Before Sunset (7/?)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Pairing: AU!Master/Doctor (10)
Summary: The Master isn't happy and Jack gets some time to think.
Note: Due to real-life matters I won't be able to write the next part for one or two weeks, sorry.
Wherever the alien ship had gone, it would come back. Bill knew it. He knew it because it had disappeared and reappeared before and because the universe wasn’t nice enough to him to let it be gone forever.
He told Harry, in not exactly the same words. Harry wanted to know when it would return. Bill couldn’t tell but it would take a while. Days. Harry was fuming.
Then Harry decided they should return to the city. He ordered Bill to take him to their hotel. The journey back was filled with silence and only when they were about to land on the roof where he usually parked, the thought struggled its way into Bill’s brain the Harry wasn’t actually in a position to give him orders.
He’d wanted to return to the hotel anyway, he consoled himself.
Then they reached his suite and went to look for the Doctor. Harry was cursing loudly while he paced through the empty room, displaying anger and annoyance, but Bill could see naked panic in his eyes. He’d never before seen anyone look so worried.
Without another word Harry ran out of the room, through the hotel and into the street. He seemed to know where to go and the time agent ran after him, not because he was worried for that strange, cold-skinned alien himself but because he wanted to know what was going on and where Harry would lead him. Of course.
He’d not expected the other man to be able to run this fucking fast!
And quite reckless too. More then one pedestrian was shoved roughly out of the way, often landing on their butt.
Finally the man ran into a small, dead-end alley close to the spot where Bill had met them the day before. There was nothing inside but some garbage and a blue wooden box at the other end. It wasn’t what Bill had expected and nothing that made any sense. He’d thought Harry was looking for the Doctor - there seemed to be little else on his mind - but here was nothing. Perhaps he was just trying to get away from the time agent and had taken a wrong turn, but he didn’t slow down despite having nowhere to run and remembering the fear he’d seen in his eyes Bill doubted Harry was right now even aware the agent existed.
He caught up with him when Harry stopped in front of the blue box and fumbled to get a key into its lock. The small windows were lit, but impossible to see through. ‘Police Public Call Box’ the sign over the door read. Bill had seen things like that before, somewhere in the history of earth. Something like a phone box if he remembered correctly. Unlikely for the Doctor to be in there.
Maybe Harry wanted to call someone? But how did that thing even get here?
The door opened. Harry disappeared inside and Bill nearly fell over when he looked trough the opening into the large room that lay behind.
Okay.
Reset.
He looked again. The sight hadn’t changed. Whatever this box was, it was definitely bigger on the inside.
The large room in front of him was not as well lit as the light falling through the windows had made him believe, but it was bright enough to leave little doubt about its dimensions.
Then the time agent shoved all those thought aside and followed Harry inside. Some part of him still expected to have fallen victim to an optical illusion and bump into a wall after two steps but he didn’t.
There was a console like thing in the middle of the room, with switches and levers and cables running all over it. He found Harry kneeling behind it, cradling the Doctor in his arms.
The alien’s eyes were half open but Bill saw at once that he wasn’t even close to conscious. His entire body was shaking, his hands cramped claw-like in front of his chest, his breath fast and intermittent.
“Oh shit!” Bill exclaimed, crouching beside the two men. “What’s wrong?” He reached out to feel the Doctor’s pulse, but Harry slapped his hand away.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I think he overdosed on painkillers.” Before Bill could say another word Harry stood with the Doctor in his arms and carried him out of the room in a hurry, as if the man weighed nothing. The time agent could only run after them.
He had his brain on stand-by - the only way from him to deal with the impossible dimension of this place. Harry went from one corridor to another, until finally they reached a room that looked like an infirmary. He placed the Doctor on one of the beds and injected something into his neck. A few seconds later the cramps stopped and the Doctor went limp.
Harry took a deep breath. Then he closed his eyes and for one minute was very still.
-
The Master took a deep gulp of his beer and glared at Jack. Now he had time to think about it he would have preferred it had the time agent not come here. But, well, there was little he could do about it now except shoot him and mess with the timeline. Not the best idea he’d ever had, but, come to think of it, not the worst either.
The stupid human was still looking around wide-eyed. As if he’d never seen a dimensional transcendental ship before.
They were sitting in the large kitchen because the Master had wanted a beer or something stronger, and he’d had no intention of staying with the Doctor like a lovesick puppy. The TARDIS would alert him of any change of his state. He would have liked to get rid of the human, but Jack would not leave the TARDIS, and so the Master had dragged him along. Better bear with him than leave him with the Doctor.
