The Crane Wife: Chapter 2 of 7
Title: The Crane Wife
Chapter: Two:Seven
Author: x_los
Rating: R
Pairing: Five/Ainley!Master
Summary: In which the Doctor's first day requires him to contend with a giant octopus, obscure points of Gallifreyan grammar, and his new Master's confusion of epistolary bickering with bonding.
Beta: aralias, sharper than a subtle knife, sweeter than sucrose
A/N: Remember that best_enemies Cliche Challenge forever ago? This was started under its auspices. Slave!fic cliche ahoy!
Chapter 1
The Crane Wife
Chapter 2
The Doctor scratched at the skin under the cuffs. He knew the degree to which they chaffed and constrained him was largely a product of how much he detested wearing them, but that didn’t stop him from feeling a persistent, irritating itch on the top of his left wrist that he’d give a regeneration to be able to reach.
Someone had slipped the wrist cuffs and the collar on him while he slept. It had probably been the nurse who’d seemed so pleasant, he thought sourly, irritated that the last two medical professionals he’d been treated by had been more interested in his bright future in forced labor than in his health for its own sake. He’d been exhausted after the Master (having enjoyed a good chuckle at the Doctor’s expense) had excused himself, but even so, he should have tried his luck then, when they’d still (quite accurately) thought him incapacitated. That said, taking advantage of his regeneration trauma-induced weakness seemed hardly fair.
The slave-control equipment he now wore was standard fare the universe over. The Doctor had no doubt that the brassy metal cuffs were equipped with tracking mechanisms as well as electric circuits to protect those mechanisms from tampering. The circuits might even prove capable of administering a remote-controlled shock to a slave who’d wandered too freely. The Doctor wondered darkly if they were going to be used as a means of behavioural control as well-‘behave or you’ll get a nasty shock’: that sort of thing.
In the course of toppling the odd oppressive regime, the Doctor had learned how to deactivate just about every such accessory. Most had either a standard lock or a circuit he could get at. These, however, were like no model the Doctor had ever seen before. He wasn’t even sure he knew where the controls were on the things. The baffling uniqueness of the devices said worryingly impressive things about both the Master’s technical ability and his standard of security. Escaping was going to take rather longer than the Doctor had anticipated.
The cuffs slid neatly under the sleeves of his jacket, and he was almost able to forget them, provided he didn’t look down and catch a flash of the glinting metal. The collar, however, was humiliatingly obvious. The torque sat heavily on his neck, and he couldn’t help but be aware of its presence at all times, couldn’t conceal the thing under his jumper or coat. Everyone who saw him would be able to tell instantly that, thanks to one stupid long-scarf-related slip-up while touring the Pharos Project’s radio tower (and one subsequent plummet to the ground), the Doctor had wound up the personal property of the Emperor of Hestin. Lovely.
The lab technicians were, with the exception of himself, all free men and women who had chosen to work for the Master. The lab’s director, Professor Linme, introduced him to everyone civilly enough, but it was obvious that the staff wasn’t accustomed to encountering slavery as an institution, and that his presence confused and discomforted them. Which was fair enough, the Doctor thought-his presence here confused and discomforted him at least equally.
After some awkward hellos, Linme dismissed the group and brought the Doctor aside. “And this,” the older man frantically cleared a nettle of tools and wires from the only dusty, disused counter in an otherwise neatly-kept lab, “will be your work station, Doctor.”
“I see.” The Doctor jammed his hands into his pockets and gave a friendly smile. “And what exactly will I be doing, Linme?”
“Well, most recently the Palace had been experiencing some trouble with the matter replicators in the cafeteria. Order a hunk of raw aggedor meat or- or a Pan Galactic Gargle-Blaster, if you like, but you’ll be getting cold tomato soup either way. Well, I say soup-really its more an ice cube that tastes of tomato and refuses to melt, no matter how long you leave it out. We can’t figure out exactly why it likes a solid state so much, but there it is. We’ve had some success with blending the cubes-the resulting paste is, at least, more palatable than the cubes.”
“Ah, like gazpacho,” the Doctor observed. At Linme’s blank look, the Doctor explained, “It’s a sort of cold soup. Originated in Andalusia-very popular in the summer. On Earth, that is. Though I can’t imagine anyone wanting it for every meal."
"Well, naturally. Of course the kitchen staff is completely unprepared to feed the entire population of the Palace three times a day. They’ve been doing as best they can, but we’ve had to supplement their work with rather expensive catering several days this week."
"Hm. Have you any idea what the source of the problem is?”
“We suspect it’s the programming itself-rather than the dispensing machines, all of which are relatively new.” Linme pulled up the appropriate program on a console on the Doctor’s workstation. The Doctor slipped half moon glasses out of his pocket and pushed them up the bridge of his nose. He took the chair and scanned the schematics.
“…I’ll just leave you to it, shall I?” Linme was amused and somewhat impressed by how quickly and completely his unusual new scientist had become engrossed in the problem.
“What? Oh, yes, thank you.” The Doctor gave him a distracted, polite smile and immediately returned to the problem, talking, seemingly to himself, as he did so. As Linme turned to go the Doctor, not looking up from the console, said, “How long ago did you say this all started?”
“Hm? Oh, I’d say the cubes first began turning up intermittently in the place of actual orders about three weeks ago, and the frequency of misfires increased gradually from there. Now not a single order processes.”
“Interesting. Well, Professor, I think we can say with absolute certainty that it’s not the fault of the programming.”
Linme glanced at the console. No large flashing text had popped up to absolve the programming of blame, and short of that he didn’t see how the Doctor could conclude the problem’s source so decisively and so soon.
The Doctor saw the unspoken doubt in the Professor’s expression and felt rather piqued at not having his cleverness immediately recognized and respected. It was the collar and the cuffs, damn the Master. And possibly the floppy blond hair that he was continually having to swipe at to keep his glasses from looking like windows obscured by heavy golden window treatments of questionable tastefulness.
“Well, that was hardly likely, was it?” he snapped. Defensiveness and irritation made his voice too sharp, and he caught himself and continued in more pleasant tones. “You’ve run this programming for some time without fault, after all. And when did you get these new machines?”
“Six weeks ago, I’d say, but we checked them over when the shipment arrived, Doctor. Every single one of them!”
“And I’m sure they worked perfectly at the time, Professor, but I’m equally sure that they’re the cause of all this. Which way’s the cafeteria?”
