Author's Note:
Thanks so much to all the people who took the time to review and make me a happy little vegemite. So big hugs to: GuesssWho, gallifrey calls now, EmmaMarie, Ant-Carrying-A-Rubber-Tree, MayFairy, vincenth, Ahsilaa, JessieDear13 (x 2), Theta'sWorstNightmare, MountainLord-92, irishartemis, TheWickedHeart, sailormajinmoon, silentnight, EDZEL2, TheWritingKat, The Mouse's Rose, Geraldine, Imorgen, pattibon, Lost Moon (x 2), and my favourite little barnacle, Aietradaea. You are all wonderful people – it's very nice to know people are still enjoying this series after so long.
To sailormajinmoon: Thanks as always – Tejana has a few more nasty shocks coming up for her in this chapter!
To silentnight: Yup, Tejana is definitely pregnant and the Master is definitely back, so look out, Gallifrey! Hopefully you are still checking and haven't given up on me :S
To Geraldine: Aw, thanks, that's very nice of you. Hopefully you enjoy this one too!
To Lost Moon: Yay, you are back! Thanks so much for both your reviews.
Thanks also from my heart to the people who have been reviewing my other couple of new stories, "Revenge, Best Served HOT!" and "The End Is Where We Start From" - your support is so very welcome! XXX
AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY – TO MEEEEEEE! Yup, it's my birthday today, but don't ask me how old I am, because I'll never tell. Somewhere between ten and sixty, that's close enough for you!
Hope you enjoy the chapter!
- Chapter Fifteen -
"I broke a thousand hearts, before I met you,
I'll break a thousand more, baby, before I am through!
I wanna be yours, pretty baby, yours and yours alone,
But I'm here to tell ya, honey, that I'm bad to the bone."
- George Thorogood & the Destroyers, Bad To The Bone
As the Doctor had predicted, it was laughably easy for Hart to disengage the internal security restraints of the Pandorica. A few quick commands from his wrist-strap, coded to the correct frequency, and both the heavy shackles and the shoulder-yoke smoothly retracted, allowing the Doctor to step out of the imprisoning box.
Breathing in the dank air of the Underhenge, he couldn't help giving a deep shudder of relief. To think that he had been so keen for the Pandorica to open, so eager to unlock the mystery of what was inside. Definitely a case of curiosity almost killing the cat!
"Hart!" the Chaos-Master yelled. "HART! I'm warning you! If you don't get me out of here, I'll make you suffer in ways you never dreamed possible!"
Reaching into his pocket for his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor swung back towards the Pandorica. But he needn't have worried. Coldly and deliberately, his face calm and expressionless, Hart was already raising his arm and aiming the wrist-strap at the door mechanism. There was a soft click and the two open walls began to slide back together.
Viciously, like a trapped animal, the Chaos-Master fought its restraints, but to no avail. The Pandorica had been designed too well. Without help, there was no chance of escape. "No! Doctor, don't you dare leave me in here. I'll destroy you all! I'll disperse your atoms throughout the cosmos! I'll...I'll... Doctor! DOCTORRRRRRR!"
But the Doctor merely grinned and twinkled his fingers in a cheeky little wave. Then the walls of the prison box came together, cutting off the creature's vitriolic tirade of hatred, leaving behind nothing but a blissful silence. One by one, the circular locks clanked and whirled, as the external security devices re-set themselves, safely sealing the Chaos-Master inside.
"Guess that makes me the good wizard after all," the Doctor commented. "Blimey, that bloke talks more rubbish than the real Master and I never thought I'd say that."
Gingerly, he rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease his cramped muscles while warily eyeing Hart at the same time. "I don't think we've been properly introduced. Hello, I'm the Doctor. And you are...?"
The other man smirked, as if at some private joke he didn't intend to share. "Captain John Hart, at your service." Despite his injured arm, he still managed to bow with dramatic flair.
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. 'Captain John Hart'...the close similarity of the name to 'Captain Jack Harkness' didn't escape him. Too much of a parallel to be a coincidence, surely?
"Pleased to meet you, Captain Hart. And thank you for your help," he replied. He nodded towards the thick leather strap encircling the other man's wrist. "You seem to be very well-versed in the various uses of a vortex manipulator."
Hart shrugged. "I used to be a Time Agent."
"I see. You wouldn't happen to know a certain Captain Jack Harkness, by any chance?"
"Maybe." This time Hart's smile held a devilish gleam, one that the Doctor decided he didn't want explained, especially knowing Jack as he did. "I know a lot of people."
