Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

Love And Monsters

Chapter 31 – Twist Of The Knife

Victor had quickly taken over the basement LINDA met in, apparently coming to the library between meetings to better reorganize the space to his tastes, shoving Bliss's art out to the bins - the girl had cried when she'd seen her largest statue broken into pieces - and taking most of the pictures from Ursula's wall of photographs to fill out the mess of corkboards he'd filled the space with, strings tethering together articles and maps and snippets of stolen files from Torchwood and another organization called 'UNIT'.

The mood at the meetings had changed with the decor. There was no more music. Nobody laughed anymore. Nobody even socialized, beyond vague greetings. Whenever Victor was in the room - which was practically all the time, seeing as he was there before Elton arrived and only left once everyone else had -, conversation just… stopped. It was all progress reports and assignments, with Victor occasionally throwing out a bit of video or audio of something Doctor-y to keep up interest.

And that didn't work for everyone. Bliss had stopped showing up after Victor's 'remodel', leaving a quietly furious Ursula to explain that her roommate wasn't coming back as she collected what bits of art Victor hadn't destroyed, and Elton was pretty sure that Bridget and Mr. Skinner were on the verge of quitting as well, given how quick they were to leave once a meeting was over with.

Della, on the other hand, seemed to have decided that she was in some sort of cold war with Victor, with each 'assignment' being taken, completed as quickly as possible, and filled out to completion only on the barest of technicalities, always tilted to make Victor out to be some sort of arrogant idiot that didn't know much about the Doctor at all and all conversations punctuated with her fiddling with a folding knife that Elton was pretty sure fell on the wrong side of 'legal'.
Not that Elton had a lot of room to talk about that sort of thing, given that Victor's missions seemed overly fond of toeing the lines between 'harmless curiosity' and 'active trespassing' or 'stalking'.

Arnold, for his part, had just gone cold. Everything was straight forward and… unsettlingly impersonal, beyond being polite to everyone that wasn't Victor. Whatever Della was doing, Arnold was playing a cold compliment to it - just as unpleasant, just as unhelpful, just as quietly and constantly mocking, but restrained in a way that felt infinitely more dangerous than the background noise of a folding knife being opened and closed like a murderer's metronome.

The man didn't even stumble over his own feet anymore, even if he did still have a habit of transposing himself into people's - not Victor's, never Victor's - personal space whenever he felt like it.

Still, that didn't seem to faze Victor Kennedy. "And where are Sinclair and Skinner?" the man said, barely looking up from the 'reports' he was going over. "It's not like them to play truant."

Elton fought the urge to give into a nervous lick of the lips or a stutter. "S-seems like some woman named Gemma found Bridget's daughter and got her to contact her mum, so Bridget and Colin are both taking time off to attend to the family situation."

Della smiled - a sharp-edged, vicious expression that, while happy, wasn't particularly friendly -, not looking terribly surprised by this development. "Oh, isn't that great? The kindness of strangers."

Victor made an irritated noise. "Does no one want to do proper work?"

"'Work' implies 'pay'. And respect," Ursula said. "And you've given us neither of those."

"I've given you purpose," Victor shot back. "Which is infinitely more valuable."

"What you've given us are a bunch of pain in the ass missions that would get all of us arrested if we did them the way you wanted," Della said, throwing down a sheaf of paper from her latest 'assignment'. "Stalking and harassment are serious charges, you know. Not to mention trespassing on private property."

"Oh yes, as an American I'm sure that you're familiar with the last…" Victor said, waving her off.

Della wasn't having any of it. "Because if you do it in America, you risk getting shot."

"Well, from my experience is that just being in America risks you getting shot," Arnold muttered, turning over the pages of his own assignment with a frown line picking up between his eyes.

Della ignored him. "And that would be bad enough, but you're not putting your own skin in the game. You're putting all the risk and stress on us for the sake of your own little ego trip."

Victor gestured at his corkboard wall of pins and strings. "And my hacking Torchwood wasn't a risk?"

"Please. Do you know how much alien tech goes 'missing' whenever someone wants to do a little extracurricular fun on their off hours? They don't even stop their workers from barebacking in the breakroom."

Elton, who'd made a point of taking a drink of water as an excuse not to make eye-contact with anyone at that very moment, started choking.

Victor himself looked mildly surprised by the statement. "...I didn't realize the full extent of your previous familiarity," he said after a minute of silence. "Were you, perhaps…"

"Not going to clarify further?" Della said. "Absolutely."

The tension ratcheted up again, stifling the atmosphere to the point of suffocation. It would take someone reaching their breaking point to do anything about it…

So maybe Elton shouldn't have been so surprised by the fact that it was his own voice that spoke up.

"No, this is over. I'm done."

"What?"

"Victor, ever since you showed up, this place has been miserable," Elton snapped, waving around at the basement. For all the space was nominally the same location, without Bliss's art and the others, it was just another room made of cinder bricks and cement, not the place that Elton had once looked forward to visiting every week. "It's not even LINDA anymore. It's just… another job. And not even a good one! Do you think that anyone was going to stick with it once you sucked the joy out of it?"

"You have, clearly," Victor sneered.

"And that's my mistake," Elton said, not stuttering or looking away. "I'm done, Victor. I'm not doing anything else for you."

