A/N: Told you that the Doctor and the Heart would return! But you better prepare yourself, as there's going to be a surprise awaiting you at the end of the second chapter.
I do not own Doctor Who. All I own is my OC the Heart and this story. Please review and no flaming will be tolerated.
Thanks :)
IN THE END…
"In spite of the way you were mockin' me.
Actin' like I was part of your property.
Rememberin' all the times you fought with me,
I'm surprised it got so far."
– Linkin Park: 'In the End' (Hybrid Theory [2000])
Outer Space
Circling above the Earth, spaceships from across the galaxy who travelled by that area, heard far and wide…
"Space line traffic is advised to stay away from Sol Three, also known as Earth. Pilots are warned Sol Three is now entering terminal extinction. Planet Earth is closed. Planet Earth is closed. Planet Earth is closed."
Beach
One Year Later
A man signals to a rowing boat offshore with an oil lamp. It comes in and Martha gets out. Immediately after, the boat and its crew leave. Martha cautiously approaches the man.
"What's your name, then?" She inquires and the man smiles politely at her.
"Tom Milligan. No need to ask who you are. The famous Martha Jones." He practically fanboys at her, and Martha gives him a slight grimace. "How long since you were last in Britain?"
"Three hundred and sixty-five days." Martha responded. "It's been a long year." She added, and it certainly had been.
A very long, very horrible year.
"So, what's the plan?" Tom asks Martha, somewhat curiously.
"This Professor Docherty." Martha stated. "I need to see her. Can you get me there?" She asks Tom who nodded.
"She works in a repair shed, Nuclear Plant Seven." He tells her, and Martha nodded in understanding. "I can get you inside." But then he frowns at her. "What's all this for? What's so important about her?"
"Sorry," Martha looks at him apologetically. "The more you know, the more you're at risk."
"There's a lot of people depending on you," Tom reminds her. "You're a bit of a legend." Martha looked pleasantly surprised and just a little bit curious about what these stories about her were about.
"What does the legend say?"
"That you sailed the Atlantic, walked across America. That you were the only person to get out of Japan alive." Martha's interested face fell a little as she lost interest in whatever Tom had to say next about her travels. It wasn't exactly something that she wanted to relive. "Martha Jones, they say, she's going to save the world." Tom scoffs a little disbelievingly at that. "Bit late for that." They both walk up to a flat bed van, and Martha was surprised to see that it was still around and still functioning.
"How come you can drive? Don't you get stopped?" She asked, curiously.
"Medical staff." Tom explained. "Used to be in paediatrics back in the old days. But that gives me a licence to travel so I can help out the other labour camps." He chuckles modestly, and Martha couldn't help but sigh and grin at the irony.
"Great. I'm travelling with a doctor."
Van cab
Tom leads a very weary but determined Martha towards the van and hops into the driver's side. Martha gets in and buckles up; knowing that Tom was itching to ask her more about her travels.
"Story goes that you're the only person on Earth who can kill him…" And there it was. "That you, and you alone, can kill the Master stone dead." Tom wasn't the best at being sly, and Martha merely sighed out of annoyance.
"Let's just drive."
Flight deck
It had been a horrible, dreadful year for all humans, a very depressed Time Lord; whom had been artificially aged a hundred years and had just recently figured out exactly what the Toclafane really were, and a world-weary Time Lady; whom had been treated like pure gold by her brother, the Master. But she was just as much a prisoner as the humans on the Valiant. The Heart had free reign on the ship and could go anywhere she pleased, but she had specific rules that she was forced to follow, set down by her possessive and over-protective twin brother. Rules like: she had to dress a certain way at all times; to keep up a certain level of 'decorum' in front of the 'lower beings' (humans). She was locked up in her quarters on the Valiant every night (for her own 'protection'. But they all knew what the real reason was…), and she was never allowed to be alone with the Doctor for any reason.
But like most rebellious, thrill-seekers, rules were made to be broken. In an act of defiance, the Jones's who had been 'employed' as the Master's servants, out of self-penance would sneak the key that locked the Heart up every night into her morning meal so she could sneak out and spend as much time as she could with the Doctor. And poor Jack had been chained up in the Brig and used as target practice whenever the Master was in a particularly foul mood.
"Citizens rejoice. Your lord and master stands high, playing track three…" The Master's voice rang out over the ship's tannoy, as the Scissor Sisters' I Can't Decide begins playing. The Master enters and begins dancing to the song before going up to a scantily clad Lucy, dressed in a tight-fitted red dress, with her strawberry blonde hair pinned up in a half-up, half-down style. She also sported a nasty looking shiner on her right eye. Not even Lucy escaped the Master's wrath when she disobeyed or displeased him.
He kisses her and they dance together.
"I can't decide whether you should live or die.
Though you'll probably go to Heaven, please don't hang your head and cry.
No wonder why my heart feels dead inside.
It's cold and hard and petrified.
Lock the doors and close the blinds, we're going for a ride.
Oh, I could throw you in a lake or feed you poisoned birthday cake.