"And now you're travelling around the Universe with my daughter and the Master."
Hart nodded. "For now, yeah, that's about the size of it."
With the ease of long experience, the Doctor had no difficulty recognising the leashed violence that coiled inside the ex-Time Agent like a venomous viper. Despite his relaxed, charming exterior, John Hart had the eyes of a killer, danger surrounding him like an imperceptible aura.
Leaning over, Hart extended his hand to Rory and levered him back to his feet. "No hard feelings, right, Julius Caesar?" Then he gave the young centurion a salacious wink. "Well, not that sort of hard, anyway."
The Doctor sighed inwardly, still trying to get his head around the fact that this man and the Master were apparently Tejana's chosen companions.
"Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that my daughter seems to have a definite taste for the bad boys of the Universe?" he muttered crossly.
Far away in both time and space, Tejana stared into a pair of inexplicably brown eyes and panic reared inside her like the crest of an enormous wave. Those eyes were centuries older than the face that held them. The younger version of the Master had gone, only to be replaced by someone...something... else altogether. Suddenly everything seemed to make a horrible kind of sense: the invisible creature that had been stalking her at Stonehenge; the unseen attacker that had dragged her away from her father into the crack in Time; the so-called "ghost" that had ambushed Anzor in his sleep...
One word screamed across her brain, written in foot high letters of fear: CHAOS-MASTER!
Without hesitation, she dropped her mouth to one of the hands that held her and bit down on into the wrist as savagely as she could, sinking her teeth deep into the flesh and drawing blood. He cursed in pain and relaxed his grip, just long enough for her to pull back her fist and punch him squarely in the jaw with all her strength. As he staggered backwards, she tore herself free and pelted full tilt towards the door. The urge to flee was purely instinctive, both her hearts pounding as if they were going to burst. She had no idea where on Gallifrey she could run to escape the Lord of Nightmares, but there had to be somewhere. There was no way she was going to just give up without a fight, not after everything she had gone through to destroy this vile creature on Mnemosyne.
But, despite the adrenaline of fear pulsing through her veins, she was injured and weak, while the possessed body of the young Koschei was strong and healthy and athletic. With a grunt, he shook off the effects of her punch and came after her. In three powerful strides, long before she reached the door, he caught up with her and seized her around the waist, sweeping her right off her feet. She scratched and struggled and kicked wildly, but it was no use, he was much too strong. Grasping her wrists tightly in one hand, he held her hard against him with the other, her back against his chest, forcibly restricting her movements, like a parent restraining a child having a tantrum.
"Calm down, Ana!" he gritted out. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"I killed you!" she hissed frantically. "John and I...we destroyed you back on Mnemosyne. How can you be here?"
"Just listen to me! It's not what you think! I'm the real Master!"
"No! NO!" she cried, still struggling against him, tears of angry defiance sparkling in her eyes. "I don't want to hear any of your lies! The real Master is safe on board our TARDIS. I brought him back. He trusted me to save him and I did!"
He whirled her around to face him, his head bent until his lips were only inches from her own. She could feel the heat of his body searing across her breasts, making her hearts beat even faster. "I am the Master," he assured her. "And you did bring me back. If you'd just stop...uh..." He broke off sharply, tightening his grip on her arms as she gave a particularly determined attempt to knee him in the groin. "If you'd just stop fighting me, I'll tell you what happened!"
Too exhausted to resist any further, she went limp in his grasp and glared hatred up at him. "Go on then, tell me, before I spit in your face!" she snarled. He had to be lying. He just had to be. Because the alternative was just too awful to think about.
"The Cruciform used my own memories to force a way into my mind, wanting me to set the Chaos-Master free. I held it off for a while, trying to buy you and Hart as much time as I could, but in the end it got through. I can't remember much after that, just that it was dark...so very cold and dark. Everything was empty and I was so lost, so far from everything I ever cared about. But then I heard your voice, piercing the nothingness, calling my name, calling me home. So I used it as a lifeline and I followed it. I could feel my body reforming around me and I could see your face...but then something hit me hard and forced me backwards. The next thing I knew, I was out of the body and he had taken possession of it. I was too weak from my battle with the Cruciform, I wasn't strong enough to stop him."
Her mouth went dry and there was a dull roaring sound in her ears, as the core certainties underpinning her universe began to waver beneath her. "You're trying to tell me that the Master who left Mnemosyne with us in the TARDIS was really the Chaos-Master," she said emptily.
"Exactly."