The man snarled, rising to his feet and drawing his hand back as if to-

"You can't hit, remember?" Elton said, not blinking. "Cause of your eczema."

Victor bristled. "I can use this!" he said, brandishing his cane.

Everyone else immediately jumped to their feet.

"Do it and I'll break it across your back," Della warned.

"And I'll give you a kick in the nethers for good measure," Ursula added. "Is that completely understood, Mr. Kennedy? You are not welcome here anymore."

Victor pulled himself up to his full height, sniffling as he smoothed out the lines of his coat. "Creatures of low ambition, the lot of you. You can't even imagine what it's like to strive to become something greater than you are. Especially you, Elton."

"I think I'm pretty comfortable not being like you," Elton shot back. "Especially given that you make a point of never being happy."

Victor huffed, grabbing his suitcase and a handful of his papers before shuffling himself into the elevator. They all waited to hear the sound of the door outside closing.

"You know what? I'm going to make sure he stays gone," Della said, pocketing her knife as she made for the stairs, taking a moment to toss a set of keys to Arnold. "Mind my motorcycle, please."

Elton sincerely hoped that didn't mean he'd have to be talking to the police later.

This was stupid. Reckless. Nobody who wasn't an idiot just followed someone they knew was dangerous to an unknown location, especially if they were injured.

(Not unless they were desperate. Not if the options left open by letting him go were infinitely worse.)

But I couldn't just trust 'Victor' to leave peacefully. That wasn't his way. Letting him just leave without confirmation of some kind that the bullshit circus was over wasn't safe, especially when he'd already established that he had no issue going after the Doctor's previous companions.

So that left me, following behind as quickly and quietly as I could on foot - still fast and nimble despite the lingering pains in my soul and broadcasting 'don't look at me' on a broad-spectrum wavelength was better than actual physical invisibility, but flying blind all the same as I followed that car through London as it zigged and zagged lazily through Southwark, looping around a few times to lazily double back on itself.

Victor knew I was following him. I knew that I was more than likely walking into a trap.

But I wasn't going to put my safety over anyone else's just because it was 'safer' that way.

Finally, after a short age spent in half-stealthy pursuit, Victor's car pulled into a parking structure next to a high-rise building cordoned off by construction signs and scaffolds, all conveniently abandoned for the weekend.

As I slipped down to street level again, toning down my psychic radar from 'I don't exist' to 'I'm not your problem', I checked out the sign in front.

Southwark Towers, the future site of the Shard. Demolition pending.

Well, at least I could worry less about collateral damage… at least within the building. It wasn't exactly lost on me that there was a hospital next door.

As I walked in, I noted that none of the doors were locked. Why would they be?

The Southwark Towers were dead; the load bearing beams just didn't know it yet.

The rest of the building did know though, with every office in the building showing plainly how the best days were long in the rearview and how none lay in its future - while it didn't have the essence of proper abandonment, there was still something uncanny about looking into spaces left half full, furniture and clothes still there like an afterthought, a visual I was no stranger to after years spent in post-apocalyptic worlds.

I wandered further in, towards the heart of the building, not quite willing to test my senses overmuch. Victor had always read weird on them anyway, so it wasn't like they would have been much of a help anyway.

Best to stick with the simple ones that worked, I figured. Victor was a lot of things, but 'light on his feet' wasn't one of them, after all.

As soon as the thought crossed my mind, there was a shadow in the hall behind me. A quick blot of the light, the sound of shoes crunching down on plaster chunks, a breeze of slimy presence across psychic shields tied to a physical movement behind me, a grasping hand moving far too close to mean well…

A knife was in my hand and thrusting into a soft target beneath the ribs - or at least where the ribs would be on a human - as I moved myself out of range before Victor could make contact.

"You-" he hissed, fingers pressed up against the place where I'd knifed him.

"Yes, I knew," I replied, twisting my blade over in my hand. "Did you think you were subtle? That you were sneaky? That I wouldn't connect the dots between the pushy asshole with the penchant for stalking tactics with the fact that I was being openly stalked by some stranger in the night? I mean, you didn't even try to shake things up between the two."

"No, you stupid - you've put a hole in my good suit," Victor whined - not in a way that spoke of pain, but annoyance as blue light poured out of the hole I'd made in his side. "Do you know how much trouble I went through to acquire it in such good condition?"

Not a great reaction to getting stabbed, if you were the one doing the stabbing.

I backed up, erring on the side of caution as I lost track of Victor Kennedy completely in the explosion of light, metal, and glass as part of the building caved in around me, the rush of air pressure and abrupt destruction more than enough to let me know I was about to be dealing with a very big problem.

And yet, even with that expectation in mind, I felt my entire body tense as I craned my neck further back to take in the visual in front of me.

This… might be more complicated than I initially expected.

The Abzorbaloff, in his true unvarnished form, was large. Not the largeness of Victor Kennedy, which had still been within human scale, but a proper Large that could likely be measured against double decker buses, given the span of his shoulders and the fact that he'd caved in at least two floors just by existing as his full and proper self.

Unexpectedly, instead of being solid and opaque, his flesh was a bile-green gelatin, like the hateful lovechild of Flubber, the B-Movie Blob, and Mr. Blobby, with the additional touch of dozens of people drowning in the depths of said-sludge added for nightmarish variety.

You didn't need to be psychic to know they were suffering, but it sure as hell did confirm that nobody in there was actually dead yet!

