DW -- Like Old Times: Part II
Title: Like Old Times
Part: 2
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Simm!Master/Ten, Koschei/Theta
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~7,200
Warnings: language, snark, mild violence, sexual situations, spoilers through DW S4
Summary: The Master breaks things in the TARDIS until the Doctor almost goes insane, then they end up in the Vivarium, and then all hell breaks loose. The Doctor is not liking any of this - and while he's at it, the dream-flashback-things really, really need to stop.
Author's Note: ajkfdjslakjkd. (…not as a place-holder; as an emotion.)
LIKE OLD TIMES - PART II
“This is hell,” the Master said. “I’ve thought it all over and done the math, and this is definitely hell.”
The Doctor was attempting to jury-rig a multipurpose scanner out of their hotel room’s television remote, alarm clock, and smoke detector, with a few parts from the electric toothbrush he’d bought in the shop downstairs.
Yet another reason why every establishment really ought to have a shop.
“Are you sure it’s hell?” the Doctor asked bemusedly. He’d temporarily unlocked the handcuffs, because it was hard enough to focus through the commentary without fighting for control of his hand as well. “It could be Tartarus. Or Naraka. Or Xibalbá, depending on whom you’re talking to.”
“It’s hell,” the Master announced. “I’m investigating an oversized science fair project on a planet your PMSing TARDIS picked, I’m handcuffed to you, and the only thing I can find to eat is pistachios.” He snapped another shell open and flung it into the bowl he’d balanced on his stomach. “Hell.”
If the Doctor could magnify the capacity of the sensor from the smoke detector, since it already gauged temperature, particle concentration, and carbon monoxide levels- “Don’t you like pistachios?”
“I love pistachios,” the Master said. “Which is precisely why I hate them, because they’re impossible to open. They exist solely to mock anyone who tries to eat them, and you think I’m sadistic.” He wrestled with another one, his cheeks coloring. “Fuck!”
The Doctor reached across the bed and subjected the stubborn pistachio to a quick jolt of sonic energy, which popped the shell cleanly in half, and then he returned to his work.
There was blessed silence for a moment, and then-
“You bastard,” the Master said.
“You’re welcome,” the Doctor said.
“Patronizing a prisoner is bad form even for you,” the Master muttered. “I’m willing to bet the Shadow Proclamation takes my side on this one. This fits squarely under ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’”
“You want to stop by and ask them about it when we’re done here?” the Doctor asked.
“No.” The Master was pouting again. “That woman creeps the living hell out of me. She looks like all of my librarian-related nightmares at once.”
“You were disruptive,” the Doctor reminded him. “The librarians had every right to try to intimidate you.”
“I wouldn’t have been disruptive if you hadn’t made me yell at you,” the Master fired back.
“You didn’t yell,” the Doctor said. “You chased me through three halls of reference books, screaming like a maniac. G through P. I remember.”
“You deserved it.”
“You deserved the reprimand. And the nightmares.”
The Master snapped another pistachio open and threw half of the shell at the Doctor’s head.
The Doctor soldered one last connection with the screwdriver and then stood up, looking at the Master sternly. “All right. Bedtime.”
The Master beamed. “Are you going to tell me a story?”
The Doctor relegated the pistachios to the nightstand next to his scanner, securely replaced the handcuffs, and settled on the other side of the double bed. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a Time Lord who demonstrated such inconceivable immaturity that the wiser, handsomer Time Lord babysitting him had to abandon him on a planet entirely populated by librarians.”
“You would never,” the Master scoffed. “You don’t believe in suffering unless you’re the one doing it.”
The Doctor set his jaw and turned out the light.
It was quiet for a moment, and as his eyes adjusted-extremely quickly; humans had it bad-to the dim city lights that filtered through the blinds at the window, he dared to hope they might have achieved something like peace.
Then the Master shifted, and his dreams were crushed.
“Stop touching me,” the Doctor said.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Well, maybe that’s because you handcuffed us together.”
“It was necessary. Is necessary.”
“That, or you just like bondage. Bet you learned it from the Freak.”
“His name is Jack.”
“Bet you learned it from Jack the Freak.”
“Jack Harkness.”
“Jack Harkness the Freak. My, but you’re hung up on specificity tonight. You should just be glad I didn’t call him the Fuckbuddy, since that’s obviously the reason you brought him alo-”
“If you don’t shut up this instant and go to sleep, I will use the newest sonic setting to interfere with your gag reflex and leave you vomiting up pistachios all night. Do not tempt me, my friend.”
There was a merciful silence.
“A sonic screwdriver can’t do that,” the Master decided.
There was another.
“…can it?”
“Go to sleep,” the Doctor said.
There was a third silence, presumably just to round things out.
“…you think we’re friends?” the Master asked.
The Doctor buried his face in the pillow.
-
Koschei’s bedroom had a balcony that looked out over the terraces, the field, and the forest. The last of the sunbeams struck sparks on silver leaves, like steel in a forge beneath the burnt peach-orange of the sky, but Theta was looking up at the first of the stars. Koschei’s long fingers were stroking through his hair, and the sky was darkening to rust around the little points of light.
Koschei’s hand drifted down to his shoulders, over his back, fingertips brushing at his spine. “Keep thinking that hard, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m not,” Theta said. “And I won’t.”
“You’ll strain something,” Koschei said, smoothing his hand over Theta’s forehead, as if he might rub the wrinkles out. “I know you. And then you’ll whine.”
Theta peeled his gaze off of the sky, smiling. “Then I guess you’ll just have to shut me up.”
Koschei’s deep blue eyes looked violet in the failing light. “Good thing,” he murmured, leaning in, breath cool and moist in the dry night, “you’re so easy to distract.”
Theta grinned into the kiss, spreading his fingers on Koschei’s neck, feeling his pulses, touching his ears. He was still grinning when Koschei curled one hand in his hair and the other around his wrist, dragging him back into the room, back to the neat bed, last night’s rumpled sheets spread and folded and hidden away.
“What’s the rush?” Theta asked coyly as Koschei pushed him down on the mattress, climbing over him, straddling his hips. “We’ve got eternity, you know.”
Koschei pinned his wrists above his head, mouthing warmly at his jaw. “Eternity’s not long enough.”
Theta writhed, back arching, stretching for Koschei’s warmth. “I’m not-I’m not thinking anymore-”
Koschei drew his tongue slowly up Theta’s throat, and his soft breath sent waves and tremors through Theta’s very bones. “That’s the way I like y-”
The Doctor woke up with a deep gasp already past his lips, tumbling back into the present only to see the Master hastily withdrawing one hand from beside his temple.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor yelped, loud enough for a flash of guilt on the behalf of their neighbors. His voice hardened. “You have no right to read my dreams. None. That’s far out of bounds, even by your standards.”
“It’s the only way to know anything about you,” the Master retorted, flexing his fingers, his eyes gleaming in the dark. “Anything other than your firmly-held belief that technobabble is good for the soul, anyway.”
“It is good for the soul,” the Doctor said. He shifted away, facing the wall, trying to relax his shoulders and finding them implacable. “You should try it sometime, if you still have one.”
“Two hearts and no soul,” the Master said. “Imagine that. Sounds like typical Time Lord physiology to me.”
“Leave it,” the Doctor warned, rolling over again to look at him.
“Do you defend them, too?” the Master asked bitterly. “The venerable Time Lords. Since you and I are the only ones who survived, logic would say we’re the strongest, don’t you think? That’s a laugh. They tried to turn us into soldiers… instead, they made you into an attention-deficit, depressive neurotic, and they turned me into a megalomaniacal psychopath.” He grinned, viciously. “I’d call that naught for two.”
The Doctor watched the flickering eyes. “Would you go back?” he asked.
The Master’s voice was flat. “We can’t. You said so yourself. You caused it.”
“I know that,” the Doctor answered. “But if we could, would you?”
The Master looked at him, silently, and then he leaned in very close, his eyes alight.
“In a nanosecond,” he said.
Steadily, belying the way his insides curled, the Doctor met his gaze. “Why?”
The Master smiled crookedly. “Because it’s home.”
After a moment of stillness, the Doctor wriggled his fingers, adjusting the angle of his wrist in the handcuff, and nodded vaguely.
“What about you?” the Master purred. “Would you go back to Gallifrey?”
They knew each other far too well, which was why the Doctor knew that the truer question was If we could do it all again, would you look at me instead of at the sky?
“No,” the Doctor said, and turned his back on the last fellow survivor of his species.
The last fellow survivor of his species breathed warmly on the back of his neck, and he twisted away.
“Not even if we had my old bed again?” the Master asked.
“Go to sleep,” the Doctor said.
“I don’t like sleeping,” the Master muttered. “It’s too damned human.”
“So is whining incessantly about my rules.”
“You know humanity is contagious.”
“I hope so,” the Doctor said, and he pointedly shut his eyes and his mouth.
-
They were in their shared room at the Academy, in the bed made for one, sticky and sated, one of Koschei’s arms bent under the pillow, the other wrapped around Theta’s waist. They were just looking at each other, saying it all silently, because telepathy wasn’t quite as wonderful as knowing someone so well that you didn’t need it in the first place.
“Theta,” Koschei said after a long time, after full minutes had passed. “If you ever… if you ever think you’re getting tired of me, just-tell me so. I can change. I can be anything you want.”
