[Disclaimer - I took some liberties with The Family of Blood's race/home planet, as not much background info was given on them in the actual episodes. So I just sort of made stuff up. Hope you enjoy! Also, some edits are coming soon to the first 5 chapters - very minor things, such as editing out Rocastle's name and adding a new headmaster - I stupidly forgot that he got obliterated by Sister of Mine in the 2nd episode. So, Chapter 7 might take a bit longer as I'm going to work on these edits first. I do so hate posting fanfic that's incorrect, even in the slightest way. I feel like it does my readers a great disservice. BTW, Thank you everyone for all your kind and helpful reviews. I plan to reply to each and every one of them this week. OK, Now on with the show...]
Chapter 6:
"Son of Mine"
Deep within the darkest recesses of the schoolboy's mind, the serpent king lay in wait. Far and long ago, his race had been great, formidable enemies who had a lifespan of nearly a thousand years. They even had forms of their own; huge and menacing forms. Green scales and yellow eyes and spiny backs and long, sharp saber-like fangs that curled into enemy flesh and gored huge chunks of dripping crimson life from it. They slithered through the majestic dark forests of their home planet, through the caverns and treehouses which made up their cities. They had no use of speech; they communicated using their minds. They powered their cities with their own psychic energy. And they had ships; ships with enough firepower to level whole universes to the ground. But then, the Daleks came.
They came to conquer; came to harness the psychic power of their race and use the energy to their own devices. They turned his race into slaves, screaming at them in their tinny, electric voices to obey. So for hundreds of years that was just exactly what they did. They obeyed. Mother of Mine obeyed. Father of Mine obeyed. Sister of Mine obeyed. And all the others. Millions of them, obeying the sinister robots which ravaged their forests with their filth.
It took nearly one hundred years for Son of Mine to lead the revolution against the Daleks. And when it finally happened, when revolution finally came, they were unsuccessful. The Daleks were too smart, too strong. They saw the uprising coming from miles away. They gave no second chances. They simply leveled their eyestalks at the serpent race and declared in their hateful metallic voices, "EXTERMINATE!"
They wiped out thousands. Millions. Soon the entire planet had turned to dust. But that was where the contingency plan came into play. For what the Daleks didn't know was that to take away their physical form before natural death could occur was, for the great serpent race, only half a death. For they lived on even afterward, in the form of incorporeal gaseous green clouds. The Daleks could find no way to exterminate that which was purely energy. They fired their eyestalks again and again but could not defeat the serpent race in its most basic form. And so the great serpent race fought back; inhabiting Daleks, forcing them to fire at each other, forcing them to kill each other off. And as each Dalek fell, the green gaseous clouds simply seeped out, congratulated each other on the victory, and inhabited another Dalek. And so it went, on and on, until all the Daleks that had been stupid enough to challenge their planet were laid to waste.
However, with no physical forms left to take on, the great serpent race was forced to get in their ships and pilot them telepathically to other planets so that they could take on other forms. Most forms proved useless in a matter of months - some lived longer than others, but not by much, and they quickly discovered that the further they had to travel to try and find more suitable, lasting forms, the less time they had to spend on their home planet before they had to go out in search of a new one again. In conquering the Daleks, they had given up not only their beautiful scales and spines, their most precious bodies, but in the end, they had given up their home planet all over again. Son of Mine had failed. He had doomed his race to wandering the stars for all eternity, searching for the perfect host.
He took his family - The Family of Blood - and they, too, wandered the stars. Along the way they ran into humanoid Time Agents, and took their forms. The technology they possessed proved quite useful, specifically their vortex manipulators. They were now able to travel through time as well as space, which would have allowed them to shorten their trips back and forth from their home planet considerably. But the lifespans of their hosts were still far too short. They needed a stronger host. One that could live ten times as long. Or perhaps even one that could live forever.
Of course, the only race that could live forever was the race of Time Lords, and they were long dead, and their planet - the infamous red-skied wonder known as Gallifrey - was under time-lock, never to be visited again. Not even with a vortex manipulator.
