The Crane Wife: Chapter 7 of 8 (Part I)
Title: The Crane Wife
Chapter: Seven (Part I): Eight
Author: x_los
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Five/Ainley!Master, Benny, Tegan, Turlough, Nyssa
Summary: In which the Master hunts the Doctor across the stars (like the faithless git he is), and in the process takes tea with his mother.
Beta: aralias, for doing the hard work for me, and innocentsmith and alex_e_smith for much-needed early read-throughs and suggestions.
A/N: Remember that best_enemies Cliche Challenge forever ago? This was started under its auspices. Slave!fic cliche ahoy!
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Part I, Chapter 6, Part II, Chapter 7, Part I, Chapter 7, Part II
A NOTE REGARDING CHAPTERING: I know I've bumped up to eight chapters from five and then from seven, and I am heartily sorry for being a tease re: that. The ending IS all written, and you can expect Chapter Seven Part II within the next day or so, whereupon I'll post this chapter to comms and take this post off f-lock. Chapter 8 is also finished, barring a few pages of epilogue. I expect to finish it and have it off to beta today, and probably to have it posted within a week. The problem with posting everything at once was that is was just too BIG, both for individual posts (all told chapters 7 and 8 would have taken three or four, given the lj character limits) and for the poor beleaguered beta to get through all in one quick go.
So with some minor waiting, here's fic:
The Crane Wife
Chapter 7, Part I
The Master fixed a winning grin on his face and gave the knocker three taps. He waited a few moments, then heard the rustling sound of someone approaching from behind the door. It opened to reveal a middle-aged woman wearing a slightly dirty apron. Her heart-shaped face was almost lost under a loose cloud of red hair.
“Hello,” the Master began, “I am-”
“The Master, yes,” the woman interrupted him, with only the barest flicker of amusement.
The Master coughed and tried to start again. “And you will-”
“Be delighted to have you as a dinner guest! He said you’d be along-do come in. I can’t leave the meringue for more than a moment, I’m afraid.”
The Master wore a suit and carried a brief case-props that were part of a larger plot. He’d come to Stockbridge to convince the Doctor’s parents he was a government official, here to ask them a few questions about their tax returns. After ‘Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Smith’ admitted him, he would hypnotize them into telling him everything they knew about their son’s recent activities and whereabouts.
He was slightly put out at having been so thoroughly anticipated.
“Just through here,” the Doctor’s mother called over her shoulder.
Grudgingly, the Master followed her into the sunny kitchen where, by all evidence, she appeared to be preparing a Sunday roast ample enough to feed three people, complete with some sort of desert waiting to be smothered in the aforementioned meringue.
“Oh-how rude of me. Verity Smith.” She thrust out a hand to him with a bright grin that was painfully reminiscent of her son’s. The Master shook it, feeling awkwardly exposed without the protection of his gloves-but they would hardly have fit the pose of a civil servant. Even this fine a suit was pushing the bounds of credulity, but it would have annoyed him wear anything shabbier, and he had the most bizarre urge to impress these people.
“Charmed,” the Master said dryly. “I would introduce myself, but it seems my reputation has preceded me.”
“Actually I think he was expecting you a good deal sooner-John came through about a week ago and said you might turn up any day now.” Verity turned back to her oven, stirring something on the hob and occasionally darting a glance back at him. “But I thought you’d try for a Sunday. There’s a greater chance of both Sydney and I being in, after all, and John implied you were bright enough to think about that sort of thing. And important enough not to want to waste more time than necessary making calls.”
“John?” the Master repeated as if he could hardly credit it.
“Oh, the Doctor, I suppose.” Verity waved an oven-mitted hand airily. “I can’t say it with a straight face, I’m afraid. It’s impossible to call a child you nursed anything so portentously Gallifreyan. If he’d gone with ‘the Biter’ or ‘the Irritatingly Precocious’ I might just have managed it. Tea?”
“Pardon?”
“Would you like some tea,” Verity repeated patiently. “And if you would, how do you take it?”
“Tea with milk and two sugars would be excellent, thank you.” The Master, ever able to adapt himself to a changing situation, turned the charm up to eleven. He smiled ingratiatingly. “Everything smells delicious.”
Verity gave him a cheeky look. “Of course it does. I’m making it.” Clearly the Doctor came by his over-weaning self-confidence honestly. “You know, you take your tea exactly like my son does in this regeneration.”
The Master managed to maintain a pleasant expression. “He introduced me to the beverage, actually.”
“How interesting.He said you bought him at a slave market and kept him prisoner for the last year or so,” she said conversationally, putting the kettle on. “And in that period of servitude, I suppose he found time to introduce you to tea?”
The Master bristled. “That is… a rather circumscribed interpretation of the events.”
“Oh, I know there’s more to it,” Verity fetched down three cups. They were Draconian china work-not so obviously alien as to be suspicious, but easy to identify if you knew what you were looking at. “John rarely lies to me, but he does tend to edit. If the truth would sound too dangerous, or even too unflattering, he tells me whatever version of the story he thinks will make me the happiest. Which is all he wants, really-to do what he likes and for me not to fuss about him. It’s both sweet and infuriating, I find. By the by, he said to give you this.” From a drawer beneath the cabinet that held the delicately patterned cups, Verity pulled a small, sealed envelope. She held it out to him with a casual air.
“How curious.” The Master examined it without opening it. The envelope was-barely-wrinkled. The wax seal was discretely smudged at one corner. “It seems almost as though someone’s already steamed this letter open and then neatly resealed it by ever so slightly reheating the wax.”
“Really? My goodness, it all sounds terribly clever,” Verity said, fetching the sugar bowl.
“What a pity it’s in Gallifreyan, and thus so very difficult to read-such effort shouldn’t go unrewarded.”
“A shame,” Verity agreed.
“I don’t suppose you’ve learned the language, in your centuries living with your husband and son?”
“Me? Oh, it’s much too difficult for a human, isn’t it? All those tenses and squiggly circles-like a gyroscopic nightmare. Can’t read a word.”
The Master chuckled, then, drawing a knife from his coat pocket, slit the seal. The message was short, and his eyes narrowed as he read it. It was phrased curtly, in a distant tense, without any of the sympathy of line and case that should have marked a letter between lovers. In a language nuanced enough to describe every shade of affection and intimacy, the Doctor had apparently preferred to write to him as though they’d never met.
It hardly contained the apologies or declarations he felt appropriate, given the circumstances of the Doctor’s departure. All it said was that if the Master hurt them (the Gallifreyan noun-symbol he used was loose enough that ‘them’ could be read to encompass his parents, people and planet), the Doctor would never forgive him.