I won't deny I'm going to miss you when you're gone…"
Francine, who was dressed as a maid, serves them tea, which the Master takes a sip from, makes a face and rudely spits out and tips the cup out on the conference table, giving Francine a disgusted glare. The Master rings a ships' bell, which was the signal for the Doctor to crawl out of his straw-strewn tent. The Master immediately forces him into a wheelchair and takes him for a push around the deck, as Francine cleans up the spill.
"Oh, I could bury you alive, but you might crawl out with a knife and kill me when I'm sleeping,
that's why I can't decide whether you should live or die…"
The Heart walks in as the singer sings that particular line and makes a distasteful face. What the hell happened now to make her brother this angry? He only played songs like these when he was about to punish or kill somebody, and she wondered who the poor bastard who pissed him off this time was. The Master wheels the Doctor towards a nearby window and forces him to look out it.
"It's ready to rise, Doctor. The new Time Lord Empire. It's good, isn't it? Isn't it good?" The Doctor doesn't say a word, just ignores him and stares off into space with a defeated expression. The Heart observes this sadly, as the Master squats down beside him and waves his hand in front of the Doctor's face, a mock look of concern on his own. "Anything? No? Anything? Oh, but they broke your hearts, didn't they, those Toclafane, ever since you worked out what they really are—"
"That's enough!" The Heart interjects to spare the Doctor more guilt and heartache. "I think you've made your point, brother." The Master brightens and spins around to greet his sister, who walks further into the room and perches on the side of the glass conference table. Her objection seemed to have broken the Doctor out of his thousand-yard stare and he turns his head in her direction and smiles warmly at her.
"Heart! Hello, my love. How did you sleep?" The Master asks her cheerfully, coming over to hug her and plant an affectionate kiss on her forehead. The Heart grimaces a little out of annoyance before responding.
"Terribly." She muttered with a fake smile on her face.
The Master frowns at her reply but easily recovers and perches beside her on the table.
"What a shame. Oh, well. Let's get down to business." He smirks at the Doctor, leaving his arm draped casually around his sister's shoulders as he proceeded to torment him. "They say Martha Jones has come back home. Now why would she do that?" He wonders, rhetorically.
Both the Doctor and the Heart scowl at him.
"Leave her alone." The Doctor warns.
"But you said something to her, didn't you?" the Master questioned him, earning a look of confusion from Heart, who had been unconscious at the time. She looks quizzically at the Doctor who avoids eye contact with her. "On the day I took control. What did you tell her?" He goes over and leans in closer to hear what the Doctor had to say about that.
"I have one thing to say to you. You know what it is." The Doctor mutters.
But the Master immediately recoils away.
"Oh no, you don't!" He shoves the Doctor's wheelchair away, unknowingly in the direction of his sister, who watches as her tether comes closer to her and thuds against the side of the table.
"Are you okay?" the Heart murmurs quietly at the Doctor who nods at her and smiles warmly at her once again. She makes sure her brother isn't looking, before she quickly reaches over and takes the Doctor's hand to squeeze it in both comfort and affection. He raises her hand to his lips and gives it a shaky kiss on the knuckles.
The overhead tannoy makes a daily announcement.
"Valiant now entering Zone One airspace. Citizens rejoice."
The Master appeared to be irritated at the lack of enthusiasm around the place and makes a point of telling everyone this.
"Come on, people! What are we doing?" He complains, as the Doctor and the Heart abruptly snatch away their hands to avoid getting caught. "Launch Day in twenty-four hours."
The Doctor then looks seriously at the Heart and holds three fingers against his thigh within eye view of both the Heart and Francine, who happened to be walking by at that moment to give the Heart a cup of tea and a biscuit. She repeats the signal to Clive, who was mopping the deck in a corridor. He passes the signal on to Tish, who is also a maid like her mother, as she takes a meal to Jack in the Brig.
Brig
A grubby, tattered Jack stands with his wrists chained to stout posts in the hot, and steamy brig. He greets Tish with false cheer as she enters the room.
"Morning, Tish. Ah, smell that sea air. Makes me long for good old British Fish and Chips." He makes a face when he sees the platter of food Tish has brought him. "Yeah. What do I get? Cold mashed swede." He scoffs playfully. "Some hotel. Last time I book over the Internet."
Tish spoons him his food and puts three fingers against the container to signal Jack, who winks at her to indicate that he understands.
Quarry
A giant statue of the Master stands above the rocks. Martha glowers it with disgust.
"All over the Earth, those things. He's even carved himself into Mount Rushmore." She lamented.
"Best to keep down." Tom suggests as they continue driving towards their destination. "Here we go. The entire south coast of England, converted into shipyards. They bring in slave labour every morning. Break up cars, houses, anything, just for the metal. Building a fleet out of scrap." They spot a fleet of space rockets, ready to be launched at any moment.
"You should see Russia. That's Shipyard Number One. All the way from the Black Sea to the Bering Strait, there's a hundred thousand rockets getting ready for war." Martha commented.
