[Fic] L'épidémie du système
Titre: L'épidémie du système
Acteurs: The Master, Radha (oc), Upaya (oc)
Mots: 2000
Bêta-lecteur: Non.
Estimation: PGish. Nothing graphically offensive, no obscenity, but dark.
Résumé: The Kashtta Trust keeps their friends close, and their enemies even closer.
Déni: The Master is owned by the BBC. The Kashtta, Radha, and Upaya are mine, to my great dismay. The Rift is many people's. I'm making no money off this.
-
The trick of the collar is that he's aware of it. He knows exactly what it does, and what it prevents him from doing. There's no mystery to unravel, no discovery to make. If he reached up to take it off, it would open beneath his fingers. He could pull it from his neck and throw it to the ground.
The trick is that he doesn't.
There are innumerable opportunities. Every day, every second. Almost as many to open his mouth and ask someone to help him, look for the latch on this thin silver chain, pull it away from his neck and let him free.
He doesn't do that, either.
-
The first time the Master tries to cross them he's thrown into a cage, barely large enough to contain him, hard shocks running through the bars so he can throw himself at them like a wild animal or cower in the centre, afraid to move lest he brush the metal. He bares his teeth, muscles so tight they tremble, lashing out with his mind against the human guards who think to contain him.
The guards don't flinch. Each one wears a headcover like a gas mask, blank bulbous eyes watching impassively. They're too quick, too thorough - he'd put one girl almost into a trance and then must have been three of them on him, with a taser strong enough to buckle a Time Lord and quick access to the cells. He bashes a palm into the bars, and is rewarded by a jolt of electricity that goes straight to his hindbrain, causing to flail out again and compounding the pain.
And there's the third, now, walking in from the far door, escorting the girl he'd attempted. She has the gall to offer him namaste, palms pressed together above her hairline, before she speaks.
"That was unkind of you, Shri Samaya." She walks up, out of the reach of his arms even if he could avoid the stinging bars. Her eyes are brown, and she's wearing the saffron brassard and gold bindi of the Trust.
"I apologise," the Master says, trying to straighten his posture without touching anything. Let me out, he says with his eyes, and she steps back again.
"This is a sovereign nation and a sovereign world," she says, eyes refocusing on a spot just above and between his eyebrows. "Your kind is an enemy to that sovereignty. Your presence is an act of war. Your life has been granted as an act of kindness by the Kashtta Trust. Betrayal of that kindness will be dealt with increasing severity."
Why they'd kept him alive at all is mystery. They'd expended some effort to do so, healing the gut wound that woman - what was her name? Jones, something Jones, the brat's mother - had decided to introduce to him. Kept him in the same regeneration, too. He has to wonder why.
He bashes his hand against a bar again, before catching himself and schooling his reactions. Dignity. He's not going to act the animal before a congregation of apes. "You've given me no reason to respect you or your laws," he says, voice edged. "And I assure you, when I'm released from this prison-"
"You'll learn that the alternative to respecting our laws and sovereignty is less pleasant than you might imagine," the woman says coolly.
The Master doesn't choose to imagine.
Soon enough, he doesn't need to.
-
Radha, the woman he'd attempted to influence, is his keeper, most of the time. No-nonsense, a bit dull, she reminds him of the worst parts (in his view) of the Doctor and Rani put together.
Today he's sitting in a small canteen, drinking a cup of tea as she comes up to him. The canteen is filled with icons of various Hindu deities, and he's been staring at the Kali one for this cup of tea and the previous three, savouring the thought of a dance across all creation. That sort of power, that freedom, existed for him. Once.
Radha comes up and offers him namaste which he does not return, and she addresses him by the honorific Shri Samaya. Time Lord.
"We would appreciate your advisement," she says. By would appreciate she means order, and by advisement she means service. It's all part of their own, personal dance, one without scope or excitement or any potential for freedom beyond the lip service they allow him.
"I would be honored to advise you," he says, with a smile.
She knows perfectly well that he hates her.
