Episode: The Lost Child
Chapter: The Weevil That Never Was [3/5]
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
"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," Captain Jack Harkness snarls, eyes ablaze with anger and hatred, as he stops a bit before reaching the frozen forms of Amy and Rory, keeping his Webley trained on the Master's face.
The Master doesn't move, tightening his grip on the screwdriver and staring at Harkness with wide eyes and his breath stuck in his throat.
It's him. It can't be him. He's some blocks away, still approaching slowly, the wrongness moving closer inexorably but still away, and yet this Jack Harkness is Jack Harkness. The stillness in Time, how it swirls all around this human without touching him, creating a margin of uncertainty, is more than proof enough.
But it can't be Jack.
"How did you sneak up on me?" the Master finally asks with a chocked voice, hands shaking softly, and Jack smirks almost sharply.
"You weren't paying attention."
"You can't sneak up on me," he tells him, almost devoid of emotion, before he manages to take in a sharp breath that kickstarts his brain into a frenzy of unanswered questions and growing panic. "You can't sneak up on me! I can feel you on the other side of the city, it's impossible for you to sneak up on me, on a Time Lord. It's just. Not. Possible!" he shouts, keeping himself still out of willpower alone, dwindling as it is, though his shaking is growing more intense and obvious.
Jack's here and there and here and there and that's just not possible! And the sneaking! The Master can feel him moving closer and closer, he can't have been around all the while because he would have felt him, it just can't be! It can't!
"Maybe you should have that checked out," Jack huffs, smirk turning humorless before completely vanishing as he lifts his Webley just the tiniest bit to bring attention back to it. "Now, where's the Doctor? How are you not dead?"
The Doctor. The Doctor is dead. The Doctor is dead because the Master came back to life and broke the time lock and Rassilon tried to kill them and the Doctor died and the Master went to Jack, he told Jack.
But this is 2008.
"Hey, put that thing down!" Amy shouts, recovered from the shock of the body's state, glaring at Jack but not doing anything more dangerous, like trying to approach him, due to Rory's hands wrapped around hers. "I don't know who you think he is, but we're here to help! He's—"
"Amelia!" he barks, making both her and Rory jump in surprise, but her voice has already done its job, snapping him out of his own shock. "Be quiet, don't say anything else!" he orders with a hiss before turning to Jack, who, despite observing Amy and Rory suspiciously, never once pulled his Webley away from the Master. "We're from your personal future, we can't tell you anything. You can't see the Doctor, or the TARDIS, or anything."
"Like Hell I can't!"
"You're a Rassilon-damned Time Agent, you know you can't!" he snaps back, still trying to keep himself still despite the growing urge to just shoot the freak in the head and walk away while he's busy being dead. "Now get out of the way and we'll just leave, never to come back again," he forces himself to add, lowering his voice and trying to get his shaking under control.
"You're not going anywhere until I have some answers," Harkness answers, and it is the wording of the sentence that tells the Master he knows he won't get the full story, but he'll still hold them here until he's satisfied with as little as they can provide.
"He told you already that we can't—"
"Not you, you're obviously too taken in by whatever lies he has told you," Jack cuts Amy, which only makes her bristle more, red-faced in indignation and anger and straining against Rory's grip and his pleas to don't anger the crazy guy with the gun. "Your boy will tell me the story of how you met the Master," he adds, effectively silencing Amy and Rory both, who exchange a startled look before turning to Jack. "You don't trust the Master. You won't lie as quickly as she would. And if you do, I will know," he tells Rory, Webley still aiming at the Master but his blue eyes landing on the nervous nurse.
"Jack, what's going on?" Gwen Cooper asks worriedly, hovering indecisively in the semi-circle she has formed at the Master's back with her colleagues, though, unlike Ianto Jones and Owen Harper, she doesn't have her gun trained on his back. "Who is this – Harold Saxon lookalike?"
