Author's Note:

Thanks very much for all the lovely folk who reviewed since the last chapter, your feedback always means the world to me, and continues to inspire my writing.

So big hugs to: gallifrey calls now, Ahsilaa, MayFairy, evilpinklollipop, pattibon, EmmaMarie, MountainLord-92, Theta'sWorstNightmare, sailormajinmoon, TheWickedHeart, Imorgen (x 2), Geraldine, Aietradaea (x 2), TheDoctorsMistress, EDZEL2, Lost Moon and JessieDear13.

To sailormajinmoon: Thanks so much again for the review. Yes, Tejana will find out in due course about what happened to Anzor. I truly hope you will also enjoy this next chapter :)

To Geraldine: Thank you, you are a brilliant reviewer XXX

To Lost Moon: That Evanescence song is one of my absolute favourites, so I'm very glad you think it's appropriate to the relationship between Tejana and the Master :) Thanks very much for your comments.

OK, ladies and gentlemen, here it is - hopefully this chapter will provide some necessary explanations to those folk who are following. Fingers crossed that it's all OK. Any feedback much appreciated :)

- Chapter Twelve -

"Here he comes again, my evil twin...

My friends have seen him hiding, underneath my skin..."

- They Might Be Giants, My Evil Twin

"Did those Nestene duplicates give you a belt over the head?" the black-dressed Time Lord asked sarcastically. "Of course I'm the Master. Who else would I be?"

The Doctor stared at him, trying to sort through the confusing jumble of everything that had happened since he had arrived at Stonehenge - trying to work out why his gut instinct was screaming that the creature imprisoned with him was not the Master he had known, no matter how much it looked and sounded like him.

The baby, he told himself, thinking of the strange jangling in the back of his mind when the Master had mentioned his daughter's pregnancy. It was as if he had left himself a hidden memo inside his own head, in the hope that he would eventually remember. The baby is the key. My grandson.

"No, you're not," he said aloud. "I have to admit, you're very good, and at first you had me fooled. But, as it happens, I believe you about my daughter coming here to tell me she was pregnant with the Master's child. As far-fetched and ridiculous as that information sounds, something tells me that's exactly what happened, even though I don't remember it. I can feel it in my bones."

"So, what...I tell you the truth and suddenly that means I'm not the Master?" the other man sneered. "Oh, come on, Doctor, you can do better than that. After all, why would I bother to lie when the truth hurts so much more?"

"No..." the Doctor said slowly, finally putting the all the pieces together and understanding precisely why his subconscious mind had been warning him. "No, because if my daughter is pregnant with the Master's child, both she and the baby would automatically become part of his direct timeline. Time-fire is an elemental part of the Universe. No living thing is immune to its effects. Even with his formidable psychic abilities, there's no way the real Master would be able to remember someone in his own direct timeline who had been erased by Time-fire, any more than I can. Ergo, you are not the real Master." His eyes narrowed, his gaze fixed steadily on the other man's face. "And the more I look at you now, the more I can see it. The one reason I've shown mercy to the Master over and over again throughout the centuries, no matter what he did, is that whenever I've looked into his eyes, I've always been able to see the soul of my old friend Koschei looking back at me. Corrupted, twisted and damaged almost beyond repair, maybe, but still there, still capable of redemption. But you don't have any soul at all. Maybe you never did. All I can see in you is darkness."

"You've always been so very clever, haven't you, Doctor?" spat the thing that wore the Master's face. "So very good at figuring things out. Only, this time it's not going to help you. You're trapped in here for eternity, just like me."

The Doctor felt a chill trickle down his spine. The false Master was right. He had no brilliant plan for getting out of here. Beyond the protective walls of the Pandorica, anything could have happened to the Universe. He assumed all the stars had died in the temporal backlash from the exploding TARDIS, just as he had predicted. Even if the Earth hadn't vanished completely, with no sun to provide essential warmth it would be nothing more than a dead, frozen wasteland. And even if, by some wild, unlikely, outrageous chance, Amy and Rory were still alive out there, they would have no clue how to open the complicated chrono-locks that secured the Pandorica. The bottom line was, for the first time ever, the Doctor was well and truly screwed.

Seeing his rising anger and fear and frustration, the false Master gave him a feral grin that turned his stomach. "It's almost going to be worth getting stuck in here, just to see you squirm, Doctor. Just to have the pleasure of watching the light of hope slowly dying in your eyes as you realise you're never going to escape. The man who never stops running. Ha, looks like I put a stop to that, didn't I?"

"Who are you?" the Doctor demanded incredulously. "What are you? You're not a living thing, but you're not a Nestene duplicate either. Your disguise is much too perfect for that. Everything about you is identical to the Master, right down to your very Time Lord essence, and that's impossible to fake."