Bewildered, Linme gave the Doctor directions and a tool kit. Ten minutes later the Doctor returned with a grease smudge on his nose and a mug of tea.
“You have a-” Linme gestured, and the Doctor glanced at his reflection in the monitor screen. He set the tea and the tools down, took out a cream handkerchief, swiped his nose efficiently, and returned the square to his coat pocket.
“Thank you, Professor. It seems the fault lies in the data couplings-you bought the new machines from Rika traders?” Linme nodded, and the Doctor continued. “I thought as much. Close to Hestin Prime, just recently reopened to trade with the ascension of a less isolationist Infanta, and, thanks to a prolonged exile from the wider universe, woefully economically depressed. The Master would had to have been stupid not to take advantage of such promising new suppliers, and while I’ve heard a great many negative things about the man, that particular charge has never been laid against him.
“The trouble is that Rika was already a closed world when all the galactic standardization agreements went through. There’s no reason you should have remembered that, it happened long before you were born. By now you’re so used to everything from everywhere working seamlessly together that it might never have occurred to you to check something as elementary as the compatibility of the electrical currents. The new replicators run on 200 Rikan Plats, which is about 120 UW-about half the normal galactic standard, you see? The machines had more power than they knew what to do with. It took them a few weeks, but they burnt through their own memory circuitry. At first that would only have caused a few misfires, but now you have a complete reversion to the boilerplate order on your hands: solid, cold, vegetable matter. Uncomplicated as it is unappetizing, I’m afraid. It also takes very little energy to produce-useful, if you’re a machine with a built-in imperative to conserve power when supplies are dwindling.
“I’ve managed to cobble together some adapters to equalize the power displacement at the actual line-level, but while they’ll serve as a temporary solution, we can’t expect them to hold for long.You’ll have to order replacement parts and construct permanent adapters, but that shouldn’t take more than a week. Meanwhile, have you got any milk? I find the replicated substitute never tastes quite as it should.”
Linme, at a complete loss for anything more intelligent to say, told a passing assistant technician to go and fetch the Doctor some milk. The assistant looked between them suspiciously.
“I don’t know that anyone but his Lordship keeps-”
“Tell his steward I’m requisitioning a pint, she’ll let you through. If she gets too inquisitive, just say it’s for an experiment.”
With a doubtful look, the assistant left.
“Thank you.” The Doctor sat down in his chair again, crossing his legs and rolling his mug of tea between his hands.
“Thank you, Doctor. You’ve saved the kitchen staff from going mad. I’ve diverted three people onto this from other projects and none of them came up with anything. We’ll have to tell his Lordship about this right away.”
By now, Linme was convinced that the Master’s latest acquisition was, as often happened with the Master’s ideas, something that looked mad initially and then turned out to be absolutely genius. He itched with the need to order a buttered roll and coffee, and so, instead of writing up the Doctor’s results, he showed the Doctor how to use the internal communication system and scurried off to the cafeteria in search of sweet, long-overdue caffeinated relief.
The Doctor typed up a short note in Hestin Common explaining, without going into too much detail, that the ice cube issue had melted away. Then, with a frown, he went back and edited out the pun-in all likelihood the Emperor of Hestin had absolutely no appreciation for humor, weak or otherwise. He attached a diagram with the fault circled and forwarded the whole thing to the Master.
The assistant returned with his milk, and the Doctor took it with thanks, adding it to his cup and leaning back to enjoy his pleasant morning brew. A moment later, a new message pinged on the screen, and the Doctor clicked it open, expecting the congratulations and appreciation that typically flowed forth when he’d found the solution to someone’s problem.
If you imagine that, in your first half an hour, you have solved a conundrum that has vexed Linme’s best minds, then I assure you that you have done it wrong. While I have been otherwise occupied and haven’t had the opportunity to examine the replicators myself, I nonetheless find your claim highly unlikely. Start again, and this time perhaps you might actually accomplish the task you’ve been assigned.
-The Master
The Doctor nearly spit out his tea on the keyboard. Of all the unbelievable cheek!
He began to write back to the Master in common, then had a better idea, and switched to Gallifreyan. This was easier said than done, as the computer did not support anything like a Gallifreyan font. The Doctor had to draw his circles freehand as neatly as he could using a stylus on the screen. When he thought he’d done a creditable job, he pushed ‘send’ with a hard smack. A few nearby scientists turned to look at the source of the emphatic computer-abuse.
“Sorry,” the Doctor murmured sheepishly, settling in to wait for the Master’s response.
***
The Master looked up from the agricultural survey he was reading at the sound of the beep that signified an incoming communiqué from his science department. Ah, the Doctor again. What was the man playing at?
The Master’s eyebrow rose ever so slightly in surprise when he opened the letter and saw Gallifreyan. The topmost hemisphere, in chilling politeness, identified the sender and the recipient. While the Doctor’s (surprisingly good) familial qualifications were spelled out with unmistakable authority, the lines where the Master’s might be indicated were left insultingly blank. Granted the Doctor didn’t know the Master’s and thus couldn’t have included them, but he might well have omitted his own for politeness’s sake. While the Doctor could, with some plausibility, deny that he’d meant to be rude, the intended snub was still blatant. His curiosity piqued, the Master opened the files relating to the Doctor’s House in his stolen Matrix data, intending to peruse them later.
Turning his attention back to the letter, he saw that the lower semi-circle detailed the entirety of the mechanical problem with both enviable precision and an eye-catching turn of phrase. Where it became necessary to speak of the configuration of the circuits in question, almost any Gallifreyan would have wasted time tracing the several swoops and curls such a description would have necessitated. The Doctor’s calligraphy, however, flowed seamlessly into a structural drawing of the circuit, which laid out its design and the reason it had failed so intuitively that no slightly intelligent recipient could possibly fail to understand him.
Having bothered to look at the Doctor’s work, the Master saw that he’d been in error. Not only had the Doctor figured out what was wrong more quickly than the Master might have anticipated anyone but himself doing, he’d taken the next step: done the necessary jiggery-pokery to get the machines working again for the moment, and intuitively seen how to implement a long-term solution. The Master was not a little impressed, but after having been (subtly) insulted he could hardly tell the Doctor so.
Not noticing that he’d begun to grin a little, the Master composed a reply.
***
Glaring at his terminal, as if daring it to show him the Master’s response, the Doctor was startled by a hand tentatively tapping his shoulder. It was only Professor Linme. The Doctor relaxed.