Right. 2008. No wonder they had looked so startled when they'd seen him coming, more than just some strange people getting past the cordon would warrant.
"He is Harold Saxon," Jack answers with a scowl, and the Master would have glared back if not because a stronger shudder overtakes him as the wrongness that feels like Jack gets closer. "He's an alien, a Time Lord, and he almost took over the human race and destroyed Earth. And he died. So, whoever you are, how did you meet him and where's the Doctor?" he adds, directing the last question to Rory, who snaps his mouth closed almost immediately as the realization on his face turns to discomfort.
"Right. I'm Rory. Hi," he tells them, waving awkwardly, before turning back to Jack when Amy hisses at him to focus. "Look, I'm really not the best to tell this story, I wasn't there at the beginning. You see, Harry—that is, the Master?—he landed on Amy's garden—this is her, Amy, by the way—fourteen years ago. Well, fourteen years ago for us, but if this is 2008, then it was just twelve years for you," he babbles, nervously looking between Jack and everyone else – and tensing when his eyes meet the Master's. "Hey, are you alright? You don't look—"
"There's an anomaly at the other side of the city that's been getting closer ever since we first stepped into this bloody place, which feels exactly like you, Harkness. So, excuse me for the headache," he hisses with a sharp humorless smirk, unwilling to reveal just how bad it's getting.
Oh, he has a headache, that much is true, but the tension mounting in his body is starting to make his muscles ache, his stomach is clenching and roiling uneasily, and his time feelers feel so charged with artron static that he doesn't even dare curl them anymore to avoid the uncomfortable zaps that would result from its discharge. At least now that he's aware of the paradox sickness he can make an effort to focus on the present, avoiding any temporal drift. Still, the sooner they are out of here, the better.
"Tosh?" Jack calls, frowning in unease rather than suspicion, and Koschei can hear the faintest tapping behind him as Sato checks her tablet.
"There was a brief spike of Rift activity about twenty minutes ago at the docks. According to the readings, it's most likely just a Weevil," she answers after a moment—a moment, not a specific amount of time, and how long has this been going on—and Jack nods and gives Koschei a mocking smirk.
"The big bad Time Lord, scared of a little Weevil. I'm almost tempted to let it rip your throat out."
"You sure you don't want to do the honors?" Koschei shoots back with a large humorless grin, and the glint in Jack's eyes tells him more than clearly that he certainly wouldn't mind.
"Anyway, twelve years ago, the TARDIS landed in Amy's house and Harry closed some kind of crack in Amy's bedroom wall that led to an alien prison," Rory quickly intercedes, lifting his hands for a moment as if preparing to step between Jack and the Master the moment they jump at the other's throat. "Then something went wrong with the TARDIS and he had to leave. But the thing is that Prisoner Zero had escaped to Earth and – well, this is 2008, right? So, has the Atraxi thing happened already?"
"The disco snowflakes with giant eyeballs threatening to burn down the planet? No, can't say it's familiar," Harper snarks, earning a deadpan look from Rory and a glare from Amy, while Jack stays immutable.
"Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence or the human residence will be incinerated," Sato quotes, and the sound that follows her words make it clear she's shuffling nervously. "And then someone hacked the Archangel Network and set all clocks in the world to 0:00 hours."
"I wonder who that was," Harkness hisses, not even bothering to add any kind of sarcasm to flavor the accusation, and the sharp mocking grin Harry tries to answer with turns into a grimace before it can form, another jab of pain and growing discomfort washing over him as the Weevil approaches.
"That was the Doctor, actually," Rory tells them, no longer nervous, and despite all eyes turning to him, he just shrugs his shoulders almost dismissively. "Harry hunted down and captured Prisoner Zero, and the Doctor sent a message to the Atraxi to let them know where it was. And then, when the Atraxi tried to just leave like nothing happened, he called them back and… Well, he told them that everyone was important and that if the Atraxi thought to threaten Earth again, he would deal with them like he had any other would-be alien invaders."
