THIRTEEN
Francine was leafing absently through a catalogue from a store called A Smarter You. It just came with the post once a month, and she had no idea how she'd gotten on the mailing list. She was looking at the anti-ageing salves they were offering, and the electric muscle stimulators.
Normally, she felt that the young/thin/chic/beautiful craze culture in which she lived was a sham, and a destructive one at that. She'd always tried to raise her girls with the idea that what was in their heads and hearts was more important than makeup, fancy clothes or a thin waistline. And she had always tried to lead by example. Never had she commented on their weight or hair, other than to tell them they looked lovely. No fawning or criticising. No exercise "regimens," no crash diets, no excessive spending on exterior accoutrements.
But lately, she'd been dreading looking in the mirror and wondered if some "miracle" face cream might not just have some positive effect. Even if all that it meant was that she could feel good about learning to take care of herself again. Clive, bless him, did make an effort every now and then to tell her she was beautiful, but she knew it was nothing more than a courtesy.
A flash of grey interrupted her thoughts. Just as well – they were starting to run to self-pity. A Jack-shaped streak flew through the front door and past the kitchen, saying "hi" as it moved. She had barely registered his presence when he was already coming back down the stairs with Martha in his arms.
Francine followed them into the living room.
"Where did you go?" the mother asked.
"To get this," Jack told her, holding up the DVD-R he had made. He turned on the television and DVD player.
"Oh no, not again!" Francine begged. "Don't do that to her again!"
"No, no," Jack assured her. "It's not footage of the Doctor. She won't – or at least she shouldn't – have any kind of adverse reaction to this. Trust me. It's just meant to induce a certain type of vision."
The player idled for a bit while Jack, once again, fitted his device together. He put the usual transmittor end on Martha, who had ceased to fight the process. He held the receiver end in his hand, and pressed play.
And there he was upon the screen.
He was standing on the steps, basking in his victory, beside his wife, beside his doomed aides. The man whom most of the world knew as Harold Saxon, but whom Jack and Francine knew as the Master. It was the footage that Jack, Martha and the Doctor had seen just as they had teleported back to London, 2007 from The End of the Universe. Harold Saxon had been on everyone's minds, and every jumbo screen in every city square in London played the clip.
"This country has been sick," he was saying, in the wake of his sweeping victory in his election as Prime Minister. "This country needs healing. This country needs medicine. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that what this country really needs right now is a Doctor."
It was meant as bait for his adversary, and it had worked. Though they had gone about it in a roundabout way, eventually, the three of them had played right into the Master's hands. And of course, by then, Clive and Francine had already been ensnared as spies, and Tish was hired as a... what, exactly?
Jack held the receiver out to Francine, and said, "Why don't you take a look?"
She was surprised, but she supposed she had been wondering all along what the experience of seeing into another person's thoughts might be like. And she had wanted to see first-hand exactly what it was that was torturing her daughter inside her own mind.
She sat down on the sofa near Martha. Jack helped her put on the visor, and then she felt as though she were falling... the sensation almost made her remove the device. And then it went away, and she knew she was seeing what Jack had intended for her to see...
Martha was feeling anticipation and apprehension. This was the moment of truth. In a little while she would know if all of her efforts, all of her tears and toil over the past year had been worthwhile. She took a deep breath and walked out the front door into the street.
The Master was there waiting. "Oh yes!" he said to her, applauding. "Very well done! Good girl! I've trained you well."
His smile was sobering, approving. Still, she was too stunned to react in any way.
"Bag," he said. "Give me the bag."
She lay it down on the pavement, and the Master's aides came and picked it up. It contained the gun with the four special chemicals that could kill a Time Lord.
"Good companion, your work is done," he told her.
She wondered what he would have her do now. She was able to do more, she could have kept going, but the Master chose this time to bring Martha Jones into the fold. He escorted her to the black SUV, and they were driven through the depressing, barren streets of London.
"How is he?" she asked as they rode.
"As he should be," the Master told her. "Miserable. Decrepit. Abject."
"Good," she said. "Advancing his age like that was a stroke of genius. One very good way to ensure that the bastard can't move."
"Yes, I thought putting him in a cell would be a bit cruel," the Master said, with real sympathy in his voice. "After all we've been through, after all the years he's lived, he deserved a bit of dignity. But I'm afraid I've had to advance his age even further, for even as a senior citizen, he was quite wily."
"What?" she asked, half smiling, half stunned.
"He attempted to hold your mother hostage in an effort to get hold of my laser screwdriver," he explained. "In order to escape, of course. He must have been planning it for weeks. But I'd have none of it. I advanced his age to the full 903 years, and ultimately was forced, I'm afraid, to place him in a cell."