She leads him into a windowless office that smells of sweat - angelic sweat, not human. In it sits an angel, rough and rangy, with a hooked nose like a beak. He's restrained, comprehensively tied, and the Master recognises his face but can't place a name to it.
"Upaya," Radha says. The angel pulls his head up, struggling against the restraints. "Angel of Vengeance," she goes on. "Against the Trust, actually. We decided it would be kinder to keep and process him than to kill him."
"Kinder," the Master says. "You have an interesting sense of the kind."
"The woman who would usually process him is unavailable," Radha continues. She walks up to stand in front of Upaya, looking down into his eyes. "It's a simple procedure for a man of your qualifications. Suppress the part of his conscious self which rationalises and realises the desires of his calling. He's happier for it."
Upaya responds by spitting on her shoes.
The Master feels a pang of sympathy for Upaya. He's unused to feeling sympathy. "You'd like me to psychically collar him," he says.
-
The second time he tried to slip his leash, they were less kind.
He hadn't realised - and perhaps this was foolish of him - the range and coordination of talents the Kashtta trained into their personnel, or how specialized they were. They knew Time Lord physiology literally inside and out, and he'd brought two humans under his thrall only to find them unconscious before he'd traversed two hallways.
He'd also found himself face to face with a Rakshasa who took great pleasure in collapsing his windpipe, a lung, and a heart.
The thing about a Time Lord's respiratory bypass was that it provided enough oxygen to sustain them, but not enough to allow for any sort of strenuous action or, say, negotiation. And the thing about an occlusive single heart failure - one heart nonfunctional and collapsed or obstructed - was that while it might not kill a Time Lord within a few hours or even a day, it was among the most painful single medical events known to the species.
The Rakshasa never introduced himself. Never let him up. It wasn't until an angel came barrelling down the hall into him that he relented, let the Master be carried off to a medical bay whose doctors also knew quite a lot about Time Lord biology.
Radha had come in later, and mentioned that the rakshasa had been a sentry. Not a punishment. The punishment would be constant surveillance for the week of his convalescence, and his keeper for the week the same rakshasa who'd stopped him.
-
Radha doesn't need to confirm his assessment. The Master doesn't expect her to. He locates another chair and pulls it over in front of Upaya, careful not to scuff the waxed floor, and settles down into it.
"Did your previous programming not work, then? Degrade?" He's looking into Upaya's eyes, trying to place him.
"External stressors. A temeluchus, who's already been dealt with."
Killed or reprogrammed. Those tend to be the ways the Kashtta Trust deals with outsiders who cross them. "An inefficient mode, if it can be so easily broken," the Master says.
Throughout all this, Upaya doesn't speak.
"Fix it," Radha says. He'll be able to do a better job. A permanent dissociation, amputation, if he wants to put his mind to it. And Radha expects nothing less than the best.
He pouts, just a bit, for show. A few indications of insubordination are still allowed him, just irrepressible evidence of his capricious Time Lord nature. One doesn't train a dog out of sniffing or wagging his tail, and no one's tried to train the Master out of the occasional quip falling on deaf ears. "We're not going to give him his opinion, then?"
Radha looks unamused.
"No? Well." The Master looks to Upaya. The irony isn't lost on him - the one slave asked to tighten the chains on the other. "If you don't mind, I'd like my privacy."
Radha thinks about that. She watches him, allowing herself the luxury or putting forth the test of meeting his eyes.
"You may have it," she says, and steps out of the room.
-
The third time was the last, and he can't quite remember what he did, any more.
Where they'd obtained the majority of their Time Lord technology, the Master didn't know, and he wasn't about to gratify them by asking. But they'd pulled him into a room, and it looked like the console room of a TARDIS minus console and plus a number of human additions, generators, locks, cuffs. He'd only be able to predict what they planned to do when they pulled the skullcap down over his head.
No human agency, no matter how well-connected or well-staffed, should have had the grounding in physics to work a chameleon arch.