"And the Atraxi ran away so fast that they should have been charged for speeding," Jack finishes with a knowing grin, eyes shining with fondness.
"Right. The Doctor left after that, but came back after two years to take Amy traveling as an apology for taking so long to fix the Prisoner Zero thing. And then they picked me up for a wedding present trip. We were going back to our time when the TARDIS was hit with some sort of… temporal turbulence, or something. Humans can't be in the TARDIS right now, so Harry took us out to get some lunch until she's fixed," Rory adds calmly, and, by his side, Amy grins proudly and glares at Jack, daring him to argue her fiancé's story.
Koschei stares at them with a mixture of feelings so bizarre that he can't make sense of it, but he's sure there's dread and admiration somewhere in there.
On the one hand, they still believe him to be the Doctor. On the other, Rory just managed to bullshit his way past Harkness' evaluation without telling a single lie. Of course, the second is a direct result of the first, but Koschei has to give both him and Amy points for keeping their composure when faced with the sudden revelation that there had been two Time Lords once upon a time, and that Harold Saxon was one of them.
… Wait, hadn't he told them about that? Or something similar? He's pretty sure they've talked about the Master someti—
The next shudder is strong enough to make Koschei gasp, time feelers curling into themselves and making him stumble as the static rushes all over him, the sensation more uncomfortable and disturbing than painful, though the spike of pain caused by the approaching wrongness messing the timeline around Jack's distortion is enough to make him grab his head tightly as he curls into himself.
"Raggedy Man—!"
"What the—"
"Will you please deal with this Weevil?!" he shouts at the Torchwood idiots behind him, not even bothering to hold back a couple of foul curses that are not translated but still have Jack's eyebrows jump to his hairline. "The Rassilon-damned thing is practically on top of our heads!"
"What? There's a Weevil on the rooftops?" Harper asks, shifting so his gun is trained on the sky, while Sato taps on her tablet.
"It makes no sense. For it to have moved so quickly it has to have traveled through the sewers. It would have never gone so far without attracting attention otherwise," she explains, and, this time, it's Jones and Cooper who shift, weapons in hand, as they analyze the alley in search for manholes.
Harkness gives the Master a searching look, lowering his Webley unconsciously as the Master pushes the pain away and tries to center himself once more, cursing the fact they parked so far away—
The Vortex manipulator strapped to Jack's wrist shrieks, flashing madly, so suddenly that Jack almost drops his gun before he pulls it up and fiddles with the manipulator, trying to figure out what's wrong with it—
Koschei doesn't need a Vortex manipulator, or a tablet connected to whatever equipment Torchwood has rigged to monitor the Rift. He doesn't need any of that, and yet he was still wrong.
He knows, as soon as the manipulator goes off, as soon as the wrongness finally enters the alley, Time swirling and ripping and mending all around them far more violently than Charybdis' whirlpool could have ever been, buffeting and bruising and soothing over and over yet also all at once.
Koschei jerks around, face bloodless in his terror, hands shaking so badly and clenching around his useless screwdriver to the point his fingers bruise, and he would have fallen to his knees if not because he's frozen in horror.
He'd had the pieces all along, from the moment they stepped out of the TARDIS—from the moment the TARDIS had been attacked—and yet he hadn't put them together.
The potential paradox, the state of Cardiff's timeline, the Rift expanding, the body. He had had all the clues, he had seen something like this before, and yet he hadn't realized.
The Neverwere hangs over their heads, not floating or flying or hovering, simply being right there, in the middle of empty air. The alley's timeline distorts around it, with memories and impressions and possibilities graying and flickering like static taking over them wherever they touch it. It spreads through the dimensions almost lazily, neither flaring nor displaying, yet not curling into itself to hide either, just being there, waiting. Observing.
Koschei's not sure what, if anything, the humans can perceive, his own sight graying as all his attention centers on the Neverwere, and he finally realizes how stupid, how blind he had been.