Theta was supposed to say “Don’t be ridiculous; I want you, Kosch, and that’s it.” That was what happened next; it was a given; except… he didn’t speak at all.
Koschei’s hand lifted and settled against his cheek, brushing his damp hair back, smoothing a thumb over his cheekbone.
“I promise,” Koschei said, and then he proved it.
He just sort of-faded at first, the colors of his skin and his eyes dulling, the contours of his face and his shoulder getting fuzzy, and then he blurred.
Slowly at first, and then more quickly, Koschei… changed. He had a long face with a dark beard and strangely sad eyes, and then his face was different, and he was smirking, but not too unkindly, and then his eyes flared yellow, the pupils narrowing to slits. Then they settled to an almost-familiar gold-flecked brown, and a warm grin spread across his face.
“I told you,” he murmured, lifting his right hand, a green ring gleaming, to brush the tips of his fingers over Theta’s cheek again.
“But you’re different,” Theta said, voice quavering. “I don’t want you to to be different. I don’t want you to disappear.”
Not-Koschei smiled again, lopsidedly. “I’m not going anywhere. And I never will.”
Hesitantly Theta laid his hand over this new man’s where it had settled against his jaw. He ran his thumb over its knuckles, over its breadth-
“Who are you?” he asked.
Another smile. “That’s not as important as what I am.”
Theta raised his other hand, pressing it against the man’s chest-right and left, two hearts.
“What are you, then?”
“Yours,” the man whispered, the corner of his lips curling up.
-
Groggily, as he swam into consciousness, the Doctor tried to scrub both hands across his eyes only to encounter the handcuffs again.
Then he was awake.
So were the birds outside the window and an invasive beam of strong sunlight.
Well. Sunlight couldn’t really wake up, per se. Well, it couldn’t unless-
Anyway.
“What time is it?” the Doctor mumbled, glancing over at the Master, who was lounging on the bed, effectively acting as a dead weight on the handcuffs.
The Master fished in his trouser pocket and came up with a familiar fob watch, which he consulted calmly. “Nine-thirty, local time.”
“What?” The Doctor rubbed at his gritty eyes with the back of his free hand. He really needed to give up sleeping. Permanently. “How did it get that late? We should have been there hours ago; we could have explored without any interference.”
“I suppose that’s what happens when you dismantle the alarm clock,” the Master said mildly. “You should be glad there wasn’t a fire; we'd be dead.”
“You could have woken me,” the Doctor muttered, climbing out of the bed and hauling the Master behind him.
“But you’re adorable when you sleep,” the Master said, and the Doctor whirled to stare at him. The Master winked. “Besides,” he went on airily, “I’m flattered that you still dream of me.”
“Not all of our nightmares are about librarians,” the Doctor said, picking up the scanner and focusing on it so he didn’t have to look at the Master’s face. “I told you not to listen in on my dreams. And how, pray tell, did you get past all the psychic barriers?” They were nothing terribly sophisticated, because he generally only required blocks built to foil a clever human, but they should at least have had an effect. The Master should have had a splitting headache or something by now.
Maybe the Master couldn’t distinguish headaches from the drums.
“A magician never tells,” the Master said. “Guess I just know you better than you know yourself.”
“Guess your ego always stays the same.”
The Master grinned. “One more thing you love about me.”
The Doctor pocketed his scanner, ran a cursory hand through his hair, and started for the door, dragging the Master with him.
-
“John Smith, health inspector.”
“Harold Saxon, undergarment inspector.”
“Will you shut up?”
The Master was enjoying this far too much. The Doctor jerked hard on the handcuffs as they turned a corner into a new hall.
“You know very well I’m incapable,” the Master remarked. “I have an underdeveloped whatsit. Amygdala?”
“I don’t think you know fear, no.”
“That’s not the one. Hypothalamus? I lack inhibitions.”
The Doctor drew them back into the room full of farm animals, scanning up and down. “You lack a lot of things.”
“Including your scientific curiosity,” the Master said. “I hope you know killing prisoners with boredom is also a flagrant violation of the Shadow Proclamation.”
“If you had an attention span,” the Doctor told him, “this wouldn’t be a problem. Speaking of which, how did you manage to hold Earth under your iron thumb for a year without one?”
“Superior delegation skills,” the Master answered calmly. “Even your scanner is bored.”
Unfortunately, it looked like he was right-there weren’t any extraordinary readings; the scanner was beeping quietly at regular intervals. These life forms were perfectly normal.
“Why did you even make that thing?” the Master asked.
“Hunch,” the Doctor said, and he turned in a slow circle, adjusting the little satellite on the top. “Hang on.” He wavered rightward, then leftward, then centered it-there was a faint but detectable increase in the tempo of readings when he angled it towards the north. “Right, then,” he said, making a distinct effort not to be smug. “Come on.”
The way the corridors wound and crossed, it was impossible to move in a straight line, which led to a merry round of the labyrinth game.
If the Master made one more comment about the Doctor’s talent for picking dead ends, the Doctor was going to shove the scanner down his throat and navigate by listening to his chest.
Directing them northward again, noting a tiny shortening of the interval, the Doctor was halfway down the latest hall before he noticed that he recognized this one.
“We’re going towards the Vivarium,” he realized.
“Just imagine,” the Master gushed. “Life in the Vivarium. Next they’ll put milk in milkshakes.”
“I’ve had a milkshake witho-”
“You have to be the thickest genius I’ve ever met.”
Before the Doctor could shut him up, possibly with the scanner, there was a substantial commotion further down the hall, just outside of the control room. The Doctor tried to jog over, but the Master dragged his feet, so they did more of a stumble-stagger thing.
When at last they arrived, a man with long black hair was most of the way into an elaborate protective suit, which a woman and yesterday’s young man were sealing carefully.
“John Smith, health inspector,” the Doctor said quickly, “and this is Harold Saxon, intergalactic criminal. He’s mostly harmless. What’s going on here, what’s all this?”
“Just the daily inspection,” the blond young man answered, fitting a glove on snugly. “Troy has clearance if you’d like to see it.”
“I believe you,” the Doctor said. “And we’ve met-what’s your name?”
“Eliot, sir,” the young man answered with a smile.
“Everything is under control here, Mr. Smith,” Troy told them just before the woman jammed his helmet on. He touched a button with one gloved hand, and after a stutter of feedback, his voice came through a speaker at the helmet’s base. “Routine, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Of course,” the Doctor said.
And of course they followed as Troy strode down the rest of the hall into the control room, and of course the scanner skipped a beep.
Troy positioned himself in front of the door to the enclosure, and Eliot pressed another button on the suit, which brought a darkened radiation visor swishing down, obscuring Troy’s face. Eliot smacked the operating button on the wall, the door hissed obediently open, Troy stepped out onto the fertile soil, and Eliot closed the door again.
“Now what?” the Doctor asked.
“Now most of us get back to work,” the woman muttered, departing, presumably to do just that.
Eliot reprised his spot in the rolling chair and leaned forward to the largest screen. “I’m supposed to keep track of all the times,” he explained. “So we know how long he’s in there, and then I can make a note of any unusual observations… it’s pretty boring stuff, though you’re welcome to stay if you like.”
“Love to, thanks,” the Doctor said cheerily.
The Master heaved a massive sigh. “He took the chair.”
“He only has one heart,” the Doctor pointed out. “He needs it more. Suck it up.”
“You are the bane of my existence.” The Master started making faces at his reflection in the glass. “When do we get to the part where things explode?”
“You’ll have to excuse him,” the Doctor said to Eliot. “He was dropped on his head as a child. Repeatedly, because his parents were trying to kill him.”
“The Shadow Proclamation has three chapters on slandering prisoners,” the Master said.
Eliot was chuckling, which was rather impressive given that they were essentially talking nonsense. The Doctor wasn’t sure whether to find the amusement flattering or disturbing. It was safer, he reasoned, not to decide, so he returned his attention to the still, tranquil, jungle-forest panorama laid out before them.
The Master was still pouting, but that wasn’t what struck him as the silence-broken only by the occasional squeak of Eliot’s chair as its occupant considered a different screen-spread out around them, filling the space. Artificial sunlight blazed down, backlighting the motionless leaves, and the Master sucked on the inside of his cheek.
The Doctor rubbed at the back of his neck, where the hairs were prickling portentously. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Something’s off.”
The Master rolled his eyes. “Apparently not your desperate need to compensate for real intellect by being enigmati-”
“It’s quiet,” Eliot said, blinking. “I-I mean, I’ve been feeling funny all morning, sitting here, and I just realized why. It’s gone quiet.”
“And that’s all wrong,” the Doctor agreed in a low voice. “Because we saw insects yesterday, and birds, and life, and now it’s all gone.”
“The trees are fine,” the Master said, eyes narrowing as he stared out past the glass. “Wouldn’t think you’d be the type to discriminate against slightly less sentient life forms, Doctor. And your scanner must be broken, because it measures life, and it brought us here.”
“No,” the Doctor said, “it measures abnormal vital signs. Should pick up alien life in particular, present company excepted.”
The Master rolled his eyes and drummed his fingers on the console. “Figures we’re not even alien enough for y-”
Troy stepped into view, appearing from the edge of the window, looming up against the glass. The distant white lights sent his shadow sprawling across the consoles, and he raised one hand to knock twice.
“All clear,” he said, voice tinny through the comm. “Let me in.”
Eliot scurried to hit the button that opened the airlock door, and Troy stumped inside. Eliot rapped the switch again, and the door slid shut.