The Master sneered. What made the Doctor think he wanted his good opinion? He was tempted to conquer the wretched planet just as a gesture, to show the Doctor his place. He crushed the letter viciously in his hand.
The night after the Doctor fled, in the course of his preparations for bed, the Master had opened the bedside table where he kept, among other things, the Doctor’s collar and cuffs. Those had been missing, and in their place had been left a sum amounting to seventy-five drachbars and a short note from the Doctor saying that he considered their debt settled and suggesting the Master buy himself a replacement and/or a small wagon.
This communiqué was almost equally enraging. The Master was tempted to do something rash, but accustomed enough to playing long games to check the impulse. The very suggestion of the Doctor’s good opinion being something the Master stood to lose was almost hopeful. If he wanted to make the option of returning to him possible and palatable for the Doctor (when the fool realized his mistake, missed his comfortable life, or had exhausted his will to constantly run from the long arm of the Master’s law), then he couldn’t create any insurmountable obstacles to their union. The Master had a feeling that kidnapping the Doctor’s parents and holding them hostage until the Doctor agreed to consult with a wedding planner would be just such a snag.
He sighed and shelved the eighteen excellent plans he’d come up with to subjugate the Earth for fun, profit, and to get the Doctor to come running to defend it. They could, of course, still come into play if he grew truly desperate, and had exhausted all the options that wouldn’t cause the Doctor the mental anguish he so richly deserved.
Verity coughed politely, interrupting the Master’s train of thought and handing him his tea.
“Do I smell Earl Grey?” An older man emerged from the den, blinking owlishly. His voice was deep and soft, but brusque. It was the aural equivalent of rubbing a fur coat against the grain.
“Yes, dear.” Verity handed him the third mug.
He took a deep swig, smacking his lips, and gave his wife a mad sort of grin. His white, curly hair stuck out madly from his head. If his wife’s tresses were cloudlike, his reminded the Master of nothing so much as a sea urchin.
“My damn neutrino sorter’s on the blink again-the whole morning’s work’s been spoilt. I’ll make Thete have a look at it when he comes by next. He has such a knack for making rickety old machinery click over when it should have passed on to robot heaven. I say,” he abruptly took notice of the Master, who was standing across the kitchen counter from the lady of the house, holding a mug of tea like it was a foreign object and watching the couple’s conversation with an air of bemusement, “who’s this young man?”
“This is the Master. He’s a friend of our son’s,” Verity said, being politic.
The Doctor’s father squinted at their visitor myopically, fishing a pair of spectacles out of his pocket and donning them. “Not that Time Lord Emperor fellow he was mooning over last week?”
Verity rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear, that one.”
“About damned time, if you ask me,” the Time Lord living as ‘Sydney’ grunted. “Mind you, he never does. Boy, what house are you from?”
Bewildered and bristling at being addressed as a boy, the Master managed to choke out his branch-designation.
“An Oakden,” Sydney turned to his wife. “Well, that’s all right then. I knew his mother-my first cousin, actually. Best of the lot, she was. She didn’t have a son when I left, though.”
“I was born the same year as the Doctor,” the Master put in, feeling he should be making some contribution to the discussion. He would have been more able to if he'd been better prepared. He’d never gotten around to properly examining the files he’d sought out on the Doctor’s father. He hadn’t even guessed that he and the Doctor were so closely related.
Gallifreyan technology could easily weed out genetic impurities. High-ranking Houses and had a vested interest in keeping their property in the family, and they considered their ‘property’ to include their genetic capital, with all its attendant advantages-the products of investment, research, and the trial and error of generations of tinkering. Such close kinship as his and the Doctor’s was actually considered an attractive incentive to marriage.
The Master’s own mother was greatly renowned for her work as both a Matrix coder and a loom specialist. As her only child, his genetic blueprint had been her pet project-the result of years of on-paper development and academic publication before she so much as nudged a nucleotide. Now that he was a renegade some rivals and critics said she’d sacrificed too much stability in pursuit of unorthodox thinking patterns, raw intelligence and drive. Others, however, commended her as they might a sculptor of a truly daring avant-garde piece.
“And you’ve earned a title-did your mother ever get hers? Good girl, excellent scientist. She should have, you know, if she didn’t.” Belatedly the Master remembered the Doctor’s father had been a well-placed scientist before dropping out of society, and was titled as well. It would be appropriate to address him by either his chosen name or his given name, as he was a not-too-distant family member. The Master debated which would better serve his ends as he answered.
“She’s the Alchemist now, yes, and a Cardinal, my Lord.”
Titles could be awarded by professional or governmental councils, or automatically conferred upon anyone who achieved certain remarkable feats. The Doctor’s father and the Master’s mother had taken the first route. The Doctor, necessarily out of touch with any such councils, had opted for the latter. Technically the Master had done both, but he preferred to think of his name as something he’d taken rather than something he’d been given.
“Good on Avdroshketyananka,” Sydney said warmly. “Now come make yourself useful, boy, and have a look at this neutrino sorter. Come along, tut tut!”
***
The Master smoldered with indignation. Sydney had commended him heartily on fixing the neutrino sorter, but he’d been appallingly patronizing about it. The Master hadn’t been treated like a child since long before he’d left the academy, and it had thrown him off to such an extent that he’d failed to make a graceful, immediate escape. He’d suffered through an excellent roast, and was now stuck in the parlor making small talk, taking tea and cake with the Doctor’s human mother. To rub salt in his wounded dignity, from every horizontal surface he was confronted with photographs of the Doctor at various ages, in several incarnations and costumes. If that weren’t painful enough, in at least half the photos the Doctor was being clung to. The guilty parties were universally attractive youths, the like of which had better not, somewhere in the galaxy, be clinging to the Doctor even now.
“He certainly does have a predilection for bright young things,” the Master noted bitterly, having only succeeded in suppressing the remark for about two minutes of conversation about the various attractions of the surrounding midlands.
The Doctor’s mother raised an eyebrow before realizing what he was talking about and smiling. “Oh not really-not it that sense, at least. More of a penchant for waifs and strays. Besides, several of those girls are his sisters.”
“Sisters? He never said he had any sisters.” Surely even the Doctor wouldn’t have dissembled about something so immaterial.
“Ah. Well. That’s a bit of a story, actually…”
“One I would be delighted to hear,” the Master assured her, with a friendly, open smile. He intended, if necessary, to use every appropriate charm he possessed (short of hypnotism) to coax her into telling him more. The more she talked, the greater the chance that she would slip and give away some stray detail that would betray the Doctor’s current activities and location.
