fabric of reality and the timeline itself, that is exactly what is going on here. It could simply be the aftereffects of whatever over-excited the Rift, and they'll simply die down and scar over on their own in a couple weeks… But it could also be that this is just the beginning and things will only get worse.
The last thing Koschei wants to do right now is deal with Torchwood, especially with Jack Harkness, even less so with the mild paradox sickness he's managed to develop so far.
No wonder the TARDIS had shaken as badly as she had, if she got caught in one of the ripples. They're lucky she didn't end with worse damage than strained engines and overheating. At least that means she'll be habitable soon enough, even if she won't be able to fly yet. Koschei can't wait to get back inside, away from the paradox building—or, hopefully, dying—out here in the city.
"Let me guess. That is our destination," Amy huffs, stepping to Koschei's side to point a bit further ahead, where the police have established a cordon at the mouth of a small side street, complete with a plastic flap blocking the way in.
Koschei doesn't even need to check to know that yes, that's where the anomaly originated, so he merely grimaces and nods before focusing on the task at hand and straightening imposingly.
Leather jacket and neon pink shirt half a dozen sizes too big or not, the policemen still straighten when they see him stroll purposefully towards them.
"Sir, I'm afraid you'll have to—" the blond one starts, blocking their way with his hands up placatingly, but Koschei simply whips out his psychic paper and he goes silent.
"They're with me," he tells the policeman with a tilt of his head towards Amy and Rory, at his back, as he puts the psychic paper back into one of the jacket's inner pockets.
With a long-suffering look, the policeman simply pulls up the line of police tape so they can walk under and gestures them towards the plastic flaps blocking the way into the side street.
"Bloody Hell, Gwen could've told me there were more of them," he mutters when they walk past, too soft for human ears to catch, but Koschei decides to ignore him and simply walks into the street without a second thought.
The side street is actually a dead end, as cliché as it may seem, and of course the anomaly is as far from them as possible. Annoying as it may be to be so far away from an easy exit and the police—who he could use as meat shields, if nothing else—it still has the advantage of giving him some extra seconds to analyze the situation.
There's a team already there, clustered around something on the ground that stinks of blood and digestive juices, among other less desirable scents filling the alley. Boxes of equipment lie around, open and with different instruments peeking out or being handed to whoever asks for them, some of them recognizable but not all of them of human make.
The team in question is, on the other hand, fully human, though there's an echo of uneasiness on them that lets Koschei identify them as Torchwood. Who else would have spent as much time around Captain Jack Harkness? One-night flings wouldn't have earned as strong an imprint as these ones carry, after all.
Fortunately, the man himself is not around, and so Koschei quickens his steps so he can deal with this mess before the former Time Agent shows up. He really doesn't want to add his presence to his building headache.
The noise from their footsteps gets the team's attention, but before they can do more than look up and widen their eyes, Koschei flashes them the psychic paper.
"Harry Smith, UNIT's Scientific Advisor, and my assistants, Amelia Williams and Rory Pond," he introduces them with a no-nonsense tone, though, inwardly, he's cringing at whatever made him think introducing himself as Smith was a good idea.
Well, at least it isn't John Smith. For such an inventive man, the Doctor sure was an idiot.
Whatever. A name is just another disguise, and, at the moment, parading around as a member of UNIT will get him what he wants faster than anything else, regardless of whatever surname he chooses. Torchwood might not be all that collaborative, but at least they won't be outright dismissive, like they would with anyone else. Besides, Harry Saxon will attract all kinds of wrong attention in the long run, and the last thing he wants is to sabotage his own timeline.
Though, judging by the way one of the Torchwood idiots jumps to his feet as if zapped, maybe Harry has misjudged their relationship with UNIT.
"You're the Doctor."
… Or, just maybe, what he has misjudged is the level of functional braincells in human skulls.
"Did I stutter? Pay attention, Jones," he snaps as he pockets the psychic paper, the rest of the team clambering to their feet as he gets by their side.
"You have a psychic paper—" Ianto Jones protests, glaring so harshly that, if looks killed, Koschei would be a smudge on the ground, and that's when he remembers that Torchwood One operatives had at least a basic level of psychic training.
Just his luck.
"So does Jack Harkness, but I don't see you calling him 'Doctor'," he retorts instead, crouching next to the anomaly and reaching inside his jacket to pull out his screwdriver— "Stand down, Owen. I doubt Captain Jack will be happy to know you shot the only being able to help you with this mess," he orders without looking up, using the second of surprise at his name that stills Harper's hand when reaching for his gun, finally taking out the sonic to scan the anomaly.