“All clear, then,” Eliot remarked contentedly. “We were getting a little worried, seeing as how it’s so quiet all of a sudden.” He started back towards the nearest console and drew up his spreadsheet, chewing his lip as he input the date and time. “You all right, mate? You’re awfully quiet yourself.”
The Doctor looked at Troy, who was turning his head slowly, considering the company and then the consoles from behind the darkly-shaded visor of his helmet.
“There are four light sources in here,” the Master muttered.
“That’s lovely,” the Doctor replied, glancing back at Eliot, who was searching for the key he wanted. “I’m glad they built this place to your drums’ standards.”
“Count the shadows,” the Master said.
There were four light sources in the control room, and five shadows spread from Troy’s booted heels.
“Oh, no,” the Doctor heard himself breathe, his heartbeats starting to thunder in his ears. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”
The Master swallowed audibly. “I always assumed that was just a catchphrase.”
“Eliot,” the Doctor said deliberately, “run. Run now and do not stop until you are as far away from here as you can get. Off the planet if you can, now run.”
The young man rose from his chair uncertainly. “But-”
“Now!”
Eliot ran, and the Doctor thanked his lucky stars, of which there were a few.
Just not enough.
“Now listen to me,” the Doctor said to the microscopic creatures swarming in the suit. “Listen close, because if you can make his voice work, you can understand. Troy, if there is any of you left in there, still feeling, please do everything you can to fight them. Don’t let them move, or you will not be their last victim, and you’re strong enough; I know you are. And to the parasites that have taken Troy, I will find you a home, find you a world, feed you, help you, save you, if you just stop now.”
The helmet of the suit tilted, as if there was still a thinking head inside.
“St… stop?” it asked. “But we… are st… starving…”
The Master’s hand tightened on the Doctor’s arm so quickly that his fingers tingled.
“Look at the shadows,” he whispered.
The Doctor looked closely, and the fifth one was growing-lengthening, creeping across the floor, expanding from Troy’s feet like radiation from a sun.
It was getting awfully close.
“One last chance,” the Doctor said, raising his voice. “One last chance to give this up before-”
“Toodles,” the Master cut in, turning and running straight down the hall, the handcuffs dragging the Doctor after.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor howled, lurching after the Master, trying to ignore the roaring of his hearts in his ears as he heard Troy’s footsteps start up, slow but unmistakable.
“You and I both know he was already dead,” the Master said, jerking them around a corner. “And we were about to be. Now think of something.”
“You think of something!” the Doctor fired back, his trainers squealing on the linoleum as they rounded another turn.
“You’re the one with practical experience,” the Master said.
“Fine!” the Doctor snapped, running ahead and shoving through a thin steel door. He slammed it shut after them and took the screwdriver to the lock, watching through the small porthole as Troy’s deliberate steps brought him around the corner and into view.
They slumped against the wall for a moment, catching their breath, and the Doctor hauled the Master’s hand along with his in order to run his own through his hair.
“Right, then,” he said lightly. “You must remember that Academy lecture.”
“They told us how to recognize foreign species,” the Master reminded him. “They didn’t usually conclude with how to kill them.”
“An enormous oversight,” the Doctor said.
“Evidently,” the Master replied.
They both laughed uneasily, and then the creatures inside Troy banged his fists against the door.
“Exactly how strong is a sonic lock?” the Master asked.
“Let’s not wait and see,” the Doctor answered, pulling them up and starting off again at a run.
The labyrinth game was even more fun when you were running at top speed, careening through the halls trying to avoid untimely death. The Master’s scuffed dress shoes skidded as the linked Time Lords swung around a particularly sharp turn, and then his feet slid out from under him, and they toppled to the floor together, the collision knocking the Doctor’s breath right out of his lungs.
“That’s it,” he wheezed, gathering himself up again. The Master did likewise, one hand over his left heart, the other at the small of his back. “We need to get you a pair of Cons.”
“I have millions of cons,” the Master panted. “Some executed, some planned, some just fondly envisioned. Where the hell are we?”
“No idea,” the Doctor said. “Come on.”
Another short sprint brought them through a set of double doors, which swung open and then kept swinging as the Doctor took in the room they’d burst into.
It was a claustrophobic room with white walls. In the center of the far one stood a steel door with a small, square window, and beside it, a familiar blond was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning back with his eyes closed.
“Eliot?” the Doctor said incredulously.
“Oh,” Eliot said, looking up at them morosely. “Hello. With what you were saying-with whatever got Troy-I thought-well, I figured-”
“Spit it out,” the Master said.
“I hit the button for emergency lockdown,” Eliot responded. He sighed deeply. “And it worked great; set the alarm off and evacuated the building, just like it’s supposed to. Except apparently lockdown includes a quarantine of the area where the alert was activated.”
“Meaning here,” the Doctor said.
Eliot nodded miserably.
“Well,” the Doctor said, crossing to the door, “we can’t have that, can we?” He retrieved the sonic screwdriver and twirled it a little. “Does your lockdown include deadlock seals?”
He pointed, and the screwdriver whirred.
Nothing happened.
“Apparently it does,” the Doctor managed, lowering his arm.
The Master snatched the screwdriver out of his hand, changed the setting, and applied it to the glass, which shattered on contact.
“Quarantine compromised,” a polite, vaguely female voice announced.
“Compromise is the foundation of progress,” the Master said, and kicked in the door.
The Doctor was a little bit impressed.
But just a little.
He jerked them back from the now-open doorway and ignored the Master’s outraged look, gesturing to their rather more vulnerable human companion.
“Eliot, you go first,” he said. “Lead the way.”
Eliot scrambled up and bounded off ahead, and the Doctor silently celebrated humans who could actually react in universe-threatening danger. They seemed to be few and far between.
The Doctor stopped celebrating when another desperate run brought them to a storage room that didn’t appear to have an exit. It didn’t appear to have much of anything at all.
Barely had the Doctor raised an eyebrow at Eliot when the boy’s knees were shaking, and he delved both hands into his hair, with which the Doctor had to sympathize at least a bit.
“Let me guess,” the Master said dryly. “It’s your first week here, and you fell asleep during the training slideshow.”
Eliot stared at him, torn between the larger horror and this new disbelief. “How’d you know?”
The Master smiled pleasantly. “I killed a few who did that.”
“Will you shut up?” the Doctor snapped. “Besides, when time reversed, we saved them.”
“We did no such thing,” the Master retorted, “and I killed them before the paradox. I had to test the screwdriver, you know.”
Speaking of screwdrivers, the Doctor took his back, slammed the door to this room shut, and locked it behind them, and then he started scanning for objects of interest.
The Master, of course, had little choice but to follow reluctantly. “What the hell do they intend to do with a Vivarium full of Vashta Nerada anyway?” he asked. “Win first place at the annual invisible fish competition?”
The Doctor spared him a glance. The Master’s eyes widened.
“You think they’re making an army?”
“At this juncture,” the Doctor said grimly, “yes.”
The Master seemed to be floored. “They’re growing an army of bloodthirsty, practically invisible air-piranhas. That’s gorgeous. Why didn’t I think of that?”
They’d reached the back wall, but the sonic frequency indicated that there was another room directly behind it. They were rather trapped.
“Well,” the Doctor said, “empirically speaking, your plan was the best I’ve seen, since it actually worked. No one ever gets to the takeover stage, but you made it well beyond.”
“Oh, Doctor,” the Master said, grinning. “I didn’t know you cared.”
The Doctor wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, well… anyway, speaking of bloodthirsty, practically invisible air-piranhas, let’s make sure the whole of the universe doesn’t get eaten by them.”
“To hell with the universe,” the Master said. “Let’s make sure we don’t get eaten.”
“Who are you?” Eliot asked uncertainly. “I mean, who are you really? You talk about these crazy things like they’re normal, and you understand each other.”
There was a pause.
“Yeah,” the Doctor drawled. “That’s… complicated. Eliot, what kind of resources do we have here? All you need to know now is that there is an incredibly deadly plague waiting to happen in the Vivarium, and Troy is the carrier.”
Eliot swallowed. “So… what? We-destroy it?”
The Master grinned. “I like the way you think, Blondie.”
The Doctor tugged at his own hair, which was slightly difficult to do around the screwdriver still in his hand. “Contain it. If we can contain it-”
“We’ve compromised quarantine,” the Master said. “It’s time for destruction.”
The Doctor scowled at him and started pacing, which was difficult given their arrangement. On the second about-face upon reaching a wall, he saw that the Master had lifted his free hand to his temple, wincing heavily. As naturally as he could manage, the Doctor transitioned to searching their surroundings again. They needed to get out of here and get back to working on the underlying problems, on the larger picture, on what could be a small but glorious return from the brink of extinction. They weren’t alone, and that in itself was something.
The Master had set his jaw, and he was suffering behind blank eyes by the time the Doctor started opening crates and boxes, all of which seemed to contain medical equipment or janitorial gear.
“After we’re done here,” the Doctor remarked, watching him, “we should head back to Earth. Take a vacation. Someplace scenic.”
“I’d be recognized,” the Master said tonelessly. “Britons would ask for my autograph. And/or casual sex.”
The Doctor made a point of looking him up and down. “We could disguise you. We could bleach your hair.”