Nor did the Master have any objection to hearing fresh information on one of his favorite subjects from such a uniquely knowledgeable source. Even admitting to himself the degree of his interest made him feel a lovelorn fool, but he knew perfectly well that if Verity wanted to show off all John ’s glowing youthful report cards, he would politely admire the things.
Verity smiled-a trifle too knowingly for the Master’s liking. “Well, you see, John was born during the War. Sydney, bless him, accidentally landed his TARDIS in entirely the wrong period. I was the nurse matron in charge of a children’s wing during the Blitz of London.”
She nudged the biscuit plate in the Master’s direction, and he obediently took a shortbread square.
“And shall I ask the inevitable question?”
“Ah-how did we meet.” Verity smiled. “One night there was this terrible crash-I thought it was a bomb that hadn’t fully detonated. In that war the Germans started dropping Brandbomben from the air. As I understand it the explosives were supposed to open at altitude and scatter, but occasionally the priming mechanism was faulty; they wouldn’t split, and thus couldn’t be ignited by the charge they carried. The duds still had to be destroyed of course-monstrous things. And so I went to investigate. I walked all the way to the end of the hall and saw… nothing. And whoever heard of a bomb without an entry path?”
“Quite,” the Master agreed, reaching for another square of shortbread, and feeling entirely at home with a technical discussion of incendiary weaponry.
“Then this strange man stumbled out of the supply closet, wearing these ridiculous-well, I know now they were Prydonian robes, but at the time I thought he might be, er, touched, and going around in a set of curtains. He started to explain, and then I had to tell the very suspicious soldiers ,who came to clear away the bomb, that he was a clown there for the children so they wouldn’t haul him off for questioning. Luckily he could juggle quite convincingly.”
The Master managed to school his features into a polite, enquiring expression, and made a civil noise that prompted Verity to continue.
“Anyway, John was born during the last of those air raids, about nine months later. Maybe it was mad for a girl in her twenties to have a whirlwind courtship with a loveably rubbish, runaway time-traveling alien she’d just met in a broom cupboard. Maybe it was crazy to marry him when I found out I was carrying his child. But those were strange times. Half the city was in ruins-celebrating life seemed the right idea, even if in this case I was half afraid the ‘life’ in question might come with baby-tentacles that dropped off at three months, or some other nonsense my husband had entirely forgotten to warn me about.”
“We do tend to be discreet on the subject of birthing tentacles-some species, I am given to understand, find them off-putting,” the Master deadpanned.
Verity snorted. “I say half-afraid-I wouldn’t have been greatly surprised, after ‘two hearts, no really’ and ‘sometimes I go out wearing a different body.’ Now, as for the girls-when the War ended in ‘45 there were, well, a great many orphans. I asked my husband if we could take some in-clearly the money wasn’t a problem. He said a pack of developing humans running around the place might interfere with his work. I told him he was being so fastidious and non-interventionist he could run for the High Council-that shut him up.
He said one might be all right, and so I argued him up to two, and actually told the orphanage they could send over as many as four. And then five, all girls, showed up at the door, and he was having none of it. Fine, I said, tell them yourself. He stomped into the living room to do it, and five minutes later he came back out having failed to so much as glare at the poor things, and said we could make the second floor dimensionally transcendental without attracting too much notice from the neighbors.
“And so John had five little sisters, as you see.” Verity gestured to a picture in which an enthusiastic blond boy was trying to coerce a circle of dubious-looking girls into playing cricket with him. A nearby photo showed the same group in boaters and school uniforms, punting, with their mother looking beatific and their disgruntled father looking uncomfortable in professorial tweed.
“That doesn’t look like Stockbrigde,” the Master remarked.
“Oh, we lived in Cambridge back then, but we went down every summer and lived here in Stockbridge. Though the children weren’t always stuck here- when John nicked his ship from the yard he took his sisters traveling. He likes a crowded TARDIS. But they all peeled off to live their own lives, in the end-I suppose they felt they had to, like Susan giving up Narnia and growing up.”
“And since then?” the Master prompted. Unless they’d all been, like Verity, preserved beyond the natural span of their years, the children the Doctor had grown up with would have died centuries ago in his relative time line. Given the Doctor’s reverence for free will above all, the Master could extrapolate that girls had likely been allowed to choose whether they wanted to take advantage of that technology.
Looking up, the Master could see pictures of at least three of them growing up and then growing old-several in which they stood next to a strangely young brother, or a never-changing, sad-eyed mother. Respecting his sisters’ decisions to age and die would have ground the sacredness of self-determination into the Doctor’s young consciousness. It didn’t excuse his fixation on the idea, but it did go some ways towards explaining his inflexibility on that point.
“And ever since then,” Verity looked up at the photographs, “he’s managed to pick up wastrels like lint on a good black dress. Adric’s the latest I’ve met-a gifted mathematician from another universe, and an orphan. Adric traveled with him for a while, but when John came to visit us the time before last I asked him if a boy that young shouldn’t be in school. John acted as though it had never occurred to him, but now Adric’s off studying Maths at Warwick, and a good deal more settled. He visits us when he can.
“That one’s Liz-she was at Cambridge with him. And that’s his niece, Josephine. Her mother was always his favorite-the sister who traveled with him the longest. He and Jo worked together when he was trapped here after that Zodin business. Of course Jo got married not terribly long ago-poor John hasn’t quite forgiven her for ‘abandoning him for the company of a supercilious Welshman,’ as he puts it.”
“You make him sound so avuncular he could never have entertained the thought of any relationship,” the Master said, with a strange air, irony half hiding hope. Of course he recognized that the bulk of this could be deliberate evasion or misdirection on Verity’s part. But, provided she was essentially straightforward, he found it comforting that he wasn’t at the end (if even that, any more) of a long, long chain of disappointed lovers.
“Avuncular enough that I’ve seen seven centuries without so much as the hint of a grandchild out of him,” Verity groused promptly. “Gallifreyan technology had sustained my life far beyond its natural bounds, but it can do nothing to bolster my patience. He adores children, he’s so good with them-stories, sweets from Raxacoricofallapatorius, Venusian lullabies. He so enjoys being an uncle, I don’t think he could help being a good father.
“He works terribly hard, and he’s burned through so many regenerations-I can’t help but think he’d be safer, happier even, if he had someone. He tries to take care of all the young people traveling with him, and of all the places he goes, but there isn’t really anyone he lets take care of him. Perhaps he needs what Earth and I can’t readily give him-a partner. To spend his time with someone his own age, with comparable experience, who won’t be too over-awed by his brilliance and charisma to tell him when he’s being a silly ass.” She gave the Master a pointed look.