"Oh my God. That's – That's a—"
"Rory," Koschei calls simply when Amy's stutter turns into quick shallow breathing, and Rory doesn't need more than that to snap out of his own horror and drag Amy away a couple steps, talking her down from her shock so she doesn't hyperventilate.
Koschei can't really blame her for that. Even he is having trouble with the anomaly, despite the fact he's just scanning it with his screwdriver at the moment, but not for the same reason.
Amy's and Rory's shock comes from the fact that the anomaly is a body, twisted and disfigured and mangled grotesquely, though not enough to not be recognizable as a human body.
Harry's trouble is how a healthy human body—huh, not that healthy, apparently the guy had kidney stones—becomes a bloody mass of unfitting parts stuck together or twisted inside out. Half of a baby's face turns into the stubble-covered chin of a man in his thirties, attached to the wrinkled neck and left shoulder of a seventy-year-old with the muscled arm of a teenager going to the gym far too often, and two out of five fingers worn down to the bone after months in a coffin. The pattern continues, the body twisted over itself in agony, with parts of it completely out of temporal synch with whichever had been the man's biological age at the moment of death. Half of his lower torso and the right leg are actually literally turned inside out, organs spilling on the ground after being precisely cut out of the body to fit the patch of reversed biology – even the stones are outside, sitting like bloodied pearls atop the fleshy mass of a kidney turned inside out.
But none of the parts is unfitting, not in the sense of someone playing Frankenstein and cutting and stitching together different body parts. No, this body, no matter how twisted, reads as the same person.
And how can a body have parts belonging to a baby alongside those of its adult and senior selves?
Koschei takes in a sharp breath and turns to his screwdriver, hoping the readings prove him wrong—
They don't.
"What have you done this time?" he snarls up at the closest Torchwood operative, Toshiko Sato, who has only managed to exchange wide-eyed and disturbed glances with her teammates in the few seconds it has taken Koschei to scan the anomaly.
The body distorted by a temporal anomaly the likes of which Koschei hasn't encountered since the Time War. What kind of experiment are these idiots running now that makes the Rift lash out and erase parts of a being's timeline indiscriminately? Don't they see what it does? Without the whole of the timeline, the victim reverts to the last chronological point or jumps to the next most probable. Such an anomaly would immediately kill the victim, the shock of an immediate change from, say, a thirty-year-old suddenly turning into a toddler would destroy the victim's mind or cause a heart-attack. Dead before they could even realize what had happened. Probably painless. But this? This is a body turning against itself, parts of it reverting to a time before it's actual stamp, others rushing forward – it would have been pure agony for the victim to go in such a way, and nowhere as fast as a full body conversion, what with the timeline being ripped apart… The victim would have died in agony all over their timeline, all their life, in an instant.
That is not painless. That is not fast. That is the kind of torture, of deadly weapon, Koschei would put at the top of his 'how not to kill people' list, right alongside 'extermination'.
He wouldn't wish extermination, or this, even on his worst enemies.
… Okay, maybe he would wish it upon the Daleks and Rassilon, but this is neither the time nor the place to re-examine his mental lists.
Sato jumps back, startled, clutching some kind of tablet closer to her chest, wide-eyed in both fear and the faintest echo of an old sense of guilt.
"We-We haven't done anything! We've been finding these bodies with increasing frequency for a week now, and we've been analyzing them to figure out who is doing it and stop them," she answers, indignation taking over her fear, but interestingly enough, doing nothing for her increasing guilt. "Why do you think it's our fault?"
"Oh, I don't know," he tells her with a fake nonchalant tone, waving his screwdriver in a circle before snarling at the whole team, who flinch back in surprise, Harper still holding his gun but keeping it aimed at the ground. "Maybe because the Rift's throwing a tantrum and Torchwood is literally sitting on top of it? Didn't you primitives learn anything from Canary Wharf?" he hisses, directing his glare at Jones with his last words – and stiffening in shock. "Ianto Jones. What are you doing in Cardiff in 2006?"
"It's 2008," a well-known voice growls at his back, over Amy's and Rory's startled gasps, and Koschei whirls around as he jumps to his feet so fast that he would be surprised he hasn't stumbled if he wasn't so full of shock and denial because that— "Let go of the screwdriver and put your hands up, Master. And, while you're at it, tell me where the Doctor is and how come you're not dead."