“Has his Lordship had a chance to respond?”
The Doctor opened his mouth to tell Professor Linme what he though of ‘his Lordship’s’ response. Fortunately the terminal began to beep before he could start in on the Master, and the Doctor lunged forward to open it.
“What’s that?” Linme asked of the indecipherable spirograph drawing on the screen.
“Hm? Oh, it’s Gallifreyan,” the Doctor said absently, eyes rapidly scanning what looked to Linme to be an absurd amount of information (if it indeed had any semantic value at all).
“You can read Gallifreyan?”
“Of course I can.” The Doctor’s eyes narrowed as he tried to puzzle out what he was looking at. “I am Gallifreyan.”
Linme, a bit startled, wondered whether any of the questions he wanted to ask could be politic.
The Doctor blinked at the unusual form. He couldn’t immediately make any sense of the letter-recognition of what he was looking at hovered on the edge of his recollection and then slammed into him.
“That bastard!” Linme blinked at the Doctor, startled. The scientists who’d turned their head at the Doctor’s rough handling of his send button began to wonder whether this new arrival was going to prove a problem.
The Doctor, mouth open to let the indignation out, was looking at a dialect of pre-Reform Gallifreyan one only ever saw in historical texts-the whole letter was couched in the demeaning, childish grammar ancient citizens of the Citadel had used to communicate with their barbarian slaves. The Master had pointedly included his (unsurprisingly good) familial qualifications and stripped the Doctor’s down to the single-hash which designated an inanimate object, or a slave. The Doctor strongly suspected he was being baited. Perhaps the move was technically rather clever, even amusing, but the Doctor was in no mood.
In addition to insulting him, the letter ordered (ordered!) him to start investigating a particular waste-disposal chute that had been spitting rubbish back up in the faces of people trying to use it. The inner-circle which indicated tense suggested that the Master thought this might take the Doctor upwards of three days to sort out. The insufferable cheek! Paying no attention to his titular superior, the Doctor grabbed his toolbox and stomped off to the wing that housed the offending chute.
Two hours later the Doctor was bidding farewell to the giant cephalopod who had been living in the chute, munching the trash and generally gumming up the works. It hadn’t particularly wanted to be there. Oooooooroot*fwap!* (as he called himself-that last being the noise produced by an accompanying tentacle wiggle) had been innocently living on a swamp planet when one of the Master’s scout ships had come in for a look around. Oooooooroot*fwap!* had smelled something juicy in the exhaust pipe, and before he’d known quite what was going on he’d been sucked up and brought back to Hestin Prime. Not knowing how to communicate with non-telepathic beings, he had tried to make the best of things. There’d even been some rather pathetic attempts at making things homey with a bit of interior decorating which made use of the refuse in the garbage chute-the Doctor had tried to be kind about his banana-peel chandelier. Poor Oooooooroot*fwap!* had obviously been alone for quite some time.
The Doctor had coerced another scout ship to drop the creature back from whence it had come. The octopus was riding comfortably in the ship’s hold even now, having tearfully promised to name one of its next brood of hatchlings after the Doctor. Oooooooroot*fwap!* had insisted even after the Doctor had blushed and tried to tell it that that really wasn’t necessary, thank you all the same.
Back in the lab, the Doctor composed a message and hit reply with a bright grin. Finished and back before tea time-that would show the smug git.
***
If asked, the Master wouldn’t have admitted to having been waiting eagerly for the Doctor to get back to him. He had, however, assigned the other Time Lord’s correspondence a distinct claxon. When he heard it he tossed the pad he was working with across the table and opened the Doctor’s letter immediately.
The first time the Master read it through he was confused, even disappointed, by the lack of counter-attack.
“Master,
I am delighted to inform you that the giant cephalopod inhabiting waste chute 89 has been repatriated to the Bog World of Smekkit. The cephalopod in question was quite cooperative and proffered its sincerest apologies for any trouble it might have caused during its sojourn in your sanitation system. Please contact me with further instructions, and good day to you, sir.
Yours humbly,
The Doctor.”
He’d already come to expect better of the Doctor than submission too easily won. Looking over it again, something nagged at him, and with the subconscious awareness of patterns and mathematical logic common to linguists and cryptographers, his eyes skated back to the letter’s third word. It had a relatively common base-shape, with an accent that told the reader what meaning to assign it. In fact every third word shared those characteristics. Taking a sheet of paper from the drawer the Master wrote down all the possible meanings that accentuation could give the base shapes in question, and, with a triumphant smile, he drew a line connecting the alternates that formed a coherent sentence.
“Of course I’ve finished already, you self-contented prat. I hope now that the replicators are fixed you order something with bones for dinner and choke on it. Yours sincerely, the Doctor.”
Chuckling in appreciation for the visual pun, the Master sent the Doctor one of the project files he had earmarked as deserving his own personal attention. The plan to increase internal security in the Palace by restoring the ancient, increasingly decrepit walls had been languishing at the lower end of his queue for the better part of a month, though the problem wasn’t pressing enough to merit an immediate response. He kept his note curt, not giving away that he’d cracked the code.
The Master frowned when only an hour later the Doctor’s ring-tone sounded again. There was absolutely no way he could be done yet. Opening the letter, the Master’s suspicion was confirmed. The Doctor wasn’t finished. Instead, he’d written a detailed explanation of why the work already done in the file-whose was it, by the way?- was fundamentally wrong. The entire concept of including a force shield current in the new walls, which would run off the building’s ambient energy and would be impermeable to most laser based weaponry, was inspired. If the walls were highly charged enough to provide a decent barrier against intruders armed with more conventional weaponry, however, they would be a constant danger to the Palace’s inhabitants. The walls might even be turned against them if intruders should gain control of the building. What was needed was something equally impregnable, but less easy for an outsider to make use of. The Doctor recommended Draconian fractal paper. Paper wall screens were ubiquitous on that planet. They could be controlled by psychic energy stored in reservoirs, could be honed until they were sharp enough to cut through armor and scales, flesh and bone, and could be made sturdy and sound-proof more easily than you might think. A person with psychic ability, like the Master, could wrest control of the structure back with his mind alone if the reservoir system were compromised.