The Master bared his teeth, and the Doctor gloried quietly in the flare of life. “No,” the Master hissed. “Never again.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” the Doctor insisted, fighting with a grin. “I was a natural blond; I didn’t know how to do it.”
“There are mistakes,” the Master said, “and then there are crimes against the species. My mother almost killed me.”
“Once she stopped laughing,” the Doctor noted.
“That wasn’t laughter,” the Master told him. “It was hyperventilation.”
“It’s a thin line,” the Doctor said.
The Master snorted. “About as thin as the asteroid belt.”
“The asteroid belt is thin in spots,” the Doctor said.
“So’s your logic,” the Master replied.
The Doctor opened another cardboard box blazoned with the Vivarium logo-a miniature planet cradled by a stylized V. This one held a few different chemicals for the laboratory, and he pushed it aside.
“You could help,” he remarked.
The Master frowned. “This is your job. I break things, remember?”
The Doctor stopped in his search, planting both hands on the edge of the latest crate (plastic buckets and a cleaning solution so volatile it had been outlawed in one galaxy) to look the Master in the eyes.
“If this planet dies,” he said deliberately, “we die with it. And even if we somehow manage to escape when we regenerate, I will never take you to the world premiere of the first episode of ‘Teletubbies.’”
The Master scowled at him for a long moment, but then he jerked a box out of the stack and pried it open.
“If you put it that way,” he muttered, “how can I refuse?”
“…‘Teletubbies’?” Eliot asked faintly.
“A staggering work of illuminating genius,” the Master explained.
“So-so these… Vashy… things…”
“Vashta Nerada,” the Doctor corrected idly.
“Yeah,” Eliot said. “Those. Where did they come from?”
“I imagine whoever is in charge of this place seeded the Vivarium with larvae.” The Doctor scanned for a box that contained something metal, but when he pulled one out, there was nothing in it but a microscope. “Then Miss Lee’s enzyme stimulant accelerated their growth-presumably faster than the organizer intended-and today they hatched. I assume they were meant to grow unnoticed, and they were to be fed with all those live animals we happened on. If they’d done their maths right, it might’ve worked rather nicely.”
“How can you kill a Vashta Nerada?” Eliot asked.
The Master had found a long lighter and was playing with the trigger. Of course he would be a pyro. The Doctor took the thing away from him and shoved it into a pocket for safety’s sake.
“I… don’t know,” he admitted. “They didn’t really brief us on that sort of thing at the Acade…”
He stopped, looking down at what appeared to be a large hamster ball.
“Oh,” he breathed.
This could be bad-this could be terrible-but it wasn’t worse than falling into shadow. It wasn’t worse than the obliteration of Poltiro and maybe more, than seeing Eliot’s life snuffed out, than another lost battle on his long, long list. It wasn’t worse than dying here, even if that wasn’t forever, right after he’d finally summoned a bit of bright light to the Master’s distracted eyes.
The Doctor took a deep breath, held it, and let it go.
He found the chemicals, the abrasive cleaner, the plastic ball, and a pair of safety goggles and laid them out in a line, placing the lighter at the end. Then he swallowed hard, unlocked the handcuffs, and dropped them beside the other objects that might have been their salvation now.
The Master was watching him closely, eyes half-narrowed and intent. The Doctor met that gaze, part suspicious and part accusatory though it was, and then drew his screwdriver and added it to the row.
“Master,” he said. “I need you to improvise the most powerful explosive that you can.”
Silence. The Master had been rubbing at his wrist, but he went completely still.
“Have Eliot help you,” the Doctor said. “I’m going to try to lead Troy away from you to buy some time. If I can’t find my way back here within fifteen minutes to assist you, you’re going to go to the terrarium and ignite as much of it as possible. Stay out of the shadows.” He mustered a smile. A TARDIS wasn’t built to translate Gallifreyan, because the owner of one wasn’t supposed to need it. “Good luck.”
He wasn’t sure why he hesitated, standing there watching the Master look from one item to another and then, incredulously, up to him. But it meant he was still there when the Master lunged forward, buried both hands in his hair, and kissed him wildly, ferociously, with a resonating hunger and need and possession, with just a fragment of apology. A few critical parts of the Doctor’s brain melted, and his insides went embarrassingly wobbly. He was, as the Master sucked on his bottom lip and slid soft fingertips around the curves of his ears, fast discovering another reason Lucy Saxon had chanced everything on a man who did not exist.
The Master drew back and immediately focused his attention on the materials at hand, and the Doctor didn’t dare to look at Eliot. He cleared his throat once, and then twice, and then gave up and ran.
He was running towards the Vivarium, ready to offer himself as bait, but he was also running to keep ahead of the tide of memories cresting at his heels-things suppressed and submerged and crushed down in the vain hopes that he had the power to forget, and denial had the power to erase.
He recognized a flickering fluorescent light they’d seen before. He was getting close, and the past was catching up.
“Theta…”
“Just a minute.”
“It’s important.”
Theta snorted and winked. “More important than the ancient origin of the Judoon? Can’t be.”
But Koschei looked serious-grave, even. Almost a little scared.
Theta tossed the textbook aside, ignoring the way it crumpled a few of its own pages as it hit his pillow, and went to Koschei, taking both his hands.
“I’m listening,” he said, smiling gently for good measure. “What is it?”
Koschei smiled back hesitantly, searching his eyes, squeezing his fingers, a tremor coursing through his shoulders and down his spine.
“Theta,” he said, so softly it was hard to hear, “will you-will you marry me?”
This was so much like the time two summers ago that Koschei had pushed him into the manor’s freezing lake that Theta thought for a long moment that he was having a flashback. His lungs were empty-all of him was empty; he was carved out and cavelike, nothing but a lace of crystallized ice to line his skull, to fill his chest.
“Kosch, that’s forever.” He choked on the last syllable.
Koschei’s grip on his hands was cutting off his circulation. “Of course it is, stupid.”
“No,” Theta insisted, “it’s really forever. Because we’re going to last forever, or near enough.”
“I know that.”
“But what if-what if something happens, and one of us regenerates? Or both of us do? Or what if we just-change?”
Koschei’s smile was small and warm and horrible, because it fell like lead into the pit of Theta’s stomach. “I’m not going to change. Not unless you tell me to, remember?”
“But your family-”
“I’ll talk them into it.”
“But what about-” Theta couldn’t breathe. What about the universe? What about the stars? What about endless expanses of nothing and clusters of life and people and progress? What about thousands, millions, billions of places they’d never seen? What about the wide-open anything the TARDIS meant, and the innumerable possibilities, and the travel and the discovery and the dreams made realer than any imaginary detail?
What about the only thing Theta had ever wanted as much as Koschei?
“I love you,” Theta said, and it felt like drowning. “You know that. I always have. That won’t change.”
“Then what’s so wrong with forever?” Koschei asked, smiling and then grinning and then beaming, and then catching Theta in a suffocating hug.
“Nothing,” Theta whispered, curling his fingers in Koschei’s hair, which was dark like a deep night’s sky without the stars.
The Doctor scrambled around a corner, darting out of the shadow of some shelving, and kept on running.
And then he swerved around the next turn and found himself a corridor away from a neat package of predator.
Troy’s sightless visor turned towards him-that was interesting, the indomitable scientist within him observed; were Troy’s residual instincts influencing the parasites?-and the Doctor planted his feet and raised his chin. It wasn’t too unlike that time with Billy the Kid when they’d… well.
The suit swiveled fully, and it cocked his head again.
“Notice anything?” the Doctor called. “Time Lord. You want food? I’ve got a dozen lives. I’m a feast. Smell it, don’t you? Others have.”
“F… feast,” Troy’s voice repeated haltingly.
“That’s right,” the Doctor said, wiggling his fingers where his hands hung at his sides. “Come and get me.”
The layer of darkness in Troy’s helmet receded quickly, revealing the flayed, fleshless skeleton beneath. The Doctor clenched his teeth and watched as the Vashta Nerada poured their energy into the extra shadow at Troy’s feet, stretching it forward down the hall, blanketing the muted tiles. The Doctor waited, and waited, and let the Troy-shaped tendril draw closer to his half-turned trainers, poised to run.
When the carnivorous menace was half a meter from his toes, extended thinly over the length of the corridor, he spun on his heel and bolted, not without a parting shot: “You’ll have to try a bit harder than that!”
Making sure to slow down at corners, giving the Vashta Nerada plenty of time to track his route and follow, the Doctor jogged through the tangle of halls, inwardly cursing their architect for the umpteenth time. He was relatively sure he was leading the creatures progressively further from the Master’s makeshift explosives lab, but educated guesses didn’t look like much when juxtaposed with certain death.
Why was it always certain death? Couldn’t he have had fifty-fifty death for once?
All the same, the Doctor’s educated guesses were generally sound, and today they were fortunately serving him well. He’d left the storerooms far behind, which he figured gave him leave to speed up a little and put some distance between him and the ravenous shadows scenting for his blood. He would just have to be careful that he didn’t end up too close to the compound’s primary entrance, the front wall of which was composed almost entirely of tall windows-a pretty feature and a pretty way to release Vashta Nerada into the air, the larger planet, anywhere they could stow away to from there. He just had to avoid the lobby, and they’d be off to an acceptable start.
The Doctor knew many things. One of the things he knew was that you didn’t generally avoid things by walking directly into them.
“Hell,” the Doctor said, lacking the breath or the patience for eloquence.
“Hello?” a voice asked in answer.