And it wasn't perfect. Far from it. It worked slowly, methodically, so that he could feel it overriding successive strains of his psyche, watch the progress - and when it had capped most of his memory, closing in on the last few moments, shutting down portions of his higher reasoning, he'd vanished.
The thing inhabiting his body, for the last few moments before he became an Australian businessman named Mark for a month and a half, was farther from him than Mark was. When he came into his own mind again, for days he couldn't get the sound of his own screaming out of his mind.
They'd used him as a personal assistant for that month and a half, which was perhaps the pettiest attack. He couldn't get the memory of trailing after Radha, laden with tea, newspapers and forms, out of his mind for longer than days.
The hollow restraint, the lip service to respect, they allowed him to get away with was better by far than that.
-
"I'll break the collar," Upaya says when Radha's gone, the blood from the corner of his mouth finally drying. "There are smaller rifts. Unmonitored. A stable green. I could get you to it - out the window, fast glide down." He lets his wings out, not that they're good for anything but display at this point. He's tied too well to the chair, the chair bolted down to the ground.
"What makes you think I can, or am inclined, to let you out?" the Master asked. Though he's beginning to remember where he's seen this man before.
Upaya stares at him. "We're not Kashtta," he says. "Won't ever be. We can do it, though, get out. You and me. The mind and the sword." He spreads his wings, pulling against the restraints. "I've seen you. You've got out of cages before."
The Master thinks of the chances. Upaya might be able to get him out, it was true. And with the collar off, it would not be so easy for them to contain him again. A vengeance angel against Radha, and the short run to the nearest window and out and they'd be on the ground, and Upaya would break the collar and he'd be free of this place. These people.
He wants that. Badly. The memory of his punishments still stings in his mind, and he knows what sort of treatment he can expect from the people who so freely hand them out.
In the end, there's only one choice for him to make.
He rests his hand on Upaya's, fingers brushing the cuffs at his wrist. He reaches deep into his mind, feeling the threads which interweave each part feeling where to separate them to drive the resistance out of him for good.
"I'll try not to hurt you," he says.
=
Acteurs: The Master, Radha (oc), Upaya (oc)
Mots: 2000
Bêta-lecteur: Non.
Estimation: PGish. Nothing graphically offensive, no obscenity, but dark.
Résumé: The Kashtta Trust keeps their friends close, and their enemies even closer.
Déni: The Master is owned by the BBC. The Kashtta, Radha, and Upaya are mine, to my great dismay. The Rift is many people's. I'm making no money off this.
-
The trick of the collar is that he's aware of it. He knows exactly what it does, and what it prevents him from doing. There's no mystery to unravel, no discovery to make. If he reached up to take it off, it would open beneath his fingers. He could pull it from his neck and throw it to the ground.
The trick is that he doesn't.
There are innumerable opportunities. Every day, every second. Almost as many to open his mouth and ask someone to help him, look for the latch on this thin silver chain, pull it away from his neck and let him free.
He doesn't do that, either.
-
The first time the Master tries to cross them he's thrown into a cage, barely large enough to contain him, hard shocks running through the bars so he can throw himself at them like a wild animal or cower in the centre, afraid to move lest he brush the metal. He bares his teeth, muscles so tight they tremble, lashing out with his mind against the human guards who think to contain him.
The guards don't flinch. Each one wears a headcover like a gas mask, blank bulbous eyes watching impassively. They're too quick, too thorough - he'd put one girl almost into a trance and then must have been three of them on him, with a taser strong enough to buckle a Time Lord and quick access to the cells. He bashes a palm into the bars, and is rewarded by a jolt of electricity that goes straight to his hindbrain, causing to flail out again and compounding the pain.
And there's the third, now, walking in from the far door, escorting the girl he'd attempted. She has the gall to offer him namaste, palms pressed together above her hairline, before she speaks.
"That was unkind of you, Shri Samaya." She walks up, out of the reach of his arms even if he could avoid the stinging bars. Her eyes are brown, and she's wearing the saffron brassard and gold bindi of the Trust.