The time agent had been reluctant to leave the Time Lord’s side. There had been a look of worry on his face in no way justified for someone who’d only known the Doctor for one day. He really shouldn’t act like the Doctor was his to worry about.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jack asked for the altogether third time. “You said he was sick before.”
“He is,” the Master said with an exasperated sigh. “But he’ll be better soon.”
He’d checked the area where the alien ship had been with the TARDIS scanners and found nothing but an echo of its existence. Now he knew where to look it was easy to find. Before it had been difficult to determine the exact location. Maybe the Doctor would have been able to, but the Master wasn’t used to handling the systems of this obsolete piece of junk.
Now that he had found the ship he didn’t need Jack anymore. The Master opened his mouth to ask him to leave - again - but when he looked up he noticed that the human was already gone. Probably wandering through the ship to see where it ended. Humans were like that. The Master decided to ignore him for the moment.
Coming back to the empty hotel suite hadn’t been the worst moment of his life, but it was rather high on the list. He had known the Doctor would do something stupid! He should have tied him to the bed. How could the Master leave him ever again if he couldn’t be sure the Doctor wouldn’t get himself killed while he was gone?
His state was more or less stable now. Yet the Master couldn’t fight the feeling that it had been dangerously close this time.
Pathetic little idiot! (‘I could have lost you!’)
His stomach seemed to have turned into a small, cold stone and was only very slowly returning to its normal form. Entering the TARDIS to find the Doctor convulsing on the floor hadn’t been so great either. Impossible to tell how much additional damage he had caused to his already failing body.
Why couldn’t he just have stayed in bed and slept through the day?
Once the alien machine came back - and it better would! - the Master would take the TARDIS to get inside. No way such a primitive force-filed could hold back a time capsule of the Time Lords, even if it was only a Type 40.
Until then there was little he could do but try not to think.
It was an art he had mastered over the past year.
-
Bill wandered through the impossible ship for a wile, trying to find its end. Corridor followed staircase followed corridor. He found a room so large he couldn’t see the opposite wall and right beside it another door lead to a little storage room. There was a pool, a gym, a room full of junk from a thousand worlds.
There were quite a lot of bedrooms, all decorated in different styles, all abandoned.
Eventually he ended up standing in the doorway of the infirmary, looking over to where the Doctor was lying on his bed, surrounded by beeping machines. It was a lonely sight.
He shouldn’t be alone like this.
The time agent had yet to make sense of the relationship the Doctor and Harry shared. On the one hand Harry was positively obsessed with his friend, on the other hand he didn’t seem to care about him at all. Like so much here it felt like Bill was missing something.
The Cobsarian was dangerous in a subtle way. He was cold. He was infuriating. He was getting on Bill’s nerves. The human was fascinated by him against his will. He had a strange charisma hard to define and harder to resist.
It was unsettling in a way. The time agent felt torn between the need to find out who he was, the desire to be close to him and the urge to run.
Most of all, though, he felt the need to keep him away from the Doctor.
It was hard to define their relationship but there was something profoundly wrong with it.
It wasn’t actually his business.
As a time agent on a mission he might well pretend to become involved, but he mustn’t ever be for real. Yet he was. He couldn’t help it. He had known the Doctor for all of one evening, but there was something about him that had made a deep impact on the human, made him want to earn his respect, his affection even - it wasn’t a feeling he was familiar with and none he could explain.
He wanted to protect him. Somehow he knew that the Doctor needed to be protected.
Still he found himself unable to walk, like he longed to, over to the sleeping alien and take his hand. He felt like they were existing in different worlds. He could never touch him, even if he did.
The Doctor seemed so very far away and Bill longed to get closer.
As feelings went it didn’t make much sense as well.
He should alert the agency and ask for someone else to take over the mission. But he’d be damned if he did that!
Eventually he decided to just go over there and sit with the Doctor for a while, for a moment. His feet didn’t move, he couldn’t leave and he couldn’t move forward.
It was freezing cold in here.
-
October 7, 2007
NEXT
I'll be in Paris for a few days with a friend and then have her staying at my place for another few days. There'll be little to no time for writing, so it'll take one or two weeks for the next chapter to appear. But the next chapter will have sex involving Jack, inappropriate moments, breakfast and the Master getting ideas. I know this one sucked but I'm actually looking foreward to writing the next.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Rating: PG
Pairing: AU!Master/Doctor (10)
Summary: The Master isn't happy and Jack gets some time to think.