[PART I] [PART III]
Part: 2
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Simm!Master/Ten, Koschei/Theta
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~7,200
Warnings: language, snark, mild violence, sexual situations, spoilers through DW S4
Summary: The Master breaks things in the TARDIS until the Doctor almost goes insane, then they end up in the Vivarium, and then all hell breaks loose. The Doctor is not liking any of this - and while he's at it, the dream-flashback-things really, really need to stop.
Author's Note: ajkfdjslakjkd. (…not as a place-holder; as an emotion.)
LIKE OLD TIMES - PART II
“This is hell,” the Master said. “I’ve thought it all over and done the math, and this is definitely hell.”
The Doctor was attempting to jury-rig a multipurpose scanner out of their hotel room’s television remote, alarm clock, and smoke detector, with a few parts from the electric toothbrush he’d bought in the shop downstairs.
Yet another reason why every establishment really ought to have a shop.
“Are you sure it’s hell?” the Doctor asked bemusedly. He’d temporarily unlocked the handcuffs, because it was hard enough to focus through the commentary without fighting for control of his hand as well. “It could be Tartarus. Or Naraka. Or Xibalbá, depending on whom you’re talking to.”
“It’s hell,” the Master announced. “I’m investigating an oversized science fair project on a planet your PMSing TARDIS picked, I’m handcuffed to you, and the only thing I can find to eat is pistachios.” He snapped another shell open and flung it into the bowl he’d balanced on his stomach. “Hell.”
If the Doctor could magnify the capacity of the sensor from the smoke detector, since it already gauged temperature, particle concentration, and carbon monoxide levels- “Don’t you like pistachios?”
“I love pistachios,” the Master said. “Which is precisely why I hate them, because they’re impossible to open. They exist solely to mock anyone who tries to eat them, and you think I’m sadistic.” He wrestled with another one, his cheeks coloring. “Fuck!”
The Doctor reached across the bed and subjected the stubborn pistachio to a quick jolt of sonic energy, which popped the shell cleanly in half, and then he returned to his work.
There was blessed silence for a moment, and then-
“You bastard,” the Master said.
“You’re welcome,” the Doctor said.
“Patronizing a prisoner is bad form even for you,” the Master muttered. “I’m willing to bet the Shadow Proclamation takes my side on this one. This fits squarely under ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’”
“You want to stop by and ask them about it when we’re done here?” the Doctor asked.
“No.” The Master was pouting again. “That woman creeps the living hell out of me. She looks like all of my librarian-related nightmares at once.”
“You were disruptive,” the Doctor reminded him. “The librarians had every right to try to intimidate you.”
“I wouldn’t have been disruptive if you hadn’t made me yell at you,” the Master fired back.
“You didn’t yell,” the Doctor said. “You chased me through three halls of reference books, screaming like a maniac. G through P. I remember.”
“You deserved it.”
“You deserved the reprimand. And the nightmares.”
The Master snapped another pistachio open and threw half of the shell at the Doctor’s head.
The Doctor soldered one last connection with the screwdriver and then stood up, looking at the Master sternly. “All right. Bedtime.”
The Master beamed. “Are you going to tell me a story?”
The Doctor relegated the pistachios to the nightstand next to his scanner, securely replaced the handcuffs, and settled on the other side of the double bed. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a Time Lord who demonstrated such inconceivable immaturity that the wiser, handsomer Time Lord babysitting him had to abandon him on a planet entirely populated by librarians.”
“You would never,” the Master scoffed. “You don’t believe in suffering unless you’re the one doing it.”
The Doctor set his jaw and turned out the light.
It was quiet for a moment, and as his eyes adjusted-extremely quickly; humans had it bad-to the dim city lights that filtered through the blinds at the window, he dared to hope they might have achieved something like peace.
Then the Master shifted, and his dreams were crushed.
“Stop touching me,” the Doctor said.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Well, maybe that’s because you handcuffed us together.”
“It was necessary. Is necessary.”
“That, or you just like bondage. Bet you learned it from the Freak.”
“His name is Jack.”
“Bet you learned it from Jack the Freak.”
“Jack Harkness.”
“Jack Harkness the Freak. My, but you’re hung up on specificity tonight. You should just be glad I didn’t call him the Fuckbuddy, since that’s obviously the reason you brought him alo-”
“If you don’t shut up this instant and go to sleep, I will use the newest sonic setting to interfere with your gag reflex and leave you vomiting up pistachios all night. Do not tempt me, my friend.”
There was a merciful silence.
“A sonic screwdriver can’t do that,” the Master decided.
There was another.
“…can it?”
“Go to sleep,” the Doctor said.
There was a third silence, presumably just to round things out.
“…you think we’re friends?” the Master asked.
The Doctor buried his face in the pillow.
-
Koschei’s bedroom had a balcony that looked out over the terraces, the field, and the forest. The last of the sunbeams struck sparks on silver leaves, like steel in a forge beneath the burnt peach-orange of the sky, but Theta was looking up at the first of the stars. Koschei’s long fingers were stroking through his hair, and the sky was darkening to rust around the little points of light.
Koschei’s hand drifted down to his shoulders, over his back, fingertips brushing at his spine. “Keep thinking that hard, you’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m not,” Theta said. “And I won’t.”
“You’ll strain something,” Koschei said, smoothing his hand over Theta’s forehead, as if he might rub the wrinkles out. “I know you. And then you’ll whine.”
Theta peeled his gaze off of the sky, smiling. “Then I guess you’ll just have to shut me up.”
Koschei’s deep blue eyes looked violet in the failing light. “Good thing,” he murmured, leaning in, breath cool and moist in the dry night, “you’re so easy to distract.”
Theta grinned into the kiss, spreading his fingers on Koschei’s neck, feeling his pulses, touching his ears. He was still grinning when Koschei curled one hand in his hair and the other around his wrist, dragging him back into the room, back to the neat bed, last night’s rumpled sheets spread and folded and hidden away.
“What’s the rush?” Theta asked coyly as Koschei pushed him down on the mattress, climbing over him, straddling his hips. “We’ve got eternity, you know.”
Koschei pinned his wrists above his head, mouthing warmly at his jaw. “Eternity’s not long enough.”
Theta writhed, back arching, stretching for Koschei’s warmth. “I’m not-I’m not thinking anymore-”
Koschei drew his tongue slowly up Theta’s throat, and his soft breath sent waves and tremors through Theta’s very bones. “That’s the way I like y-”
The Doctor woke up with a deep gasp already past his lips, tumbling back into the present only to see the Master hastily withdrawing one hand from beside his temple.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor yelped, loud enough for a flash of guilt on the behalf of their neighbors. His voice hardened. “You have no right to read my dreams. None. That’s far out of bounds, even by your standards.”
“It’s the only way to know anything about you,” the Master retorted, flexing his fingers, his eyes gleaming in the dark. “Anything other than your firmly-held belief that technobabble is good for the soul, anyway.”
“It is good for the soul,” the Doctor said. He shifted away, facing the wall, trying to relax his shoulders and finding them implacable. “You should try it sometime, if you still have one.”
“Two hearts and no soul,” the Master said. “Imagine that. Sounds like typical Time Lord physiology to me.”
“Leave it,” the Doctor warned, rolling over again to look at him.
“Do you defend them, too?” the Master asked bitterly. “The venerable Time Lords. Since you and I are the only ones who survived, logic would say we’re the strongest, don’t you think? That’s a laugh. They tried to turn us into soldiers… instead, they made you into an attention-deficit, depressive neurotic, and they turned me into a megalomaniacal psychopath.” He grinned, viciously. “I’d call that naught for two.”
The Doctor watched the flickering eyes. “Would you go back?” he asked.
The Master’s voice was flat. “We can’t. You said so yourself. You caused it.”
“I know that,” the Doctor answered. “But if we could, would you?”
The Master looked at him, silently, and then he leaned in very close, his eyes alight.
“In a nanosecond,” he said.
Steadily, belying the way his insides curled, the Doctor met his gaze. “Why?”
The Master smiled crookedly. “Because it’s home.”
After a moment of stillness, the Doctor wriggled his fingers, adjusting the angle of his wrist in the handcuff, and nodded vaguely.
“What about you?” the Master purred. “Would you go back to Gallifrey?”
They knew each other far too well, which was why the Doctor knew that the truer question was If we could do it all again, would you look at me instead of at the sky?
“No,” the Doctor said, and turned his back on the last fellow survivor of his species.
The last fellow survivor of his species breathed warmly on the back of his neck, and he twisted away.
“Not even if we had my old bed again?” the Master asked.
“Go to sleep,” the Doctor said.
“I don’t like sleeping,” the Master muttered. “It’s too damned human.”
“So is whining incessantly about my rules.”
“You know humanity is contagious.”
“I hope so,” the Doctor said, and he pointedly shut his eyes and his mouth.
-
They were in their shared room at the Academy, in the bed made for one, sticky and sated, one of Koschei’s arms bent under the pillow, the other wrapped around Theta’s waist. They were just looking at each other, saying it all silently, because telepathy wasn’t quite as wonderful as knowing someone so well that you didn’t need it in the first place.
“Theta,” Koschei said after a long time, after full minutes had passed. “If you ever… if you ever think you’re getting tired of me, just-tell me so. I can change. I can be anything you want.”
Theta was supposed to say “Don’t be ridiculous; I want you, Kosch, and that’s it.” That was what happened next; it was a given; except… he didn’t speak at all.
