This is what occurred while Marion Slept
"Shut up"
"The Doctor will NOT do either."
"I won't let him. I won't let that happen. He will not become the Master of the Land of Fiction."
"No. I'm not-"
"No, I won't-"
He saw Marion braced in place with her limbs pressed against the side of the book speaking to something, as wires not too dissimilar to the one's in the Master's hat dig into the back of her neck. And he could hear the way every breath of air came out in a low hiss. And she could see the way her face screwed up in pain.
And then she was screaming.
He'd heard Marion raise her voice and yell at people. Often in his defense (on one or two occasions at him directly).
He had heard Marion scream after being startled. (It was almost comedic how she could face Daleks and Cybermen and all sorts of horrors without much more than a nervous laugh, and yet a small earth spider was enough to make her shriek).
He pretended not to hear the loud (and often incredibly colorful) shrieks that were followed by a low groans that were his cue to go to where he heard the shout from and get her to her feet.
But he'd never heard her like this. He'd never heard her scream in pain.
When it came to pain, the Doctor had never heard Marion let out more than a low hiss, a choked laugh, or an expletive. Sometimes one after the other.
But right now she was screaming. The audio had quickly cut out of the footage, but the video feed remained and he could see her face. She was still screaming.
"What have you done to her!" the Doctor demanded.
He had seen her shot at and stabbed and burned but he had never heard her scream. And now she was screaming.
"It seems that the intelligence is attempting to convince her to take my place. We meant to use Zoe and Jamie in order to convince one of you to change your mind, but that might not be necessary. But my- my, she's awfully stubborn. I wonder how much longer she'll hold out. Of course, if she won't take my place you obviously could. Then you could end her suffering for her."
"Oh?"
"Once you have taken up your post here, there would be no need for- persuasion."
He knew that if he took the offer, Marion would be furious with him. He stared at his friend's screaming face and he considered it for a moment. Surely she would be angry at him. And he would understand her anger. But, what was he supposed to do? Then Marion's expression suddenly changed.
She stopped screaming and then she looked confused and then calm, then angry. And then her eyes flicked towards the camera and then the feed cut out.
The Master began to frantically press at the controls.
His mask slipped a little bit.
"Well then," the Master asked, "Have you changed your mind?"
"What did you do to her?" the Doctor demanded.
"I can honestly tell you that I haven't done anything at all. I assure you that we did make her the same offer we made you. The offer still stands, you know. Perhaps the force of the intelligence was too strong for her fragile mind or-" The Master looked off in the distance and seemed to be listening to the mechanical beeps of the main brain, "Ah. My apologies. It seems that she was an unsuitable candidate. Something about her mind wasn't compatible and attempting to forcibly assimilate her had consequences"
'But for whom?' The Doctor looked at the screen, and then over at the Master in horror. He took a step back.
"Perhaps you might consider changing your mind? Marion was impressive, but she was of course only human. You would be able to handle it. And you could put her back together."
"My answer is still no." the Doctor said firmly. Whatever the process it took to become the Master of the Realm of Fiction, there was no real guarantee that he would actually be able to fix whatever was done to her. Even if he were to consider the offer he- what he needed to do was find his friend and get her help as soon as he could.
"How very unfortunate." The man said. The honeycomb doors that they had indeed the room through slid aside to reveal three of those large white robots that Jamie and Zoe had seen earlier.
"I'm sorry to have to use violent methods, but you must submit. You have no alternative."
The Doctor looked around the room for a moment, and then his eyes narrowed at the bookshelf.
"I have yet to see a robot that can climb!" he declared. And then he scrambled up the side of the shelf and ran across the top.
The robots were in pursuit. He had been right that they could not climb, but that didn't stop him from following from the ground.
Having nothing else to do, and no other option, the Time Lord continued to hop along the shelves getting closer and closer to the corner until he finally got to a large space between shelves, almost like a small clearing.