Note: Due to real-life matters I won't be able to write the next part for one or two weeks, sorry.
Wherever the alien ship had gone, it would come back. Bill knew it. He knew it because it had disappeared and reappeared before and because the universe wasn’t nice enough to him to let it be gone forever.
He told Harry, in not exactly the same words. Harry wanted to know when it would return. Bill couldn’t tell but it would take a while. Days. Harry was fuming.
Then Harry decided they should return to the city. He ordered Bill to take him to their hotel. The journey back was filled with silence and only when they were about to land on the roof where he usually parked, the thought struggled its way into Bill’s brain the Harry wasn’t actually in a position to give him orders.
He’d wanted to return to the hotel anyway, he consoled himself.
Then they reached his suite and went to look for the Doctor. Harry was cursing loudly while he paced through the empty room, displaying anger and annoyance, but Bill could see naked panic in his eyes. He’d never before seen anyone look so worried.
Without another word Harry ran out of the room, through the hotel and into the street. He seemed to know where to go and the time agent ran after him, not because he was worried for that strange, cold-skinned alien himself but because he wanted to know what was going on and where Harry would lead him. Of course.
He’d not expected the other man to be able to run this fucking fast!
And quite reckless too. More then one pedestrian was shoved roughly out of the way, often landing on their butt.
Finally the man ran into a small, dead-end alley close to the spot where Bill had met them the day before. There was nothing inside but some garbage and a blue wooden box at the other end. It wasn’t what Bill had expected and nothing that made any sense. He’d thought Harry was looking for the Doctor - there seemed to be little else on his mind - but here was nothing. Perhaps he was just trying to get away from the time agent and had taken a wrong turn, but he didn’t slow down despite having nowhere to run and remembering the fear he’d seen in his eyes Bill doubted Harry was right now even aware the agent existed.
He caught up with him when Harry stopped in front of the blue box and fumbled to get a key into its lock. The small windows were lit, but impossible to see through. ‘Police Public Call Box’ the sign over the door read. Bill had seen things like that before, somewhere in the history of earth. Something like a phone box if he remembered correctly. Unlikely for the Doctor to be in there.
Maybe Harry wanted to call someone? But how did that thing even get here?
The door opened. Harry disappeared inside and Bill nearly fell over when he looked trough the opening into the large room that lay behind.
Okay.
Reset.
He looked again. The sight hadn’t changed. Whatever this box was, it was definitely bigger on the inside.
The large room in front of him was not as well lit as the light falling through the windows had made him believe, but it was bright enough to leave little doubt about its dimensions.
Then the time agent shoved all those thought aside and followed Harry inside. Some part of him still expected to have fallen victim to an optical illusion and bump into a wall after two steps but he didn’t.
There was a console like thing in the middle of the room, with switches and levers and cables running all over it. He found Harry kneeling behind it, cradling the Doctor in his arms.
The alien’s eyes were half open but Bill saw at once that he wasn’t even close to conscious. His entire body was shaking, his hands cramped claw-like in front of his chest, his breath fast and intermittent.
“Oh shit!” Bill exclaimed, crouching beside the two men. “What’s wrong?” He reached out to feel the Doctor’s pulse, but Harry slapped his hand away.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I think he overdosed on painkillers.” Before Bill could say another word Harry stood with the Doctor in his arms and carried him out of the room in a hurry, as if the man weighed nothing. The time agent could only run after them.
He had his brain on stand-by - the only way from him to deal with the impossible dimension of this place. Harry went from one corridor to another, until finally they reached a room that looked like an infirmary. He placed the Doctor on one of the beds and injected something into his neck. A few seconds later the cramps stopped and the Doctor went limp.
Harry took a deep breath. Then he closed his eyes and for one minute was very still.
-
The Master took a deep gulp of his beer and glared at Jack. Now he had time to think about it he would have preferred it had the time agent not come here. But, well, there was little he could do about it now except shoot him and mess with the timeline. Not the best idea he’d ever had, but, come to think of it, not the worst either.
The stupid human was still looking around wide-eyed. As if he’d never seen a dimensional transcendental ship before.
They were sitting in the large kitchen because the Master had wanted a beer or something stronger, and he’d had no intention of staying with the Doctor like a lovesick puppy. The TARDIS would alert him of any change of his state. He would have liked to get rid of the human, but Jack would not leave the TARDIS, and so the Master had dragged him along. Better bear with him than leave him with the Doctor.