"War? With who?" Tom looked at Martha in a puzzlement. Martha shrugged but looked a bit sad as well.
"The rest of the universe." She clarified. "I've been out there, Tom, in space, before all this happened, and there's a thousand different civilisations all around us with no idea of what's happening here. The Master can build weapons big enough to devastate them all."
"You've been in space?"
"Problem with that?" Martha raised an eyebrow at him, challengingly.
Tom shook his head.
"No. No, just er, wow. Anything else I should know?" He questioned her, curiously.
Martha smirked at him a little.
"I've met Shakespeare…" She trails off when two sphere fly in from behind the statue.
"Identify, little man." One of the sphere demands, rudely. Tom visibly quakes in his boots but manages to withdraw his license and show it to them.
"I've got a license. Thomas Milligan, Peripatetic Medical Squad. I'm allowed to travel. I was just checking for—"
"Soon the rockets will fly, and everyone will need medicine. You'll be so busy!" Both spheres fly off to the shipyard, laughing mockingly at him. Tom turns and looks down at Martha, surprised that the spheres hadn't taken notice of her at all during the confrontation.
"But, they didn't see you?" He frowns at her.
Martha smirks and holds up her modified Tardis key for Tom to see.
"How do you think I travelled the world?" She stated. They both head back to Tom's van. "Because the Master set up Archangel, that mobile network, fifteen satellites around the planet, but really it's transmitting this low-level psychic field. That's how everyone got hypnotised into thinking he was Harold Saxon." Martha explains, and Tom winces at the mention of the Master's pseudonym.
"Saxon. Feels like years ago."
"But the key's tuned into the same frequency. Makes me sort of not invisible, just unnoticeable." Martha continues.
"Well, I can see you." Tom pointed out.
"That's because you wanted to."
"Yeah, I suppose I did." Tom smiles at Martha. She returns the smile, somewhat coyly.
"Is there a Mrs Milligan?" She asked, curiously.
"No. No. What about you?" Tom asks, just as slyly as Martha did he.
"No, just me." She sighed heavily. "Come on, I've got to find this Docherty woman." Martha urges Tom on, and he immediately stops her.
"We'll have to wait until the next work shift. What time is it now?" He asks Martha who consults her wristwatch.
"It's nearly three o'clock."
Flight deck
It is 14:58 according to the chronometer on the bridge. The Doctor, the Heart, who was pretending to be reading from a novel at the conference table, Francine and Tish are there, whilst Clive is still cleaning below decks. Jack can see a clock from his cage too and starts to pull on his chains.
The Master enters the flight deck.
"Time for my massage." The Master announces. "Who shall I have today?" The Heart makes a disgusted face. "Tanya. Come on, sweetheart." The unfortunate girl goes over to him, while Lucy looks visibly hurt. "Lucy, have you met Tanya? She's gorgeous. Tanya, when we go to the stars, I'm going to take you to the Catriga Nova. Whirlpools of gold."
"Ugh, could you be any more of a pig, brother?" The Heart complains, and the Master just gives his sister a bored look.
"If it bothers you, sweetheart. You're always welcome to leave the room." He retorts, as Tanya starts to massage his shoulders. On the stroke of 3 o'clock, the tannoy suddenly gives a red alert.
'Condition red.'
"What the hell?" The Master looks around, bewildered.
'Repeat, condition red.' The tannoy continues.
Francine grabs the Master's abandoned jacket and tosses it to Tish, who hands it to the Doctor. He rummages around the pockets before withdrawing the Master's laser screwdriver and pointing it directly at him. The Master takes notice of this and rolls his eyes.
"Oh, I see…"
"I told you," the Doctor reveals to him. "I have one thing to say." However, the Master laughs out loud when the Doctor discovers to his dismay that the laser screwdriver won't work for him.
He, the Heart, Francine and Tish deflate in disappointment.
"Isomorphic controls." The Master explains, walking over and taking the screwdriver from the Doctor, before punching him in the face.
"Doctor!" the Heart yells in alarm and goes to his aid but is immediately stopped by her brother who harshly grabs her arm in his anger. She yells out in pain, which is ignored by the Master.
"Which means they only work for me." The Master states. "Like this." He aims his laser beam at Francine and fires at her, just barely missing. "Say sorry!"
"Sorry. Sorry. Sorry." Francine shouts through gritted teeth as she glares hatefully at the Master.
"Mum!" Tish goes over to her mother, alarmed.
"Didn't you learn anything from the blessed Saint Martha?" the Master mocks them. "Siding with the Doctor is a very dangerous thing to do." He looks over at a couple of guards and gives them orders. "Take them away."
"Move. Come on!" The guard growls at the two women as he escorts them from the flight deck. The Master then redirects his attention back on to both the Doctor and his sister.
"Tsk, tsk. I would have thought that you'd remember the consequences from the last time you misbehaved, my dear sister." The Master sneers at the Heart who grimaces in pain when he increases his grip a little on her arm.
"Leave her alone…" the Doctor snarls protectively. "She had nothing to do with this!" He insisted, angrily.