Jack's a Fact. He's a Fixed Point in time that exists through all of time at once, unmovable, unchangeable, with time moving around it but never with or alongside or through him. The distortion caused by a Fixed Point is that of a whirlpool, with the Fixed Point in the middle and everything else changing around it, or, at least, that's the excessively simplified and consequently erroneous definition of Fixed Points. But the fact still stands that, while everything changes, whatever's in the Fixed Point doesn't.
Neverwere create such a disturbance too, only they are the negative version of a Fixed Point, with their being something that could never be. And if they can't be, anything they interact with can't exist either, because nothing can interact with something that doesn't exist. Time warps around the Neverwere, but unlike the Fixed Points, they are not a rock around which water moves, but an emptiness to be avoided at all costs.
Koschei should've been able to tell the difference between a Fact and a Neverwere, especially since he has met Jack and dealt with Neverweres before.
But he didn't. For whatever reason, he didn't. Though, if the state Cardiff's timeline is in is anything to go by, he has his suspicions as to why.
He quickly pushes that thought away and focuses on this one second, the second the Neverwere finally reveals itself, and time stops. It's not stopped, of course not, there's no way to lock time without some tools, and while the screwdriver could be used for some seconds, this is not what is going on now.
No, what Koschei has just done is shift most of his self to the fourth dimension, not enough to mess up his tridimensional shell but hopefully, enough to deal with a lone Neverwere.
… It's strong, well fed, and Koschei is just one Time Lord, but he has to do something or the Neverwere will erase them all.
So, he shifts, and, once focused in the fourth dimension, he flares, and the Gallifreyan flows out of him without hesitation nor weakness—
But he has a weakness. He's alone, no one to support him, to help him weave time into being so that the Neverwere can be vanquished.
And Koschei doesn't know who he is.
Harry, Harold, the Professor, Ulysses – even the Master. All of them are fake names, lacking power, lacking self, and while he has favored 'Koschei' ever since the Doctor's death, that's not him either. Koschei was the ambitious and hard-working Time Tot and Academy student who would travel the stars and go on adventures with Theta, but this 'Koschei' isn't that person anymore.
A lack of conviction is a lack of strength. Koschei is nameless, non-existing.
The Gallifreyan and Time Lord formerly known as the Master Is Not.
He hasn't even started weaving time but he's also far enough into it to realize it's useless, when the Neverwere finally reacts.
And Koschei dies.
It may be hypocritical of him to say this, but when Jack sees someone die, he expects them to stay dead.
Then again, this is the one Time Lord who managed to survive the Time War, other than the Doctor, so he's not really that surprised. What he is, however, is pissed.
After everything the Master did during the Year that Never Was, up to and including dying in the Doctor's arms to spite him, this takes the cake. He's back, with the same damned face, and apparently traveling around with the Doctor and his new companions. The fact that they seem to like him, though the man is still wary of him if the occasional looks he gives him are any indication, only makes it worse.
The worst part of it all is the whole 'we're from your personal future'. Personal. As in, Jack will have a part in the whole Doctor and Master traveling together, someday, and he's not sure if he can take it.
Of course, part of it depends on the Doctor himself. If he's not allowed to see him, it's probably because he has regenerated again, and while part of him is sad to hear that, thinking about what might have happened and how much he'd liked that spiky hair, among other things, the other part is actually excited to see what the Doctor might look like now.
It's no use speculating about the future, especially not when Time Lords are involved, but damn if Jack can't help but run through different scenarios as he listens to Rory's story, each more bizarre than the last.
… Well, at least the Master is earning his keep, helping the Doctor deal with the Atraxi and watching after the humans while he repairs the TARDIS.
It also makes sense to send the Master out if they thought it was 2006, as no one would recognize him and the Doctor would still stay away from Jack to avoid messing with the timelines. It doesn't mean he's not annoyed at the fact he'll have to just let the Doctor leave without even a hello, though.