"I apologise," the Master says, trying to straighten his posture without touching anything. Let me out, he says with his eyes, and she steps back again.
"This is a sovereign nation and a sovereign world," she says, eyes refocusing on a spot just above and between his eyebrows. "Your kind is an enemy to that sovereignty. Your presence is an act of war. Your life has been granted as an act of kindness by the Kashtta Trust. Betrayal of that kindness will be dealt with increasing severity."
Why they'd kept him alive at all is mystery. They'd expended some effort to do so, healing the gut wound that woman - what was her name? Jones, something Jones, the brat's mother - had decided to introduce to him. Kept him in the same regeneration, too. He has to wonder why.
He bashes his hand against a bar again, before catching himself and schooling his reactions. Dignity. He's not going to act the animal before a congregation of apes. "You've given me no reason to respect you or your laws," he says, voice edged. "And I assure you, when I'm released from this prison-"
"You'll learn that the alternative to respecting our laws and sovereignty is less pleasant than you might imagine," the woman says coolly.
The Master doesn't choose to imagine.
Soon enough, he doesn't need to.
-
Radha, the woman he'd attempted to influence, is his keeper, most of the time. No-nonsense, a bit dull, she reminds him of the worst parts (in his view) of the Doctor and Rani put together.
Today he's sitting in a small canteen, drinking a cup of tea as she comes up to him. The canteen is filled with icons of various Hindu deities, and he's been staring at the Kali one for this cup of tea and the previous three, savouring the thought of a dance across all creation. That sort of power, that freedom, existed for him. Once.
Radha comes up and offers him namaste which he does not return, and she addresses him by the honorific Shri Samaya. Time Lord.
"We would appreciate your advisement," she says. By would appreciate she means order, and by advisement she means service. It's all part of their own, personal dance, one without scope or excitement or any potential for freedom beyond the lip service they allow him.
"I would be honored to advise you," he says, with a smile.
She knows perfectly well that he hates her.
She leads him into a windowless office that smells of sweat - angelic sweat, not human. In it sits an angel, rough and rangy, with a hooked nose like a beak. He's restrained, comprehensively tied, and the Master recognises his face but can't place a name to it.
"Upaya," Radha says. The angel pulls his head up, struggling against the restraints. "Angel of Vengeance," she goes on. "Against the Trust, actually. We decided it would be kinder to keep and process him than to kill him."
"Kinder," the Master says. "You have an interesting sense of the kind."
"The woman who would usually process him is unavailable," Radha continues. She walks up to stand in front of Upaya, looking down into his eyes. "It's a simple procedure for a man of your qualifications. Suppress the part of his conscious self which rationalises and realises the desires of his calling. He's happier for it."
Upaya responds by spitting on her shoes.
The Master feels a pang of sympathy for Upaya. He's unused to feeling sympathy. "You'd like me to psychically collar him," he says.
-
The second time he tried to slip his leash, they were less kind.
He hadn't realised - and perhaps this was foolish of him - the range and coordination of talents the Kashtta trained into their personnel, or how specialized they were. They knew Time Lord physiology literally inside and out, and he'd brought two humans under his thrall only to find them unconscious before he'd traversed two hallways.
He'd also found himself face to face with a Rakshasa who took great pleasure in collapsing his windpipe, a lung, and a heart.
The thing about a Time Lord's respiratory bypass was that it provided enough oxygen to sustain them, but not enough to allow for any sort of strenuous action or, say, negotiation. And the thing about an occlusive single heart failure - one heart nonfunctional and collapsed or obstructed - was that while it might not kill a Time Lord within a few hours or even a day, it was among the most painful single medical events known to the species.
The Rakshasa never introduced himself. Never let him up. It wasn't until an angel came barrelling down the hall into him that he relented, let the Master be carried off to a medical bay whose doctors also knew quite a lot about Time Lord biology.
Radha had come in later, and mentioned that the rakshasa had been a sentry. Not a punishment. The punishment would be constant surveillance for the week of his convalescence, and his keeper for the week the same rakshasa who'd stopped him.