Large hands, large enough to crush a car if he wanted to - well, half-crush, given that one was occupied with a now-comically undersized cane -, fiddled with a number of technological looking rings on his fingers, allowing him to shrink down to a size slightly better adjusted to the confines of the space.

'Well, that does neatly explain how that much alien fit into so little a suit,' Kordy noted with a tightly wound tone of false cheer.

"Impressive isn't it?" 'Victor' asked as he pulled himself out of the hole, a few stray bits of broken glass slowly melting into his body. There was a gurgling quality to his voice now, almost like the human language was trying to escape through a pipe filled with half-congealed Jell-o. "Everyone always has to stare when they see me properly for the first time. It makes catching them so-"

I jumped back from his grasping hand as he lunged, adjusting my grip on my knife before slashing at the air, forcing kinetic energy along a thin line through pure technique and muscle power.

Unfortunately, a comparatively thin line of damage was all I got for my trouble.

"-easy," 'Victor' finished, sounding disappointed as he looked over the scratch I'd left running across his torso, smoothing it over with his free hand. "You're going to have to do better than that, I think. But it's a good effort - most people don't even get that far and I think I'm going to enjoy learning how exactly you manage that little trick."

The Abzorbaloff reached for me again and I formed an Aura shield, only to have it sputter out after a moment's contact - enough to jump out of reach again, but only because I was fast as hell in the first place.

Dammit, that's what I got for pushing so much of myself into the TARDIS; powers as wonky as they were back when I was just starting out, but further seasoned with pain if I pushed too far too fast.

"Oh, I was right. You are interesting," 'Victor' said, eyes alight with interest. "A secondary prize to the Last of the Time Lords, but certainly not a disappointing one. So what are you? An experiment, a psychic, a cyborg, a hybrid? Some rare species I've never heard of? You certainly aren't anything so mundane as 'human', I know that much, even if you can decently camouflage yourself as one."

Not inaccurate, but it still was Rude. Just for that, I threw my knife at his eye.

That didn't do much to phase him either, the metal simply sinking in harmlessly. "I do wonder what you'll taste like."

I made a face. Okay, rude, evil, and nasty. Literally every other sentence out of this guy's mouth was the worst kind of double entendre and I wasn't entirely sure if the sleaziness was a deliberate act or inherent flaw.

"Really, Victor? Sexual harassment? I think that we're going to have to kick you out of the fan club for that - well, not that we weren't aiming to do that anyway, seeing as you're a massive asshole, but still."

The Abzorbaloff laughed. "Keeping your spirits up. Admirable. But it only prolongs the chase - and for what cause? You can't touch me and I can outlast you in any contest of endurance. Why draw it out when you can find everlasting peace within my embrace?"

Hah. That might - on a very, very narrow margin, I think, because most people had sense - have worked better on someone who didn't have the ability to read other people's emotions at range. But I had a feeling that it didn't take superpowers for a person to pin on the fact that every single mind and soul inside the Abzorbaloff's body was screaming.

"Sorry, while I've got a decent list of bodies I'd be interested in exploring, yours is very much not on it," I said, ripping out a piece of metal - not foundational, fortunately - from a wall to throw at the alien.

The makeshift spear sunk into the gooey flesh with barely a ripple, not even slowing the Abzorbaloff down for a second.

I ran, forcing my way through a stairwell door before slamming and flash-welding it shut. I hoped, on some small level, that would buy me a bit of time. A minute, thirty seconds-

Instead, I ended up with only a five second lead as I parkoured up the shaft of the stairwell, a happily unhindered Abzorbaloff running up the stairs behind me - not a complete match for my speed, but close enough where I couldn't just stop to throw something better at him.

Right. So no close combat, no thrown weapons, no magic, almost no environmental advantage - not without getting clever -, while working under a handicap that was seeing my stumble in pain and trip over the skills that I could use and - most importantly - keeping all of this away from civilians or anyone else that I didn't want literally sucked into this mess while literally in the middle of London.

This was going to be difficult.

Not impossible, but… yes, definitely difficult.

There was a bit of poetic justice to it, the idea of leaving Victor's precious corkboards out by the bins like he'd done to Bliss's art, pulling down every string and pin like it was so much nothing… and for all Elton knew, most of it could have been.

Victor had been incredibly territorial about his precious data - accusations of 'doubting the veracity of his evidence' and 'lollygagging' flying quite frequently if anyone asked to have a closer look, which nobody would really get beyond a short glance at anything more than 'the pertinent details' and the odd bit of juicy possibility that was just enough bait to keep everyone hooked… and sometimes even that wasn't much more than a bit of audio that featured that strangely terrifying and wonderful all at once wheezing sound that was, allegedly, the sound of a ship taking off.

But Elton was finding… both what he expected and things he didn't. Some of the 'reports' were so sparse and vague as to edge into comedy - crop circles? UFO sightings? The Loch Ness monster? Really? -, while others were… overdetailed, stalking the steps of seemingly random people who the Doctor had apparently associated with over the course of decades, with only public relevance or a lack of immediately useful details serving as any sort of protection against…

What, being kidnapped? Dragged away in handcuffs? Disappeared in more than one sense of the term? Elton may have had questions for the Doctor, yes, but no intentions nearly as dark as Torchwood seemed to have from the language in their reports.