Jack saw the Doctor not that long ago, he got the answers he needed, if not the ones he wanted, so it's not as urgent as it would have been had it actually been 2006… but this is the Doctor. Jack will never have enough of him, no matter how much time they spend together or how often they meet.
… No matter that the Doctor will never look at him the way Jack looks at the Doctor.
But now, the current issue is not the Doctor and how much Jack misses him, but getting the Master out of Cardiff so Torchwood can deal with the disturbing bodies left behind by temporal anomalies.
Jack was pretty sure they were aftershocks from the Rift activity Tommy closed back in 1918, with someone being unlucky enough to get caught in it… But that was before they found the second body. After the third, they started to search for something that might have slipped through, while smoothing over the last tremors of the Rift as it closed.
Now, though… If the Master's pinched face is any indicator, Jack might need the Doctor's help with this one.
The Master stumbles with a pained gasp, curling into himself and grabbing his head, and everyone startles
"Raggedy Man—!"
"What the—"
"Will you please deal with this Weevil?!" the Master shouts at Jack's team without turning around, before releasing a couple of foul curses that are not translated but still have Jack's eyebrows jump to his hairline. "The Rassilon-damned thing is practically on top of our heads!"
And that's when Jack knows. Even as his team looks around, trying to make sense of that statement, and even before the Vortex manipulator goes crazy at the sudden readings of a temporal anomaly, Jack knows it isn't a Weevil.
The moment he checks the manipulator and sees that what has just appeared is a temporal void… That's when he knows the Rift's activity was the cause of the 'mystery murders'.
When the Master whirls around, shaking in fear and pale as death, to stare at where the manipulator tells Jack is the center of the void, and he follows his line of sight to see clotheslines vanish and walls erode right in front of his eyes, with the air darkening and shimmering like a heat mirage, Jack knows they'll be lucky to survive.
And then the Master tenses, strong and imposing and as capable of anything as the Doctor had been aboard the Game Station, telling the Daleks he was going to rescue Rose and destroy them all, and Jack hopes.
Master or not, this is a Time Lord. And if all those horror stories and legends that circulated around the Time Agency have the slightest grain of truth in them—
The Master stiffens, limbs contorting unnaturally and spine twisting as if crushed in an invisible grip, head thrown back with his mouth wide open into the most agonized and inhuman scream Jack's ever heard, wisps of darkness thickening around his body like smoke even as he flickers into static, blond-Saxon into brown-suit-brown-hair and into buzzcut-big-ears and to colorful-coat and to white-hair-red-vest and to black-suit-goatee and to burnt-corpse—
Golden dust bursts from the shrieking ghoul and Jack's eyes widen impossibly more before he throws himself at the Doctor's companions and tries to make eye-contact with his team past the golden mist—
"Get down!"
The two civilians under him squeak and protest as he practically throws them to the ground before dropping atop them, but they still when the air over them explodes, a wave of gold blinding him even through his tightly-closed eyelids, and the rush of energy and rock shattering and glass rattling replaces the inhuman shrieking.
… If this is what regeneration is like, Jack better make sure to run away if the Doctor ever regenerates in front of him, immortality or not. The way the Vortex manipulator is shrieking and warbling, he really doesn't want to know how that energy reacts with anything organic.
It doesn't even occur to him that Jack's actually hoping this is what regeneration is like. This is the Master, who should be dead, and Jack definitely doesn't want him alive or anywhere near Cardiff. But when faced with the choice between the Master and a temporal void, Jack doesn't hesitate in choosing the Master as the lesser evil.
He can escape and he won't be killed permanently with one, but he really doesn't know how he would be able to live through being erased from history.
Damn it all, temporal voids are supposed to be theories! Sure, it seems some events all over history can only be explained by temporal voids, but the Time Agency had never dealt with any of them! If someone had, it was before the Time Agency had been established, which means – it means Time Lords had dealt with temporal voids.
And the only Time Lord currently available is regenerating due to the very temporal void he was trying to fix.