Koschei’s hand lifted and settled against his cheek, brushing his damp hair back, smoothing a thumb over his cheekbone.
“I promise,” Koschei said, and then he proved it.
He just sort of-faded at first, the colors of his skin and his eyes dulling, the contours of his face and his shoulder getting fuzzy, and then he blurred.
Slowly at first, and then more quickly, Koschei… changed. He had a long face with a dark beard and strangely sad eyes, and then his face was different, and he was smirking, but not too unkindly, and then his eyes flared yellow, the pupils narrowing to slits. Then they settled to an almost-familiar gold-flecked brown, and a warm grin spread across his face.
“I told you,” he murmured, lifting his right hand, a green ring gleaming, to brush the tips of his fingers over Theta’s cheek again.
“But you’re different,” Theta said, voice quavering. “I don’t want you to to be different. I don’t want you to disappear.”
Not-Koschei smiled again, lopsidedly. “I’m not going anywhere. And I never will.”
Hesitantly Theta laid his hand over this new man’s where it had settled against his jaw. He ran his thumb over its knuckles, over its breadth-
“Who are you?” he asked.
Another smile. “That’s not as important as what I am.”
Theta raised his other hand, pressing it against the man’s chest-right and left, two hearts.
“What are you, then?”
“Yours,” the man whispered, the corner of his lips curling up.
-
Groggily, as he swam into consciousness, the Doctor tried to scrub both hands across his eyes only to encounter the handcuffs again.
Then he was awake.
So were the birds outside the window and an invasive beam of strong sunlight.
Well. Sunlight couldn’t really wake up, per se. Well, it couldn’t unless-
Anyway.
“What time is it?” the Doctor mumbled, glancing over at the Master, who was lounging on the bed, effectively acting as a dead weight on the handcuffs.
The Master fished in his trouser pocket and came up with a familiar fob watch, which he consulted calmly. “Nine-thirty, local time.”
“What?” The Doctor rubbed at his gritty eyes with the back of his free hand. He really needed to give up sleeping. Permanently. “How did it get that late? We should have been there hours ago; we could have explored without any interference.”
“I suppose that’s what happens when you dismantle the alarm clock,” the Master said mildly. “You should be glad there wasn’t a fire; we'd be dead.”
“You could have woken me,” the Doctor muttered, climbing out of the bed and hauling the Master behind him.
“But you’re adorable when you sleep,” the Master said, and the Doctor whirled to stare at him. The Master winked. “Besides,” he went on airily, “I’m flattered that you still dream of me.”
“Not all of our nightmares are about librarians,” the Doctor said, picking up the scanner and focusing on it so he didn’t have to look at the Master’s face. “I told you not to listen in on my dreams. And how, pray tell, did you get past all the psychic barriers?” They were nothing terribly sophisticated, because he generally only required blocks built to foil a clever human, but they should at least have had an effect. The Master should have had a splitting headache or something by now.
Maybe the Master couldn’t distinguish headaches from the drums.
“A magician never tells,” the Master said. “Guess I just know you better than you know yourself.”
“Guess your ego always stays the same.”
The Master grinned. “One more thing you love about me.”
The Doctor pocketed his scanner, ran a cursory hand through his hair, and started for the door, dragging the Master with him.
-
“John Smith, health inspector.”
“Harold Saxon, undergarment inspector.”
“Will you shut up?”
The Master was enjoying this far too much. The Doctor jerked hard on the handcuffs as they turned a corner into a new hall.
“You know very well I’m incapable,” the Master remarked. “I have an underdeveloped whatsit. Amygdala?”
“I don’t think you know fear, no.”
“That’s not the one. Hypothalamus? I lack inhibitions.”
The Doctor drew them back into the room full of farm animals, scanning up and down. “You lack a lot of things.”
“Including your scientific curiosity,” the Master said. “I hope you know killing prisoners with boredom is also a flagrant violation of the Shadow Proclamation.”
“If you had an attention span,” the Doctor told him, “this wouldn’t be a problem. Speaking of which, how did you manage to hold Earth under your iron thumb for a year without one?”
“Superior delegation skills,” the Master answered calmly. “Even your scanner is bored.”
Unfortunately, it looked like he was right-there weren’t any extraordinary readings; the scanner was beeping quietly at regular intervals. These life forms were perfectly normal.
“Why did you even make that thing?” the Master asked.
“Hunch,” the Doctor said, and he turned in a slow circle, adjusting the little satellite on the top. “Hang on.” He wavered rightward, then leftward, then centered it-there was a faint but detectable increase in the tempo of readings when he angled it towards the north. “Right, then,” he said, making a distinct effort not to be smug. “Come on.”
The way the corridors wound and crossed, it was impossible to move in a straight line, which led to a merry round of the labyrinth game.
If the Master made one more comment about the Doctor’s talent for picking dead ends, the Doctor was going to shove the scanner down his throat and navigate by listening to his chest.
Directing them northward again, noting a tiny shortening of the interval, the Doctor was halfway down the latest hall before he noticed that he recognized this one.
“We’re going towards the Vivarium,” he realized.
“Just imagine,” the Master gushed. “Life in the Vivarium. Next they’ll put milk in milkshakes.”
“I’ve had a milkshake witho-”
“You have to be the thickest genius I’ve ever met.”
Before the Doctor could shut him up, possibly with the scanner, there was a substantial commotion further down the hall, just outside of the control room. The Doctor tried to jog over, but the Master dragged his feet, so they did more of a stumble-stagger thing.
When at last they arrived, a man with long black hair was most of the way into an elaborate protective suit, which a woman and yesterday’s young man were sealing carefully.
“John Smith, health inspector,” the Doctor said quickly, “and this is Harold Saxon, intergalactic criminal. He’s mostly harmless. What’s going on here, what’s all this?”
“Just the daily inspection,” the blond young man answered, fitting a glove on snugly. “Troy has clearance if you’d like to see it.”
“I believe you,” the Doctor said. “And we’ve met-what’s your name?”
“Eliot, sir,” the young man answered with a smile.
“Everything is under control here, Mr. Smith,” Troy told them just before the woman jammed his helmet on. He touched a button with one gloved hand, and after a stutter of feedback, his voice came through a speaker at the helmet’s base. “Routine, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Of course,” the Doctor said.
And of course they followed as Troy strode down the rest of the hall into the control room, and of course the scanner skipped a beep.
Troy positioned himself in front of the door to the enclosure, and Eliot pressed another button on the suit, which brought a darkened radiation visor swishing down, obscuring Troy’s face. Eliot smacked the operating button on the wall, the door hissed obediently open, Troy stepped out onto the fertile soil, and Eliot closed the door again.
“Now what?” the Doctor asked.
“Now most of us get back to work,” the woman muttered, departing, presumably to do just that.
Eliot reprised his spot in the rolling chair and leaned forward to the largest screen. “I’m supposed to keep track of all the times,” he explained. “So we know how long he’s in there, and then I can make a note of any unusual observations… it’s pretty boring stuff, though you’re welcome to stay if you like.”
“Love to, thanks,” the Doctor said cheerily.
The Master heaved a massive sigh. “He took the chair.”
“He only has one heart,” the Doctor pointed out. “He needs it more. Suck it up.”
“You are the bane of my existence.” The Master started making faces at his reflection in the glass. “When do we get to the part where things explode?”
“You’ll have to excuse him,” the Doctor said to Eliot. “He was dropped on his head as a child. Repeatedly, because his parents were trying to kill him.”
“The Shadow Proclamation has three chapters on slandering prisoners,” the Master said.
Eliot was chuckling, which was rather impressive given that they were essentially talking nonsense. The Doctor wasn’t sure whether to find the amusement flattering or disturbing. It was safer, he reasoned, not to decide, so he returned his attention to the still, tranquil, jungle-forest panorama laid out before them.
The Master was still pouting, but that wasn’t what struck him as the silence-broken only by the occasional squeak of Eliot’s chair as its occupant considered a different screen-spread out around them, filling the space. Artificial sunlight blazed down, backlighting the motionless leaves, and the Master sucked on the inside of his cheek.
The Doctor rubbed at the back of his neck, where the hairs were prickling portentously. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Something’s off.”
The Master rolled his eyes. “Apparently not your desperate need to compensate for real intellect by being enigmati-”
“It’s quiet,” Eliot said, blinking. “I-I mean, I’ve been feeling funny all morning, sitting here, and I just realized why. It’s gone quiet.”
“And that’s all wrong,” the Doctor agreed in a low voice. “Because we saw insects yesterday, and birds, and life, and now it’s all gone.”
“The trees are fine,” the Master said, eyes narrowing as he stared out past the glass. “Wouldn’t think you’d be the type to discriminate against slightly less sentient life forms, Doctor. And your scanner must be broken, because it measures life, and it brought us here.”
“No,” the Doctor said, “it measures abnormal vital signs. Should pick up alien life in particular, present company excepted.”
The Master rolled his eyes and drummed his fingers on the console. “Figures we’re not even alien enough for y-”
Troy stepped into view, appearing from the edge of the window, looming up against the glass. The distant white lights sent his shadow sprawling across the consoles, and he raised one hand to knock twice.
“All clear,” he said, voice tinny through the comm. “Let me in.”
Eliot scurried to hit the button that opened the airlock door, and Troy stumped inside. Eliot rapped the switch again, and the door slid shut.