"Wow!" Martha exclaimed. "The Doctor's really in a cell now? And he actually looks 903?"
"Yes," the Master said, genuinely distressed. "It's really more of a cage. But I take no pleasure in it. He and I were friends once – I'm so sorry that it's come to this."
Martha was silent for a bit, and tried to contain her glee.
"Is the paradox machine holding up?" Martha asked, after a bit..
"It is, thank goodness. I don't know what I would have done without it. After the havoc the Doctor has wrought upon the Earth – removing ten per cent of the population – the paradox preserver has been a life saver," he explained. "Now those nice folks at the end of the universe really will find their Utopia, and won't have been wiped out several trillion years before their time."
Martha felt a chill, remembering. The Doctor had come unhinged at the End of the Universe, when he discovered that his old foe was still alive. After Jack and Martha had wrangled him into leaving that place via Jack's teleport, neither of them had had the strength to stop him. He'd given them the slip, and before they knew it, entire neighborhoods were exploding in mad rains of blood and cinder. Plagues were taking out villages, poisonous gases were running amok in various cells of humanity. The Doctor had gone ultimately psychotic, and was attempting to systematically wipe out all hope that humans would harbour his enemy at any time in the future. In his demented fury, this was the only way he could see to defeat the Master, and he could not be stopped.
Except, of course, by the Master himself. He had been their saviour. Jack and Martha had gone to him immediately for help, once they realised who he was. He had, just in the nick of time, placed a paradox machine in the heart of the TARDIS to give the people at the End of the Universe a chance. The Doctor had gotten cocky and arrogant, and had turned up inside the Valiant. Luckily, the Master's aides were able to wrestle him down, and then the clever Master had rendered him harmless and elderly. At least for a while.
Now, Martha's chill changed to a warm glow. She was on her way there, to the Valiant. She would see the Doctor again, and perhaps even be allowed to witness as the weapon for which she had searched far and wide was used. She admonished herself for having loved him once, in spite of everything he had done to her, to her family, the millions, billions of aliens and humans, all across time and space. He was a monster, and finally, she would be letting go.
When the SUV stopped beneath the Valiant, she stepped out onto the specially-made platform. The Master took her arm, and they were teleported on board. Aides and guards nodded hello to the Master and Martha, just before the Master slipped into a side-room, to make his entrance elsewhere. He told her to go ahead and make her way to the conference bridge, where the ship was piloted, and where the Doctor was being held prisoner.
She reached the end of the hallway, and the guard nodded at her and smiled subtly. A door buzzed open before Martha, and she nervously strode into the room. Her mother, father and Tish were there, as was Jack, disciples of the Master. They observed her with reverence as she passed them. The Master was already in the room, standing at the helm, watching her with pride. She spotted the tiny, helpless figure of the Doctor, in a bird cage hanging nearby. She smiled at him, and he looked back with pathetic, supplicant eyes.
The Master asked her to kneel. Of course, she did so. She considered herself a loyal, humble servant.
"Down below, the fleet is ready to launch," the Master announced to the room. "Two hundred thousand ships to send aid across the world."
He pressed a button and readied himself for the launch, and began the countdown. The Doctor would be forced to see it. The Master was going to begin to repair the damage he'd done, to become a bona-fide saviour to the people of the Earth. The Doctor would not die just yet, Martha realised. He'd be taught a lesson first.
"At zero, to mark this day," the Master continued to orate. "The child, Martha Jones, will be venerated. My first disciple." He looked at her warmly, proudly. "Have you anything to say?" he asked her.
She was too choked to speak.
"No?" he verified. "Bow your head."
She did as she was told. He pointed his beloved laser at her.
"And so it falls to me as Master of All to establish, from this day, a new order of Time Lords from this day forward..."
And then the laughter began. A tiny laugh from the corner of the room. The Doctor, small, puppet-like, dressed in his miniscule pin-striped pajamas, with his disproportionately large, pathetic eyes, was laughing.
"What's so funny?" asked the Master, irritated to have been interrupted in the middle of his veneration of Martha Jones.
"A gun?" the Doctor asked incredulously.
"What about it?"
"A gun in four parts?"
"Yes."
"A gun in four parts scattered across the world. I mean, come on. Did you really believe that?"
Martha was stunned. She'd been sent on a wild goose chase!
"I planted that legend," the Doctor told Martha. "It was one of the first things I did after so easily separating myself from you and Jack. I planted the seeds for a rumour of a gun that could be found, and would kill a Time Lord."