The Jones's plan, in hindsight, was a brave and very appreciated attempt to make amends to both the Doctor and the Heart for causing them trouble with the Master. But like most things, it all came crumbling down one night when the Master unexpectedly caught the two lovers when the Heart secretly crept down to the flight deck to spend some time alone with the Doctor. Needless to say, the Heart was forced to witness the Doctor being tortured by her brother as punishment for disobeying him. It was a harsh lesson that neither the Doctor nor the Heart wished to revisit.
"Oh, I have no doubt. But a lesson still needs to be learned." The Master pushes his sister into a nearby chair, before going to the Doctor and helping him into a separate chair away from the Heart. "Oh boy. There you go, Gramps." He continues to mock the Doctor who worriedly looks over at the Heart to make sure that she was alright, only to have his face firmly pulled back to face the Master himself. "Oh, do you know, I remember the days when the Doctor, oh, that famous Doctor, was waging a Time War, battling Sea Devils and Axons." He recalled with false whimsy. "He sealed the rift at the Medusa Cascade single-handed. And look at him now. Stealing screwdrivers." He smirks down at him. "How did he ever come to this? Oh yeah, me."
"I just need you to listen…" the Doctor pleads, but the Master harshly cuts him off.
"No! It's my turn. Revenge! Best served hot. And this time, it's a message for Miss Jones."
Workshop
Tom cuts a gap in the shipyard's chain link fence, and both he and Martha run to a building where an older woman is thumping a cathode ray tube in frustration. Tom immediately addresses her.
"Professor Docherty?"
"Busy." The woman snaps. However, Tom persists with his explanation on why he was there anyway.
"They, er, they sent work ahead. I'm Tom Milligan. This is Martha Jones."
"She can be the Queen of Sheba for all I care. I'm still busy." Docherty retorts, evenly. Martha eyes what the woman was doing with bemused interest.
"Televisions don't work anymore." She points out, earning a groan of frustration from Docherty when she still gets static from the rickety old television set.
"Oh God, I miss Countdown. Never been the same since Des took over. Both Deses." Then she frowns. "What's the plural for Des? Desi? Deseen? But we've been told there's going to be a transmission from the man himself." Docherty tells Tom and Martha, who grimace as she continues fiddling with the television set. Suddenly a static-ridden black and white image appears. "There!" Docherty yells triumphantly.
"My people." The Master greets his 'subjects' with a deceptively kind smile. "Salutations on this, the eve of war. Lovely woman." He chuckles. "But I know there's all sorts of whispers down there. Stories of a child, walking the Earth, giving you hope. But I ask you, how much hope has this man got?" The Master turns the camera towards the Doctor who stares blankly into the television camera. "Say hello, Gandalf!" He tells him. "Except he's not that old, but he's an alien with a much greater lifespan than you stunted little apes." The Master sneers coldly. "But what if it showed?"
Flight deck
He flashes both the Doctor and the Heart a cruel smile before he continued with his taunt.
"What if I suspend your capacity to regenerate?" Both the Doctor and the Heart froze; their eyes widening in horror. "All nine hundred years of your life, Doctor. What if we could see them?" The Heart needed to act now. She jumps up from her seat and clutched at the Master's arm, looking at him pleadingly.
"No! Stop! I'm sorry, brother. I promise, I won't disobey you again. Just don't do this!" But the Master merely glares at her.
"Oh, you're sorry now. Now that your precious Doctor is being threatened once again. Well, tough little sister. It's about time you learned that life isn't fair!" He retunes his screwdriver and zaps the Doctor again. Anguished tears roll down the Heart's face as the Doctor begins to painfully convulse once again. "Older and older and older. Down you go, Doctor. Down, down, down the years…" the Heart drops to her knees crawling over to him, feeling helpless.
"Please! Please, stop this!" She turned and begged the Master. When the convulsions finally stop, the Heart looks over and sees that the Doctor was no longer sitting in the wheelchair. "What have you done?!"
"Doctor?" the Master calls out to him.
To everyone's horror, from within the Doctor's empty brown pinstriped suit, a tiny creature with big eyes, resembling Gollum from Lord of the Rings, wiggles his head out of the neck hole of the suit. In a moment of rare mercy, the Master allows his sister to scoop up the tiny Doctor creature, clothing and all, and cradle him to her chest, instead of ordering her away from his nemesis.
"Doctor…" The Heart whimpers. Tiny hands reach out and cup her face in them.
"I'm okay, darling." The Doctor soothes her, gently. "Everything will be all right soon. I promise." The Doctor hinted cryptically, before he leans in and kisses her cheek.
Workshop
A sympathetic tear falls down Martha's face as she sees the heartbreaking scene on screen. The camera pans up, showing the Master's incredibly serious, angry face glaring right into the camera.
"Received and understood, Miss Jones?" The Master questions before the broadcast ends.
Tom looks at Martha with sad eyes.
"I'm sorry." He tells her with sympathy. However, Martha looks unconcerned. Something told her that the Doctor was safe and still alive.
