Disclaimer - You know the drill by now, I don't own Doctor Who.
Luck runs out.
Clegg rubbed his eyes tiredly as he studied the charts in front of him as he tried to think of a way out of the mess he was now in. For the last 2 months, the Seal had been hunted by the Royal Navy stationed out here in the West Indies, the accidental death of the governor's daughter had given them the excuse they needed to hunt down any and all pirates out there.
And it was all his fault.
At first it hadn't been too bad since it took so long for the islands and ships in this stupid era to know what was happening everywhere else, and it was relatively straightforward for Clegg and the rest of the Seal crew to try to move on from that disastrous night, and continue with their lives of pirates. Clegg had taken the Seal to a few of the small islands and had attacked the port towns there after planting bombs on the hulls of various warships using some of the boats and then raiding the town while it was in chaos, but it had proved to be a big mistake, since all the attacks had done was make the navy even more determined to catch him, execute him and his crew, and destroy his ship. It didn't matter which.
Looking down at his charts, Clegg was trying to think of a way he could get himself and his crew out of this mess, though truthfully he was more worried about the crew. He could tell they blamed him for all their bad luck, and he knew he had to shoulder the blame since it had been his idea to capture the governor's daughter and his actions had led to her death, starting a chain reaction where the navy was hunting him down.
The navy had already encountered the Seal a few times, and thinking of those encounters made him feel sick. The Seal had needed to use up all their precious explosive shot just to deal with two ships of the line, and quite a few members of the crew had been killed, impaled either by splinters the length of spears, or shot by musket balls.
For a long time the Time Lord studied the charts of the Caribbean, but he didn't see them; finally he pushed them aside and looked for the charts of the Atlantic ocean, and the ones in Europe. He wondered how the remainder of his crew would feel about the proposal to return to England, but he couldn't help but feel they'd want him to stay here and fight.
As a pirate, Clegg had learnt that you did need to fight, but he was enough of a realist enough to know that while the Seal could stay out at sea for a long time for as long as their food and medical supplies lasted, at some point his ship would encounter another warship, and he doubted they could survive that. The chances of survival had become so serious that they had resorted to towing a boat behind the ship so then they didn't need to waste any time getting survivors into the boats and using those cumbersome ropes to heave them up and drop them into the sea.
Picking up one of the charts, Clegg went to the window and he opened it so he could take a look at the stars to calculate a decent course back to England, and made some notes on the chart itself once he made a few speedy calculations in his head. It was when he was getting into his stride that the door opened, and he turned around quickly, his hand automatically reaching for the cutlass that he had at his side.
In the doorway, covering him with their pistols were his officers and a few other members of the crew. Frost himself was covering him with a musket, of all things.
Clegg sighed under his breath. "We're going through this again, are we?" he asked quietly as he gathered his energy. There was no way he was going to go out without a fight, but he knew that he wasn't indestructible, and there were enough guns covering him to be a threat - if one of those balls hit him in his chest, then there was a good chance he would regenerate, but there was another equal chance he could be killed by a ball if it passed through his hearts before regeneration set in.
It was the same with a cutlass thrust. He had to keep them on the other side of the room, and besides he wasn't sure if they had noticed the open window he'd been using to get a navigational fix.
Frost was the first to reply. "You've led us into one case of bad luck after another," he said.
"I'm also the one who'd led you to your biggest successes," Clegg countered as he walked to the desk casually as if the threat of being shot meant nothing to him, though his eyes never left the pistols, knives, or the musket in Frost's hand. "Don't ever forget that. If it wasn't for me, you would never have become free of Abercrombie and those stupid fops who'd made it their goal to keep us down."
Clegg gestured to the guns. "It mustn't have taken you long to decide to mutiny against me," he commented, "how many of you are backing it?"
"All of the crew," May growled. This was obviously not going the way he'd wanted or expected, which explained his aggression.
"All of them?" Clegg repeated in surprise, before he recalled how everyone of the Raven crew had mutinied against Abercrombie. And he shook his head. "Just as I was thinking of ending our time in these waters and return home," he added in the hope of getting everyone here to change their mind and put up with him for one final voyage, then he would decide what to do with them…
"You were planning on returning us home?" May asked skeptically.