“All clear, then,” Eliot remarked contentedly. “We were getting a little worried, seeing as how it’s so quiet all of a sudden.” He started back towards the nearest console and drew up his spreadsheet, chewing his lip as he input the date and time. “You all right, mate? You’re awfully quiet yourself.”
The Doctor looked at Troy, who was turning his head slowly, considering the company and then the consoles from behind the darkly-shaded visor of his helmet.
“There are four light sources in here,” the Master muttered.
“That’s lovely,” the Doctor replied, glancing back at Eliot, who was searching for the key he wanted. “I’m glad they built this place to your drums’ standards.”
“Count the shadows,” the Master said.
There were four light sources in the control room, and five shadows spread from Troy’s booted heels.
“Oh, no,” the Doctor heard himself breathe, his heartbeats starting to thunder in his ears. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”
The Master swallowed audibly. “I always assumed that was just a catchphrase.”
“Eliot,” the Doctor said deliberately, “run. Run now and do not stop until you are as far away from here as you can get. Off the planet if you can, now run.”
The young man rose from his chair uncertainly. “But-”
“Now!”
Eliot ran, and the Doctor thanked his lucky stars, of which there were a few.
Just not enough.
“Now listen to me,” the Doctor said to the microscopic creatures swarming in the suit. “Listen close, because if you can make his voice work, you can understand. Troy, if there is any of you left in there, still feeling, please do everything you can to fight them. Don’t let them move, or you will not be their last victim, and you’re strong enough; I know you are. And to the parasites that have taken Troy, I will find you a home, find you a world, feed you, help you, save you, if you just stop now.”
The helmet of the suit tilted, as if there was still a thinking head inside.
“St… stop?” it asked. “But we… are st… starving…”
The Master’s hand tightened on the Doctor’s arm so quickly that his fingers tingled.
“Look at the shadows,” he whispered.
The Doctor looked closely, and the fifth one was growing-lengthening, creeping across the floor, expanding from Troy’s feet like radiation from a sun.
It was getting awfully close.
“One last chance,” the Doctor said, raising his voice. “One last chance to give this up before-”
“Toodles,” the Master cut in, turning and running straight down the hall, the handcuffs dragging the Doctor after.
“What are you doing?” the Doctor howled, lurching after the Master, trying to ignore the roaring of his hearts in his ears as he heard Troy’s footsteps start up, slow but unmistakable.
“You and I both know he was already dead,” the Master said, jerking them around a corner. “And we were about to be. Now think of something.”
“You think of something!” the Doctor fired back, his trainers squealing on the linoleum as they rounded another turn.
“You’re the one with practical experience,” the Master said.
“Fine!” the Doctor snapped, running ahead and shoving through a thin steel door. He slammed it shut after them and took the screwdriver to the lock, watching through the small porthole as Troy’s deliberate steps brought him around the corner and into view.
They slumped against the wall for a moment, catching their breath, and the Doctor hauled the Master’s hand along with his in order to run his own through his hair.
“Right, then,” he said lightly. “You must remember that Academy lecture.”
“They told us how to recognize foreign species,” the Master reminded him. “They didn’t usually conclude with how to kill them.”
“An enormous oversight,” the Doctor said.
“Evidently,” the Master replied.
They both laughed uneasily, and then the creatures inside Troy banged his fists against the door.
“Exactly how strong is a sonic lock?” the Master asked.
“Let’s not wait and see,” the Doctor answered, pulling them up and starting off again at a run.
The labyrinth game was even more fun when you were running at top speed, careening through the halls trying to avoid untimely death. The Master’s scuffed dress shoes skidded as the linked Time Lords swung around a particularly sharp turn, and then his feet slid out from under him, and they toppled to the floor together, the collision knocking the Doctor’s breath right out of his lungs.
“That’s it,” he wheezed, gathering himself up again. The Master did likewise, one hand over his left heart, the other at the small of his back. “We need to get you a pair of Cons.”
“I have millions of cons,” the Master panted. “Some executed, some planned, some just fondly envisioned. Where the hell are we?”
“No idea,” the Doctor said. “Come on.”
Another short sprint brought them through a set of double doors, which swung open and then kept swinging as the Doctor took in the room they’d burst into.
It was a claustrophobic room with white walls. In the center of the far one stood a steel door with a small, square window, and beside it, a familiar blond was sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning back with his eyes closed.
“Eliot?” the Doctor said incredulously.
“Oh,” Eliot said, looking up at them morosely. “Hello. With what you were saying-with whatever got Troy-I thought-well, I figured-”
“Spit it out,” the Master said.
“I hit the button for emergency lockdown,” Eliot responded. He sighed deeply. “And it worked great; set the alarm off and evacuated the building, just like it’s supposed to. Except apparently lockdown includes a quarantine of the area where the alert was activated.”
“Meaning here,” the Doctor said.
Eliot nodded miserably.
“Well,” the Doctor said, crossing to the door, “we can’t have that, can we?” He retrieved the sonic screwdriver and twirled it a little. “Does your lockdown include deadlock seals?”
He pointed, and the screwdriver whirred.
Nothing happened.
“Apparently it does,” the Doctor managed, lowering his arm.
The Master snatched the screwdriver out of his hand, changed the setting, and applied it to the glass, which shattered on contact.
“Quarantine compromised,” a polite, vaguely female voice announced.
“Compromise is the foundation of progress,” the Master said, and kicked in the door.
The Doctor was a little bit impressed.
But just a little.
He jerked them back from the now-open doorway and ignored the Master’s outraged look, gesturing to their rather more vulnerable human companion.
“Eliot, you go first,” he said. “Lead the way.”
Eliot scrambled up and bounded off ahead, and the Doctor silently celebrated humans who could actually react in universe-threatening danger. They seemed to be few and far between.
The Doctor stopped celebrating when another desperate run brought them to a storage room that didn’t appear to have an exit. It didn’t appear to have much of anything at all.
Barely had the Doctor raised an eyebrow at Eliot when the boy’s knees were shaking, and he delved both hands into his hair, with which the Doctor had to sympathize at least a bit.
“Let me guess,” the Master said dryly. “It’s your first week here, and you fell asleep during the training slideshow.”
Eliot stared at him, torn between the larger horror and this new disbelief. “How’d you know?”
The Master smiled pleasantly. “I killed a few who did that.”
“Will you shut up?” the Doctor snapped. “Besides, when time reversed, we saved them.”
“We did no such thing,” the Master retorted, “and I killed them before the paradox. I had to test the screwdriver, you know.”
Speaking of screwdrivers, the Doctor took his back, slammed the door to this room shut, and locked it behind them, and then he started scanning for objects of interest.
The Master, of course, had little choice but to follow reluctantly. “What the hell do they intend to do with a Vivarium full of Vashta Nerada anyway?” he asked. “Win first place at the annual invisible fish competition?”
The Doctor spared him a glance. The Master’s eyes widened.
“You think they’re making an army?”
“At this juncture,” the Doctor said grimly, “yes.”
The Master seemed to be floored. “They’re growing an army of bloodthirsty, practically invisible air-piranhas. That’s gorgeous. Why didn’t I think of that?”
They’d reached the back wall, but the sonic frequency indicated that there was another room directly behind it. They were rather trapped.
“Well,” the Doctor said, “empirically speaking, your plan was the best I’ve seen, since it actually worked. No one ever gets to the takeover stage, but you made it well beyond.”
“Oh, Doctor,” the Master said, grinning. “I didn’t know you cared.”
The Doctor wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, well… anyway, speaking of bloodthirsty, practically invisible air-piranhas, let’s make sure the whole of the universe doesn’t get eaten by them.”
“To hell with the universe,” the Master said. “Let’s make sure we don’t get eaten.”
“Who are you?” Eliot asked uncertainly. “I mean, who are you really? You talk about these crazy things like they’re normal, and you understand each other.”
There was a pause.
“Yeah,” the Doctor drawled. “That’s… complicated. Eliot, what kind of resources do we have here? All you need to know now is that there is an incredibly deadly plague waiting to happen in the Vivarium, and Troy is the carrier.”
Eliot swallowed. “So… what? We-destroy it?”
The Master grinned. “I like the way you think, Blondie.”
The Doctor tugged at his own hair, which was slightly difficult to do around the screwdriver still in his hand. “Contain it. If we can contain it-”
“We’ve compromised quarantine,” the Master said. “It’s time for destruction.”
The Doctor scowled at him and started pacing, which was difficult given their arrangement. On the second about-face upon reaching a wall, he saw that the Master had lifted his free hand to his temple, wincing heavily. As naturally as he could manage, the Doctor transitioned to searching their surroundings again. They needed to get out of here and get back to working on the underlying problems, on the larger picture, on what could be a small but glorious return from the brink of extinction. They weren’t alone, and that in itself was something.
The Master had set his jaw, and he was suffering behind blank eyes by the time the Doctor started opening crates and boxes, all of which seemed to contain medical equipment or janitorial gear.
“After we’re done here,” the Doctor remarked, watching him, “we should head back to Earth. Take a vacation. Someplace scenic.”
“I’d be recognized,” the Master said tonelessly. “Britons would ask for my autograph. And/or casual sex.”
The Doctor made a point of looking him up and down. “We could disguise you. We could bleach your hair.”
The Master bared his teeth, and the Doctor gloried quietly in the flare of life. “No,” the Master hissed. “Never again.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” the Doctor insisted, fighting with a grin. “I was a natural blond; I didn’t know how to do it.”