"Then what the hell are those four chemicals?" Martha asked, stepping angrily toward the little cage. "Those four coloured vials that I picked up around the world? They're something! Did you plant those too?"
"No," the tiny man grinned. "Professor Daugherty did."
"That nice old bird who let me stay in her bunker?"
"That's her," the Doctor told Martha. "I threatened her son, and she catered to my every whim. It's amazing how much mileage one can get out of motherly love."
"You bastard," she spat.
He burst out laughing rather maniacally. "Good grief, girl! I never imagined it would take so long! What were you doing all that time?"
"I was spreading the word of the Master," she insisted angrily. "Faith and hope over destruction and despair. Respect for life, respect for friendship. Something that you will never understand."
"Martha," the Master said gently. "Back off now. He's my responsibility. I'll deal with him."
"Good luck with that," the Doctor mocked. "Because in a few moments, I'll be my old unstoppable self."
"Come again?" asked the Master.
"I'm using the countdown," he announced. "The professor is out there somewhere, and she's hacked into the system. And in fifteen seconds, the Archangel Network will crash, and you will lose your connection with it. And with that, you will lose your power over me."
Martha and the Master looked at each other with fear.
The clock ran down. The Master reeled a bit as he lost his psychic connection with the world. A silvery glow enveloped the tiny, evil thing in the cage. The cage itself dissipated, as the Master cried out helplessly, "Oh no, no, you don't!"
"I've had a whole year to tune myself into the psychic network and integrate with its matrices," the Doctor said smugly as he stood to his full height. His face still looked quite old, but his body was slowly coming back to itself. As his face came back to the younger, handsomer, and yet more sinister version, he said, "The one thing you could never do was think for yourself." No one was sure whether he was speaking to the Master or to his former companion.
Martha ran to hug her family, for what she felt might be the last time. If the Doctor was still bent on destroying all hope for Utopia, he would likely start right here, right now. The Master bravely tried to attack the Doctor with his laser, but a kind of forcefield surrounded him and prevented anything from harming him.
The Doctor sarcastically apologised for this, and then began to advance on the Master. Then, some inexplicable power allowed the Doctor to knock the laser from the stunned Master's hand.
"No! You can't do this!" the Master cried out.
"You know what happens now," the Doctor said, advancing on him more and more quickly.
Suddenly, the Doctor stopped. He dashed for the control panel of the Valiant, and as he flipped some switch, the vessel began to tremble beneath their feet. Martha and her family, the Doctor, the Master, Lucy, Captain Jack, the aides, the guards, all were sent stumbling, fumbling about for purchase. The Doctor and Martha wound up by chance once again in close quarters on the floor, and through necessity, hung onto one other for leverage.
"Time is reversing!" he cried out.
Martha was filled with dread. The Doctor was taking them all back one year, before the Master had done any good in repairing the damage done by his enemy, before Martha had gone out into the world to help spread hope. The world would be in the same ruin as before the Doctor was captured, before the hope and peace of the Master had been deployed to spare the people of Earth.
In the chaos of the moment, one of the guards failed to notice that his weapon clattered to the floor. Martha and her mother focused on it at the same time.
The world around the Valiant was moving backward, becoming more and more wrecked, more and more frightened with each upside-down moment. But, all in one instant, everything stopped moving. The Doctor got to his feet and announced, "The paradox is broken! We've reverted back one year and one day. Two minutes past eight in the morning. It's all restored!"
Their collective hearts sank. "But I can remember it," Francine mused, confounded, disappointed beyond measure.
"We're at the eye of the storm," the Doctor told her. "The only ones who will ever know."
The Master made a sudden dash for the lift. Martha never would understand what his plan was, because just as he turned to look back, the Doctor seized the weapon fallen to the floor and shot him. The bullet lodged just below the rib cage, damaging, Martha suspected, the second heart. She lunged for him, and caught him as best she could as he went down.
The next few moments were a blur, as she saw them through tears. She wept, begged him not to leave them begged him to regenerate, begged him to fight. She realised with terror that he was growing colder, and with even more terror realised that he was giving up! She tried to rally him back to life, but his efforts, his toil, all had been undone, and he was finished. He was too tired, and had very little fight left in him. And with agony, she felt his life slip away. She wailed in misery as she watched the Earth's only chance die in her arms. The only man who could possibly give the Jones family hope that they would not spend eternity as prisoners to the Doctor was dead. She lay his head on the floor, and wept over his body...
Francine ripped the device off of her head, just as Jack had the first time he'd been inside Martha's visions. She looked at Jack with desperation in her eyes.
"What did you see?" he asked.
She didn't answer. She swallowed hard. "All right," she said, her voice husky and tired. "Bring the Doctor in."