But then they came to a planet - just a silly little rock with not much more than saliva and a prayer holding it in orbit - and on that planet came another visitor as well. A visitor in a bright blue box called the TARDIS. They had taken other forms by then, cyclopean beasts with a limited range of vision. They smelled him rather than saw him. The Doctor. The last of the Time Lords. The very, very last.
That was when they made the decision. Son of Mine would take his form. The form of a Time Lord, and with the power a Time Lord possessed he would never die. He would regenerate and live infinite lifetimes, and with the technology inside his TARDIS, he would find a way to get his planet back. To go back in time and defeat the Dalek race. The Time Lords had been the Daleks most formidable enemy, after all; surely if anyone could defeat them it would be the Doctor.
They followed the TARDIS through time and space, from planet to planet and century to century. But they never quite caught up with it. And then, somehow, they lost it completely. They landed on Earth in the early 20th century but they lost the trail. Lost his scent. And so they took forms, and they assimilated as best they could, doing recon to try and find the Doctor. They found him, of course. But he defeated them as easily as swatting flies. He trapped Sister of Mine in the Mirror-World, chained his father with dwarf star alloy, and threw Mother of Mine into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy. Perhaps most insulting of all, he froze Son of Mine in time and stuck him on a hill dressed as a scarecrow. A thing not even the birds were afraid of.
It had perhaps been quite amusing for the Doctor to accomplish that.
But he wouldn't be laughing very long.
While Son of Mine had been trapped inside the awkward adolescent body of the schoolboy perched on the edge of manhood, frozen in time on a hill in the English countryside, his body had been bound to a wooden cross, but his mind had been bound by no one. Not Human nor Dalek nor Time Lord could bind the mind of the serpent race, and Son of Mine found that he could communicate easily with his family, even though their forms were separated so cruelly. So he had spent the last six weeks communicating with them. Plotting. Planning. And reaching out with their minds in frantic desperation to find even the slightest hint of a time traveler within their disparate vicinities. Time Lord, Time Agent, or even just some unfortunate soul who stumbled upon the void. And that last bit was just exactly what Son of Mine found. A girl barely out of her teenage years who had been taken by the strange race of the Weeping Angels and displaced in a different time. A time which just so happened to be the time that Son of Mine was trapped in. It was almost too perfect; almost as if they had gotten together with the Angels and planned it, though Son of Mine knew that they had done no such thing. It was just one of those happy accidents. A very happy accident indeed.
He knew she would have energy left swirling inside of her. Time energy given to her by the Angels so that she would be able to travel through the vortex with no technology to aid her. And it was just exactly that energy he needed to reverse the freezing process. Luring her to him had been child's play. What would be the real challenge would be sufficiently mimicking the form which he had taken on. The only time they had to assimilate into the world of their forms was when they were looking for the Doctor, and they had been very poor imitations. They had no idea about the history of their forms; had no interest in delving into the brains of their humans to educate themselves about things like personality, and mannerisms, and memories. They were in a rush, and they did a rush job, and it had been a poor show indeed. But the six weeks that the Doctor had granted Son of Mine before Sally Sparrow came along had been more than enough time for him to completely absorb the brain of one Jeremy Baines, former student at the Farringham School for Boys.
He learned all that he could; soaked in all his memories, learned all his opinions, discovered all his quirks and idiosyncrasies. And by the time Sally Sparrow came to him in the dawn and pressed her mouth to his in the kiss that set him free, he knew he would, like a great method actor, be able to portray the role of Jeremy Baines with absolute and pristine accuracy. He would become Baines, in a sense.
He had no more than a month before this form expired, and he already felt it weakening. But somehow he didn't think the Doctor would wait that long before returning. It was crunch time, then. He would have to gain the humans' trust. And he would have to send a distress call to the rest of the serpent race. With the vortex manipulator technology they had begun replicating on their home planet, they should be able to come to Earth in 1913 with relatively little difficulty. And when the Doctor came back to freeze him again - as he undoubtedly would - Son of Mine would have a new army at his command. Not an army of straw, this time, oh no.
This time, he would have an army of flesh.
...To Be Continued...