She shook her head, slowly at first, then faster and faster, over and over again in emphatic denial, not wanting to even entertain the idea. She had been so sure that everything would be all right once they left Mnemosyne, so sure she had won, so sure she had the man she loved back in her arms. How could she have been so wrong?
"No, that's a lie!" she cried painfully. "It's not possible! The Master's my life-mate! I would never have been tricked into accepting that monster in his place, not ever!"
"Ana, you opened yourself to the Cruciform to bring me back. You allowed it past your defences into your mind. It forged a link with you and then he used it against you, to deceive you. You wanted so much for us to be together again – and he made sure that was all you saw."
Despite her stubborn refusal to believe what he was saying, Tejana found her mind going back to all the times after Mnemosyne the Master had seemed a bit off to her; how their psychic connection had never been quite the same; how their love-making, while still deliciously exciting, had occasionally struck ever-so-slightly the wrong chord, as if he was holding part of himself back from her...
For some reason, which was strangely unclear to her now, she had uncharacteristically shrugged it off, putting it all down to the trauma of their experiences on the Planet of Memory. Why hadn't she questioned it? After the life she had led, she very rarely accepted things at face value. Why hadn't she been suspicious? Was it true – had she been under some sort of psychic spell?
"No," she whispered to herself, the revulsion rising up to choke her as the sordid memories played out in front of her eyes. "I let him...touch me. I let him...make love to me. Oh gods, oh please no, it can't be true!"
His mouth tightened into a thin, harsh line at the mounting horror in her voice. She had stopped trying to struggle now, and his hands no longer imprisoned her. Instead, they stroked gently across her back in a caressing motion, as if he was trying to soften the impact of his words. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'm so sorry. There wasn't anything I could do. I couldn't make you see me or hear me."
Anguished, her eyes shot to meet his. "You were...watching?" Somehow, just the thought of it made everything seem even worse.
A dark shadow of memory fell across his features, the brown eyes hardening into cold stone. "He made sure of it," he answered flatly. "It gave him pleasure to kill you and my child slowly while I was watching, laughing all the time because I couldn't stop him."
"Kill us? What are you talking about?"
"He's an incubus, Ana. Every time he had sex with you, he was draining your life energy away to maintain his own existence in this reality," he bit out. His tone vibrated with barely-suppressed rage, lines of remembered pain etched into his face. "He hurt you...every time, so badly...and all I could do was watch. But afterwards, he messed with your head and you never remembered...all you could remember was intense pleasure instead of intense pain."
"The bruises..." she murmured, chilled to the bone, suddenly understanding what a blind fool she had been. "The Doctor pointed them out at Stonehenge, but I'd never noticed them before."
"When you used the vortex manipulator to get to Stonehenge, you managed to put some distance between you and the Chaos-Master. The further you got from him, the clearer your perceptions became. You could even sense me following you, for the first time since Mnemosyne," he explained tautly. "But, by then, you were already in a critical condition. If he'd continued to feed from you, both you and our child were going to die. Then the crack opened up in the Underhenge and I decided that wiping you from Time was the only way to break the link with him and keep you safe. I can't control the opening and closing of the cracks, but because I'm not a part of this reality any more, I can negotiate my way through them once I'm inside."
"So you pulled me in and brought me here."
To Tejana's dismay, she realised that, deep inside, she was beginning to accept his story. It was as if she had been stumbling through a dark room and someone had just turned on the light, revealing horrors all around her she hadn't even dreamed had existed.
He nodded. "It wasn't easy, believe me, especially with you and the Doctor fighting me every inch of the way. It took nearly all my energy reserves. I was almost too weak to get us here safely."
"But why here? Why Gallifrey? Why break the Fourth Law of Time?"
"To bring us back to the Eye of Harmony. It was the only way. I knew you would need help to heal you of the damage he had done," he replied. "And I could draw on the power to restore my energy levels. Since we've been back in this time, we've both been growing stronger every day. That's why I was finally able to speak to you directly."
Her eyes searched his face. That ring of blue around his pupils...was that indicative that he didn't have complete control of the body? Was young Koschei still inside there somewhere, trapped and screaming? At the thought, one last flash of panicked stubbornness raced through her, and she pulled abruptly away from him, stepping backwards. He allowed her to retreat from him, making no move to stop her or seize her again.
"Why should I believe you?" she demanded passionately. "Why should I believe any of this? If I could be so wrong before...how am I supposed to know now what's real and what isn't?"
"Your link to the Chaos-Master was severed by the Time-fire inside the crack. There's nothing obscuring your perceptions now," he said. "Just open your mind to me, Ana, and you'll see the truth."