The time agent had been reluctant to leave the Time Lord’s side. There had been a look of worry on his face in no way justified for someone who’d only known the Doctor for one day. He really shouldn’t act like the Doctor was his to worry about.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jack asked for the altogether third time. “You said he was sick before.”
“He is,” the Master said with an exasperated sigh. “But he’ll be better soon.”
He’d checked the area where the alien ship had been with the TARDIS scanners and found nothing but an echo of its existence. Now he knew where to look it was easy to find. Before it had been difficult to determine the exact location. Maybe the Doctor would have been able to, but the Master wasn’t used to handling the systems of this obsolete piece of junk.
Now that he had found the ship he didn’t need Jack anymore. The Master opened his mouth to ask him to leave - again - but when he looked up he noticed that the human was already gone. Probably wandering through the ship to see where it ended. Humans were like that. The Master decided to ignore him for the moment.
Coming back to the empty hotel suite hadn’t been the worst moment of his life, but it was rather high on the list. He had known the Doctor would do something stupid! He should have tied him to the bed. How could the Master leave him ever again if he couldn’t be sure the Doctor wouldn’t get himself killed while he was gone?
His state was more or less stable now. Yet the Master couldn’t fight the feeling that it had been dangerously close this time.
Pathetic little idiot! (‘I could have lost you!’)
His stomach seemed to have turned into a small, cold stone and was only very slowly returning to its normal form. Entering the TARDIS to find the Doctor convulsing on the floor hadn’t been so great either. Impossible to tell how much additional damage he had caused to his already failing body.
Why couldn’t he just have stayed in bed and slept through the day?
Once the alien machine came back - and it better would! - the Master would take the TARDIS to get inside. No way such a primitive force-filed could hold back a time capsule of the Time Lords, even if it was only a Type 40.
Until then there was little he could do but try not to think.
It was an art he had mastered over the past year.
-
Bill wandered through the impossible ship for a wile, trying to find its end. Corridor followed staircase followed corridor. He found a room so large he couldn’t see the opposite wall and right beside it another door lead to a little storage room. There was a pool, a gym, a room full of junk from a thousand worlds.
There were quite a lot of bedrooms, all decorated in different styles, all abandoned.
Eventually he ended up standing in the doorway of the infirmary, looking over to where the Doctor was lying on his bed, surrounded by beeping machines. It was a lonely sight.
He shouldn’t be alone like this.
The time agent had yet to make sense of the relationship the Doctor and Harry shared. On the one hand Harry was positively obsessed with his friend, on the other hand he didn’t seem to care about him at all. Like so much here it felt like Bill was missing something.
The Cobsarian was dangerous in a subtle way. He was cold. He was infuriating. He was getting on Bill’s nerves. The human was fascinated by him against his will. He had a strange charisma hard to define and harder to resist.
It was unsettling in a way. The time agent felt torn between the need to find out who he was, the desire to be close to him and the urge to run.
Most of all, though, he felt the need to keep him away from the Doctor.
It was hard to define their relationship but there was something profoundly wrong with it.
It wasn’t actually his business.
As a time agent on a mission he might well pretend to become involved, but he mustn’t ever be for real. Yet he was. He couldn’t help it. He had known the Doctor for all of one evening, but there was something about him that had made a deep impact on the human, made him want to earn his respect, his affection even - it wasn’t a feeling he was familiar with and none he could explain.
He wanted to protect him. Somehow he knew that the Doctor needed to be protected.
Still he found himself unable to walk, like he longed to, over to the sleeping alien and take his hand. He felt like they were existing in different worlds. He could never touch him, even if he did.
The Doctor seemed so very far away and Bill longed to get closer.
As feelings went it didn’t make much sense as well.
He should alert the agency and ask for someone else to take over the mission. But he’d be damned if he did that!
Eventually he decided to just go over there and sit with the Doctor for a while, for a moment. His feet didn’t move, he couldn’t leave and he couldn’t move forward.
It was freezing cold in here.
-
October 7, 2007
NEXT
I'll be in Paris for a few days with a friend and then have her staying at my place for another few days. There'll be little to no time for writing, so it'll take one or two weeks for the next chapter to appear. But the next chapter will have sex involving Jack, inappropriate moments, breakfast and the Master getting ideas. I know this one sucked but I'm actually looking foreward to writing the next.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6