Clegg nodded.
One of the men raised his pistol, and fired it. Clegg dropped to the ground behind the desk, ignoring Frost's angry shouting towards the shooter, and he reached into the desk and pulled out two small, roughly cut wooden cylinders with two fuses, and two pistols with cloth wrapped around both of their flintlock mechanisms.
Crouched behind the desk, Clegg closed his eyes and focused on the speed of local time, and using the Rassilon Imprimature he slowed it down enough to head to the desk and gather the charts, a telescope, the sextant, the dividers and a compass and he stuffed them into his trousers before he lit the fuses on the bombs and returned time to its usual rate. The pirates gaped in shock at how fast he had moved from behind the desk to stand, but they didn't have much time to do anything as he threw the bombs in quick succession, and he used his cutlass to bring the tow rope closer to him.
Grabbing onto the rope, Clegg quickly slid down it to the boat and he quickly used his heavy cutlass to slice through the rope so no one could grab on it and pull the rope to bring the boat back to the ship. Clegg was preparing to make sail when he saw Frost and May stick their heads out of the window of the cabin.
"Using that gun on me isn't going to bring me back, Frost," Clegg shouted when he noticed the musket in his once first mate's hands.
"We'll get you back, Clegg!" Frost shouted back, though the Time Lord was uncertain if that meant he and the others were going to kill him for all of his mistakes, or if they planned to hunt him down.
Clegg held up the charts he'd managed to grab from the cabin. "Not without these; you're a smart man, Frost, but you will need a lot of luck finding your way around. Its one thing being able to use navigational instruments and knowing how to use a chart, but you've never had that kind of training."
"You bastard, Clegg," another pirate shouted from the deck above the cabin. "You can't hide from us forever-"
"Just like you can't with the navy, at some point you'll blunder into the path of a frigate or a sloop," Clegg called mockingly, "I think you'll have a few bigger problems to worry about, don't you?" Stepping over the small mast in the boat, Clegg used all of his strength to push it into position, "Goodbye Seal. I'll see you again, and believe me, you'll regret this."
By that point, the boat had drifted away steadily from the Seal, and Clegg heaved up the sail before he grabbed the oars and he started rowing away from the brigantine, thankful that the darkness of the night meant the chances of the crew finding him were slim.
Port Royal was just as noisy as Clegg remembered a few weeks later, as the Time Lord pirate ate a simple meal of bread, cheese and bits of tough meet while a pint of rum was sitting nearby. The Seal was only a few miles away from Port Royal when the crew had mutinied against him, and it was child's play for Clegg to row towards. Ever since the Royal Navy had intensified the hunt for him and his crew, Clegg had moved his former ship ten miles further out to sea than he would have done usually.
When Clegg and his former crew had become pirates after that mutiny on the old Raven, one of Clegg's successful policies was to sail close to one of the many islands in the Caribbean and plunder ships leaving the numerous harbours, and then taking what they'd taken to be sold. If there was one thing to be glad for with the death of the governor's daughter, it was the fact the navy had been sending ships out into the deeper waters and not really bothered to imagine that Clegg had found the perfect hiding spot, which was quite close to the port towns themselves, though that had probably changed.
Now he was alone and truthfully he was happy about that because it meant he could no longer hide his alien nature in such a cramped place, but truthfully Clegg was bored. He wanted to get away from Earth, but he needed to either steal another ship or find a berth on a ship that would travel straight to England. He didn't want to go anywhere near the Royal Navy ships, what few there were, because there was a chance Phillips had been rescued by now. But truthfully after his experiences on the Raven, he wanted to steer clear of any naval crew. He could steal a ship, but that was impractical since how would he explain himself being the only occupant on a ship?
