Fic: Poetic Justice
I always vaguely intended to write this, but never thought I actually would. The ending is blatently open for another sequel, but I wouldn't go counting on it. Unless absolutely no one gets what Jack is supposed to do...
Anyway, jadesfire2808 requested "12 hours after Irony", for the datestamp meme. And... this happened.
Helps if you read "Irony" first.
Title: Poetic Justice
Rating: Adult
Pairing: Simm!Master/Jack (unrequited: Jack/Doctor, Doctor/Master)
Summary: There's an answer to everyone's problems, one thing the Master wants that Jack can do for him, and a way for Jack to avenge the man he needs and hates. And they're all the same thing.
Sequel to: Irony
Warnings: Mm, kinky violence.
“Never,” says the Master, closing the door, “ever, ever underestimate women.” He leans back against the wood, sticks his hands in his pockets, giggles. Jack stares at him, from the bed.
There’s a long, thin gash down the Master’s right cheek. Jack feels a little flare of anger rising in his gut, pushes himself to his feet, remembers too late that one half of the electro-cuff is around his wrist, and the other half is clamped to the bedpost. The jolt of electricity sends him stumbling back onto the bed, his head spinning, bile rising in his throat.
“Woah, Nelly,” says the Master, still grinning. “No need to go killing yourself on my account. You just sit there like a good boy, I’ll fix myself up.”
Jack watches him rummage in a drawer until he finds a tube of something - Savlon, probably - and a plaster. He stands in front of the full-length mirror, examining his wound. Jack can see his own reflection, his face unfamiliar, his hair standing up at all angles like some demented echinoderm. He’s been cooped up in this room for twelve hours, locked in here by the Master’s lackeys, waiting, worrying, half afraid that the Master would never come back for him.
Now that he’s here, Jack feels the overwhelming urge to prove himself. He edges forward on the bed, moves on all fours, his eyes fixed on the Master’s mirror eyes; in turn, the Time Lord is watching him in the silver-backed glass.
“Let me,” says Jack.
“Let you what?”
Jack reaches out for the medical supplies, twitching his fingers in encouragement. He doesn’t know what’s driving him, but whatever it is, it feels one hell of a lot like jealousy.
“Let me fix you.”
The Master turns to face him, and laughs out loud. “Oh!” he says. “I get it. You want to play Doctors and Nurses.”
Jack flinches, which is, of course, exactly what the Master was aiming for.
“I know,” says the Master. He rests one knee on the bed, still holding onto the plaster and antiseptic. “You can be the nurse, Jack. You’d be good at that. Assertive yet caring. And… if you’re the nurse, I guess that means I’ll be playing the role of-”
“Who did it?” Jack growls. If it was that bitch Lucy he’s going to hurt her.
“Who did what, Jack?”
He reaches out, touches the Master’s cheek, just below the cut. His fingers are trembling. He hasn’t been eating properly, hasn’t been sleeping. There’s something he needs first, needs more.
The Master’s hand closes round his, lowers it from his face. “It was my own silly fault,” he says, “dear, sweet, concerned Jack. My own fault for thinking so little of you humans.” He laughs. “Trying to stab me with a cheese knife! Brilliant! Serves me right for taking a liking to camembert, I suppose.”
“Tish,” says Jack.
“How did you guess?”
Jack doesn’t answer. He pries the tube of cream out of the Master’s hand, unscrews the cap. His mind suggests a few other, more interesting uses for tubes of cream, but he focuses on the livid red scratch rising up on the Time Lord’s face. There’s some blood trickling over his chin, a little stain on his collar, but it isn’t a very deep wound.
He applies a little chalky cream to his fingertips, tries to ignore the look of amusement on the Master’s face. He massages the antiseptic into the wound, gently, his fingers still trembling.
“Was she… provoked?” asks Jack. He’s never certain how the Master will respond to being questioned. Sometimes Jack’s impertinence earns him a highly imaginative punishment; others, the Master is simply happy to chat. It depends entirely on the mood of this man, whose temperament is impossible to judge and subject to change without warning.