“An interesting observation,” he said sharply. “I assume you’ve told the Doctor something similar, for all the good that will do. I can’t imagine, even as a child, that the remarks on his report card included ‘responds well to criticism.’” Abruptly, the Master stood up and walked to the window. .After a moment’s stiff silence, the Master seized on the nearest passing conversational topic.
“You seem to be quite happily situated here. I’d like to know how you’ve managed it. You’re living here and now, in Stockbridge at the end of the millennia, and yet you seem to have done exactly that centuries ago in your personal timelines. Your husband’s in chronological synchronicity with the Doctor, and yet you managed to simultaneously raise a family between here and Cambridge.”
“Oh, that-I like this millennia, you see, and we like Stockbridge. We’re settled very comfortably here, I’d hate to leave. And so we’re crossing our own time stream,” she said, as if that weren’t a capital time crime. “It’s a trick of my step-son’s. When the children were grown, I suggested looping back. Besides, we’d seen ourselves doing it, we already knew it would happen at some point.
“My husband and I went back and settled in the Middle Ages, and so there have been Smiths in Stockbridge since time immemorial. Smiths that look an awful lot like the Smiths of the previous generation, but no one bothers about that in a small town like this. As I said, my husband and I look the same as we ever did, and so now that we’ve caught up with our younger selves, when we clear out to let them use the place everyone in town thinks it’s just the kids coming home for school holidays. They assume various older regenerations of my son are just other family members stopping by for a visit. It’s as easy as pie,” she said, sliding another bite of just that onto her fork.
“As pi?” The Master was completely lost now.
“As P-I-E,” Verity corrected. “A baked pastry dough shell containing a sweet or savory filling.”
“Ah yes!” The Master remembered this part. “Like the one made of shepherds.”
“Hm. Well, not-”
An explosion rattled the windowpanes. Verity calmly set her teacup down in its saucer. “That’ll be the children, then. I remember this visit-we let John drive once we got out into the country. This is about the time we discovered he’d taken that as permission to make a ‘few small modifications’ to the engine.”
In the drive, a younger voice that was nonetheless unquestionably still Verity’s shrieked, “What do you mean, ‘it runs on jam’?”
A boy laughed awkwardly. “Mum… Really, it’s-”
The Master pulled back the curtains, taking a look at the gangly blond teenager making the excuses. He was comically swallowed up by his large black tailcoat, but handsome enough when he shrugged it off his shoulders, revealing a waistcoat, pin-striped trousers, wing collar and bow tie. Some form of school uniform, the Master supposed. Clearly this was the foundation of his peculiar predilection for stripy trousers. The boy shoved his hands in his pockets defensivly. He frowned severely in response to an amused accusation from one of his sisters, the frown deepening almost into a pout. The Master missed him suddenly and bitterly. He turned around at a cough from Verity.
“I’m afraid we’d better clear out,” she said quite gently. “I’ve got to drag my contemporary Sydney out of his lab, though heaven knows how I’ll manage to pry him off that neutrino-sorter you’ve patched up for him.
“Of course,” the Master conceded, allowing Verity to show him the back door, and Sydney to shake his hand more firmly than might have been expected of someone so frail-looking.
Standing at the edge of the wood where he had hidden his TARDIS, the Master looked back at the house. The drive was empty now, the family having apparently gone in as he himself left. Then the front door slammed, and the Doctor, so unbelievably young, bounded outside again and down the steps. He threw open the boot of the car, sorting through the parcels there. The Master wanted to shake him, grab him, kiss him, steal him away-but for the sake of their Time Streams he didn’t dare even wish him a forgettable ‘good day.’
Besides, the Master reminded himself, he was just a child. Though, he mused, they had been born the same year in relative Gallifreyan time. Had they grown up together, the Master supposed this was about the age they might have begun to first consider each other as more than innocent playmates. He gave the boy a searching look, trying to see him through his own fifteen-year-old eyes. Brash, arrogant and unconventional. Decidedly handsome, in lean, laughing sort of way. Achingly, obviously still the Doctor.
The Master concluded he would have been just as devastatingly taken with him as he found himself now. He felt cheated of those years, even as he was grateful for the ignorant autonomy he’d enjoyed while never suspecting that such a person as the Doctor existed. He’d been the master of his own will and desires until very recently-he suspected he’d never have been, had his thoughts been fixated on this ‘John’ from an early age.
The Master waited for ‘John’ to select an assortment of bags, to slam the boot shut and to head into the house before he turned away. Back in his TARDIS the Master flicked the fast-return switch. Though this effort had met with failure, he was not without alternative means of attaining what he wanted. A slow smirk spread across his face as he contemplated his next move. He even cheered up so far as to chuckle softly when he imagined the moment the Doctor realized his ex-lover had put a contract out on him. His expression of delicious dismay alone would be beyond price.
***
At first, the Emperor of Hestin’s orders specified that the Doctor be taken alive and unharmed. After two months, they more curtly requested that he be returned alive. This had its effect.
The Master was nothing short of gleeful when his night staff put through a transmission from the Koban High Command. The Command had called to let the Emperor know that a man calling himself the Doctor was being held on one of their frigates and could be picked up at his convenience. They had a visual link-did the Master wish to confirm the identity of the prisoner?
He dressed hurriedly, and was still straightening his collar when he walked into the command center. “Put it on screen,” the Master waved his hand at a young ops officer, taking the command chair from the security division head, who rose to make way for him. The Master leant forward, tapping his fingers on the arms of the chair, impatient for the signal to come through. With a few keystrokes a hologram snapped on, illustrating the frigate’s bridge in shallow relief. Three people, unaware of their observers, were being restrained by uniformed Koban troopers. The Master’s attention immediately fixed on the man on the far left. The picture was grainy, but it was unmistakably the Doctor.
“Him again?” a red haired girl asked incredulously, evidently responding to something the troop commander had just told her. She craned her neck to look over at the Doctor. “This must be the fourth time-what did you do to this guy, Doc?”
The Doctor had the decency to look chagrined. “I’d rather not discuss it,” he said primly, struggling in the grasp of his guards. “Could I ask you to move your hand? You’re cutting off the blood flow. Ah, thank you, there’s a good chap.”