Arnold didn't entirely seem impressed either. "Really. I never spent that much time looking into Torchwood, but the way they talk about me… absolutely ridiculous," he muttered, flipping through some papers noisily. "'A threat to humanity?', like the British Empire isn't that a dozen times over…"

Elton blinked. He must have misheard. "...sorry, what was that again?"

Arnold blinked back at him. "Something about the Empire? I just find those sorts of things a bit dull, you know; repetitive, unoriginal, generally making the universe a more boring place, one more would-be Napoleon at a time."

"...no," Ursula said slowly, also staring at Arnold. "I think Elton meant the fact that you said that Torchwood was talking about you, when all of these files are about the Doctor."

The silence was one of those that you would have liked to have dropped a pin in, both to break the tension and to see how big a noise it'd make.

Instead, it was Arnold that broke it.

"Ah." He clapped his hands together and paced around in a circle quickly before facing Elton again.

"Well, that would be because the Doctor is me. One of me. All the different mes? Or perhaps just most of them?" he trailed off, clearly bothered by the question now that he'd tripped over the tangent. "I mean, I've mostly been the Doctor, especially as me, but there's been times where I've clearly not been, and I'm fairly certain that I'm going to still be the Doctor in the future, but…"

Elton felt a bit dizzy. He wanted to say something, but the sentences seemed to be fizzling away before he could properly take hold of them, the words rising and falling apart like the bubbles in a glass of pop before they could properly come together in a way that made sense. The whole situation didn't feel quite real - like a bad joke that you had to hear a second time to even understand what the sentence was.

Finally, he managed it. "So, you… you're the Doctor," Elton said slowly, tasting each word as it formed to make sure it had come out right. Even saying it aloud felt ridiculous. Fake in a way that made Elton feel stupid just speaking it. But it felt more… right than anything Victor had said or made them do, which was a point in favor if nothing else.

"The definitive article, as some have said. Mostly me, though according to my wife that statement might be quite literal at this point. But, like I was saying earlier, not the only one." Arnold - the Doctor - stepped to the side, lifting a string on one of Victor's cork boards. "And not one of the faces you've got information on - that's why your esteemed 'leader' didn't think much of me after the scanning equipment he was using failed to pick up anything suspicious."

"Should there have been something?" Elton asked, still feeling a bit faint.
"I mean, I'm not human. I may look like it on the outside, but the differences have a tendency to show up on X-ray and other scanners, if I'm not taking precautions," he said, lifting the wrist with the leather band around it as if to say that alone was the reason.

Maybe it was. Some sort of sci-fi space jammer.

Ursula had focused on something else. "And you took precautions to come… spy on us?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Well, not… proper spying. I was curious about you. I knew about your group for… oh, ages, but I never thought to look into you until Delaine - er, Della - expressed an interest. And then I got interested myself."

Elton swallowed. "Why? I'm… we're nobody important."

"Nonsense. Everyone's important. Never met a single person that wasn't - and I do travel a lot, you know." The Doctor began to go through the files Victor had brought, pouring over the pages carelessly before tossing them to the side. "Ugh, Torchwood, Torchwood, Torchwood. Never liked them, even before this. I still think Vicky forming a government death squad because I was a little too laissez-faire about that werewolf was a bit much… but then again, Elizabeth did it over me skipping town after the wedding, so…"

Elton tried again. "But how could you know about us? We've… we've barely been around for four months - and you've been here most of that time!"

"Time travel, Elton, I thought I covered that back when I first came in," the Doctor said, waving a hand around dismissively. "And of course I know about you - you lot are one of the few fanclubs I actually know by name. And I've known about you for… oh, I don't know how many years. Since I was all blond and crickety."

Blond and crickety?

Elton found his eyes pulled to one of the pictures of the Doctor they had - a blond man in cricket gear with a stalk of celery pinned to his lapel making a sour face at Ursula through the lens -

"Immortal time traveling, face-changing alien," Elton said numbly. "You- you told us exactly what you were on your second meeting with us?"

The faint feeling was back again en force.

"Suppose I did," the Doctor agreed as he rummaged through the drawers of Victor's desk, office supplies clattering to the floor. "Delaine's little fake theories… annoyed me, since I know that they know better. But she was trying to keep me safe. Be a bigger target. It's what they do when she's worried about one of her friends being in danger."

Elton abruptly flashed back to how Della - Delaine had stepped between him and Victor when he'd first appeared, so smugly pointing out all the ways LINDA was worthless and a waste of time.

"But we weren't-"

The noise of office bric-a-brac getting tossed to the side stopped as the Doctor shifted to a drawer full of papers. "Not from you. Victor. Or whatever his real name is - you can get some similar-to-English sounding ones from different planets, but I know what… area he's from and it's not really one of those. If they even do names, some places don't. Collective species identity and all that."

"Wouldn't you know who he is?" Ursula asked, grabbing some of the files the Doctor hadn't touched yet. "If he's trying to hunt you down? Wouldn't that make him important?"

"Not particularly. There's lots of people out there trying to find me at any given time, wanting to kill me, clone me, or other unpleasant things like that. Sometimes more than one of those at once. Your LINDA… doesn't. Oh, you don't exactly think I'm a god or anything, but you…" the Doctor popped up from behind the desk and rolled his hand over in the air, humming as he searched for a word. "You're curious. You have questions. You want to learn. But you never let that stop you from growing as people, from being real friends with each other. You make things - not plots, not weapons, but art. And… this is the part that's important; you've never hurt anyone to do that. That's special. And rarer than I'd like it to be."