“Of course,” says the Master. “Tish isn’t the sort of girl to lash out with no good reason.” He leans closer to Jack, until they are almost touching noses. “I may,” he continues, “have tried to cop a feel.”
Jack’s jaw clenches. He tries to keep himself focused. There’s only one thing he wants from the Master, one thing he needs. His body almost aches with longing, but he mustn’t let himself be distracted.
“I mean, wouldn’t you? Of course you would, I know you well enough to know that. Little maid’s outfit, bending over the table…” he giggles again. “That perfect round bum, right in front of me. Cheese is good, but it’s nice to have a little fruity number to go with it, wouldn’t you agree? Ahh!”
Jack stares. His thumb is pressed against the Master’s wound, the nail digging into red flesh. He can feel the pressure through his arm, but the Master doesn’t move. His expression is mixed pleasure and triumph.
“And now you’re hurting me, Jack,” he says. “Don’t want to be outdone, eh? But you can do better than that, surely.”
Jack’s hand drops to the bed. He sits back. The Master clambers onto the bed, squats above him.
“No? No more anger, yet?”
“No.”
“Hmm.”
The Master shuffles up the bed, crawls along Jack’s body, before settling himself astride Jack’s hips, thighs clenched tight either side of Jack’s chest. He rests his hands on his own knees, looking down at Jack.
“Yesterday,” he says, “we had a chat. Didn’t we?”
“Yes,” says Jack.
“A nice little chat, about what you could do for me, and what I could do for you. You agreed to do two things for me, and in exchange I would do something for you. Happily, my favour to you is nicely compatible with one of the things I want you to give me.”
He grips Jack’s t-shirt, hauls him up a little, kisses him. Jack kisses back with a little more enthusiasm than is entirely dignified, but he doesn’t care. He feels himself stiffen against his tight jeans. The Master’s tongue is deep in his mouth, his free hand tight in Jack’s hair. And then, suddenly, he is released, and falls back against the bed, panting.
“We also,” says the Master, breathing heavily himself, “discussed the matter of irony. How you love the man who just can’t help his own little obsession with me. Tonight we’re going to discuss irony’s suspiciously close sibling, poetic justice. I was going to leave you here for a week, at least, but fortunately I got slashed with a soft cheese knife and now I think you’re ready. Are you ready, Jack?”
“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, but he’s seen the consequences of disagreeing with the Master, and tonight, placating him is Jack’s best hope of getting what he needs.
“You are,” says the Master, running a finger down Jack’s throat, over his collarbone, “my devoted, loyal servant.”
“Yes.”
“Some of my servants are less devoted, and not at all loyal. Some of them try to stick cutlery into me. How does that make you feel, Jack?”
Jack likes Tish. He likes her a lot. In another place and time, he’d be very keen to get to know her, but not here, not now. There’s only one thing Jack wants since the Doctor ran away from him, and Tish could never give it to him.
She tried to hurt the only man who can help him.
The fact burns in Jack’s mind like a smouldering ember. She tried to hurt the Master. A few inches lower, and she’d have sliced open his jugular vein. The thought of the Master bleeding, dying, changing into something else, sends a surge of anger through him. Leticia Jones, impulsive and empty-headed, had come so close to ruining Jack’s only chance of being whole again, and she must be made to pay for it.
“Thing is…” says the Master. He hitches up Jack’s t-shirt, strokes fingers over his abs, rubs the pad of his thumb against a nipple. “Thing is, Jack, you can hurt vicious little Tish and fulfil part of our arrangement at the same time. Isn’t that good?”
It is good. Jack wonders what the catch is.
The Master reads his thoughts, or his expression, or maybe both.
“I’ll explain,” he says. “But first, since you are such a devoted, loyal servant, I’ll give you a little taste of the thing your darling Doctor so cruelly denied you..”