Unfortunately, finding a berth was proving to be harder than Clegg had thought it would be since some of the merchant services had now worked out their cargos were targets for piracy. He had beached the boat from the Seal not far from the harbour, but truthfully Clegg didn't want to use the boat to return to England. He had seen the storms thanks to the years he had spent at sea, and they were terrifying on a frigate and a brigantine, in a small boat it would be like asking for certain death.
The boat was a contingency plan he genuinely did not want to use, but it was at the back of his mind regardless.
Once he was finished with the meal, Clegg left the tavern and went out to try to find a berth. He had taken to using burglary to get enough cash to save up for another contingency, passage on a ship if he couldn't get a berth. So far he had earned enough money to do that, but the problem was a berth would keep him busy.
As he tried looking for a ship heading towards England and had berths on board, he kept his eyes open in case he saw someone who recognised him - there were posters with his likeness in a few towns already, but he had been in Port Royal long enough to know this town hadn't received them yet, so he was still safe, but he wanted to get away from the town before that happened - and he saw someone that made his senses tingle.
Walking through the crowd, dressed in a brown tunic with a tricorn hat, was a man who was physically older than Clegg was himself in his current incarnation, sporting a neatly trimmed moustache. Clegg studied the man from where he was, instinctively knowing that the man was another Time Lord. Stepping into an alcove, he closed his eyes for a brief moment and he reached out gently and touched the mind of the other.
It was a risk of course, because he didn't know this Time Lord. But Clegg was very gentle with how he touched the mind of the other Time Lord, making enough mental contact with him while being sure the other didn't notice his presence, but he knew that the Time Lord probably had a TARDIS of his own nearby. If he could get to it then perhaps he could use it to return to the TARDIS he had here. Using the mind of the other Time Lord as a guide and reinforcing his own mental barriers to prevent the other Time Lord from noticing his presence, Clegg followed the man as close as he could through the town, the hunt for a decent berth on one of the ships forgotten in favour of getting something better.
The other Time Lord stopped off at a few of the shops for an hour, picking up supplies like bottles of alcohol, but Clegg always kept a suitable distance from the other Time Lord, trying to make sure he wasn't seen and he made sure the other couldn't sense him. Clegg knew he could have left the other Time Lord and tried to find the TARDIS he had on his own - he'd be able to use the key he had for the Type 53 to get inside of course, all TARDIS keys were the same - but Port Royal was vast, and he had no idea how long the Time Lord had planned to be here for, and he was desperate to get away from this part of Earth and return to London where he could recover the Type 53. He couldn't risk the chance of losing this Time Lord and the TARDIS here.
While he didn't like the obvious risk of the Time Lord realising he was there, Clegg knew he had to follow the other so then he could gain access to the other's TARDIS, but as he did so he looked around for a small but reasonable weapon - he still had his dagger, but he'd been forced to leave his cutlass behind in the boat because it was too large to not be seen - to use on the Time Lord; he didn't want to hurt him after being deprived of the company of another of his race for so long, but while he didn't want to hurt the man he was still nursing a lot of resentment for his exile. He found the weapon in a piece of rope near one of the ships, and he hurried after the other Time Lord.
Finally, after being led around the port, the Time Lord led Clegg to a fairly large looking ship in the docks. It wasn't as grand as the polished looking warships owned by the Royal Navy, this ship looked battered and unkempt, but Clegg recognised the TT capsule for what it was right away, though he could tell this TARDIS was a very old model, but the perception filter was on maximum - if it wasn't for the fact the Time Lord had headed straight for the ship, then he would not have noticed it.
Sneaking quietly on the gangplank, Clegg watched as the Time Lord walked around the quarterdeck, and he crept towards one of the masts and he hid behind it and ducked down. The other Time Lord gave up on his inspection and walked towards the aft cabin. Clegg stood up slowly and padded over to him as carefully as he could, but he cursed how well the chameleon circuit of this TARDIS disguised this ship as a wooden vessel. It even creaked. But despite that, he still headed purposefully towards the other Time Lord, but he was surprised when the other man turned around. He didn't seem surprised to see Clegg.
"Good day to you, Buccaneer. Why don't we step inside my TARDIS, so we can talk?"
Who is the other Time Lord?