"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" She gave a harsh, cracked, contemptuous laugh. "Just how stupid do you think I am? Asking me to drop all my defences and just let you inside my head?"
He reached out and cupped her cheek, tilting her head up until her eyes met his. "On Mnemosyne, you learned enough about the Cruciform to know that it can't lie. Psychic pollen will always corrupt the truth - distort it and misrepresent it in order to deceive - but it doesn't have the capacity to manufacture an outright lie. So, if I was the Chaos-Master, I couldn't say this to you: I'm the same man who held you in my arms for the first time when you were three months old; I'm the same man who found you in a greenhouse throwing tomatoes at a door when you were eight years old; I'm the same man who held you and took you for his own, that first time in The Matrix; I'm the same man who told you his true name on board the Valiant; I'm the same man who wound his marriage-flowers into your hair on the planet Mnemosyne. And I'm the same man who fathered the child in your belly, Ana. That was me, not the Chaos-Master."
Tejana gazed up at him, transfixed by the intense, burning brown of his eyes, so strange in the face of the young Koschei but still so familiar. So many different things she had seen in those eyes in their time together – hatred and blood-lust and insanity during The Year That Never Was; raw, unbridled desire in The Matrix; uncertainty and need on board the Ship of the Eternals; fury and pain and loss at the revelation of their Could-Have-Been-Son in the catacombs of Avalon; vulnerability and hope as he told her his true name; possessive, protective softness as he entwined the forget-me-nots into her hair in the moonlight; the fierce elation and pride when he realised she was carrying his son...
Now, looking into them once more, all she could see was...truth.
Trembling, she stood on tiptoe and mirrored his action, raising her hand to cup his face, joining them together with her touch. She could feel his fingers against her cheek, and simultaneously, the warmth of his face under her own hand. Concentrating hard, she loosened her mental shields, while still keeping her actions carefully screened and isolated from the rest of the psychic link. Instead, she allowed the unique, special bond that existed only between them - as lovers, as life-mates - to open more fully and completely than she ever had before. Then she was falling into what seemed like an endless ocean and he was there, around her and through her and in her. He was part of her and she was part of him, every last secret laid bare; she could sense every breath he took, every heartbeat, as her own. She could feel everything he had felt, experiencing for herself his helpless rage as the Chaos-Master gleefully hurt her over and over, brutally taking her in the bed that had been theirs to share; sharing his pain as he watched her forget what had happened as soon as she woke. And in return, she shared with him her anguish, her sense of complete violation, that everything she had believed she was giving to him, and only to him, had been stolen from her and defiled by a monster. As the tumult of agonised emotion met and joined, a shudder of primal recognition ran through her body. The raw feelings surging between them could never be copied, never be replicated, never be falsified. And in that moment, she suddenly had no more doubts.
"Oh gods," she whispered. "It's really you."
He bent his head, his lips brushing hers. "Yeah, it's really me," he confirmed huskily.
Tears of grief rained down her face, her fingers moving to thread through the softness of his hair at the back of his neck. "Amin Mekhil. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
"Don't say that!" he growled, pulling her close. "Don't ever say that to me. You have nothing to be sorry for!"
Still the jagged sobs ripped through her. She usually managed to stay strong, no matter what happened, stubbornly refusing to let anything get the better of her. The Doctor had taught her that there was always hope in every situation, no matter how dire it seemed. But right now, she felt so tired and ill, so utterly spent and depleted, that she hardly even knew who she was any more. The Master's revelations had changed everything, breaking her deep inside. Such a short time ago, her life had seemed so right and perfect, so full of promise for their future together. But it had all been a lie. She hadn't saved him. Instead, she had allowed the Chaos-Master to win, to take her life-mate's body and to violate her in the most fundamental and soul-shattering way. Now she could see nothing but darkness waiting for them, every way she turned, and she wasn't sure she could keep on fighting this time.
He felt it through their link, the awful, black despair that was consuming her, sapping her willpower, draining her dry more effectively than the Chaos-Master ever had. Grasping her by the upper arms, he gave her a little shake.
"It's going to be all right, Ana, I promise you!" he told her. "I will make this right for us."
She stared back at him dully. "How can you, Koschei? You're no longer even corporeal. You're not much more than a ghost. How much energy are you burning up just to speak to me like this? And I don't even really exist any more – I've been wiped out of time. I have no identity, no history, no thread in the pattern of the Universe. And we're both trapped in a time that has no place for either of us. How can we ever be together? How can we raise our child?"