“He’s never been anything but polite to me,” said a brunette girl -surely that wasn’t Nyssa of Traken? The brunette looked resigned to being captured, as if it were a regular occurrence in her life. “Before he became our Keeper my father conducted trade negotiations with him. I’ve been a guest in his Palace many times.” She looked over at the Doctor. “Perhaps we should arrange a meeting to clear up the misunderstanding you mentioned.”
The Doctor winced for reasons entirely unrelated to issues of blood flow. “No, Nyssa, I don’t think that would be-”
A sudden explosion rocked the deck, and the Doctor was slammed to the floor. He caught himself with his hands and looked up at the ship’s captain. “I told you the gravity well was too intense. Your systems can’t handle the pressure. Listen, you must let me fix the dampeners, and to do that you have to let me into the engine room! Everything depends on it! Please!” There was a second explosion, and the Doctor struggled to his feet, gripping the console nearest to him. The emergency claxons kicked on and the feed cut out. The Master leaned back in his chair.
“Trying to re-establish, sir.” The technician worried the keys. When, ten minutes later, she managed to get the image back, the bridge was conspicuously empty. His expression unreadable, the Master stood.
“Call me when further word comes through,” he said. He turned and walked back to his bedroom. When, early in the morning, the Koban High Command communicated their deepest regrets that the prisoner had managed to escape, the Master cut the connection mid-apology. He lay back down, acutely conscious of the bed’s largeness. Naturally the Doctor had managed to save the crew of the frigate and secure his own liberty-he’d done much the same on every occasion on which he’d seemed close to capture. The Monin Host, for example, had only relented in their quest to tie him up in ribbons and leave him on the Master’s doorstep once he’d saved their world from a devastating temporal paradox.
As infuriating and, the Master sometimes admitted to himself, painful as it was to watch the Doctor squirm out of his clutches time and again, it was also undeniably impressive.
To the best of his admittedly incomplete intelligence, while on the run the Doctor had managed to avert no less than three major inter-stellar wars. He’d also helped the Skelarri rebel faction gain a key tactical victory, foiled a planned Cyberman invasion of Earth, and, through an amusing series of mistakes, won a Xeraphin beauty contest. This was not as much of a credit to his appearance as it might have been, given that, due to a recent, thoroughly unamusing series of mistakes, the Xeraphin now found themselves a single bioplasmic gestalt intelligence. As such they were formless, and largely incapable of competing in any contests of a physical nature-not even their own.
If the Doctor had been fetchingly capable and dynamic whilst his prisoner, he was infinitely more so given free reign of the wider universe. The Master had appreciated what he knew of the Doctor’s accomplishments, but he could admit now that it had been a fond, patronizing sort of appreciation, based on a clearly insufficient estimation of the Doctor’s talents. He had considered the Doctor his equal, but now the Doctor was manifestly exactly that, and it required no such declaration from the Master to make it evident.
Of course, this still didn’t justify his absurd escape. The Master would dearly love to wring a few regenerations out of his impressive little neck. As the weeks of humiliating, pining celibacy dragged on into months, his desire to do so grew stronger. The more he valued what he’d lost, the more keenly he wanted it back, and the more viciously he begrudged its absence. If the Doctor assumed the Master was calming down or forgetting him, he was sorely mistaken.
A screeching Dalek voice interrupted his reverie, and the Master rolled over, pushing his face down into his pillow with a growl. When that wasn’t enough to block out the noise, he squirmed under the pillow. His technicians had yet to comprehend, let alone undo, the clever trick the Doctor had managed with the sensor ghosts. At random intervals a faux invasion force squawked and blustered over the communication system, and the sensors detected a variety of nonexistent Dalek incursions. It was absolutely maddening. As if he weren’t dwelling on it already, the breakdowns served to constantly remind the Master not only of the Doctor’s absence, and the added horror of his lover having jilted him quite visibly before the entire Palace staff.
The Master himself had been too preoccupied (with hunting the Doctor, rather than the state business he knew he’d been neglecting of late) to take a proper look at the fault. Besides, he was at a disadvantage to the saboteur-it was always easier to break something than to repair it.
The alarms silenced, and the Master irrationally hoped they’d finished for the night. He poked his head out from under the pillow tentatively.
“SURRENDER!! SURRENDER TO THE-”
The Master groaned, grabbed his pillow, and stomped off into his TARDIS to sleep, vowing to follow up on the lead Nyssa of Traken had presented him with in the morning.
***
According to the gossip a Traken Council member had leaked to the Master’s ambassador, the Doctor had managed to talk the Keeper of Traken out of holding him. Hestin was Traken’s principal trading partner, and such strong ties should have prevented Traken from acting expressly against the Emperor’s interests. Tremas, however, had always been a willful man, even before he became the supreme authority of the Union.
The Master tapped his foot impatiently. Ravel’s Bolero was stuck in his head, and it was working its way out through his body. A human composer-the Doctor truly had infected him. When at last the Keeper shimmered grandly into visibility before him, the Master glared at the aged reflection of his own face.
“Ah,” the Keeper studied him, not without amusement. “I trust you’re here about that Doctor fellow who came calling.”
“What part of ‘detain him at all costs’ did you interpret as ‘send him on his merry way with a fresh assistant and sandwiches for the road’? I was under the impression that you and I had something of an understanding, Tremas.”
The older-looking man chucked. “Don’t look so put out-you resemble me at that age having a strop. I can’t take you seriously at all.”
The Master grit his teeth. “I hardly chose to regenerate in the manner I did.”
“No,” Tremas smirked, “but I think it suits you remarkably well. Besides, I’ve chosen to interpret it as flattery. And as to our understanding-come now, Master. I like you a great deal and consider you a good friend and ally, but you are a dictator, and as such your personal vendettas are hardly a trustworthy means of identifying public enemies. In this case, quite the opposite. I found the Doctor very agreeable. He managed, in the course of his stay here, and with the assistance of my wife Cassia, to put an end to a most barbaric ancient practice of ours which had long been a blight on the serenity of our capital. Perhaps, in your haste to accuse me of abetting your fugitive, you did not notice that the Melkur grove has been abolished? The Doctor took objection to the practice and argued passionately against it. I took his counsel to heart.”
“I’m amazed your ossified society managed to change so much as its letterhead, let alone anything which ‘tradition’ had managed to encrust with dignity,” the Master growled. He was frustrated by the Keeper’s attempts to shift the discussion, but unable to avoid putting in a bid for the position he normally took in such arguments with Tremas.
“Well, this Doctor of yours is a rather remarkable man. Rumor has it you thought so as well.”
