for muse_shuffle: So you thought you might like to
So you thought you might like to
(Pink Floyd - 'In The Flesh?')
I could make you a Time Lord
The right answer is no. You should say no. You need to say no.
You are living the lifespan of your body. You are living the life you are meant to be living. You are what you are and it is wrong to play god. You were not meant to become again. You are this and you will never be anything more or less.
You need to say no.
You need to say no, but you want to say yes. It feels like there are so many things that you want that you let slip by, because you should do something else or you need to do something else. You want to be reckless and selfish and stupid.
You don’t care how wrong the answer is, you say yes.
You don’t want to lie anymore. You should lie, you need to lie, but you want to be honest, so you are, and you tell Him what you’re doing. He doesn’t approve, of course. You knew that. He gives you a speech. It’s not the one you expected and it almost sways you, but you don’t want to listen to reason. You don’t want to think about the ways you work as you are now. The Doctor, He is always jealous of everything. That’s what the Master tells you, and you want to believe the Master, so you do.
You leave Him for him and you know it’s wrong, and you know you should stay with Him and you need to stay with Him. Should has never gotten anyone anywhere though, and you’ve given up so much for what was needed. You only have so long, your life will be over before it begins, and a life this short should be ruled by wants, not needs.
You tell him all of this, what you‘ve done and what you want, and it’s much too honest for your taste. You want to be honest though, because pretending is necessary and difficult and that all feels so trite. He offers to take you on his Doctor’s TARDIS, and the way he asks is masked in a way that it doesn’t sound like asking at all. It sounds like a sacrifice of some sort, a new burden added to old ones. He has so long that he can find the time to pretend. Or maybe this is him, and you just want him to want you to come along. Because it’s what you want it’s what you’ll believe and it feels good to be selfish and delusional.
Eventually his Doctor finds out what the two of you are planning and objects. He tells his Master that he won’t allow it. There are words and gestures and as you watch them you wonder if cruelty is the only way the Master knows to mark the differences between Doctors. He is cruel with his Doctor in a way that he isn’t with you, and he isn’t with Him, but one Doctor’s reaction seems very much like another’s. You wonder if this is what you look like when he has all his cruelty focused on you.
You find Donna and you hide in her room and you tell her you don’t want to talk. She is fine with this, and even though she’s a Donna she’s still not your Donna. You can tell the differences so easily it scares you, because they’re not the sort of differences that anyone should really notice. She’s still a Donna though, and that’s all that’s important to you. You wonder if the way you look at her is the way he looks at Doctors. If he can mark the tiny differences, but having one is more than enough to make things fit more properly. You don’t think you’ll have this Donna much longer though, because you’re certain this Doctor will make him get rid of you. Then you’ll be left more alone than you were before he decided he could fix you.
But maybe he wants to fix you because it’s him saying he loves you in the only way he knows how. You’re not sure if this is what you want to believe or if it’s the truth. You decide you want it to be the truth and that makes it the truth, because you’re still only concerned with what you want. Shoulds and needs and rights are disregarded for the time being. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?
By some strange miracle, you get to stay. You don’t question it. You don’t want to know why or how, so you won’t know. You’re not sure if you two are sneaking around to get this done, or if the Master is just openly disregarding his Doctor’s wishes. You don’t care, and you don’t talk about it, and you want the topic to not even exist when his Doctor is about, so it doesn’t.
You’re on a cold steel table, sitting up on elbows. It all feels so crude and barbaric. He stands over you, and he looks like a doctor. You tell him as much and you think it’s funny. You want him to think it’s funny, too. He doesn’t react, or maybe he does and you just can’t see his reaction. His face is hidden behind a surgical mask. You want him to say something, something to make you feel better. This isn’t about what you want though, it never has been. This was always about what he wanted. Your heart, your one single heart, races. You’re confused and panicked and you don’t know what to do. You try to calm yourself because you don’t want him to see you like this. Of course he does, you’re so easy to read. He’s told you that so many times. You can feel your one single heart skip a beat entirely, panic replaced with terror as a gloved hand pushes you flat on your back against the cold steel table. The way he pushes you is gentle, too gentle, and it only makes the terror intensify.