Something occurred to Elton. "Della - er, Delaine went after Victor a while ago… shouldn't she be back by now?"

The Doctor looked up, that soft good humor fading away quickly. "...she should. And that she isn't isn't good. She's still injured."

"And Victor's an alien. A not particularly nice one, you said."

"Yep! An absorbing one at that…" the Doctor's face twitched in realization before he stumbled to his feet, running for the stairs. "And she can't do anything about that right now!"

Elton and Ursula ran after him, and it was all too easy to catch up, given that the Doctor was busy trying and failing to start Della- Delaine's motorcycle as he scrambled to get the keys out of his pocket and then into the ignition.

"Why are human nerves like this, I never - well, almost never - drop important things in a crisis," he was muttering as he tried again to get the right key in the slot.

"...if Delaine is an alien? Shouldn't she be fine?" Elton asked, trying to calm down the time traveler before realizing that question was probably more than a bit… what, specist? Was that the right word? "I mean-"

"No. No no no no. She's human. Mostly. Weird human, but human in all the ways that actually matter - and that's a good way to insult anyone, calling them the wrong species and then saying they should be fine with it," the Doctor said as he fumbled between using the keys properly and his habit of talking with his hands. "And that doesn't stop her from getting hurt. Honestly, that happens far more often then I'd like. Usually because she's out of her depth or overdoing something. And I forgot that she's hurt enough where she really can't do things the way she would normally."

That took a bit of the wind out of Elton's sails. The injury - glossed over since nearly the start - was real and severe. Potentially enough to get Delaine hurt or even killed. And yet, despite that, she'd made the call to make sure Victor left everyone alone, despite knowing he was dangerous. Just because it was more dangerous for the rest of them if she hadn't gone.

It was not a happy realization for anyone to make. And now the Doctor - who Elton had spent his life confused by - was going off to help. Alone.

Unless…

Elton Pope had a moment of hesitation, a moment of 'well, what can you really do to help?'

He wasn't that special. He wasn't that talented. He wasn't even that memorable, if you asked anyone outside of LINDA. Aside from that one footnote of meeting the Doctor way back in his backstory, he was just a rather average, ordinary person.

But that hadn't mattered to the Doctor, had it? He'd called them - him, ordinary ol' Elton - 'special'. Just because he was curious and didn't want to hurt anyone chasing that curiosity.

Elton steeled his spine. "We're coming with you."

I hadn't really wanted the Doctor involved in this, but I was well past the point to which I could deny that I needed help with this.

Still, I had room to be annoyed with him, because the Time Lord had arrived - fashionably late at that - with both Elton and Ursula in tow, the pair piled into the sidecar of my motorcycle like newlywed sardines. If sardines could blush and look awkward about being a little too close to each other in a small space.

"I thought you said you were going to keep them out of trouble!" I snapped, swiping a bit of soaked hair out of my face. "Not bring them right to it!"

"I think you should know very well by now that I have a limited amount of say once a human gets it into their mind to do something recklessly brave," the Doctor replied before looking me over. "You look terrible."

I'd guessed as much. My jacket was gone, my pants were a bit shredded from a quick dip through a shredded up hole in the floor, and there was a general covering of dust that had come with that but… ah, the soot and water from the time I had the brilliant idea to figure out if the Abzorbaloff was flammable.

He wasn't. And, in the event he had been, the building's still functioning sprinkler system would have put a stop to that line of inquiry pretty fast. The only advantage I'd gotten there was finding out that 'Victor' wasn't particularly good on slippery surfaces and couldn't absorb water all that well.

"I think I'm doing pretty good for someone fighting an opponent I can't touch. I've run like…" I paused to count. "Like seventeen laps around this building?" Maybe more? I was losing track. I was pretty sure that I'd hit all twenty-five floors at least once, sometimes literally.

How nobody had called the fucking cops yet was beyond me. Possibly because there wasn't anything to really lose and there hadn't been any explosions.

"Can't you use any -" The Doctor did a jazz hands sort-of gesture.

I shook my head, wincing as my wet hair slapped me across the face. "Tried the few tricks I have. Did a bit of damage, but not as much as I'd like, either because I'm failing type-matchups, I'm flexing a muscle I shouldn't, or the whole-" I returned the Doctor's semi-jazz hand gesture. "-not being properly worky to begin with."

I was so fucking good at words.

"Anything else?" The Time Lord paused. "Did you try a knife like you said you were going to?"

"Yes, I tried a knife. A chair. A desk. And rebar I ripped straight from the wall. Physical items just get absorbed and close combat ain't on the table for obvious reasons. As for ranged - I was able to use a bit of my natural firepower, but it's still not enough to do more than blunt his claws a bit," I said. Currently, setting off the sprinkler system had been the best I'd managed against him, which was kinda sad considering where I usually sat on the power-matchup totem pole. "And I'm not exactly wild about trying any energy weapons or explosives on him either. I mean, it might work, but..."

But Torchwood was right across the river. Perhaps not literally, but it was still too close for comfort, and that was beside the point of not wanting to break out any bombs or crazy destructive future-tech in the middle of 21st century London.