The Master gave him a poisonous look and opened his mouth to respond, but Tremas cut him off. “Don’t be so vexed, you know how difficult it is to keep the goings-on in a palace the size of yours a secret-and by all accounts you were hardly interested in discretion. The situation is as I expected, and I’ve no intention of interfering in a lovers’ quarrel, on either side.”
“You’ve already interfered, Keeper. I leave you empty-handed,” the Master pointed out. “The Doctor managed to pick up a new traveling companion during the encounter. For all your talk of neutrality, I doubt he counts his visit here as a loss.”
Tremas raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my Nyssa has had a difficult time adjusting to my assumption of the Keepership. I can no longer be simply her father, and while she and her step-mother are fond of each other, there is little for her here now. The Doctor offered her a chance to further her education, and to travel. He admitted there might be danger in accompanying him, but Nyssa believed she would be working in the service of something greater than her own life, and so she chose to encounter it. Though as her father I might have wished to keep her here, as her Keeper I could only honor her decision. She is a woman grown now, but even still-tell me honestly. Can you think of any reason I should not have entrusted the Doctor with my child?”
“Why I should tell you?” the Master sneered.
“Perhaps you have a point,” Tremas admitted, “I have not been generous to you. But despite having known the Doctor only a short while, I felt I could not betray him. That was unfair to you, and I am sorry for it. But I cannot be ashamed of it.”
The Master glowered at the base of Tremas’s golden throne for a while before speaking. “Your daughter is quite safe. The Doctor is what he seems-an insufferably good man.” The Master did not add that he had hoped to entrust his own children to him.
Watching him, and recognizing the lost look on his face in a way no one else could have, Tremas took pity-of course the Master could never simply ask how his lover had seemed, and if Tremas didn’t volunteer the information, in all likelihood he’d just steal security camera footage and comb the grainy holofeed for clues.
“Tell me Master, do you think of this Doctor of yours as having a melancholic temperament?”
The Master was taken aback. “Somewhat reserved, perhaps, but hardly melancholy.” The Doctor’s joie de vivre was one of his most attractive qualities.
“Hm.” Tremas pursed his lips. “Suppose I told you that the man I met was positively grave? He seemed pleasant-short tempered at times, but otherwise infallibly polite. But he was withdrawn. As if determined to bear some great disappointment. A man who had reconciled himself to never being entirely happy.”
The Master started. “I’d say we were speaking of different people.”
Tremas raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think he could be mistaken for anyone else?”
“No,” the Master conceded. “He’s…” maddeningly incomparable, the Master thought. “Distinctive in his dress, if nothing else.” He drew himself up and said sharply, “And you have no further information regarding his whereabouts?”
Tremas gave him a dubious look, as though they’d already cleared this point up-he hadn’t given the Doctor away earlier, and he had no intentions of rectifying his error.
The Master signed. “I only intend to speak to him, Tremas. He has nothing to fear from me.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it, though I’m sure he’d feel differently. As it happens, I believe you. But I’m afraid I cannot help you. You’ll simply have to attempt to contact him through other means.”
***
Dressed as always in black, the Master paced back and forth in front of yet another row of bounty hunters. The Doctor would have made a joke about how this was very Star Wars, the Master mused, but the Doctor wasn’t here.
The Master had redoubled his efforts after his spectacularly unsuccessful interview with Tremas of Traken. He’d charged Hestin’s internal security forces to find the Doctor with little result, and so the Master was holding this briefing to acquaint the absolute best people in the field with the problem. He was offering a king’s ransom-enough to buy two goodish star systems, or perhaps one outstanding one.
Of course the Master knew he’d do a better job tracking the Doctor himself, but he ran an empire, and an empire’s influence stretches even further than its actual borders. If the Doctor wanted to travel anywhere within a wide sector of space he had to visit the time period the Master occupied, due to his TARDIS’s unwillingness to violate the two Time Lords’ chronological synchronicity. And the Doctor had been cleverer than to leave Hestin’s sphere of influence for long. While he remained in temporal synchronicity with the Master’s Empire, the Master couldn’t run off to chase him without abandoning his throne for however long the pursuit took. He’d lose everything he’d worked towards for centuries, his lives’ ambition, and when he finally attained his prize he would be incapable of offering the Doctor so much as a square meter of land as a bridal gift. The Master hoped he could never be reconciled to giving the Doctor that satisfaction, but the calculus of desperation’s results were looking grimmer by the day.
And so it seemed the Master would have to subcontract out to professionals. If the Doctor felt the insult of being fetched like a runaway pet picked up by the pound rather than personally pursued, so much the better.
He knew that those professionals would be able to track the Doctor more easily if they knew they were hunting a Time Lord, but if he made that common knowledge, listed it as another bullet point on the wanted posters, he would be betraying the Doctor to the CIA. Lifetimes’ carefully guarded anonymity could be spoilt. The paranoid, controlling CIA, which prided itself on keeping Gallifreyans in line even more than it did on keeping the rest of the universe similarly in order, would feel had, would feel like rubes, and would pursue the Doctor with a vengeance to assuage that embarrassment.
Such a disclosure would make the galaxy a more dangerous place for the Doctor to roam without the Master’s protection, and could force him to return home. It would also put the Doctor in danger, and if he was more stubborn than prudent, as per usual, the CIA might catch up with him before the Master could. As furious as he was, and as much as he wanted the Doctor to suffer for having made a fool of him and abandoned him, a cosmos without the infuriating bastard scarcely bore thinking about. No, the Master had no intention of ever publicizing the Doctor’s background.
“My once-and-future chief scientific adviser is not to be taken lightly,” he concluded, looking around at the motley group. “He may look young. He may seem disarmingly innocuous. But trust me, for I have the benefit of considerable experience with the man-if he is allowed the slightest slack, he will wriggle through your nets, no matter how capable you consider yourselves to be. And his technical expertise-” the faux Dalek sensor ghosts flared to life, predicting four simultaneous Dalek incursions, interrupting the Master, alarming the assembled bounty hunters, and prompting the Master’s staff to wearily pull out and don thick headphones to continue about their business, “is without parallel,” the Master finished with grim bitterness.
***
Chapter 7, Part II
Chapter: Seven (Part I): Eight
Author: x_los
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Five/Ainley!Master, Benny, Tegan, Turlough, Nyssa
Summary: In which the Master hunts the Doctor across the stars (like the faithless git he is), and in the process takes tea with his mother.
Beta: aralias, for doing the hard work for me, and innocentsmith and alex_e_smith for much-needed early read-throughs and suggestions.
A/N: Remember that best_enemies Cliche Challenge forever ago? This was started under its auspices. Slave!fic cliche ahoy!