"Always so full of questions, aren't you? It's always been one of the many annoying things about you. But I suppose I may as well tell you. No point trying to keep it a secret any more, now we're both locked in here," the false Master replied. "If you must know, I was born from the Cruciform, the mightiest ship ever created. But that doesn't mean anything to you either, does it, Doctor? It should – it really, really should. But you have so many forgotten memories. So many unexplained holes you just can't fill. Your head must feel like a piece of Swiss cheese."

"The Cruciform?" The Doctor wrinkled his forehead, recalling that long ago telephone conversation with the real Master, just before all hell broke loose on the Earth and 'The Year That Never Was' began. "The Gallifreyan warship the Master was on during the Time War? The one that the Dalek Emperor boarded?"

"Oh, the Cruciform was much more than just a warship, Doctor. It was the ultimate weapon, created by the Master's half-brother, Kelios, bastard son of the House of Oakdown, with the full sanction of Lord President Rassilon and the High Council of Gallifrey. And, at its heart, five million grains of psychic pollen combined with the Matrix technology of the Time Lords."

"Five million grains?" the Doctor exclaimed in horror, recalling just how much damage three grains had done in his own TARDIS. The destructive potential embodied in five million grains was beyond even his imagination...and if the Time Lords had been insane enough back then to amalgamate that with the psychic nerve centre that had been The Matrix...

The other man nodded maliciously. "Five million grains, all of them concentrated on the mind of just one Time Lord."

"The Master."

"See, now you're getting it, Doctor. Your old friend Koschei was the dark well from which sprang all the abominations of the Time War – the Nightmare Child, the Requiem of Arcadia, the Horde of Travesties, the Skaro Degradations...and, of course, that particular old favourite of yours, the Moment. Remember the Moment, Doctor? Remember watching Gallifrey burn?"

The Doctor turned his head aside, fighting to control his surging emotions. If all this was true, why didn't he know about it? Why didn't he remember?

"What are you then? Some kind of Dream Lord? An anthropomorphic manifestation of the Master's dark side, a walking and talking doppelgänger, extracted from his mind by the psychic pollen, am I right? That's why you're so alike in every way, because you're actually a reflection of part of him."

The creature inclined its head in mocking acknowledgement. "Again, a very good deduction. Ten out of ten. Although, I prefer the name Chaos-Master. 'Anthropomorphic manifestation' tends to take such a long time to say."

"But you're obviously tangible – those plastic Romans touched you, those restraints are holding you...if you're just some kind of psychic manifestation, how have you managed to take on physical form?"

The Chaos-Master sniggered suggestively. "You can thank your daughter for that. Such a lot of determination for such a little thing."

"What are you talking about? What has my daughter got to do with this?" the Doctor snapped. "And what happened to the real Master?"

"Like I said, Doctor – there's so much you don't remember! So let's take a little trip down memory lane, shall we? During the Time War, you took it upon yourself to rescue the Master from his confinement at the heart of the Cruciform. You destroyed the ship and sent it crashing into oblivion on an unknown planet, before wiping all memory of it from both your own mind and his, to ensure it would never be resurrected again. After that, in your so-called mercy, you turned the Chameleon Arch on him, transforming him into a human and abandoning him at the end of the Universe, supposedly for his own protection. And then, you took the Moment for yourself and used it to play god, wiping out Daleks and Time Lords alike, thereby ending the War. Sound familiar?"

The Doctor shook his head mutely, his eyes stinging with tears. This version of what had happened during the Time War was so different to the one he had clung to for so long. And yet, like the devastating information that his daughter was carrying the Master's child, he couldn't refute it. Somewhere deep inside, he knew that everything the Chaos-Master was telling him was true. He was the one who had turned the Master human, to save him from the annihilation of the Moment. He was the one who had left him on the shores of the Silver Devastation. The shock of the realisation made him feel physically ill. Up until now, he had always thought that the TARDIS had ended up on Malcassairo through some sort of weird coincidence - that the only reason they had found Professor Yana at the end of the Universe was because Jack had thrown the time machine off course by leaping on to the outside of it, just as it entered the Time Vortex. But now he understood that, once again, the TARDIS had taken him where he needed to go. Even though he hadn't remembered his intention to return for the Master, the ever-loyal TARDIS had, faithfully obeying an instruction he hadn't even known he had given her.

And the tiny bit of psychic pollen that had ended up inside his time-rotor, causing the almost-fatal encounter with his own Dream Lord – where had that come from? Had it been hidden inside his TARDIS all that time, since the War, somehow drifting inside when he had rescued the Master from the Cruciform? He supposed he would never know for sure, but it seemed very likely that was what had happened. Suddenly, a lot of things were beginning to make much more sense.