"...how big a thing did you try throwing? After the knife."

"Victor's self-driving car." It had slowed the Abzorbaloff down for a bit, during our one misadventure through the parking garage, but that might have been just as much on the surprise factor as the 3,000 lbs of steel to the chest, and it'd taken more out of me than I liked for that result. "I'm pretty sure his insurance isn't going to cover 'consumed by space blob'. If alien tech can be insured down here yet."

If it was, I was blaming Torchwood.

"Ah! Then we're probably going to die if you don't go for the- is it a literal nuclear option?" the Doctor asked, well aware of how far my horse shit arsenal could go. "Because I'd rather you not."

"Yes, please don't bomb England," Ursula said.

"I wasn't going to! Seriously, why does everyone think that I'm the type to skip to the most brutal solution possible? I match the energy that I'm met with!"

"It's the leather, I think," the Doctor said. "Everyone makes assumptions about me when I'm in a leather wearing face. Well, in fairness, they had a good reason to at the time–"

"It was the knives and the murderous expression," Elton corrected.

Ah, right. Forgot that my blowing off steam was also something everyone else could see happening and interpret to their own ends. Especially with a knife involved. "Well, I've only got one of those now and it's not aimed at you."

"I see you've brought company - or should I call them appetizers?" 'Victor' gurgled as he finally made it around the corner, body loaded down with dozens of watery 'blisters' that seemed right on the edge of bursting from how much liquid was in them while the remains of his car - which had very much been two tons of metal - slowly twisted around in his chest as it sank further in, compacting further under the powers of the compression technology he was wearing.

The scariest part of it all wasn't even that he was still going or that he wasn't even all that damaged for all my efforts - though that was still a pretty big wrinkle in my concern -, but that he was still pretty fast despite everything I'd done. Hell, even the fact that I'd even managed to break some of his compression tech, leaving him at a size too large to properly get around a human-scaled building, hadn't done much there, given that I wasn't even sure he had bones.

Still, it was evidence that I could manage something, if I played my cards right.

"...why is he missing part of his left hand?" Elton asked, sounding distressed. "Is that what you call 'blunting his claws'?"

"Ah, yeah, I did manage to cut that off. And then the floor ate it," I said. And it didn't look like 'Victor' had a proper healing factor to fix that… or at least, not one that was fast enough to be useful in live combat. A small, but useful detail - if I could figure out how to hurt him properly in the first place. "Figure he's got some sort of trick gizmo that keeps his main body from doing the same thing - I'm pretty sure it's the cane but I haven't been able to get a clean hit on the damn thing, so I've been aiming at the compression rings instead."

I was pretty sure that there was no way for him to shrink down to human size again now - at least not until he got replacements for the rings I broke -, but that wasn't necessarily a big immediate improvement on the situation.

"Seems a bit of an inefficient way to deal with him, cutting him to bits… especially since I know you'd have done something bigger if it'd actually stood a chance of working," the Doctor said. "Any other ideas?"

"One. But I'm gonna need to take us to higher ground and you're probably gonna have to carry me out of here afterwards."

"Oh, like that hasn't always been a theme with you-"

"You lot should be saving your breath for running, not talking!" 'Victor' spat, lunging forward.

Ursula screamed.

I grabbed everyone and jumped, teleporting us up into the main building above the giant hole Victor had ripped through the heart of the towers at the very start of our fight, ignoring the tearing sensation in my chest as I forced myself further than I had during the whole fight.

Ursula was still screaming as I landed again, even as Elton fell out of my grip and puked into the pit. The Doctor had held onto more of his dignity, but I could still tell there was a vague tremor in his hand from the sudden translocation.

I could hear Victor snarling in another part of the building.

"Over here, you shitty Shrek wannabe!" I called in his general direction, just to make sure that he wouldn't wander off. Then I turned to the Doctor. "You can take off the limiter now. Bit late for hiding."

"It, isn't it?" Eleven replied, leaning forward to brace himself against my shoulder for a moment. "But, I've got no idea just how much or what sort of equipment Torchwood has going right down the river - they're malicious idiots, but they've managed a few tricks ahead of schedule for humanity. Not interested in finding out if one of them is a DNA scanner when they inevitably show up to make a nuisance of themselves."

I shrugged. "I mean, the Tower is closer. Might get UNIT first."

"Oh, really, because shooting this fellow is going to help anyone."

"I don't know. Maybe one will bring a rocket launcher. You'd be surprised how often those come in handy with these so-called 'invincible' opponents," I said, looking down to see 'Victor' come back into view.

He didn't look any worse for the bit of walking, beyond looking absolutely furious at the fact that I'd just shown off how much I'd been holding back on him. A big change from the easy, smarmy confidence earlier. "You dare toy with me?"

"It's not really toying if I legitimately don't have any strategy beyond 'run away really good', is it?" I called down before lowering my voice. "I'm gonna take my shot now."

"Don't pass out," the Doctor warned.

"No promises."

"You stupid little creatures - you could have made this easier on yourselves, all of you," the Abzorbaloff said, slowly climbing up the wreckage. It seemed like he actually had to put effort into not absorbing his handholds. "Just given up nicely. Played along. Gone quietly. Instead, you just opted to be difficult."

Right. This was it.