He could see the book that Marion had been inside of but his friend was nowhere to be found. The book was lying on the ground. The book had a smeared bloody handprint inside of it, as if Marion had ripped something out and then tried to brace herself and the paper itself was torn in places, as if someone with blunted fingernails had tried to claw it open.
Marion kept her fingernails short. She said that if they got too long they got distracting.
He looked at the handprint closely, trying to see if it could give him a hint to which direction Marion had gone. He tried not to let the blood worry him. The first time he'd ever met her, long ago, he'd watched her get stabbed in the gut with a dirty stone knife, yank it out (to Ian and Barbara's horror), and make a joke about keeping it.
At the time, he had been convinced that she too had been a Time Lord. Perhaps someone who'd been sent from Gallifrey either to check in on the Hand of Omega. Perhaps someone who had been sent specifically to spy on him. Perhaps a renegade. Perhaps a coincidental traveler.
Her being a Time Lord explained how she managed to survive things that might have killed her. It was unusual for certain. But it was a theory to work off on. An explanation. Something that he could trust would continue the way that it should.
But she wasn't a Time Lord. Which meant that if there were limitations to her abilities, he didn't know them and judging from the way her answer kept changing, neither did she.
The handprint was no help. The Doctor stood up and looked around. Perhaps he would hear her or she would be looking for him or he might catch a glimpse of her clothing.
From behind him, he heard the sound of something creaking. Concerned, the Doctor turned around and saw the bookshelf that had been to his back falling towards him.
"Oh dear!"
The Doctor took a single step backward and hit another shelf. A dead end. Books fell off the shelf as it began to lean forward faster and faster.
The Doctor frantically looked left and right. And just as he was going to make a break for it, the shelf crashed into his head sending him sprawling to the ground with a loud thud. He saw stars and heard the sound of his skull crack and he felt his ribs cave in on themselves as he struggled to-
The handprint was no help. The Doctor stood up and look-. Ah. Well that made his search more urgent then, Another curious thing about Marion is that despite not being a Time Lord, some part of her noticed time hiccups. They made her anxious and jittery and he needed to find her because there had just been one and she always ran to him when they happened.
From behind him, he heard the sound of something creaking. Concerned, the Doctor turned around and saw the bookshelf that had been to his back falling towards him.
"Oh dear!"
The Doctor took a single step backward and hit another shelf. A dead end. Books fell off the shelf as it began to lean forward faster and faster.
The Doctor frantically looked left and right. And just as he was going to make a break for it, something crashed into the Doctor's side and sent him sprawling to the ground with a loud thud.
Something warm was on top of him and an arm was braced under his head. He heard the clatter of books as the last of them thudded to the ground. He too was on the ground. He shut his eyes and he realized he wasn't being crushed by that warm thing.
When he blinked again, he realized that the warm thing was Marion. Her form quickly flickered in and out of sight like an old lightbulb until finally, like a machine that someone had hit the side of, she was solid and permanent. She was above him. It was her left arm braced under his head and her right arm holding her up and the bookshelf off of him and her knees bracketed on either side of him. Her face was maybe half a foot from his and she was staring at him. She was staring down at him with an odd expression on her face not saying a word.
Marion gently moved her left arm and the Doctor, catching the hint, lifted his head. Marion pulled it free. She lifted herself further up off him. Her now free left arm settled on the other side of his head. Her wrist flexed and she slowly rose. She shifted her weight from her knees to her feet and lifted her right arm out against the side of the shift as she slowly stood up lifting the shelf and however many shelves had fallen as when something caused the shelves to fall over like dominos. She paused for a moment to readjust her arms and she finally stood up fully shoving the bookshelf in place with her back, steadying herself and then shoved the shelf backward with it and then other shelves crashing to the ground with audible thuds. Marion kept the hand that she had raised to shoved the desk in the air, and she stared at it for a moment before lowering it again and holding her palm to her face, lightly flexing it. She stared at it for a little bit longer. And then she stared down at him where he remained on the floor pushing himself upwards on his elbows and staring up at her.