"Unfortunately for you," the Chaos-Master continued. "The Master's half-brother, Kelios, survived the crash. In the fullness of time, he set a trap for the Master, drawing his TARDIS out of the time-vortex back to the planet Mnemosyne, where he and Tejana found the remains of the Cruciform, entombed in the side of a mountain. That was when I was born, created from the Master's mind through the renewed power of the psychic pollen. In the battle that followed, the two Time Lords and their human associate managed to temporarily defeat me. But in the process, the Master was killed and his body turned to dust. Your daughter, however, refused to accept that he was lost. She had the Master's DNA inside her body, through the child she carries. Using this as a biometric link, she forged a psychic connection with the dying Cruciform and harnessed its last flicker of power to call him back from death. And it almost worked. He heard her voice and began to return, just as she intended. But I was waiting – and at the last minute, I stepped in. He was still weak and no match for me. I took possession of the body and now he's the one who is nothing, just as I was once nothing. As I told you, Doctor, I am the Master...the only Master now!"

"And Tejana...?" the Doctor asked, his hearts contracting for his unknown daughter. "Didn't she realise? Didn't she see that he had changed?"

"The connection I now have with her, the link she created using the power of the Cruciform, blinds her to everything except my will. It's not difficult. She wanted so badly to have him back that she sees only what she wants to see."

"That's how you've managed to maintain yourself in this reality!" the Doctor said, appalled. "You've been using her. You've been draining her life energy, stealing her regenerations."

The Chaos-Master laughed, its brown eyes glittering. "Every time we had sex," he confirmed gleefully. "Little by little, bit by bit. Every time she offered herself so willingly to me and I took what I wanted, not just her lovely little body, but her life as well. And she didn't even realise I was doing it. It hasn't exactly been a hardship, I have to say."

The Doctor lunged involuntarily against his restraints, longing to punch the nasty smirk right off the creature's face.

"Tsk, tsk, temper, temper," the Chaos-Master tutted. "Calm down, Doctor. I thought you were supposed to be a man of peace."

"You're talking about my daughter!" the Doctor gritted out. "My pregnant daughter!"

"Whom you can't even remember." The Chaos-Master leaned back against the head-rest of its chair, making itself comfortable. All its fury at being imprisoned within the Pandorica seemed to have evaporated for the time being. It was having far too much fun taunting the Doctor. "So it seems a bit hypocritical for you to be turning on the over-protective parent act, doesn't it? Especially when you were always such a lousy father to start with."

With an effort that was almost physical, the Doctor managed to bite back an angry reply. Arguing with the real Master would have been pointless enough. But allowing this...this thing, with its stolen face and body...to bait him was a victory he couldn't allow.

Then another thought struck him. "Wait a minute! Just before they put you in here, you said: 'He thinks he can keep her from me by using the Time-fire'. What did you mean by that?" he demanded.

The creature twitched its shoulders in a small, uninterested shrug. "The original Master and I have effectively switched places. I have the corporeal body, he doesn't. But he's far from dead. Tejana brought him back far enough to give him a semblance of life, even if it's as nothing more than an intangible dream. I'm assuming he's somehow managed to pull her through one of the cracks, knowing that the only way to sever the link between her and me was to wipe her from Time altogether. As I said, he's clever."

"So he wasn't trying to harm her, he was trying to save her," the Doctor said. "And the Master never does anything without a plan. He wouldn't just randomly choose to cancel out her entire existence. Wherever he's taken her, it's somewhere he thinks is safe. Which means she's not lost forever."

"It hardly matters, does it?" the Chaos-Master answered coldly. "I don't need her any more. The Pandorica will maintain my existence forever, whether I want it to or not. And from inside here, you can't help her either. Both you and I lost any chance of bringing her back when those doors closed."

At that moment, the intricate, circular locks inset into the walls of the Pandorica glowed a fluorescent green and began to rotate with a portentous clicking sound.

"Maybe...and maybe not!" the Doctor crowed in delight. "Just maybe it's my turn for a ridiculous miracle."

"Come," Borusa's voice commanded.

Tejana took a deep breath. All at once, she missed Theta's reassuring presence beside her. This time, she would have to face Borusa on her own, and she wasn't looking forward to it. She opened the door to the study. As expected, he was seated elegantly behind his desk, his fingers steepled before him in that habitual, thoughtful gesture she remembered so well. Sitting opposite him was a nondescript-looking man wearing the pure white formal robes of the President of Gallifrey. Tejana had never encountered Lord Drall before, since his term of office had long been past by the time she joined the Academy. She found herself studying him curiously, wondering what sort of a man could sire a brute like Anzor. But there was nothing notable in his thin, anxious face – no obvious sign of evil or malice. Just an ordinary man distraught by the inexplicable illness of his beloved son.

"Yes?" Borusa asked, bringing her attention sharply back to the task at hand.