The Master wrote back that it was his ‘inspired’ work, actually, which the Doctor was dismissing-and how did the Doctor propose they go about attaining quantities of this paper? Draconia had been closed to all trade for half a century after the major pandemic that had swept through their quadrant. While the Master’s TARDIS could naturally visit a period before the quarantine had gone into effect, his time capsule wasn’t a freight service. Additionally, though he didn’t mention it to the Doctor, the Master preferred not to return to that planet due to some business with the Ogrons that had occurred, for him, centuries ago, during a period in which the Daleks had absconded with his TARDIS.
"Ah," the Doctor replied an instant after the Master had sent his response. “My apologies. And I’ll simply put in a word with the Red Emperor.”
The Master blinked at his screen, got up and walked to the lab. There, he accosted the Doctor without bothering to greet anyone else.
“Do you seriously expect me to believe you intend to ring up the Emperor of Draconia?”
“No, I expect you to sneer at me incredulously and then look extremely foolish when I do just that.” The Doctor arched an eyebrow at him.
The Master surged closer, until there was very little room between he and the other man. “I won’t tolerate your insolence,” he hissed into the Doctor’s face.
The Doctor’s eyes widened and he swallowed, but he held his ground. “How interesting-I won’t tolerate you underestimating me. Or your high-handed manner, for that matter. Your communicator, if I might?”
The Master thrust it out, and the Doctor took it, stepping back out of the Master’s reach. “Thank you. Now, let me see. If I can just-ah!”
Static cackled for a moment, and then a voice broke through. “Thissssss is Commander Kyo of the Palace Guard. By what right do you use this frequency?”
“The Doctor to speak to the Red Emperor, if you could put me through.”
“The Doctor?” The Draconian seemed taken aback. “The Doctor? A moment, sir.”
When someone next spoke into the communicator, his voice was old, and brittle as cracking leaves. “Doctor. To what do I owe the honor?”
“The honor is, of course, my own, your Majesty. I thought I might put you in the way of some business.”
“Business?” the Emperor cackled, which fell into coughing before it subsided. “Not, if I recall, a subject you have ever expressed a great interest in, Doctor. Besides, our world is still cut off from even our imperial possessions, on your advice.”
“I meant for the duration of the plague, your Highness, as well you know.” The Doctor shifted his weight, now paying more attention to the communicator than to the Master, who was watching him intently.
“Very true, Doctor, but for all your wisdom you do not know my people.” The Emperor sighed, and there was a sound of heavy fabric settling around him as he shifted his body. “If we reopen ourselves to contact with the outside, this time with our Empire devastated, we will loose face. Here on Draconia, encountering only ourselves, we pretend that we cannot feel the loss.”
“‘Is the star in the darkness not a sun in its own right?’” The Doctor quoted the proverb with an arch look, glancing over to make sure the Master was paying attention.
The Emperor’s laughter rattled down the line again. “True enough, Doctor, and we are not without uses for funds. I will consider any proposition put to me. Yet I should still prefer to conduct such an exchange discretely. The rest of Draconia need not know. I shall have my purser attend to you on this frequency on the morrow.” As a matter of court etiquette, the Emperor could not concern himself with low questions of finances. He could not even ask the Doctor exactly what goods he knew of a buyer for. To do so would have been indecent.
“Gracious as ever, your Majesty. My life at your command.” The Doctor waited until the Emperor had cut the transmission, as protocol demanded, and then tossed it the communicator back to the Master, who caught it in his right hand.
“You’re a noble of Draconia.”
The Doctor shrugged as if it were of little importance. “An honorary noble, actually.”
“And you know the Emperor himself.”
“Naturally - he enobbled me. And an excellent Sazou player he is, too. Do you know the game?”
“I dabble,” the Master admitted, with a slight smirk that meant he was sickeningly good. “Now Doctor, explain to me how this fractal paper of yours can be rendered useful.”
The Doctor proceeded to explain, and the Master proceeded to tell him he was talking nonsense. No, the Doctor assured him, he most certainly was not, and he detailed the many and varied ways in which he was right. Perhaps he had a point, the Master considered, but what about doing that instead. The Doctor admitted he’d never considered that, but it was brilliant-and it would work even better if-
A few hours later they came up for air, the Master grinning madly at having reached a solution wildly beyond his highest expectations, at having completed the hellishly complicated, tedious job in a single afternoon, and with the fierce pleasure of having collaborated with such a powerful, intriguing intellect. The Doctor, he flattered himself, looked a bit flushed as well-though perhaps that was just the dregs of regeneration sickness. The Master had an absurd urge to ask if it had been good for him, too.
“We've missed lunch,” the Doctor observed. “And dinner as well, it seems. I hardly noticed.” Everyone else who’d been working in the lab seemed to have gone home.
“No, nor did I." The Master stretched. He glowed with self-satisfaction and magnanimity. "You know Doctor, initially I thought you were going to be merely competent. It’s a rare Gallifreyan who’s not a genius by the standards of most races, but it’s a rarer Gallifreyan still whose mind isn’t useless for anything more than a recapitulation of received wisdom. I admit, I considered you as I might a mere utility. This, however,” the Master’s eyes gleamed as he took in the work spread before them, “demonstrates all the ingenuity and craft of a mind nearly the equal of my own!”
“You know, until that last, you almost sounded complimentary.” The Doctor leaned against his workstation, left spent by the breathless ferocity and duration of their efforts. “I was halfway to being flattered.”
The Master laughed. “Excellent, Doctor. I wouldn’t want you to feel your talents were unappreciated. Come, we’ll have a late dinner.”
The Doctor stood up straight and slid his hands into his coat pockets. “Thank you, but I prefer not to eat with my captors, as a rule.”
The Master’s grin twitched at the unexpected hit, and his voice tightened. “Then this will be the occasion on which you make an exception. Don’t be tiresome, Doctor. I’m perfectly aware that you desire the return of your freedom, but I have no intention of granting you that privilege, especially now that you’ve proven so supremely useful to me. You can either be petulant at every opportunity your situation affords you, or you can live quite pleasantly here in the Palace under my care.”
The Doctor gave a flinty smile. “If I'm so 'useful' a person I can hardly require anyone's care. I’ll share your table, Master, but I intend to escape as soon as I possibly can.”
“And I,” the Master took a step towards the Doctor to emphasize his point, “have no intention of letting you.”
The Doctor grinned, brightly. “We’ll see, shan’t we? Now, I believe you mentioned dinner. I find I’m rather hungry.”
The Master threw an arm around the Doctor’s shoulder and led him towards his private rooms. “I have the most peculiar desire to order something with bones this evening,” he said with a chuckle, and the Doctor laughed with him.