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Part I, Chapter 6, Part II, Chapter 7, Part I, Chapter 7, Part II
A NOTE REGARDING CHAPTERING: I know I've bumped up to eight chapters from five and then from seven, and I am heartily sorry for being a tease re: that. The ending IS all written, and you can expect Chapter Seven Part II within the next day or so, whereupon I'll post this chapter to comms and take this post off f-lock. Chapter 8 is also finished, barring a few pages of epilogue. I expect to finish it and have it off to beta today, and probably to have it posted within a week. The problem with posting everything at once was that is was just too BIG, both for individual posts (all told chapters 7 and 8 would have taken three or four, given the lj character limits) and for the poor beleaguered beta to get through all in one quick go.
So with some minor waiting, here's fic:
The Crane Wife
Chapter 7, Part I
The Master fixed a winning grin on his face and gave the knocker three taps. He waited a few moments, then heard the rustling sound of someone approaching from behind the door. It opened to reveal a middle-aged woman wearing a slightly dirty apron. Her heart-shaped face was almost lost under a loose cloud of red hair.
“Hello,” the Master began, “I am-”
“The Master, yes,” the woman interrupted him, with only the barest flicker of amusement.
The Master coughed and tried to start again. “And you will-”
“Be delighted to have you as a dinner guest! He said you’d be along-do come in. I can’t leave the meringue for more than a moment, I’m afraid.”
The Master wore a suit and carried a brief case-props that were part of a larger plot. He’d come to Stockbridge to convince the Doctor’s parents he was a government official, here to ask them a few questions about their tax returns. After ‘Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Smith’ admitted him, he would hypnotize them into telling him everything they knew about their son’s recent activities and whereabouts.
He was slightly put out at having been so thoroughly anticipated.
“Just through here,” the Doctor’s mother called over her shoulder.
Grudgingly, the Master followed her into the sunny kitchen where, by all evidence, she appeared to be preparing a Sunday roast ample enough to feed three people, complete with some sort of desert waiting to be smothered in the aforementioned meringue.
“Oh-how rude of me. Verity Smith.” She thrust out a hand to him with a bright grin that was painfully reminiscent of her son’s. The Master shook it, feeling awkwardly exposed without the protection of his gloves-but they would hardly have fit the pose of a civil servant. Even this fine a suit was pushing the bounds of credulity, but it would have annoyed him wear anything shabbier, and he had the most bizarre urge to impress these people.
“Charmed,” the Master said dryly. “I would introduce myself, but it seems my reputation has preceded me.”
“Actually I think he was expecting you a good deal sooner-John came through about a week ago and said you might turn up any day now.” Verity turned back to her oven, stirring something on the hob and occasionally darting a glance back at him. “But I thought you’d try for a Sunday. There’s a greater chance of both Sydney and I being in, after all, and John implied you were bright enough to think about that sort of thing. And important enough not to want to waste more time than necessary making calls.”
“John?” the Master repeated as if he could hardly credit it.
“Oh, the Doctor, I suppose.” Verity waved an oven-mitted hand airily. “I can’t say it with a straight face, I’m afraid. It’s impossible to call a child you nursed anything so portentously Gallifreyan. If he’d gone with ‘the Biter’ or ‘the Irritatingly Precocious’ I might just have managed it. Tea?”
“Pardon?”
“Would you like some tea,” Verity repeated patiently. “And if you would, how do you take it?”
“Tea with milk and two sugars would be excellent, thank you.” The Master, ever able to adapt himself to a changing situation, turned the charm up to eleven. He smiled ingratiatingly. “Everything smells delicious.”
Verity gave him a cheeky look. “Of course it does. I’m making it.” Clearly the Doctor came by his over-weaning self-confidence honestly. “You know, you take your tea exactly like my son does in this regeneration.”
The Master managed to maintain a pleasant expression. “He introduced me to the beverage, actually.”
“How interesting.He said you bought him at a slave market and kept him prisoner for the last year or so,” she said conversationally, putting the kettle on. “And in that period of servitude, I suppose he found time to introduce you to tea?”
The Master bristled. “That is… a rather circumscribed interpretation of the events.”
“Oh, I know there’s more to it,” Verity fetched down three cups. They were Draconian china work-not so obviously alien as to be suspicious, but easy to identify if you knew what you were looking at. “John rarely lies to me, but he does tend to edit. If the truth would sound too dangerous, or even too unflattering, he tells me whatever version of the story he thinks will make me the happiest. Which is all he wants, really-to do what he likes and for me not to fuss about him. It’s both sweet and infuriating, I find. By the by, he said to give you this.” From a drawer beneath the cabinet that held the delicately patterned cups, Verity pulled a small, sealed envelope. She held it out to him with a casual air.
“How curious.” The Master examined it without opening it. The envelope was-barely-wrinkled. The wax seal was discretely smudged at one corner. “It seems almost as though someone’s already steamed this letter open and then neatly resealed it by ever so slightly reheating the wax.”
“Really? My goodness, it all sounds terribly clever,” Verity said, fetching the sugar bowl.
“What a pity it’s in Gallifreyan, and thus so very difficult to read-such effort shouldn’t go unrewarded.”
“A shame,” Verity agreed.
“I don’t suppose you’ve learned the language, in your centuries living with your husband and son?”
“Me? Oh, it’s much too difficult for a human, isn’t it? All those tenses and squiggly circles-like a gyroscopic nightmare. Can’t read a word.”
The Master chuckled, then, drawing a knife from his coat pocket, slit the seal. The message was short, and his eyes narrowed as he read it. It was phrased curtly, in a distant tense, without any of the sympathy of line and case that should have marked a letter between lovers. In a language nuanced enough to describe every shade of affection and intimacy, the Doctor had apparently preferred to write to him as though they’d never met.
It hardly contained the apologies or declarations he felt appropriate, given the circumstances of the Doctor’s departure. All it said was that if the Master hurt them (the Gallifreyan noun-symbol he used was loose enough that ‘them’ could be read to encompass his parents, people and planet), the Doctor would never forgive him.
The Master sneered. What made the Doctor think he wanted his good opinion? He was tempted to conquer the wretched planet just as a gesture, to show the Doctor his place. He crushed the letter viciously in his hand.
The night after the Doctor fled, in the course of his preparations for bed, the Master had opened the bedside table where he kept, among other things, the Doctor’s collar and cuffs. Those had been missing, and in their place had been left a sum amounting to seventy-five drachbars and a short note from the Doctor saying that he considered their debt settled and suggesting the Master buy himself a replacement and/or a small wagon.