She was still quiet, and he wondered for a moment if she was in shock. She got like this sometimes when time skipped like it had. Quiet. That didn't seem right though. Marion was still. Not eerily still, but still. The easiest way to tell when Marion was frightened or nervous or in shock or was that her hands would be shaking.
He tried calling out to her.
"Marion?"
Her head turned to look at him. "Yes?" she blinked. "Yes." She moved towards him quickly. She crouched down, grabbed his hand with both of hers and pulled him to his feet.
"Are you alright?" Marion asked. She didn't let go of his hand.
"Yes." the Doctor replied. And he was. He was a little bit shaken, of course, but Marion had been careful to keep the worst of the weight away from him. And her arm had kept his head from hitting the ground. "I'm alright thanks to you." He remembered the blood smeared on the book,
"Are you?"
"Yes." she replied, "Of course. I'm fine. I'm always fine."
The way Marion hadn't let go of his hand suggested otherwise. Perhaps she was using his hands to keep hers still.
He knew by now that asking her directly was a terrible way to learn what was wrong. He was much better off listening carefully to her speech until she eventually slipped up and said something that was much more honest than she intended, and then pretending that he didn't notice her suddenly changing the subject.
Still, he mentioned the blood that he'd see in the books.
"Ah." With her free hand she drummed on the back of her neck. "There were wires there. I removed them. But they were deep. So there was blood, and then when I tried to keep the book open, the hand I used had blood on it. I don't know where to find Jamie and Zoe. We need to find them. They might not be-" she suddenly stopped talking and tilted her head to the side as if she was listening for something. And then her eyes narrowed. She turned her head sharply and in the direction that Marion looked, the Doctor heard the sound of loud footsteps and moments later, one of the robots came from around the corner.
Marion let go of the Doctor's hand and pushed him firmly behind her. He expected her to reach into her bag for her crowbar or her knife. Surely not her sword because he was fairly certain that she didn't have that yet.
She simply stared at the robot. Then there was a tenseness in her posture like a wound up spring and then she sprung.
The Doctor hadn't gotten close enough to the robots to know what they were made of. He considered that since this was the World of Fiction it was possible that the robots hadn't been made of metal at all. Perhaps it had all just been an illusion and the robots were in fact merely made of cardboard and paper mache. The parts of the robot didn't fold like plastic or cardboard.
That would explain why Marion was able to dig her fingers into the accordion-like joints off its shoulders and rip apart their arms and send them to the ground and then got on her knees so that she could lean down after them to tear off their antennas and pry off its head and rip into its chest and yank out its wires with jerky yet powerful movements uncaring of the way the metal (because he couldn't deny it was metal) cut at her hands; stopping when the robot stopped twitching and sparking.
She did this all without a word and without a sound save for the ones that came from the robot itself. And then, she stared down at the fallen robot, as if daring it to move again.
Then she got to her feet again. Her gaze slowly turned from the robot to himself. The Doctor could see shallow cuts in her hands slowly repair themselves as they remained still by her sides.
It was a moment that might not have been much to Jamie or Zoe or to anyone else who wasn't a Time Lord capable of analyzing moments as if they had been minutes or hours. But the Doctor was a Time Lord and in that moment, the way that Marion was standing still and looking at him was wrong.
It wasn't that she looked flat or fake or uncanny. The expression on her face and the stillness of her hands and, now that he thought about it, the tone of her voice and the way that her sentences were simple and short instead of long and meandering would have all been perfectly normal if not for the fact that he knew Marion and he knew the way her face emoted and the way that she stood and the way that she moved and the way she talked the longer he looked at the woman standing in front of him the more it began to occur to him that the woman might in fact not be Marion at all.
And then, the woman's posture suddenly relaxed like a string had been cut and the moment ended.
The woman closed her eyes, and Marion opened them again. She rubbed the back of her neck and her expression shifted into something more familiar. And then her eyes closed again, she stumbled forward, and he barely caught her in his arms before she hit the ground.
hey you should check out chapter 8 of the side stories fic btw.