"The Doctor's still alive." She reassures Tom, who blinks at her in astonishment. Docherty redirects their attention towards the situation at hand.
"Obviously the Archangel Network would seem to be the Master's greatest weakness. Fifteen satellites all around the Earth, still transmitting. That's why there's so little resistance. It's broadcasting a telepathic signal that keeps people scared."
"We could just take them out." Tom pointed out, and Docherty just gives him a flat look.
"We could. Fifteen ground to air missiles. You got any on you?" She inquires bluntly, as Tom deflates when he realises the foolishness of his suggestion. Docherty continues on with her explanation. "Besides, any military action, the Toclafane descend." She reminds both him and Martha. However, Martha frowns and shakes her head at the name the Master had bestowed upon the metal spheres.
"They're not called Toclafane," She stresses, firmly. "That's a name the Master made up."
"Then what are they, then?" Docherty questioned.
"That's why I came to find you." Martha shrugged nonchalantly. "Know your enemy." She looked very pointedly at the older woman, although neither Docherty nor Tom realise this. "I've got this." Martha holds up a computer disc. "Nobody's been able to look at a sphere close up. They can't even be damaged, except once. The lightning strike in South Africa brought one of them down, just by chance. I've got the readings on this." She indicates to the computer disc, which Docherty takes from her and inserts into her computer … and thumps it out of frustration when it struggles to read the data.
"Oh, whoever thought we'd miss Bill Gates." Docherty mumbles grumpily. Tom looks at Martha sceptically.
"So is that why you travelled the world? To find a disc?"
"No. Just got lucky." Martha admitted. Docherty observes Martha curiously as she scrolls through the information contained in the disc Martha had supplied for them.
"I heard stories that you walked the Earth to find a way to build a weapon." Then she suddenly spots something important on screen. "There!" She points at it eagerly. "A current of fifty-eight point five kiloamperes transferred a charge of five hundred and ten megajoules precisely." Docherty reveals triumphantly.
"Can you recreate that?" Tom asks, curiously.
"I think so," Docherty confirmed. "Easily. Yes."
"Right then, Doctor Milligan, we're going to get us a sphere." Martha declared with a determination.
Outside, the three of them take their positions, ready to take down a stray sphere so that they could examine it further and get to the bottom of what it really was inside its curved interior. Tom fires a gun into the air three times. It immediately summons a sphere, which gives chase.
"He's coming!" Martha alerts Docherty, who was standing beside a throw switch that was hooked up to an electrical field. "You ready?"
"You do your job. I'll do mine!" Docherty retorts just as Tom runs in.
"Now!" He gives the signal, and Docherty throws the switch. The sphere immediately gets caught in the electrical field which had been setup across the narrow passageway Martha and Docherty had been standing in wait. After a few minutes, the sphere drops to the ground. The three of them surround the sphere, looking down at it with both determination and trepidation.
"That's only half the job. Let's find out what's inside." Docherty suggested, as she carefully stoops down to scoop up the temporarily shut down sphere.
Flight deck
The diminutive Doctor, now wearing a smaller version of his pinstriped suit that the Heart had replicated for him, was imprisoned inside a bird cage. The Heart was now forced to remain by her brother's side at all times, except when he and Lucy were alone together. Then the Time Lady was secluded in her quarters with a guard stationed outside her door. Lucy was no longer the happy little wife she had been when the Master had first taken over the Earth, but she was forced, like her sister-in-law, to be obedient, or suffer the consequences.
"Tomorrow, they launch." The Master stated, referring to the many rockets he had forced the surviving humans to create all over the world. "We're opening up a rift in the Braccatolian space. They won't see us coming. It's kind of scary." The Master admitted.
"Then stop." The Doctor piped up, dryly.
"Once the Empire is established, and there's a new Gallifrey in the heavens, maybe then it stops. The drumming. The never-ending drumbeat." The Master theorised. "Ever since I was a child. I looked into the vortex. That's when it chose me. The drumming, the call to war. Can't you hear it?" He questioned the Doctor and the Heart, almost desperately. "Listen, it's there now. Right now. Tell me you can hear it. Tell me!"
"It's only you." The Doctor shook his head, despairingly. However, the Heart had paused with her eyes shut before reluctantly opening them and looking directly at her brother, feeling disturbed.
"I can hear it…" She admitted quietly, earning surprised looks from the Master and the Doctor.
"You can?" the Master blurted out.
"How?" the Doctor added, alarmed. The Heart grimaced, trying to think of a plausible answer to their questions.
"It's more of an echo; like I'm hearing it second-hand. It happened in Utah, Doctor, when we encountered that Dalek. And again at the End of the Universe. Except, I think it's because the Master and I are twins and we're biologically linked because we came from the same ovum." The Heart explained, uncomfortably.
"You mean, like when one twin can feel when the other one is in pain or is feeling angry or hurt?" the Doctor guessed and the Heart shrugged.
"That's probably a very plausible explanation for why I can hear the 'drumming' too." She confirmed. A sphere enters the room before anyone could say something else.