-
Radha doesn't need to confirm his assessment. The Master doesn't expect her to. He locates another chair and pulls it over in front of Upaya, careful not to scuff the waxed floor, and settles down into it.
"Did your previous programming not work, then? Degrade?" He's looking into Upaya's eyes, trying to place him.
"External stressors. A temeluchus, who's already been dealt with."
Killed or reprogrammed. Those tend to be the ways the Kashtta Trust deals with outsiders who cross them. "An inefficient mode, if it can be so easily broken," the Master says.
Throughout all this, Upaya doesn't speak.
"Fix it," Radha says. He'll be able to do a better job. A permanent dissociation, amputation, if he wants to put his mind to it. And Radha expects nothing less than the best.
He pouts, just a bit, for show. A few indications of insubordination are still allowed him, just irrepressible evidence of his capricious Time Lord nature. One doesn't train a dog out of sniffing or wagging his tail, and no one's tried to train the Master out of the occasional quip falling on deaf ears. "We're not going to give him his opinion, then?"
Radha looks unamused.
"No? Well." The Master looks to Upaya. The irony isn't lost on him - the one slave asked to tighten the chains on the other. "If you don't mind, I'd like my privacy."
Radha thinks about that. She watches him, allowing herself the luxury or putting forth the test of meeting his eyes.
"You may have it," she says, and steps out of the room.
-
The third time was the last, and he can't quite remember what he did, any more.
Where they'd obtained the majority of their Time Lord technology, the Master didn't know, and he wasn't about to gratify them by asking. But they'd pulled him into a room, and it looked like the console room of a TARDIS minus console and plus a number of human additions, generators, locks, cuffs. He'd only be able to predict what they planned to do when they pulled the skullcap down over his head.
No human agency, no matter how well-connected or well-staffed, should have had the grounding in physics to work a chameleon arch.
And it wasn't perfect. Far from it. It worked slowly, methodically, so that he could feel it overriding successive strains of his psyche, watch the progress - and when it had capped most of his memory, closing in on the last few moments, shutting down portions of his higher reasoning, he'd vanished.
The thing inhabiting his body, for the last few moments before he became an Australian businessman named Mark for a month and a half, was farther from him than Mark was. When he came into his own mind again, for days he couldn't get the sound of his own screaming out of his mind.
They'd used him as a personal assistant for that month and a half, which was perhaps the pettiest attack. He couldn't get the memory of trailing after Radha, laden with tea, newspapers and forms, out of his mind for longer than days.
The hollow restraint, the lip service to respect, they allowed him to get away with was better by far than that.
-
"I'll break the collar," Upaya says when Radha's gone, the blood from the corner of his mouth finally drying. "There are smaller rifts. Unmonitored. A stable green. I could get you to it - out the window, fast glide down." He lets his wings out, not that they're good for anything but display at this point. He's tied too well to the chair, the chair bolted down to the ground.
"What makes you think I can, or am inclined, to let you out?" the Master asked. Though he's beginning to remember where he's seen this man before.
Upaya stares at him. "We're not Kashtta," he says. "Won't ever be. We can do it, though, get out. You and me. The mind and the sword." He spreads his wings, pulling against the restraints. "I've seen you. You've got out of cages before."
The Master thinks of the chances. Upaya might be able to get him out, it was true. And with the collar off, it would not be so easy for them to contain him again. A vengeance angel against Radha, and the short run to the nearest window and out and they'd be on the ground, and Upaya would break the collar and he'd be free of this place. These people.
He wants that. Badly. The memory of his punishments still stings in his mind, and he knows what sort of treatment he can expect from the people who so freely hand them out.
In the end, there's only one choice for him to make.
He rests his hand on Upaya's, fingers brushing the cuffs at his wrist. He reaches deep into his mind, feeling the threads which interweave each part feeling where to separate them to drive the resistance out of him for good.
"I'll try not to hurt you," he says.
=