I took a deep breath, pooled in as much fire energy as I could into my lungs before letting the breath rise into my mouth, gathering all the power I could along the way.

There would only be enough for one shot.

"That didn't work last time, you stupid little-!" 'Victor' snarled.

'I'm not doing the same thing that I did last time,' I replied psychically. After all, you didn't waste breath talking when you were charging up a proper Blast Burn.

Readying my aim at that nice big car buried in the Abzorbaloff's center of mass - only one shot, couldn't risk aiming at that cane and missing it -, I opened my mouth.

I knew how it looked from the outside; the adrenaline-stretched microsecond of doubt that there was going to be something impressive because all there was to see was a near invisible blue-tinged butane fire looking thing, barely a few inches long, hovering just outside of my mouth.

And, in the next moment, then you saw the thread of light - blue again, but brighter and more 'solid' - abruptly trace its way into existence between that dinky little ghost of a flame and the target.

It disappears with a flicker.

A beat passes.

And then - contact. A streak of activation, white, yellow, orange, the lightest touch of red…

And then, the boom.

Light, backblast, a cascade of shattering glass as air pressure shifts too fast for fragile material to take, heat that makes you realize that you were dealing with Fire as A Very Angry God Intended It To Be, with the sound of an explosion - not the shrapnel or chemical reactions, but the fire itself bursting into being after being smushed down to a pinprick of super-condensed plasma - coming almost as an afterthought because you've already been knocked back a few steps.

All of it, in that order, in a matter of three or four seconds, followed by the sprinklers going off again.

That's what a properly executed Blast Burn looks like in practice - no energy expended until that point of contact and barely any time to dodge, even for the ones who knew exactly what was about to happen.

'Victor' had very much not been one of them. I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd even thought for a moment that he should dodge, given that he'd resisted all my previous fire without a whole lot of damage to show for it.

His mistake.

"You couldn't have done that earlier?" Elton asked, sounding faintly hysterical as 'Victor' howled, huge hands pawing uselessly at the burning vehicle in his chest, no longer protected by the thin membrane of his being but sparking flame in direct contact with the air.

"I mean, maybe." I drew in a ragged breath before coughing. Yep, that was the last of the gas I had, even with a bit of time to recharge. Damn sprinklers going off on every floor weren't going to help with that. "But I figured that I had to make it hit and make that hit count."

And also not fucking collapse from overexertion without a back-up plan in place, considering that despite that being a pretty good Blast Burn, it still hadn't managed to take down the Abzorbaloff entirely.

"Aiming for the fuel cell?" the Doctor asked as he slid himself under one of my arms, his free hand breaking out his sonic to try scanning the Abzorbaloff, who was still occupied with the fizzing and popping fire immediately under his nose.

"That or a gas tank. Don't… know how heavily he modded the car, beyond the auto-pilot," I said. If either had been a target, I certainly hadn't hit them. "Figured at minimum superheating the metal would at least make the damage a bit worse."

"Well, you've certainly done that; magnesium fires are a bugger to put out, even without water involved."

It felt somewhat wrong to be having such a casual conversation with the sound of someone screaming in the background, but on the other hand, the person screaming was an asshole who'd come around with the intent to eat both me and the Doctor, so that cut down the sympathy quite quickly.

"Still not dead though," Elton pointed out, slightly unnecessarily.

"Should we get more water to throw on him, then?" Ursula asked, sounding hesitant. "There's a fire hose on the wall over there-"

Elton was already running for it, grabbing the hose and unwinding it as he scrambled to get the spigot loose enough to provide waterflow. Then he was back, almost tripping as he aimed the hose at the Abzorbaloff and let the high pressure spray fly.

His aim, I noted with a faint bit of amusement, had taken a lot less time to line up than mine.

Immediately, there was another spark of magnesium reaction and then a proper wall-rattler of a second explosion as the fuel tank - gas or whatever the hell 'Victor' had put in it - finally caught flame and ignited. On reflex, I ducked, pulling everyone down with me as something gelatinous sped past where my head had been to impact the ceiling.

If there had been any windows left unshattered in the building from my Blast Burn, there sure weren't any now.

"Ew," was a pretty summation as I watched the bit of Abzorbaloff soak into the ceiling tiles, turning it into a putty-like amalgam of fiberglass and stuff I didn't even want to try and identify. Whatever it was now at least wasn't alive.

We slowly made our way down the stairs, mostly thanks to me having to lean on the Doctor for support. Occasionally, the group would have to change path, either because of some damage I'd done during the chase or some bit of architecture ruined by a stray bit of Abzorbaloff that had seen fit to melt a door into uselessness.

But we made it down to the ground floor eventually and without any injury to show for it, leaving us with the sight of our vanquished opponent… or what was left of him.

And that was the remains of a car, twisted and warped and looking like it'd suffered through a very severe acid bath before going through the world's worst sand blaster, stuck part of the way out of the ground at the center of the explosion, while only one part of Victor himself remained - one large clawed hand, not attached to any body, still wrapped around that tiny cane like a lifeline.

"...you're right, I don't think insurance is going to cover that," Elton said, still sounding faintly numb.

Ursula had a different priority. "That stupid cane survived all that?" she said, sounding personally offended. "I'm going to snap it in half."