"Tomorrow, the war. Tomorrow we rise, never to fall." The sphere reveals, and the Master is positively giddy with anticipation, much to the Doctor and the Heart's consternation.
"You see? I'm doing it for them." He goes over to the birdcage and leans over it to leer at the Doctor intimidatingly. "You should be grateful," the Doctor glowers at him gravely. "After all, you love them so very, very much." He mocks him, condescendingly.
Workshop
Docherty was attempting to pry open the sphere, with Martha and Tom hovering behind her, watching the process rather anxiously. It was a tense moment, waiting to see what they were likely to discover hidden with the metal ball of mass destruction. It seemed, however, that it was a fairly frustrating endeavour.
"There's some sort of magnetic clamp. Hold on, I'll just trip the—" the tool that Docherty was using to open the sphere causes it to spark, making everyone flinch back away from the sparks. The tool seemed to have done what it intended to do as it helps open the four quarters on top of the sphere. Docherty's eyes widen in shock. "Oh, my God!" The sphere turned out to contain a tiny, wizened head. Its eyes suddenly snap open, making all of them jump back. "It's alive!"
The creature inside the sphere appeared to recognise Martha, and 'beamed' when it saw her.
"Martha. Martha Jones."
"It knows you." Tom stated with a curious frown. Martha looks down at the creature with surprise.
"Sweet, kind Martha Jones." The sphere continued talking, as though Tom hadn't made any comment. "You helped us to fly." Martha frowns at it with confusion.
"What do you mean?"
"You led us to salvation." The sphere elaborated, but Martha still didn't understand what the sphere was hinting towards.
"Who are you?" She asked.
"The skies are made of diamonds." The sphere hinted with a quote, and Martha recoils back in horror.
"No!" She exclaimed. "You can't be him!" She thinks back to when she had last seen that little orphaned boy, Creet, back at the end of the universe.
"The skies are made of diamonds…" She recalled him describing what he believed Utopia would be like. Martha swallows down the bile that immediately rises in her throat.
"We share each other's memories. You sent him to Utopia." The sphere, now identified as a mutilated Creet, tells a sickened Martha, who pales when she finally understands what the 'Toclafane' really were.
"Oh, my God…" She whispered, horrified.
"What's it talking about? What's it mean?" Tom questioned her.
"What are they?" Docherty frowns at Martha with concern when she sees how anguished and pale the younger woman had become when the creature had spoken about skies made of diamonds. Martha didn't say anything, still too disturbed by her discovery.
"Martha, Martha, tell us. What are they?" Tom wheedles to her, gently.
"They're us." Martha finally reveals. "They're humans. The human race from the future."
Flight deck
The Master perches on a chair, with a reluctant Heart seated beside him at the table in her own chair, looking both resentfully and warily at her brother. Lucy takes position a little behind her husband, waiting obediently for her next orders. The Master observes the Doctor trapped inside his bird cage with laser focus as he tells both his sister and the Doctor a little story of what happened after he had stolen the Tardis that fateful day, what seemed long ago. The Doctor watches him cautiously, while simultaneously observing his Heart worriedly.
"I took Lucy to Utopia." The Master explains to them. "A Time Lord and his human companion." He mocks the Doctor who narrows his eyes at him. "I took her to see the stars. Isn't that right, sweetheart?" The Master addresses Lucy, who sways a little; lost in the memory of what she had seen.
"Trillions of years into the future, to the end of the universe…" Lucy mumbles.
The Master smirks.
"Tell them what you saw." He orders her.
"Dying." Lucy confirms, tears welling up in her eyes. "Everything dying." The Heart pales, filled with despair at the thought of what this poor woman might have seen. This was borderline barbaric. "The whole of creation was falling apart, and I thought, there's no point. No point to anything. Not ever."
"And it's all your fault!" The Master lays on the blame on the Doctor.
Workshop
Tom and Docherty make themselves comfortable as Martha gives them an explanation into what she had revealed to them after they discovered what was contained inside the sphere they had dissected only moments earlier. But in order to fully explain, Martha needed to go back to when it all started; back to the day before the Master came to power.
"I'd sort of worked it out with the paradox machine, because the Doctor said, on the day before the Master came to power, he said—"
"When he was stealing the Tardis, the only thing I could do was fuse the coordinates. I locked them permanently. He can only travel between the year one hundred trillion and the last place the Tardis landed, which is right here, right now."
"The Master had the Tardis." Martha explained. "This time machine, but the only other place he could go was the end of the universe, so he found Utopia."
Flight deck
The Master grins at the Doctor, evilly.
"You should have seen it, Doctor. Furnaces burning. The last of humanity screaming at the dark." He described the horrific sounding scene, making both the Doctor and the Heart cringe at the mental picture the Master was painting for them so articulately.
Workshop
"The Utopia Project was the last hope. Trying to find a way to escape the end of everything." Martha continued her explanation, and the sphere also chimed in with his two cents also.
"There was no solution, no diamonds. Just the dark and the cold." The sphere confirmed.