“There are mistakes,” the Master said, “and then there are crimes against the species. My mother almost killed me.”
“Once she stopped laughing,” the Doctor noted.
“That wasn’t laughter,” the Master told him. “It was hyperventilation.”
“It’s a thin line,” the Doctor said.
The Master snorted. “About as thin as the asteroid belt.”
“The asteroid belt is thin in spots,” the Doctor said.
“So’s your logic,” the Master replied.
The Doctor opened another cardboard box blazoned with the Vivarium logo-a miniature planet cradled by a stylized V. This one held a few different chemicals for the laboratory, and he pushed it aside.
“You could help,” he remarked.
The Master frowned. “This is your job. I break things, remember?”
The Doctor stopped in his search, planting both hands on the edge of the latest crate (plastic buckets and a cleaning solution so volatile it had been outlawed in one galaxy) to look the Master in the eyes.
“If this planet dies,” he said deliberately, “we die with it. And even if we somehow manage to escape when we regenerate, I will never take you to the world premiere of the first episode of ‘Teletubbies.’”
The Master scowled at him for a long moment, but then he jerked a box out of the stack and pried it open.
“If you put it that way,” he muttered, “how can I refuse?”
“…‘Teletubbies’?” Eliot asked faintly.
“A staggering work of illuminating genius,” the Master explained.
“So-so these… Vashy… things…”
“Vashta Nerada,” the Doctor corrected idly.
“Yeah,” Eliot said. “Those. Where did they come from?”
“I imagine whoever is in charge of this place seeded the Vivarium with larvae.” The Doctor scanned for a box that contained something metal, but when he pulled one out, there was nothing in it but a microscope. “Then Miss Lee’s enzyme stimulant accelerated their growth-presumably faster than the organizer intended-and today they hatched. I assume they were meant to grow unnoticed, and they were to be fed with all those live animals we happened on. If they’d done their maths right, it might’ve worked rather nicely.”
“How can you kill a Vashta Nerada?” Eliot asked.
The Master had found a long lighter and was playing with the trigger. Of course he would be a pyro. The Doctor took the thing away from him and shoved it into a pocket for safety’s sake.
“I… don’t know,” he admitted. “They didn’t really brief us on that sort of thing at the Acade…”
He stopped, looking down at what appeared to be a large hamster ball.
“Oh,” he breathed.
This could be bad-this could be terrible-but it wasn’t worse than falling into shadow. It wasn’t worse than the obliteration of Poltiro and maybe more, than seeing Eliot’s life snuffed out, than another lost battle on his long, long list. It wasn’t worse than dying here, even if that wasn’t forever, right after he’d finally summoned a bit of bright light to the Master’s distracted eyes.
The Doctor took a deep breath, held it, and let it go.
He found the chemicals, the abrasive cleaner, the plastic ball, and a pair of safety goggles and laid them out in a line, placing the lighter at the end. Then he swallowed hard, unlocked the handcuffs, and dropped them beside the other objects that might have been their salvation now.
The Master was watching him closely, eyes half-narrowed and intent. The Doctor met that gaze, part suspicious and part accusatory though it was, and then drew his screwdriver and added it to the row.
“Master,” he said. “I need you to improvise the most powerful explosive that you can.”
Silence. The Master had been rubbing at his wrist, but he went completely still.
“Have Eliot help you,” the Doctor said. “I’m going to try to lead Troy away from you to buy some time. If I can’t find my way back here within fifteen minutes to assist you, you’re going to go to the terrarium and ignite as much of it as possible. Stay out of the shadows.” He mustered a smile. A TARDIS wasn’t built to translate Gallifreyan, because the owner of one wasn’t supposed to need it. “Good luck.”
He wasn’t sure why he hesitated, standing there watching the Master look from one item to another and then, incredulously, up to him. But it meant he was still there when the Master lunged forward, buried both hands in his hair, and kissed him wildly, ferociously, with a resonating hunger and need and possession, with just a fragment of apology. A few critical parts of the Doctor’s brain melted, and his insides went embarrassingly wobbly. He was, as the Master sucked on his bottom lip and slid soft fingertips around the curves of his ears, fast discovering another reason Lucy Saxon had chanced everything on a man who did not exist.
The Master drew back and immediately focused his attention on the materials at hand, and the Doctor didn’t dare to look at Eliot. He cleared his throat once, and then twice, and then gave up and ran.
He was running towards the Vivarium, ready to offer himself as bait, but he was also running to keep ahead of the tide of memories cresting at his heels-things suppressed and submerged and crushed down in the vain hopes that he had the power to forget, and denial had the power to erase.
He recognized a flickering fluorescent light they’d seen before. He was getting close, and the past was catching up.
“Theta…”
“Just a minute.”
“It’s important.”
Theta snorted and winked. “More important than the ancient origin of the Judoon? Can’t be.”
But Koschei looked serious-grave, even. Almost a little scared.
Theta tossed the textbook aside, ignoring the way it crumpled a few of its own pages as it hit his pillow, and went to Koschei, taking both his hands.
“I’m listening,” he said, smiling gently for good measure. “What is it?”
Koschei smiled back hesitantly, searching his eyes, squeezing his fingers, a tremor coursing through his shoulders and down his spine.
“Theta,” he said, so softly it was hard to hear, “will you-will you marry me?”
This was so much like the time two summers ago that Koschei had pushed him into the manor’s freezing lake that Theta thought for a long moment that he was having a flashback. His lungs were empty-all of him was empty; he was carved out and cavelike, nothing but a lace of crystallized ice to line his skull, to fill his chest.
“Kosch, that’s forever.” He choked on the last syllable.
Koschei’s grip on his hands was cutting off his circulation. “Of course it is, stupid.”
“No,” Theta insisted, “it’s really forever. Because we’re going to last forever, or near enough.”
“I know that.”
“But what if-what if something happens, and one of us regenerates? Or both of us do? Or what if we just-change?”
Koschei’s smile was small and warm and horrible, because it fell like lead into the pit of Theta’s stomach. “I’m not going to change. Not unless you tell me to, remember?”
“But your family-”
“I’ll talk them into it.”
“But what about-” Theta couldn’t breathe. What about the universe? What about the stars? What about endless expanses of nothing and clusters of life and people and progress? What about thousands, millions, billions of places they’d never seen? What about the wide-open anything the TARDIS meant, and the innumerable possibilities, and the travel and the discovery and the dreams made realer than any imaginary detail?
What about the only thing Theta had ever wanted as much as Koschei?
“I love you,” Theta said, and it felt like drowning. “You know that. I always have. That won’t change.”
“Then what’s so wrong with forever?” Koschei asked, smiling and then grinning and then beaming, and then catching Theta in a suffocating hug.
“Nothing,” Theta whispered, curling his fingers in Koschei’s hair, which was dark like a deep night’s sky without the stars.
The Doctor scrambled around a corner, darting out of the shadow of some shelving, and kept on running.
And then he swerved around the next turn and found himself a corridor away from a neat package of predator.
Troy’s sightless visor turned towards him-that was interesting, the indomitable scientist within him observed; were Troy’s residual instincts influencing the parasites?-and the Doctor planted his feet and raised his chin. It wasn’t too unlike that time with Billy the Kid when they’d… well.
The suit swiveled fully, and it cocked his head again.
“Notice anything?” the Doctor called. “Time Lord. You want food? I’ve got a dozen lives. I’m a feast. Smell it, don’t you? Others have.”
“F… feast,” Troy’s voice repeated haltingly.
“That’s right,” the Doctor said, wiggling his fingers where his hands hung at his sides. “Come and get me.”
The layer of darkness in Troy’s helmet receded quickly, revealing the flayed, fleshless skeleton beneath. The Doctor clenched his teeth and watched as the Vashta Nerada poured their energy into the extra shadow at Troy’s feet, stretching it forward down the hall, blanketing the muted tiles. The Doctor waited, and waited, and let the Troy-shaped tendril draw closer to his half-turned trainers, poised to run.
When the carnivorous menace was half a meter from his toes, extended thinly over the length of the corridor, he spun on his heel and bolted, not without a parting shot: “You’ll have to try a bit harder than that!”
Making sure to slow down at corners, giving the Vashta Nerada plenty of time to track his route and follow, the Doctor jogged through the tangle of halls, inwardly cursing their architect for the umpteenth time. He was relatively sure he was leading the creatures progressively further from the Master’s makeshift explosives lab, but educated guesses didn’t look like much when juxtaposed with certain death.
Why was it always certain death? Couldn’t he have had fifty-fifty death for once?
All the same, the Doctor’s educated guesses were generally sound, and today they were fortunately serving him well. He’d left the storerooms far behind, which he figured gave him leave to speed up a little and put some distance between him and the ravenous shadows scenting for his blood. He would just have to be careful that he didn’t end up too close to the compound’s primary entrance, the front wall of which was composed almost entirely of tall windows-a pretty feature and a pretty way to release Vashta Nerada into the air, the larger planet, anywhere they could stow away to from there. He just had to avoid the lobby, and they’d be off to an acceptable start.
The Doctor knew many things. One of the things he knew was that you didn’t generally avoid things by walking directly into them.
“Hell,” the Doctor said, lacking the breath or the patience for eloquence.
“Hello?” a voice asked in answer.
[PART I] [PART III]