Jack is panting again before the Master’s hand has fully closed around his cock. He rolls his eyes back, pushes his hips up, hisses at the warm pleasure that rushes through him. The Master grins at him, and Jack can almost believe it’s his pleasure the Master enjoys. But he isn’t stupid. Jack’s known some twisted, kinky bastards in his time, men who liked pain, women who liked giving it, people with a multitude of unique, individual perversions, but somehow none of it seems as grotesque as the Master’s simple, comparatively vanilla fixation with dominating others. Jack’s seen the less pleasurable outcomes of his obsession, and he’s been watching Lucy and the other girls; the Master’s libido is never more demanding than when he hasn’t killed anyone in a while.
But that knowledge, those thoughts, are all beneath the surface of Jack’s mind. His conscious thoughts have no hope of distraction from the Master’s teeth on Jack’s earlobe, his hand on Jack’s erection, his knees nudging Jack’s thighs wider apart.
Jack writhes on the bed, pent up frustrations making him restless, impatient. Jack needs to be fucked, and he needs it now, but the Master can sense his every emotion. He continues to stroke Jack, torturously slow, immersing himself in Jack’s need for him. Part of Jack despises him for that. Most of him doesn’t care.
The Master produces a tube from nowhere. It isn’t the antiseptic cream, Jack realises. His breath quickens in anticipation as the Master sits back, slicks himself up, his eyes never leaving Jack’s face.
“I’m going to be kind to you tonight, Jack,” he says. “Because once I have fucked you, I’m going to tell you what you will do for me. And it will break you. Oh, it will.” He laughs. “But I almost forgot. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Jack nods. The Master gives him an appraising smile, smacks him on the thigh.
“On your knees, captain.”
Jack turns his back on the Master, braces himself with his hands gripping the headboard, his arms stiff. He bows his head, bites his lip in anticipation.
The Master doesn’t bother readying Jack. He knows exactly what Jack wants, how much pain he can take, and the whole point is to push Jack to his limits. Not all at once, but gradually. Dismantling rather than shattering him. The difference is in how easy it will be to repair him. Even the Master knows a permanently broken tool is no use.
Jack isn’t quite surprised when the Master’s arms slide round his torso, almost hugging Jack to him. There’s something needy about this alien, something clingy. Jack once quipped that the Master couldn’t have ever been cuddled as a child, but the Doctor didn’t seem to find it funny.
There’s no more warm-up, no preparation for Jack. One moment the Master is kissing the skin at Jack’s hairline with bewildering tenderness, and the next he is thrusting into him, deep and hard. There’s a moment when the sensations of pain and need and love and hate almost short out his brain, and then the Master is pulling back again, but Jack doesn’t have time to breathe before his arms buckle and his face hits the wall under the force of the Master’s next thrust.
Jack pushes himself up again, shoves back into the Master’s body, but he’s rewarded with a vicious bite to the jaw and a too-tight grip on his balls. His hands slip, and he’s forced to grasp the Master’s arms, which are still tight around his chest and stomach. He hears a low, brief laugh before his own shout drowns it out.
He finds out exactly how rough the Master will get with him when his thoughts slip for a moment. He can’t help it. The idea rises completely unbidden in his mind, but it rises too high and the Master sees it clear as day.
For a fraction of a second, Jack imagines it is the Doctor doing this to him.
His face hits the wall again, twice, the Master’s hand clawing the back of his scalp. Hot blood stings Jack’s eye. He wonders if he’ll have a scar.
And then there’s an arm, a familiar arm around his throat, the elbow squeezing tight so Jack can’t breathe. He’s asphyxiated before, a couple of times, and he doesn’t ever want to experience that again. He claws at the arm, but it makes no difference. The Master is hissing furiously in Jack’s ear, swearing at him in a language Jack doesn’t understand, all the while crushing Jack’s throat and never letting his rhythm slip. Killing Jack and fucking him at the same time.
So this, Jack thinks, is the extent of Time Lord kindness.