Chapter: Two:Seven
Author: x_los
Rating: R
Pairing: Five/Ainley!Master
Summary: In which the Doctor's first day requires him to contend with a giant octopus, obscure points of Gallifreyan grammar, and his new Master's confusion of epistolary bickering with bonding.
Beta: aralias, sharper than a subtle knife, sweeter than sucrose
A/N: Remember that best_enemies Cliche Challenge forever ago? This was started under its auspices. Slave!fic cliche ahoy!
Chapter 1
The Crane Wife
Chapter 2
The Doctor scratched at the skin under the cuffs. He knew the degree to which they chaffed and constrained him was largely a product of how much he detested wearing them, but that didn’t stop him from feeling a persistent, irritating itch on the top of his left wrist that he’d give a regeneration to be able to reach.
Someone had slipped the wrist cuffs and the collar on him while he slept. It had probably been the nurse who’d seemed so pleasant, he thought sourly, irritated that the last two medical professionals he’d been treated by had been more interested in his bright future in forced labor than in his health for its own sake. He’d been exhausted after the Master (having enjoyed a good chuckle at the Doctor’s expense) had excused himself, but even so, he should have tried his luck then, when they’d still (quite accurately) thought him incapacitated. That said, taking advantage of his regeneration trauma-induced weakness seemed hardly fair.
The slave-control equipment he now wore was standard fare the universe over. The Doctor had no doubt that the brassy metal cuffs were equipped with tracking mechanisms as well as electric circuits to protect those mechanisms from tampering. The circuits might even prove capable of administering a remote-controlled shock to a slave who’d wandered too freely. The Doctor wondered darkly if they were going to be used as a means of behavioural control as well-‘behave or you’ll get a nasty shock’: that sort of thing.
In the course of toppling the odd oppressive regime, the Doctor had learned how to deactivate just about every such accessory. Most had either a standard lock or a circuit he could get at. These, however, were like no model the Doctor had ever seen before. He wasn’t even sure he knew where the controls were on the things. The baffling uniqueness of the devices said worryingly impressive things about both the Master’s technical ability and his standard of security. Escaping was going to take rather longer than the Doctor had anticipated.
The cuffs slid neatly under the sleeves of his jacket, and he was almost able to forget them, provided he didn’t look down and catch a flash of the glinting metal. The collar, however, was humiliatingly obvious. The torque sat heavily on his neck, and he couldn’t help but be aware of its presence at all times, couldn’t conceal the thing under his jumper or coat. Everyone who saw him would be able to tell instantly that, thanks to one stupid long-scarf-related slip-up while touring the Pharos Project’s radio tower (and one subsequent plummet to the ground), the Doctor had wound up the personal property of the Emperor of Hestin. Lovely.
The lab technicians were, with the exception of himself, all free men and women who had chosen to work for the Master. The lab’s director, Professor Linme, introduced him to everyone civilly enough, but it was obvious that the staff wasn’t accustomed to encountering slavery as an institution, and that his presence confused and discomforted them. Which was fair enough, the Doctor thought-his presence here confused and discomforted him at least equally.
After some awkward hellos, Linme dismissed the group and brought the Doctor aside. “And this,” the older man frantically cleared a nettle of tools and wires from the only dusty, disused counter in an otherwise neatly-kept lab, “will be your work station, Doctor.”
“I see.” The Doctor jammed his hands into his pockets and gave a friendly smile. “And what exactly will I be doing, Linme?”
“Well, most recently the Palace had been experiencing some trouble with the matter replicators in the cafeteria. Order a hunk of raw aggedor meat or- or a Pan Galactic Gargle-Blaster, if you like, but you’ll be getting cold tomato soup either way. Well, I say soup-really its more an ice cube that tastes of tomato and refuses to melt, no matter how long you leave it out. We can’t figure out exactly why it likes a solid state so much, but there it is. We’ve had some success with blending the cubes-the resulting paste is, at least, more palatable than the cubes.”
“Ah, like gazpacho,” the Doctor observed. At Linme’s blank look, the Doctor explained, “It’s a sort of cold soup. Originated in Andalusia-very popular in the summer. On Earth, that is. Though I can’t imagine anyone wanting it for every meal."
"Well, naturally. Of course the kitchen staff is completely unprepared to feed the entire population of the Palace three times a day. They’ve been doing as best they can, but we’ve had to supplement their work with rather expensive catering several days this week."
"Hm. Have you any idea what the source of the problem is?”
“We suspect it’s the programming itself-rather than the dispensing machines, all of which are relatively new.” Linme pulled up the appropriate program on a console on the Doctor’s workstation. The Doctor slipped half moon glasses out of his pocket and pushed them up the bridge of his nose. He took the chair and scanned the schematics.
“…I’ll just leave you to it, shall I?” Linme was amused and somewhat impressed by how quickly and completely his unusual new scientist had become engrossed in the problem.
“What? Oh, yes, thank you.” The Doctor gave him a distracted, polite smile and immediately returned to the problem, talking, seemingly to himself, as he did so. As Linme turned to go the Doctor, not looking up from the console, said, “How long ago did you say this all started?”
“Hm? Oh, I’d say the cubes first began turning up intermittently in the place of actual orders about three weeks ago, and the frequency of misfires increased gradually from there. Now not a single order processes.”
“Interesting. Well, Professor, I think we can say with absolute certainty that it’s not the fault of the programming.”
Linme glanced at the console. No large flashing text had popped up to absolve the programming of blame, and short of that he didn’t see how the Doctor could conclude the problem’s source so decisively and so soon.
The Doctor saw the unspoken doubt in the Professor’s expression and felt rather piqued at not having his cleverness immediately recognized and respected. It was the collar and the cuffs, damn the Master. And possibly the floppy blond hair that he was continually having to swipe at to keep his glasses from looking like windows obscured by heavy golden window treatments of questionable tastefulness.
“Well, that was hardly likely, was it?” he snapped. Defensiveness and irritation made his voice too sharp, and he caught himself and continued in more pleasant tones. “You’ve run this programming for some time without fault, after all. And when did you get these new machines?”
“Six weeks ago, I’d say, but we checked them over when the shipment arrived, Doctor. Every single one of them!”
“And I’m sure they worked perfectly at the time, Professor, but I’m equally sure that they’re the cause of all this. Which way’s the cafeteria?”