She swept him a low curtsey, inwardly thinking that her knees were never going to be the same again after all this unaccustomed obeisance. At least she had no difficulty in giving this particular Time Lord the deference he expected. He had always been such an imposing figure in her own childhood, it came quite naturally to her. It was odd to realise that, for all his majesty and dignity, at this stage in his career he had been probably no older than she was now.

"Forgive me, my Lord," she said in a quiet voice. "The Head Housemaid sent me, to inquire whether His Supremacy had need of anything."

Borusa's icy gaze ran over her, prickling across her skin like a thousand needles.

"Ah...Kat, is it not?" he said. "The servant girl who broke my tea cups."

As before, Tejana kept her gaze lowered to the floor. "Yes, my Lord."

"Very well. You may serve us with some metheglin. If, of course, His Supremacy permits?"

The Lord President gave a vague nod of agreement, as though his mind was elsewhere. His face was as pale as paper, and Tejana doubted whether he had even heard and understood the question.

"The decanter and glasses are over there. Do try not to break anything this time," Borusa continued, his tone laced with his usual mordant sarcasm.

Following the direction of his graceful gesture, Tejana moved over to the sideboard, where she found a crystal decanter full of the strong Gallifreyan honey wine known as metheglin. Tejana had never liked it much herself, but she was aware that it was known to have medicinal value as a restorative. She guessed that Borusa had chosen it in an attempt to remedy the Lord President's obvious shock. Even from this distance, she could see Drall's hands shaking. As quietly and unobtrusively as possible, she busied herself with preparing the glasses, all the while keeping her ears sharply tuned to their conversation.

"As I was saying, Your Supremacy, the Academy will make every resource available to the investigation," Borusa was saying smoothly. "Whoever has carried out this cowardly attack on your son will soon be found and punished."

Drall gave a strangled sound that was either a choked laugh or a sob, it was difficult to tell which. "I wish I could be assured of that, Borusa. There's nothing I want more than to see Anzor's attacker brought to justice. But I don't think you'll find the perpetrator as easily as you may think."

Borusa frowned. "Why do you say that, my Lord? Surely you can't subscribe to this mad theory that your son was attacked by some sort of...ghost?"

"Not at all," Drall responded irritably. "I believe that this attack on my son was a deliberate attempt to weaken me and therefore, in turn, the government of this planet. There are...indications...that there is something loose in this Academy that doesn't belong on Gallifrey. "

Behind them, Tejana drew her breath in sharply, suddenly aware that her unauthorised presence on her home world might not have gone as unnoticed as she had hoped.

"What sort of indications?" Borusa demanded.

Drall lowered his voice to a confidential murmur. But Tejana's hearing was exceptional, even for a Time Lord, and she still easily managed to catch his next words. "The APC-Net has detected cracks in the skin of the Universe, emanating from a devastating temporal explosion in the future, reaching all the way back to us through Time."

To Borusa's credit, his face barely showed any reaction to this startling news, apart from raising one cool eyebrow. "And do we know what sort of temporal explosion has caused these cracks?"

"The Co-ordinator of the Matrix believes that the only reasonable possibility is a TARDIS, exploding at a weak point in the space/time continuum."

At this information, Tejana nearly dropped the delicate crystal decanter she was holding, only just managing to catch it at the last minute. A TARDIS exploding? Oh gods, was that really what had caused the cracks? But in the future, there were only two TARDISes left, each of them belonging to someone she loved more than life itself. Who did it belong to, the Doctor or the Master? Who was in danger, her father or her lover? Both alternatives made her head swim with fear. Not only that, just how dangerous were the resulting cracks to the rest of the Universe? If even the stars were going out...

"One of our people?" Borusa was querying in disbelief.

"Apparently so. And that's not all. The Fourth Law of Time has been breached. A Time Lord has dared to travel back from the same point in the future, into the past of Gallifrey. The data gathered by the APC-Net indicates that, whoever this renegade is, they are currently at large within the Prydonian Academy," Drall said flatly. "We have no way of knowing their agenda. But I firmly believe that this person is the one responsible for the attack on my son."

I didn't harm your son, he harmed ME! Tejana wanted to shout, horrified that they were so close to tracking her down. And I didn't choose to come here. I'm NOT a renegade!

She hated that word, the term that had always been given to any Time Lord who decided to escape the restrictive regime of their home world. Renegades were regarded as traitors to Gallifrey, as if the desire for freedom was the ultimate shame.

Glancing up, she saw to her alarm that Borusa's gimlet eyes were resting on her, almost as if he'd heard her silent scream. No, that's not possible, she told herself. He's good, but he's not that good. Hurriedly, she finished pouring out the metheglin and carried the glasses across to the two men.

She had to get out of this room and she had to do it as soon as possible.