Flight deck
"All that human invention that had sustained them across the eons. It all turned inwards. They cannibalised themselves." The Master stated, and one of the spheres hovering nearby bounced up and down joyfully.
"We made ourselves so pretty!" She gushed.
"Regressing into children." The Master summed up, making the Doctor and the Heart understand that the shock of what had happened to them, had quite obviously caused them all to go insane, thus changing them irreversibly into their child-like personas, unable to realise that what happened to them was horrible and devastating, or simply not wanting to understand. "But it didn't work. The universe was collapsing around them."
Heartbroken tears fell from the Heart's eyes.
Workshop
"But then the Master came with his wonderful time machine to bring us back home." The sphere took over the explanation, obviously eager to relay what he believed to be a wonderous adventure, instead of a tale of a nightmarish reality. Docherty frowns down at the sphere, spotting the flaw in the Master's plan.
"But that's a paradox," she pointed out. "If you're the future of the human race, and you've come back to murder your ancestors, you should cancel yourselves out. You shouldn't exist."
"And that's the paradox machine…" Martha confirmed, grimly.
Flight deck
"My masterpiece, Doctor, Heart. A living Tardis, strong enough to hold the paradox in place, allowing the past and the future to collide in infinite majesty." The Master basked in the 'brilliance' of his evil mastermind. The Doctor was astounded and did not hesitate to voice his protests.
"But you're changing history." He warned the Master. "Not just Earth, the entire universe."
"No wonder the Tardis is in so much pain…" the Heart piped up, glowering at her brother. The Master waves a careless, dismissive hand at them both; obviously aware of the consequences and just not giving a damn.
"I'm a Time Lord. I have that right." He stated callously.
"You most certainly do not!" the Heart blurted out. "This is not a game, brother. This whole entire travesty is just one colossal dummy spit because of something the Time Lords did to you when you were a child." The Heart realised. "You do not have the right to play God."
"But even then, why come all this way just to destroy?" the Doctor added on to the Heart's rant, deeply confused about the Master's destructive methods.
"We came backwards in time all to build a brand-new empire lasting one hundred trillion years." The female sphere confirmed.
"With me as their master." The Master stated. "Time Lord and humans combined. Haven't you always dreamt of that, Doctor?" He asked him, then turned and looked inquiringly at his sister. "Or you, Heart?"
Workshop
"But what about us?" Tom questioned the sphere, sounding scandalised. "We're the same species. Why do you kill so many of us?"
"Because it's fun!" the sphere confirmed shamelessly, and in his outrage, Tom raises the handgun and shoots the head point blank.
Flight deck
The Master rises to his feet; satisfied that he had demoralised both the Doctor and his sister's spirits enough for one day.
"Human race, greatest monsters of them all." He turns and offers his hand towards the Heart who eyes him with disgust and, at first, ignores him and glares defiantly.
The smug smile drops from the Master's face when he sees the resistance on his sister's face and hardens his own warningly before becoming very insistent. Reluctantly, the Heart places her hand in her brother's and allows him to help her up from the chair. With his other hand, the Master beckons over to Lucy who obediently comes over and the Master wraps an arm around her waist and plants a kiss on her temple. He looks over at a depressed looking Doctor who watches them go.
"Night, then." He bids him, before he, Lucy, the Heart, who glances over her shoulder at the Doctor, looking just as miserable as he did, before turning away, and the sphere leave.
Docherty's room
After disposing of the now deceased sphere, the three relocate to Docherty's room. Immediately, Docherty verbally pounces on Martha, frowning at her.
"I think it's time we had the truth, Miss Jones. The legend says you've travelled the world to find a way of killing the Master. Tell us, is it true?" She demanded, and Martha sighed heavily.
"Just before I escaped the Doctor told me. The Doctor and the Master, they've been coming to Earth for years. And they've been watched. There's UNIT and Torchwood, all studying Time lords in secret. And they made this, the ultimate defence." Martha reaches into her backpack and pulls out a small square case. She opens it to reveal a gun-like device, with a squeeze trigger and four small cylinders along the top. She also has three vials of coloured liquid.
"What about the Heart?" Tom asks Martha who immediately looks sternly at him.
"What about her?" Martha was cautious.
"Well, she's the Master's sister, isn't she? She could potentially be a threat also. Just by association." He pointed out and Martha just glowers at him, in offence.
"She's no threat to anyone. If anything, she's just as much a prisoner as the rest of us. And I'll have words with anyone who says otherwise." Martha warns him, protectively.
"Sounds as though you have a soft spot for the Heart…" Docherty observes with a raised eyebrow at how fiercely this young woman was defending an alien who looked like a young woman in her early 20s, and Martha smiles unconcerned.
"The Heart is my friend. It really hasn't been very long since I met her, but she's given me no reason to fear her." Martha reassures the pair. "Plus, she's also the Doctor's … how do I say this?" She hesitates to find an appropriate description of her friends' relationship.
"Lover?" Docherty supplied, and Martha made a face, but shrugged realising that there probably wasn't any other way to really describe what it essentially was.
"Yeah, basically."