Jack feels light headed, and the world has turned black and white. His struggling grows more frantic, even though he knows there is no point fighting. He’s got seconds left, no more than that, before the clammy, scratchy blanket of death smothers him. He wants his last thoughts to be of the Doctor, but for some reason he cannot picture the Time Lord’s face.
And then he can breathe again. Everything has stopped, and Jack isn’t dead. Blood rushes back to his head, air into his lungs, and he feels the Master pull out of him and sink back on the bed. Jack collapses. He hasn’t come, but he’s no longer hard, and he feels spent, exhausted. His limbs are trembling slightly. His vision is furry.
“If you ever,” says the Master, his voice ragged, “ever do that again, I will have you so thoroughly destroyed that you will never have a hope in hell of coming back.”
Jack buries his face in the pillow.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, Master.”
He feels the Master shift, easing himself off the bed. “We were talking,” he says, “about poetic justice. Perhaps I should force the Doctor to screw you, Jack, and all the while you’ll be wondering if he’s thinking of you or me.” He laughs again, humourlessly, as though the thought of the Doctor’s lust revolts him. “Or perhaps I should break this deal of ours, and leave you to your pathetic fantasies.”
“No,” says Jack. “I’m sorry.”
“No you aren’t. Because you love him. Perhaps more than you need me.”
Jack says nothing. He stares at the white cotton pillow, wonders why it smells so similar to the ones on his bed as a child. So very long ago.
He listens to the Master moving around the room. Getting dressed. Opening drawers, re-arranging things. He’s waiting for the sound of the door opening, then closing again a moment later. But it doesn’t come. The Master isn’t finished with him yet.
“Are you still angry with Leticia?” he says.
Jack rolls over, looks at him finally. The bright red gash is still vivid on his pale cheek.
He’s still angry. He needs the Master. Needs him and more. He can’t have people trying to kill him. Not before Jack’s been broken by him. Perhaps not ever.
“You can destroy her, and punish the Doctor for his neglect of you, and help me, all with one simple action,” says the Master. His voice is quiet. He is standing at the foot of the bed, watching Jack like a guardian angel.
“Tell me,” says Jack.
With a cruel smile scarring his pale face, the Master does.
Anyway, jadesfire2808 requested "12 hours after Irony", for the datestamp meme. And... this happened.
Helps if you read "Irony" first.
Title: Poetic Justice
Rating: Adult
Pairing: Simm!Master/Jack (unrequited: Jack/Doctor, Doctor/Master)
Summary: There's an answer to everyone's problems, one thing the Master wants that Jack can do for him, and a way for Jack to avenge the man he needs and hates. And they're all the same thing.
Sequel to: Irony
Warnings: Mm, kinky violence.
“Never,” says the Master, closing the door, “ever, ever underestimate women.” He leans back against the wood, sticks his hands in his pockets, giggles. Jack stares at him, from the bed.
There’s a long, thin gash down the Master’s right cheek. Jack feels a little flare of anger rising in his gut, pushes himself to his feet, remembers too late that one half of the electro-cuff is around his wrist, and the other half is clamped to the bedpost. The jolt of electricity sends him stumbling back onto the bed, his head spinning, bile rising in his throat.
“Woah, Nelly,” says the Master, still grinning. “No need to go killing yourself on my account. You just sit there like a good boy, I’ll fix myself up.”
Jack watches him rummage in a drawer until he finds a tube of something - Savlon, probably - and a plaster. He stands in front of the full-length mirror, examining his wound. Jack can see his own reflection, his face unfamiliar, his hair standing up at all angles like some demented echinoderm. He’s been cooped up in this room for twelve hours, locked in here by the Master’s lackeys, waiting, worrying, half afraid that the Master would never come back for him.
Now that he’s here, Jack feels the overwhelming urge to prove himself. He edges forward on the bed, moves on all fours, his eyes fixed on the Master’s mirror eyes; in turn, the Time Lord is watching him in the silver-backed glass.
“Let me,” says Jack.
“Let you what?”