"Don't touch that hand - Victor had a nasty absorbing power and I'm not entirely sure it's not working anymore," I said quickly as Ursula walked over to the green claw, grabbing a loose bit of rebar and giving it a test swing as she went.

I wasn't entirely sure she'd heard me.

"What are we even going to tell anyone?" Elton said, staring at the wreckage of Victor's car.

"Ideally, nothing, because this is the part where we leave before anyone arrives," the Doctor said. It was a good idea - the sound of sirens finally approaching. "Though I suppose UNIT isn't the worst thing that could happen now, especially with clean-up…"

There was a snapping sound, and everyone turned to see Ursula, rebar still in hand, standing over the cane as the great green gelatin hand - the last part of the Abzorbaloff left intact - melted into the ground, turning the muddy earth faintly damp looking for a moment before fading away entirely.

For good measure, Ursula stomped the broken cane again. "It's not as good as breaking it over his fat head, but I'm still satisfied," she said, grinding her heel in the shattered machinery of its core.

"...and, well, I suppose that resolves even the clean-up part!" the Doctor said, clapping his hands together softly. "Now, I'm not quite sure how all of us are going to fit onto Delaine's bike, but I'm certainly not letting her drive…"

I could have complained about that.

I could have.

But I didn't.

[Deleted scene - before Southwark Towers was picked as the final conflict location.]

"You're choosing to do this when Canary Wharf is literally right fucking there full of people entirely down to murder you for the sin of existing as an alien on Planet Earth," I said incredulously, pointing across the Thames at the skyscraper in question. "Of all fucking places to have a fight, you pick the location where I could throw a rock and hit Torchwood's leader."

That wasn't hyperbole. I could probably ping a skipping stone off of that… blonde annoying lady's head from here. Yvette or Yvonne or Yvony Cartman or Hartman or something distressingly Fox News like that.

The name didn't matter so much as the fact that I didn't have a modicum of respect for her did.

'Victor' gave the skyscraper in question a sideways glance. "Provided a strong enough throwing arm, yes, you probably could. But somehow, I think that you're even more interested in avoiding their attention than I am."

"No shit! Nobody with sense wants to end up in Torchwood!"

Author's Notes

My best friend (who's been checking over my Eleven voice for this whole arc) is sick of hearing me saying 'Making Good LM Progress This Week, I Should Be Finished By Friday' for over a month straight. But this is the Friday that litany comes true.

Anyway, related - I wanted to get Love and Monsters done before this fic goes on a light hiatus so I can work on my One Piece projects and a few other things for a while, that way the arc is at least concluded instead of hanging on a weird note. There's a few 'wind-down' chapters planned that have some stuff written out already, but they're not going to be on as firm a time-table as I tried to keep for this arc.

Can you believe that the original plan was for Ursula and Elton to die taking out the Abzorbaloff? And then the fight scene shook out like that. Like I'm not complaining about a happy ending and I think I would have ended up having to jump through a few hoops to stretch it out further (they pretty much would have gotten to do the same stuff But More Dramatic And Self-Lethal) but wow, this chapter really did want to fight me on everything. So that's how we get an Everybody Lives (except the asshole) Ending.

Did a brief study of UK knife law for the folding knife bit in one of the last LINDA sections, gave up on figuring out the exact line of legal when it turned out that it was apparently successfully argued in 2005 that butter knives could be classified as deadly weapons in England.

Blast Burn - strongest Pokemon non-legendary Fire-type move, barring G-Max Fireball. I mean, I guess it's matched by Eruption and Shell Trap, but Blast Burn is cooler. It's basically lived rent free in my mind since I saw a Pokemon fic (Ashes of the Past, natch) describe it in an absolutely awesome way.

Magnesium fires are extremely nasty - they burn extremely hot (from 2,200 to 5,610 °F flame temperatures have been recorded in different cases, though the heat stays pretty close to the flame instead of radiating outwards), CO2 does nothing, water makes them worse, and the flames (white) can blind you just from looking at them.

Which doesn't play well considering that magnesium and magnesium alloys are a common(ish) choice to cut down on vehicle weight without sacrificing a lot of structural strength. Thankfully the ignition point is fairly high (883 °F), so it's not like they're made of explodium or anything, and usually in the case of car fires, it's typically the last thing that burns.

Which is why I made there be another fuel source to do the proper exploding, using the magnesium fire as the 'fuse', which is also a common set-up with thermite!

But Yeah SCIENCE!

Location picking for the final confrontation was difficult - I wanted a certain amount of space and a low chance of civilians getting in the way to start with, but then I had the difficulty of 'distance' and how believable it would be for Eleven + Elton + Ursula to track down Delaine + 'Victor'. My first idea was to track down some industrial park, but those are vanishingly rare in London (at least to the size I needed), which then almost led me to using Shad Thames (not just because of its previous use in Doctor Who's Resurrection of the Daleks, but because it was one of the bigger warehouse thingies in the area that fit the vibe)... but then when checking Canary Wharf's location, I was reminded of the other Big Bad Guy skyscraper in the Revival - the Shard (even if it was just used for a little bit in the Bells of Saint John).

Which led to its own little tour and the blessings of good timing in the Southwark Towers being demo'd in 2007-2008, meant that I had a perfect location right there. It did mean having to adjust a lot of the fight scene to work with it, but I like the effect a lot more than 'uuuuuh random abandoned place'.