An arm is restrained, and the restraints are soft and tight and seem to contrast too much with the cold steel table. It doesn’t help ease your terror at all because this is definitely not what you wanted. Before you can make yourself react, limbs are secured and a mask is over your face and gas fills your lungs. You can’t filter it out, because your body doesn’t work that way. You try to tell your body to stay awake. Arms and legs and hands and feet and everything in between, you try to rouse them into life, but they betray you one by one, numbness replacing feeling, until finally even your own mind betrays you and awareness is replaced with darkness and fog and nothingness.
Everything hurts and burns and you feel like you’re being torn apart from the inside out. Your eyes open, but all you see is light, and it’s blinding. You think you can make out his face in the light and you think you love him and you want to reach out and make sure he’s real. Your limbs are restrained though, and even if they weren’t you can’t control the way your limbs move. The pain is too much as your body writhes in agony. This is why restraints were necessary. You would scream out in pain, but the pain is too much and has left you mute. As suddenly as it began, something snaps. You can feel it. It still burns though, but it’s incomplete somehow. You hear him mutter something about power sources as he rushes to his equipment. You try to remember how to breath again, and something went wrong and your mind got ahead of your body a bit, because your heart is only working at half time, as is your respiratory system. It’s tricked itself into thinking you’ve made the jump all ready, that you have two hearts where you really only have one. You would tell your mind to remember what you are, but you’re too focused on gasping for breath. You’re afraid your heart is going to stop any moment now, it’s beating too slow by half.
He must’ve noticed, but you’re not sure how and you’re not sure why and all you can think about is making yourself work. He must be thinking the same thing. You are counting your breaths and they are too few and far between. Your lungs are too weak and shallow. Your body needs a twin respiratory system to help carry the load it needs - and your thoughts are cut sharply as your body fast forwards, doubles up, and once again is back in proper time. You’re not sure what he did and you don’t even ask because you don’t want to know. Once again, it’s only about what you want.
You wait for him to find what he needs to make it work. He says he needs to test it more, to avoid something like that happening again. You wait until the equipment or the tools or whatever it is he needs to make it work are ready. You don’t ask specifics because you don’t want to know.
Years or days or weeks pass by, you’re not sure. It must be years though, because you look older, and so does Donna, and even Lucy looks older. The Master and his Doctor still look as they always have, though. You avoid his Doctor as much as you can, his hair is still much too dark and yours is starting to show signs of grey. You don’t visit the Plane anymore. You don’t want to, and you won’t. It’s hard enough watching yourself age compared to a Doctor who still shares your face. You’ve heard the one you used to travel with has regenerated. He looks even younger than He did before, if that’s at all possible. You can’t bare the thought. You can’t look at Him if He’s something new, so you just won’t go to the Plane and you’ll believe that He is still as He was. It’s what you want, so it’s what you do.
You wonder if the Master still looks for a way to fix you, or if he’s forgotten and given up entirely on the prospect. You pass that room with the cold steel table one day, and you think you hear voices inside. Maybe he hasn’t forgotten you. You walk in, taking uncertain steps. You stop in horror as you look around the room. People disposed of so easily, randomly filling the empty spaces in between. Strangers are babbling in corners and staring vacantly at nothing and you stop as you see a familiar face. Counting on fingers and rattling off equations and he has your face, he always did. You wondered what had happened to him, and you told yourself he went back to his life of science and god and if you looked for him on the Plane you might see him.
You didn’t want to know.
You’re horrified as you look around. He had to run more tests, and the results of the tests sit and stand and lie before you. How many test subjects have there been? You don’t know. You didn’t want to know. That is what this all comes down to, isn’t it?