"There's a way," he replied, his eyes narrowing, as if wondering how much he should tell her. "There's always a way, if you're prepared to look for it."
"What way?" Apprehension lapped at the edges of her despair. As much as she loved him, the absolute ruthlessness at the core of his being still had the power to frighten her. He was capable of anything, she had known him far too long and too well to doubt that. "Koschei? If you've got some sort of plan, you need to tell me! How exactly are you planning to get us back to our own time?"
"I'm not," he responded tersely. "If we were to go back, the Chaos-Master would be able to finish what he started, and you and our son would die together. And away from the Eye of Harmony, I would eventually disperse and blow away in the wind."
"But you said there was a way..."
"Yes, a way to make a place for us here, on Gallifrey. I'm not strong enough yet to hold on to this body permanently, but before long, I will be."
The little colour that remained in her cheeks drained away. "Permanently? You're planning to take your younger self over permanently? Oh gods, you're talking about changing Gallifreyan history, aren't you? You can't do that! It's one of the fundamental rules we were taught as Time Lords. The history of Gallifrey is sacrosanct!"
"And where did their stupid bloody rules end up getting them, Ana?" he spat. "Dead! Destroyed! A billion years of Time Lord history wiped out in an instant. All that knowledge, all that superiority, all that dominance, just gone. What was the point of that? What did it achieve?"
"The Doctor had to destroy them, you know that. You know what they were planning. They were going to rip apart the whole of creation!"
"And I can change that, here and now!" His hands tightened on her arms, all his previous gentleness vanishing as he became immersed in the intricacies of his plan. "All I need is for an unfortunate accident to befall my father and then my younger self becomes the Kitriarch of the House of Oakdown. Such a powerful and influential family, so many resources at my command...who would dare to comment or criticise, even if the new Lord Oakdown was to flout every tradition and take a servant-girl to wife? Especially once my son and heir was born from the union."
Dismay tingled down her spine. His voice was so impersonal and matter-of-fact, as if he was talking about the weather instead of coldly planning to murder his own father. She had every sympathy for how he must feel. Lord Oakdown was an evil, vicious bastard who had systematically destroyed the lives of both his sons and burning in hell was too good for him. But that didn't mean she could condone his murder, however much it was deserved.
"They would never allow you to pollute the bloodlines like that!" she exclaimed, trying to make him see sense. "The Lord President would never sanction our marriage, not while he believed I was nothing more than a servant."
A small smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth. "Oh, I think Drall could be persuaded. Particularly if I could restore his son to health."
She stiffened in his arms. "So it was you who attacked Anzor!"
"Of course it was me! He should never have dared to lay hands on what was mine!" he snarled. "The only reason I didn't kill him was because I thought he might come in useful later on, as leverage against Drall." His grin widened, his youthful face at odds with the hard purpose in his eyes. "And after our son is born, after my younger self graduates from the Academy to become a full Time Lord, it should be easy enough to use my knowledge of past events to topple the Lord President from his position. He's weak and ineffectual. Gallifrey will welcome a strong leader...a new Master." His gaze sought hers. "Don't you see, Ana? We can make a life for ourselves here, on our own planet, together. Our son will have the birth-right that's due to him, just as it always should have been. And this time, instead of sending the Doctor to prevent the genesis of the Daleks, as Lord President, I will make sure Skaro is blown to pieces before Davros is even born. Imagine it, Ana... a Universe in which the Daleks never existed."
At his words, something stirred inside her, an elemental response, something fierce and proud and war-like. He was so cunning. She might know him, but in the same way, he knew her, through and through, both her strengths and her weaknesses. He knew that the one thing she wanted above all others was to see the end of the Daleks, the enemy she hated beyond reason, once and for all. Nothing had ever tempted her as much as the vision of a Universe in which the Time War never happened.
"No," she breathed. "We can't."
Whatever he said, however beguiling his offer, she knew it wouldn't stop at Skaro. With the power of Gallifrey behind him, how many other planets would he subjugate, how many others would he destroy in his insatiable desire to rule? And if he changed Theta Sigma's timeline, as he no doubt would, there would be no Doctor to oppose his destructive whims, nothing to keep him from obtaining absolute power over the entire Universe.
"We can," he said inflexibly, lowering his mouth to hers. "And we will."
Another Author's Note:
Oh yeah, that's the Master all right – bad to the bone!
I've heard a little whisper that I'm writing too much...so if you think I'm updating too quickly, please let me know. I can always slow it down :)