Jack reaches out for the medical supplies, twitching his fingers in encouragement. He doesn’t know what’s driving him, but whatever it is, it feels one hell of a lot like jealousy.
“Let me fix you.”
The Master turns to face him, and laughs out loud. “Oh!” he says. “I get it. You want to play Doctors and Nurses.”
Jack flinches, which is, of course, exactly what the Master was aiming for.
“I know,” says the Master. He rests one knee on the bed, still holding onto the plaster and antiseptic. “You can be the nurse, Jack. You’d be good at that. Assertive yet caring. And… if you’re the nurse, I guess that means I’ll be playing the role of-”
“Who did it?” Jack growls. If it was that bitch Lucy he’s going to hurt her.
“Who did what, Jack?”
He reaches out, touches the Master’s cheek, just below the cut. His fingers are trembling. He hasn’t been eating properly, hasn’t been sleeping. There’s something he needs first, needs more.
The Master’s hand closes round his, lowers it from his face. “It was my own silly fault,” he says, “dear, sweet, concerned Jack. My own fault for thinking so little of you humans.” He laughs. “Trying to stab me with a cheese knife! Brilliant! Serves me right for taking a liking to camembert, I suppose.”
“Tish,” says Jack.
“How did you guess?”
Jack doesn’t answer. He pries the tube of cream out of the Master’s hand, unscrews the cap. His mind suggests a few other, more interesting uses for tubes of cream, but he focuses on the livid red scratch rising up on the Time Lord’s face. There’s some blood trickling over his chin, a little stain on his collar, but it isn’t a very deep wound.
He applies a little chalky cream to his fingertips, tries to ignore the look of amusement on the Master’s face. He massages the antiseptic into the wound, gently, his fingers still trembling.
“Was she… provoked?” asks Jack. He’s never certain how the Master will respond to being questioned. Sometimes Jack’s impertinence earns him a highly imaginative punishment; others, the Master is simply happy to chat. It depends entirely on the mood of this man, whose temperament is impossible to judge and subject to change without warning.
“Of course,” says the Master. “Tish isn’t the sort of girl to lash out with no good reason.” He leans closer to Jack, until they are almost touching noses. “I may,” he continues, “have tried to cop a feel.”
Jack’s jaw clenches. He tries to keep himself focused. There’s only one thing he wants from the Master, one thing he needs. His body almost aches with longing, but he mustn’t let himself be distracted.
“I mean, wouldn’t you? Of course you would, I know you well enough to know that. Little maid’s outfit, bending over the table…” he giggles again. “That perfect round bum, right in front of me. Cheese is good, but it’s nice to have a little fruity number to go with it, wouldn’t you agree? Ahh!”
Jack stares. His thumb is pressed against the Master’s wound, the nail digging into red flesh. He can feel the pressure through his arm, but the Master doesn’t move. His expression is mixed pleasure and triumph.
“And now you’re hurting me, Jack,” he says. “Don’t want to be outdone, eh? But you can do better than that, surely.”
Jack’s hand drops to the bed. He sits back. The Master clambers onto the bed, squats above him.
“No? No more anger, yet?”
“No.”
“Hmm.”
The Master shuffles up the bed, crawls along Jack’s body, before settling himself astride Jack’s hips, thighs clenched tight either side of Jack’s chest. He rests his hands on his own knees, looking down at Jack.
“Yesterday,” he says, “we had a chat. Didn’t we?”
“Yes,” says Jack.
“A nice little chat, about what you could do for me, and what I could do for you. You agreed to do two things for me, and in exchange I would do something for you. Happily, my favour to you is nicely compatible with one of the things I want you to give me.”
He grips Jack’s t-shirt, hauls him up a little, kisses him. Jack kisses back with a little more enthusiasm than is entirely dignified, but he doesn’t care. He feels himself stiffen against his tight jeans. The Master’s tongue is deep in his mouth, his free hand tight in Jack’s hair. And then, suddenly, he is released, and falls back against the bed, panting.