Bewildered, Linme gave the Doctor directions and a tool kit. Ten minutes later the Doctor returned with a grease smudge on his nose and a mug of tea.
“You have a-” Linme gestured, and the Doctor glanced at his reflection in the monitor screen. He set the tea and the tools down, took out a cream handkerchief, swiped his nose efficiently, and returned the square to his coat pocket.
“Thank you, Professor. It seems the fault lies in the data couplings-you bought the new machines from Rika traders?” Linme nodded, and the Doctor continued. “I thought as much. Close to Hestin Prime, just recently reopened to trade with the ascension of a less isolationist Infanta, and, thanks to a prolonged exile from the wider universe, woefully economically depressed. The Master would had to have been stupid not to take advantage of such promising new suppliers, and while I’ve heard a great many negative things about the man, that particular charge has never been laid against him.
“The trouble is that Rika was already a closed world when all the galactic standardization agreements went through. There’s no reason you should have remembered that, it happened long before you were born. By now you’re so used to everything from everywhere working seamlessly together that it might never have occurred to you to check something as elementary as the compatibility of the electrical currents. The new replicators run on 200 Rikan Plats, which is about 120 UW-about half the normal galactic standard, you see? The machines had more power than they knew what to do with. It took them a few weeks, but they burnt through their own memory circuitry. At first that would only have caused a few misfires, but now you have a complete reversion to the boilerplate order on your hands: solid, cold, vegetable matter. Uncomplicated as it is unappetizing, I’m afraid. It also takes very little energy to produce-useful, if you’re a machine with a built-in imperative to conserve power when supplies are dwindling.
“I’ve managed to cobble together some adapters to equalize the power displacement at the actual line-level, but while they’ll serve as a temporary solution, we can’t expect them to hold for long.You’ll have to order replacement parts and construct permanent adapters, but that shouldn’t take more than a week. Meanwhile, have you got any milk? I find the replicated substitute never tastes quite as it should.”
Linme, at a complete loss for anything more intelligent to say, told a passing assistant technician to go and fetch the Doctor some milk. The assistant looked between them suspiciously.
“I don’t know that anyone but his Lordship keeps-”
“Tell his steward I’m requisitioning a pint, she’ll let you through. If she gets too inquisitive, just say it’s for an experiment.”
With a doubtful look, the assistant left.
“Thank you.” The Doctor sat down in his chair again, crossing his legs and rolling his mug of tea between his hands.
“Thank you, Doctor. You’ve saved the kitchen staff from going mad. I’ve diverted three people onto this from other projects and none of them came up with anything. We’ll have to tell his Lordship about this right away.”
By now, Linme was convinced that the Master’s latest acquisition was, as often happened with the Master’s ideas, something that looked mad initially and then turned out to be absolutely genius. He itched with the need to order a buttered roll and coffee, and so, instead of writing up the Doctor’s results, he showed the Doctor how to use the internal communication system and scurried off to the cafeteria in search of sweet, long-overdue caffeinated relief.
The Doctor typed up a short note in Hestin Common explaining, without going into too much detail, that the ice cube issue had melted away. Then, with a frown, he went back and edited out the pun-in all likelihood the Emperor of Hestin had absolutely no appreciation for humor, weak or otherwise. He attached a diagram with the fault circled and forwarded the whole thing to the Master.
The assistant returned with his milk, and the Doctor took it with thanks, adding it to his cup and leaning back to enjoy his pleasant morning brew. A moment later, a new message pinged on the screen, and the Doctor clicked it open, expecting the congratulations and appreciation that typically flowed forth when he’d found the solution to someone’s problem.
If you imagine that, in your first half an hour, you have solved a conundrum that has vexed Linme’s best minds, then I assure you that you have done it wrong. While I have been otherwise occupied and haven’t had the opportunity to examine the replicators myself, I nonetheless find your claim highly unlikely. Start again, and this time perhaps you might actually accomplish the task you’ve been assigned.
-The Master
The Doctor nearly spit out his tea on the keyboard. Of all the unbelievable cheek!
He began to write back to the Master in common, then had a better idea, and switched to Gallifreyan. This was easier said than done, as the computer did not support anything like a Gallifreyan font. The Doctor had to draw his circles freehand as neatly as he could using a stylus on the screen. When he thought he’d done a creditable job, he pushed ‘send’ with a hard smack. A few nearby scientists turned to look at the source of the emphatic computer-abuse.
“Sorry,” the Doctor murmured sheepishly, settling in to wait for the Master’s response.
***
The Master looked up from the agricultural survey he was reading at the sound of the beep that signified an incoming communiqué from his science department. Ah, the Doctor again. What was the man playing at?
The Master’s eyebrow rose ever so slightly in surprise when he opened the letter and saw Gallifreyan. The topmost hemisphere, in chilling politeness, identified the sender and the recipient. While the Doctor’s (surprisingly good) familial qualifications were spelled out with unmistakable authority, the lines where the Master’s might be indicated were left insultingly blank. Granted the Doctor didn’t know the Master’s and thus couldn’t have included them, but he might well have omitted his own for politeness’s sake. While the Doctor could, with some plausibility, deny that he’d meant to be rude, the intended snub was still blatant. His curiosity piqued, the Master opened the files relating to the Doctor’s House in his stolen Matrix data, intending to peruse them later.
Turning his attention back to the letter, he saw that the lower semi-circle detailed the entirety of the mechanical problem with both enviable precision and an eye-catching turn of phrase. Where it became necessary to speak of the configuration of the circuits in question, almost any Gallifreyan would have wasted time tracing the several swoops and curls such a description would have necessitated. The Doctor’s calligraphy, however, flowed seamlessly into a structural drawing of the circuit, which laid out its design and the reason it had failed so intuitively that no slightly intelligent recipient could possibly fail to understand him.
Having bothered to look at the Doctor’s work, the Master saw that he’d been in error. Not only had the Doctor figured out what was wrong more quickly than the Master might have anticipated anyone but himself doing, he’d taken the next step: done the necessary jiggery-pokery to get the machines working again for the moment, and intuitively seen how to implement a long-term solution. The Master was not a little impressed, but after having been (subtly) insulted he could hardly tell the Doctor so.
Not noticing that he’d begun to grin a little, the Master composed a reply.
***
Glaring at his terminal, as if daring it to show him the Master’s response, the Doctor was startled by a hand tentatively tapping his shoulder. It was only Professor Linme. The Doctor relaxed.