"Ha! I bet the Master was thrilled to learn that about his sister. Sounded to me like he's a very possessive man." Docherty snorted at this.
"All you need to do is get close." Tom realises, changing the subject quickly after settling the matter that the Heart was no threat and was to be spared from being outright killed by the special 'gun' Martha had apparently been collecting and assembling this entire time over the year. "I can shoot the Master dead with this." He indicates to the gun he still held in his hand.
"Actually, you can put that down now, thank you very much." Docherty requests, pushing down the gun in Tom's hand with a free hand that wasn't supporting her chin in almost a bored-like fashion.
"Point is, it's not so easy to kill a Time Lord. They can regenerate. Literally bring themselves back to life." Martha explains, and Docherty groaned out of frustration.
"Ah, the Master's immortal. Wonderful…" she muttered sarcastically.
"Except for this," Martha holds up one of the coloured vials. "Four chemicals, slotted into the gun. Inject him. Kills a Time Lord permanently."
"Four chemicals?" Tom looked dubious. "You've only got three."
"Still need the last one, because the components of this gun were kept safe, scattered across the world, and I found them. San Diego, Beijing, Budapest and London." Martha explained.
"Then where is it?" Tom indicated to the fourth and final piece that Martha had been describing.
"There's an old UNIT base, North London." She confirms; smirking a little when she noticed out the corner of her eye, Docherty paying particular attention to that little factoid. "I've found the access codes. Tom, you've got to get me there." Martha urged Tom who nodded without further questioning.
Workshop
Tom and Martha prepare for their potentially hazardous trip across London to get Martha to her destination in one piece. However, there was just one thing that was standing in their way.
"We can't get across London in the dark," Tom explained to Martha who looked at him with confusion. "It's full of wild dogs. We'll be eaten alive." Her eyes widened in understanding and she nodded. "We can wait till the morning, then go with the medical convoy."
"You can spend the night here, if you like." Docherty offered, but Martha shook her; very anxious to get this over and done with as fast as possible.
"No, we can get halfway, stay at the slave quarters in Bexley." Martha smiles politely at Docherty. "Professor, thank you." She and Docherty shake hands.
"And you. Good luck."
"Thanks." Martha nods before she and Tom continuing making their preparations and headed for the workshop door. Docherty looked unconvinced that Martha had what it takes to take down the Master once and for all.
"Martha, could you do it?" the younger woman looks at her questioningly. "Could you actually kill him?" Martha hesitated, obviously uncomfortable with the idea of killing somebody, even if that person happened to be a mass-murdering psychopath. It went against everything she took an oath to protect as a potential doctor. But still, the future of the human race depended on her to triumph and be successful.
She shrugs helplessly at Docherty.
"I've got no choice."
"You might be many things, but you don't look like a killer to me." Docherty responded, shaking her head despairingly. Tom and Martha slip out into the night, it was a race against time to get to Bexley without being detected by the Master or his goons.
Outside the Slave Quarters
Bexley, England.
Tom and Martha make it to the Slave Quarters in Bexley. They manage to dodge a patrol, and Tom knocks urgently on a door. He hears some shuffling behind the front door.
"Let me in. It's Milligan!" He whisper-shouts.
The door is immediately unlocked, and both Tom and Martha are quickly pulled inside.
Slave Quarters
The place is full to bursting with surviving humans, looking exhausted and hungry as they take in the new arrivals with interest. Some of them surround Tom, looking eager and desperate.
"Did you bring food?" One of the women asks Tom who looked regretful.
"Couldn't get any, and I'm starving." Tom admitted.
"All we've got is water," the woman stated, and Martha looks at the poor woman with deep sympathy.
"I'm sorry." She states, unhappily.
Tom explains the situation with the slave quarters to an uncomfortable and extremely anguished Martha, who knew of the hardships that the surviving humans were going through but had yet to actually see it for herself as she had been so busy carrying out the Doctor's personal errand.
"It's cheaper than building barracks." He tells her, somewhat bitterly. "Pack them in, a hundred in each house, ferry them off to the shipyards every morning."
Martha nodded.
A teenage boy tentatively approaches her.
"Are you Martha Jones?" He asks her, curiously.
"Yeah, that's me."
"Can you do it?" the boy asks eagerly when he realises he was in the presence of someone who was very likely able to liberate them all from this nightmare. "Can you kill him? They said you can kill the Master, can you?" Martha winced at the eagerness; a year of being enslaved had turned all the surviving humans into a vengeful almost bloodthirsty lot. "Tell us you can do it. Please, tell us you can do it." The boy continued begging.
Before long, this started a chain reaction of people asking Martha endless questions.
"Who is the Master?" Another woman questioned her before Tom steps in, a little exasperated with the crowd.
"Come on, just leave her alone." He scolds them, disappointedly. "She's exhausted." However, Martha steps over to him and places a reassuring hand on his arm, smiling tiredly at him.
"No, it's alright." She tells him. "They want me to talk, and I will."
A/N: Stay tuned for a new arrival, and the temporary farewell to Martha Jones.