“We also,” says the Master, breathing heavily himself, “discussed the matter of irony. How you love the man who just can’t help his own little obsession with me. Tonight we’re going to discuss irony’s suspiciously close sibling, poetic justice. I was going to leave you here for a week, at least, but fortunately I got slashed with a soft cheese knife and now I think you’re ready. Are you ready, Jack?”
“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to, but he’s seen the consequences of disagreeing with the Master, and tonight, placating him is Jack’s best hope of getting what he needs.
“You are,” says the Master, running a finger down Jack’s throat, over his collarbone, “my devoted, loyal servant.”
“Yes.”
“Some of my servants are less devoted, and not at all loyal. Some of them try to stick cutlery into me. How does that make you feel, Jack?”
Jack likes Tish. He likes her a lot. In another place and time, he’d be very keen to get to know her, but not here, not now. There’s only one thing Jack wants since the Doctor ran away from him, and Tish could never give it to him.
She tried to hurt the only man who can help him.
The fact burns in Jack’s mind like a smouldering ember. She tried to hurt the Master. A few inches lower, and she’d have sliced open his jugular vein. The thought of the Master bleeding, dying, changing into something else, sends a surge of anger through him. Leticia Jones, impulsive and empty-headed, had come so close to ruining Jack’s only chance of being whole again, and she must be made to pay for it.
“Thing is…” says the Master. He hitches up Jack’s t-shirt, strokes fingers over his abs, rubs the pad of his thumb against a nipple. “Thing is, Jack, you can hurt vicious little Tish and fulfil part of our arrangement at the same time. Isn’t that good?”
It is good. Jack wonders what the catch is.
The Master reads his thoughts, or his expression, or maybe both.
“I’ll explain,” he says. “But first, since you are such a devoted, loyal servant, I’ll give you a little taste of the thing your darling Doctor so cruelly denied you..”
Jack is panting again before the Master’s hand has fully closed around his cock. He rolls his eyes back, pushes his hips up, hisses at the warm pleasure that rushes through him. The Master grins at him, and Jack can almost believe it’s his pleasure the Master enjoys. But he isn’t stupid. Jack’s known some twisted, kinky bastards in his time, men who liked pain, women who liked giving it, people with a multitude of unique, individual perversions, but somehow none of it seems as grotesque as the Master’s simple, comparatively vanilla fixation with dominating others. Jack’s seen the less pleasurable outcomes of his obsession, and he’s been watching Lucy and the other girls; the Master’s libido is never more demanding than when he hasn’t killed anyone in a while.
But that knowledge, those thoughts, are all beneath the surface of Jack’s mind. His conscious thoughts have no hope of distraction from the Master’s teeth on Jack’s earlobe, his hand on Jack’s erection, his knees nudging Jack’s thighs wider apart.
Jack writhes on the bed, pent up frustrations making him restless, impatient. Jack needs to be fucked, and he needs it now, but the Master can sense his every emotion. He continues to stroke Jack, torturously slow, immersing himself in Jack’s need for him. Part of Jack despises him for that. Most of him doesn’t care.
The Master produces a tube from nowhere. It isn’t the antiseptic cream, Jack realises. His breath quickens in anticipation as the Master sits back, slicks himself up, his eyes never leaving Jack’s face.
“I’m going to be kind to you tonight, Jack,” he says. “Because once I have fucked you, I’m going to tell you what you will do for me. And it will break you. Oh, it will.” He laughs. “But I almost forgot. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Jack nods. The Master gives him an appraising smile, smacks him on the thigh.
“On your knees, captain.”
Jack turns his back on the Master, braces himself with his hands gripping the headboard, his arms stiff. He bows his head, bites his lip in anticipation.
The Master doesn’t bother readying Jack. He knows exactly what Jack wants, how much pain he can take, and the whole point is to push Jack to his limits. Not all at once, but gradually. Dismantling rather than shattering him. The difference is in how easy it will be to repair him. Even the Master knows a permanently broken tool is no use.