You can’t blame the Master. This is who he is, he‘s told you so many times. You’ve always known what he was capable of, you just didn‘t want to admit the truth. You didn‘t want to know. There is only one person to blame. This is your fault. You should‘ve known to say no, you needed to say no. You think you might be sick. He tells you they volunteered, they wanted the chance at something more. This was all for you, it’s what you wanted, too. He gladly reminds you of all this as you protest in horror to what he has done.
You tell him this isn’t what you want, not anymore, not like this. You back away, needing to run, needing to get away from this room. You stumble as you move backwards and you fall and you quickly get back to your feet. You don’t know where you’re going, you just need to run somewhere. You need to be far away, so you get yourself lost in TARDIS corridors hoping he won’t find you. He always finds you, though. You always run and he always finds you. It’s the way it’s always been.
He reminds you of what you wanted, and the sacrifices made. All those people, how many you don’t know. All of that work and testing would be wasted if you say no now. You’ve wanted this for so long and so badly and it’s given you some form of purpose. You’ve spent so much time only concerned with what you want, that you’ve forgotten how to identify what should be done or what needs to be done. You want to believe him and you want him. You are shocked by how easily you let yourself be swayed.
You think something inside of you is inherently and irreparably wrong. That day on that beach He might have been right, you needed to be fixed. The Master will fix you. It’s your only chance now, what you’ve become is too broken for anyone else to be burdened with fixing.
It all seems so unremarkable. You aren’t concerned with fear or pain or any of it, you feel numb to it all, something snapping when confronted with the price of what you wanted. There is pain and burning and feeling yourself torn apart, it’s there and you feel it from outside of yourself. Nothings snaps and nothing stops and everything seems to go as he wanted. The only problem is there’s not enough of you to fill a proper Time Lord. There are too many empty spaces,
You are awake in the most technical of ways. You are awake, but everything is too far away. You feel like you are standing at the end of a very deep, dark, empty tunnel. Thoughts and emotions and sensations are too far away to properly reach. Voices carry in the strangest ways and everything echoes back too loudly. Your hearts and your voice and the few thoughts you are able to join together all echo back on you, over and over and over again. You see every possibility of even the smallest thought or action, and your mind is so busy trying to remember how to work out these equations that you can’t possibly act on anything.
He wants his Doctor to help fill in the missing pieces, but his Doctor refuses. There are words and emotions, but you can’t remember how to reason out what they mean. It’s too far away to reach, too much emptiness all around you, and everything echoes too much and too deeply and you can’t tell what is a new thought and what is the echo of a thought from hundreds of thousands of millions of possibilities ago.
He is here to fix you though, and you need the empty spaces filled to work even half properly. His Doctor will not have any part of it, so he will fix you instead. He will fill the emptiness. You feel him there, and it’s the first thing you can remember feeling in so long. You don’t know how long so long is, but it feels like it should be an eternity. Pieces are filled in and fractured shapes are glued together. Thought patterns you never remembered keep everything from falling apart. Equations and numbers that were never His or hers or yours are keeping you together.
You look at him, and he is as much a part of you now as anyone or anything else. That has to translate to some form of love. You’re not sure what love is anymore, not really. You want to pick it apart, you want to find out what makes it work and what makes it break and where it stops and starts. You want to pick yourself apart, you want to know what you are now and why you are and what that means. You want to pick everything apart, you want to break everything down to see how it works, you want to watch things deconstructed to their simplest form so you can name it and know it and put it back together into something you might understand.
You remember words like should and need. You remember them the way a person remembers an odd foreign phrase they heard years ago, but can’t quite define. You only really understand what you want.
What you wanted was to be a Time Lord again, you wanted to be something more. You have what you wanted, and now you have the extra heart and the extra lung capacity and you even a few extra thought patterns and equations to show for it.
So why do you feel like less than you were to begin with?
OOC: Written for
savagestime and based on RP in
realityshifted