“Has his Lordship had a chance to respond?”
The Doctor opened his mouth to tell Professor Linme what he though of ‘his Lordship’s’ response. Fortunately the terminal began to beep before he could start in on the Master, and the Doctor lunged forward to open it.
“What’s that?” Linme asked of the indecipherable spirograph drawing on the screen.
“Hm? Oh, it’s Gallifreyan,” the Doctor said absently, eyes rapidly scanning what looked to Linme to be an absurd amount of information (if it indeed had any semantic value at all).
“You can read Gallifreyan?”
“Of course I can.” The Doctor’s eyes narrowed as he tried to puzzle out what he was looking at. “I am Gallifreyan.”
Linme, a bit startled, wondered whether any of the questions he wanted to ask could be politic.
The Doctor blinked at the unusual form. He couldn’t immediately make any sense of the letter-recognition of what he was looking at hovered on the edge of his recollection and then slammed into him.
“That bastard!” Linme blinked at the Doctor, startled. The scientists who’d turned their head at the Doctor’s rough handling of his send button began to wonder whether this new arrival was going to prove a problem.
The Doctor, mouth open to let the indignation out, was looking at a dialect of pre-Reform Gallifreyan one only ever saw in historical texts-the whole letter was couched in the demeaning, childish grammar ancient citizens of the Citadel had used to communicate with their barbarian slaves. The Master had pointedly included his (unsurprisingly good) familial qualifications and stripped the Doctor’s down to the single-hash which designated an inanimate object, or a slave. The Doctor strongly suspected he was being baited. Perhaps the move was technically rather clever, even amusing, but the Doctor was in no mood.
In addition to insulting him, the letter ordered (ordered!) him to start investigating a particular waste-disposal chute that had been spitting rubbish back up in the faces of people trying to use it. The inner-circle which indicated tense suggested that the Master thought this might take the Doctor upwards of three days to sort out. The insufferable cheek! Paying no attention to his titular superior, the Doctor grabbed his toolbox and stomped off to the wing that housed the offending chute.
Two hours later the Doctor was bidding farewell to the giant cephalopod who had been living in the chute, munching the trash and generally gumming up the works. It hadn’t particularly wanted to be there. Oooooooroot*fwap!* (as he called himself-that last being the noise produced by an accompanying tentacle wiggle) had been innocently living on a swamp planet when one of the Master’s scout ships had come in for a look around. Oooooooroot*fwap!* had smelled something juicy in the exhaust pipe, and before he’d known quite what was going on he’d been sucked up and brought back to Hestin Prime. Not knowing how to communicate with non-telepathic beings, he had tried to make the best of things. There’d even been some rather pathetic attempts at making things homey with a bit of interior decorating which made use of the refuse in the garbage chute-the Doctor had tried to be kind about his banana-peel chandelier. Poor Oooooooroot*fwap!* had obviously been alone for quite some time.
The Doctor had coerced another scout ship to drop the creature back from whence it had come. The octopus was riding comfortably in the ship’s hold even now, having tearfully promised to name one of its next brood of hatchlings after the Doctor. Oooooooroot*fwap!* had insisted even after the Doctor had blushed and tried to tell it that that really wasn’t necessary, thank you all the same.
Back in the lab, the Doctor composed a message and hit reply with a bright grin. Finished and back before tea time-that would show the smug git.
***
If asked, the Master wouldn’t have admitted to having been waiting eagerly for the Doctor to get back to him. He had, however, assigned the other Time Lord’s correspondence a distinct claxon. When he heard it he tossed the pad he was working with across the table and opened the Doctor’s letter immediately.
The first time the Master read it through he was confused, even disappointed, by the lack of counter-attack.
“Master,
I am delighted to inform you that the giant cephalopod inhabiting waste chute 89 has been repatriated to the Bog World of Smekkit. The cephalopod in question was quite cooperative and proffered its sincerest apologies for any trouble it might have caused during its sojourn in your sanitation system. Please contact me with further instructions, and good day to you, sir.
Yours humbly,
The Doctor.”
He’d already come to expect better of the Doctor than submission too easily won. Looking over it again, something nagged at him, and with the subconscious awareness of patterns and mathematical logic common to linguists and cryptographers, his eyes skated back to the letter’s third word. It had a relatively common base-shape, with an accent that told the reader what meaning to assign it. In fact every third word shared those characteristics. Taking a sheet of paper from the drawer the Master wrote down all the possible meanings that accentuation could give the base shapes in question, and, with a triumphant smile, he drew a line connecting the alternates that formed a coherent sentence.
“Of course I’ve finished already, you self-contented prat. I hope now that the replicators are fixed you order something with bones for dinner and choke on it. Yours sincerely, the Doctor.”
Chuckling in appreciation for the visual pun, the Master sent the Doctor one of the project files he had earmarked as deserving his own personal attention. The plan to increase internal security in the Palace by restoring the ancient, increasingly decrepit walls had been languishing at the lower end of his queue for the better part of a month, though the problem wasn’t pressing enough to merit an immediate response. He kept his note curt, not giving away that he’d cracked the code.
The Master frowned when only an hour later the Doctor’s ring-tone sounded again. There was absolutely no way he could be done yet. Opening the letter, the Master’s suspicion was confirmed. The Doctor wasn’t finished. Instead, he’d written a detailed explanation of why the work already done in the file-whose was it, by the way?- was fundamentally wrong. The entire concept of including a force shield current in the new walls, which would run off the building’s ambient energy and would be impermeable to most laser based weaponry, was inspired. If the walls were highly charged enough to provide a decent barrier against intruders armed with more conventional weaponry, however, they would be a constant danger to the Palace’s inhabitants. The walls might even be turned against them if intruders should gain control of the building. What was needed was something equally impregnable, but less easy for an outsider to make use of. The Doctor recommended Draconian fractal paper. Paper wall screens were ubiquitous on that planet. They could be controlled by psychic energy stored in reservoirs, could be honed until they were sharp enough to cut through armor and scales, flesh and bone, and could be made sturdy and sound-proof more easily than you might think. A person with psychic ability, like the Master, could wrest control of the structure back with his mind alone if the reservoir system were compromised.