Jack isn’t quite surprised when the Master’s arms slide round his torso, almost hugging Jack to him. There’s something needy about this alien, something clingy. Jack once quipped that the Master couldn’t have ever been cuddled as a child, but the Doctor didn’t seem to find it funny.
There’s no more warm-up, no preparation for Jack. One moment the Master is kissing the skin at Jack’s hairline with bewildering tenderness, and the next he is thrusting into him, deep and hard. There’s a moment when the sensations of pain and need and love and hate almost short out his brain, and then the Master is pulling back again, but Jack doesn’t have time to breathe before his arms buckle and his face hits the wall under the force of the Master’s next thrust.
Jack pushes himself up again, shoves back into the Master’s body, but he’s rewarded with a vicious bite to the jaw and a too-tight grip on his balls. His hands slip, and he’s forced to grasp the Master’s arms, which are still tight around his chest and stomach. He hears a low, brief laugh before his own shout drowns it out.
He finds out exactly how rough the Master will get with him when his thoughts slip for a moment. He can’t help it. The idea rises completely unbidden in his mind, but it rises too high and the Master sees it clear as day.
For a fraction of a second, Jack imagines it is the Doctor doing this to him.
His face hits the wall again, twice, the Master’s hand clawing the back of his scalp. Hot blood stings Jack’s eye. He wonders if he’ll have a scar.
And then there’s an arm, a familiar arm around his throat, the elbow squeezing tight so Jack can’t breathe. He’s asphyxiated before, a couple of times, and he doesn’t ever want to experience that again. He claws at the arm, but it makes no difference. The Master is hissing furiously in Jack’s ear, swearing at him in a language Jack doesn’t understand, all the while crushing Jack’s throat and never letting his rhythm slip. Killing Jack and fucking him at the same time.
So this, Jack thinks, is the extent of Time Lord kindness.
Jack feels light headed, and the world has turned black and white. His struggling grows more frantic, even though he knows there is no point fighting. He’s got seconds left, no more than that, before the clammy, scratchy blanket of death smothers him. He wants his last thoughts to be of the Doctor, but for some reason he cannot picture the Time Lord’s face.
And then he can breathe again. Everything has stopped, and Jack isn’t dead. Blood rushes back to his head, air into his lungs, and he feels the Master pull out of him and sink back on the bed. Jack collapses. He hasn’t come, but he’s no longer hard, and he feels spent, exhausted. His limbs are trembling slightly. His vision is furry.
“If you ever,” says the Master, his voice ragged, “ever do that again, I will have you so thoroughly destroyed that you will never have a hope in hell of coming back.”
Jack buries his face in the pillow.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, Master.”
He feels the Master shift, easing himself off the bed. “We were talking,” he says, “about poetic justice. Perhaps I should force the Doctor to screw you, Jack, and all the while you’ll be wondering if he’s thinking of you or me.” He laughs again, humourlessly, as though the thought of the Doctor’s lust revolts him. “Or perhaps I should break this deal of ours, and leave you to your pathetic fantasies.”
“No,” says Jack. “I’m sorry.”
“No you aren’t. Because you love him. Perhaps more than you need me.”
Jack says nothing. He stares at the white cotton pillow, wonders why it smells so similar to the ones on his bed as a child. So very long ago.
He listens to the Master moving around the room. Getting dressed. Opening drawers, re-arranging things. He’s waiting for the sound of the door opening, then closing again a moment later. But it doesn’t come. The Master isn’t finished with him yet.
“Are you still angry with Leticia?” he says.
Jack rolls over, looks at him finally. The bright red gash is still vivid on his pale cheek.
He’s still angry. He needs the Master. Needs him and more. He can’t have people trying to kill him. Not before Jack’s been broken by him. Perhaps not ever.
“You can destroy her, and punish the Doctor for his neglect of you, and help me, all with one simple action,” says the Master. His voice is quiet. He is standing at the foot of the bed, watching Jack like a guardian angel.
“Tell me,” says Jack.
With a cruel smile scarring his pale face, the Master does.