The Master wrote back that it was his ‘inspired’ work, actually, which the Doctor was dismissing-and how did the Doctor propose they go about attaining quantities of this paper? Draconia had been closed to all trade for half a century after the major pandemic that had swept through their quadrant. While the Master’s TARDIS could naturally visit a period before the quarantine had gone into effect, his time capsule wasn’t a freight service. Additionally, though he didn’t mention it to the Doctor, the Master preferred not to return to that planet due to some business with the Ogrons that had occurred, for him, centuries ago, during a period in which the Daleks had absconded with his TARDIS.
"Ah," the Doctor replied an instant after the Master had sent his response. “My apologies. And I’ll simply put in a word with the Red Emperor.”
The Master blinked at his screen, got up and walked to the lab. There, he accosted the Doctor without bothering to greet anyone else.
“Do you seriously expect me to believe you intend to ring up the Emperor of Draconia?”
“No, I expect you to sneer at me incredulously and then look extremely foolish when I do just that.” The Doctor arched an eyebrow at him.
The Master surged closer, until there was very little room between he and the other man. “I won’t tolerate your insolence,” he hissed into the Doctor’s face.
The Doctor’s eyes widened and he swallowed, but he held his ground. “How interesting-I won’t tolerate you underestimating me. Or your high-handed manner, for that matter. Your communicator, if I might?”
The Master thrust it out, and the Doctor took it, stepping back out of the Master’s reach. “Thank you. Now, let me see. If I can just-ah!”
Static cackled for a moment, and then a voice broke through. “Thissssss is Commander Kyo of the Palace Guard. By what right do you use this frequency?”
“The Doctor to speak to the Red Emperor, if you could put me through.”
“The Doctor?” The Draconian seemed taken aback. “The Doctor? A moment, sir.”
When someone next spoke into the communicator, his voice was old, and brittle as cracking leaves. “Doctor. To what do I owe the honor?”
“The honor is, of course, my own, your Majesty. I thought I might put you in the way of some business.”
“Business?” the Emperor cackled, which fell into coughing before it subsided. “Not, if I recall, a subject you have ever expressed a great interest in, Doctor. Besides, our world is still cut off from even our imperial possessions, on your advice.”
“I meant for the duration of the plague, your Highness, as well you know.” The Doctor shifted his weight, now paying more attention to the communicator than to the Master, who was watching him intently.
“Very true, Doctor, but for all your wisdom you do not know my people.” The Emperor sighed, and there was a sound of heavy fabric settling around him as he shifted his body. “If we reopen ourselves to contact with the outside, this time with our Empire devastated, we will loose face. Here on Draconia, encountering only ourselves, we pretend that we cannot feel the loss.”
“‘Is the star in the darkness not a sun in its own right?’” The Doctor quoted the proverb with an arch look, glancing over to make sure the Master was paying attention.
The Emperor’s laughter rattled down the line again. “True enough, Doctor, and we are not without uses for funds. I will consider any proposition put to me. Yet I should still prefer to conduct such an exchange discretely. The rest of Draconia need not know. I shall have my purser attend to you on this frequency on the morrow.” As a matter of court etiquette, the Emperor could not concern himself with low questions of finances. He could not even ask the Doctor exactly what goods he knew of a buyer for. To do so would have been indecent.
“Gracious as ever, your Majesty. My life at your command.” The Doctor waited until the Emperor had cut the transmission, as protocol demanded, and then tossed it the communicator back to the Master, who caught it in his right hand.
“You’re a noble of Draconia.”
The Doctor shrugged as if it were of little importance. “An honorary noble, actually.”
“And you know the Emperor himself.”
“Naturally - he enobbled me. And an excellent Sazou player he is, too. Do you know the game?”
“I dabble,” the Master admitted, with a slight smirk that meant he was sickeningly good. “Now Doctor, explain to me how this fractal paper of yours can be rendered useful.”
The Doctor proceeded to explain, and the Master proceeded to tell him he was talking nonsense. No, the Doctor assured him, he most certainly was not, and he detailed the many and varied ways in which he was right. Perhaps he had a point, the Master considered, but what about doing that instead. The Doctor admitted he’d never considered that, but it was brilliant-and it would work even better if-
A few hours later they came up for air, the Master grinning madly at having reached a solution wildly beyond his highest expectations, at having completed the hellishly complicated, tedious job in a single afternoon, and with the fierce pleasure of having collaborated with such a powerful, intriguing intellect. The Doctor, he flattered himself, looked a bit flushed as well-though perhaps that was just the dregs of regeneration sickness. The Master had an absurd urge to ask if it had been good for him, too.
“We've missed lunch,” the Doctor observed. “And dinner as well, it seems. I hardly noticed.” Everyone else who’d been working in the lab seemed to have gone home.
“No, nor did I." The Master stretched. He glowed with self-satisfaction and magnanimity. "You know Doctor, initially I thought you were going to be merely competent. It’s a rare Gallifreyan who’s not a genius by the standards of most races, but it’s a rarer Gallifreyan still whose mind isn’t useless for anything more than a recapitulation of received wisdom. I admit, I considered you as I might a mere utility. This, however,” the Master’s eyes gleamed as he took in the work spread before them, “demonstrates all the ingenuity and craft of a mind nearly the equal of my own!”
“You know, until that last, you almost sounded complimentary.” The Doctor leaned against his workstation, left spent by the breathless ferocity and duration of their efforts. “I was halfway to being flattered.”
The Master laughed. “Excellent, Doctor. I wouldn’t want you to feel your talents were unappreciated. Come, we’ll have a late dinner.”
The Doctor stood up straight and slid his hands into his coat pockets. “Thank you, but I prefer not to eat with my captors, as a rule.”
The Master’s grin twitched at the unexpected hit, and his voice tightened. “Then this will be the occasion on which you make an exception. Don’t be tiresome, Doctor. I’m perfectly aware that you desire the return of your freedom, but I have no intention of granting you that privilege, especially now that you’ve proven so supremely useful to me. You can either be petulant at every opportunity your situation affords you, or you can live quite pleasantly here in the Palace under my care.”
The Doctor gave a flinty smile. “If I'm so 'useful' a person I can hardly require anyone's care. I’ll share your table, Master, but I intend to escape as soon as I possibly can.”
“And I,” the Master took a step towards the Doctor to emphasize his point, “have no intention of letting you.”
The Doctor grinned, brightly. “We’ll see, shan’t we? Now, I believe you mentioned dinner. I find I’m rather hungry.”
The Master threw an arm around the Doctor’s shoulder and led him towards his private rooms. “I have the most peculiar desire to order something with bones this evening,” he said with a chuckle, and the Doctor laughed with him.