This communiqué was almost equally enraging. The Master was tempted to do something rash, but accustomed enough to playing long games to check the impulse. The very suggestion of the Doctor’s good opinion being something the Master stood to lose was almost hopeful. If he wanted to make the option of returning to him possible and palatable for the Doctor (when the fool realized his mistake, missed his comfortable life, or had exhausted his will to constantly run from the long arm of the Master’s law), then he couldn’t create any insurmountable obstacles to their union. The Master had a feeling that kidnapping the Doctor’s parents and holding them hostage until the Doctor agreed to consult with a wedding planner would be just such a snag.
He sighed and shelved the eighteen excellent plans he’d come up with to subjugate the Earth for fun, profit, and to get the Doctor to come running to defend it. They could, of course, still come into play if he grew truly desperate, and had exhausted all the options that wouldn’t cause the Doctor the mental anguish he so richly deserved.
Verity coughed politely, interrupting the Master’s train of thought and handing him his tea.
“Do I smell Earl Grey?” An older man emerged from the den, blinking owlishly. His voice was deep and soft, but brusque. It was the aural equivalent of rubbing a fur coat against the grain.
“Yes, dear.” Verity handed him the third mug.
He took a deep swig, smacking his lips, and gave his wife a mad sort of grin. His white, curly hair stuck out madly from his head. If his wife’s tresses were cloudlike, his reminded the Master of nothing so much as a sea urchin.
“My damn neutrino sorter’s on the blink again-the whole morning’s work’s been spoilt. I’ll make Thete have a look at it when he comes by next. He has such a knack for making rickety old machinery click over when it should have passed on to robot heaven. I say,” he abruptly took notice of the Master, who was standing across the kitchen counter from the lady of the house, holding a mug of tea like it was a foreign object and watching the couple’s conversation with an air of bemusement, “who’s this young man?”
“This is the Master. He’s a friend of our son’s,” Verity said, being politic.
The Doctor’s father squinted at their visitor myopically, fishing a pair of spectacles out of his pocket and donning them. “Not that Time Lord Emperor fellow he was mooning over last week?”
Verity rolled her eyes. “Yes, dear, that one.”
“About damned time, if you ask me,” the Time Lord living as ‘Sydney’ grunted. “Mind you, he never does. Boy, what house are you from?”
Bewildered and bristling at being addressed as a boy, the Master managed to choke out his branch-designation.
“An Oakden,” Sydney turned to his wife. “Well, that’s all right then. I knew his mother-my first cousin, actually. Best of the lot, she was. She didn’t have a son when I left, though.”
“I was born the same year as the Doctor,” the Master put in, feeling he should be making some contribution to the discussion. He would have been more able to if he'd been better prepared. He’d never gotten around to properly examining the files he’d sought out on the Doctor’s father. He hadn’t even guessed that he and the Doctor were so closely related.
Gallifreyan technology could easily weed out genetic impurities. High-ranking Houses and had a vested interest in keeping their property in the family, and they considered their ‘property’ to include their genetic capital, with all its attendant advantages-the products of investment, research, and the trial and error of generations of tinkering. Such close kinship as his and the Doctor’s was actually considered an attractive incentive to marriage.
The Master’s own mother was greatly renowned for her work as both a Matrix coder and a loom specialist. As her only child, his genetic blueprint had been her pet project-the result of years of on-paper development and academic publication before she so much as nudged a nucleotide. Now that he was a renegade some rivals and critics said she’d sacrificed too much stability in pursuit of unorthodox thinking patterns, raw intelligence and drive. Others, however, commended her as they might a sculptor of a truly daring avant-garde piece.
“And you’ve earned a title-did your mother ever get hers? Good girl, excellent scientist. She should have, you know, if she didn’t.” Belatedly the Master remembered the Doctor’s father had been a well-placed scientist before dropping out of society, and was titled as well. It would be appropriate to address him by either his chosen name or his given name, as he was a not-too-distant family member. The Master debated which would better serve his ends as he answered.
“She’s the Alchemist now, yes, and a Cardinal, my Lord.”
Titles could be awarded by professional or governmental councils, or automatically conferred upon anyone who achieved certain remarkable feats. The Doctor’s father and the Master’s mother had taken the first route. The Doctor, necessarily out of touch with any such councils, had opted for the latter. Technically the Master had done both, but he preferred to think of his name as something he’d taken rather than something he’d been given.
“Good on Avdroshketyananka,” Sydney said warmly. “Now come make yourself useful, boy, and have a look at this neutrino sorter. Come along, tut tut!”
***
The Master smoldered with indignation. Sydney had commended him heartily on fixing the neutrino sorter, but he’d been appallingly patronizing about it. The Master hadn’t been treated like a child since long before he’d left the academy, and it had thrown him off to such an extent that he’d failed to make a graceful, immediate escape. He’d suffered through an excellent roast, and was now stuck in the parlor making small talk, taking tea and cake with the Doctor’s human mother. To rub salt in his wounded dignity, from every horizontal surface he was confronted with photographs of the Doctor at various ages, in several incarnations and costumes. If that weren’t painful enough, in at least half the photos the Doctor was being clung to. The guilty parties were universally attractive youths, the like of which had better not, somewhere in the galaxy, be clinging to the Doctor even now.
“He certainly does have a predilection for bright young things,” the Master noted bitterly, having only succeeded in suppressing the remark for about two minutes of conversation about the various attractions of the surrounding midlands.
The Doctor’s mother raised an eyebrow before realizing what he was talking about and smiling. “Oh not really-not it that sense, at least. More of a penchant for waifs and strays. Besides, several of those girls are his sisters.”
“Sisters? He never said he had any sisters.” Surely even the Doctor wouldn’t have dissembled about something so immaterial.
“Ah. Well. That’s a bit of a story, actually…”
“One I would be delighted to hear,” the Master assured her, with a friendly, open smile. He intended, if necessary, to use every appropriate charm he possessed (short of hypnotism) to coax her into telling him more. The more she talked, the greater the chance that she would slip and give away some stray detail that would betray the Doctor’s current activities and location.
Nor did the Master have any objection to hearing fresh information on one of his favorite subjects from such a uniquely knowledgeable source. Even admitting to himself the degree of his interest made him feel a lovelorn fool, but he knew perfectly well that if Verity wanted to show off all John ’s glowing youthful report cards, he would politely admire the things.
Verity smiled-a trifle too knowingly for the Master’s liking. “Well, you see, John was born during the War. Sydney, bless him, accidentally landed his TARDIS in entirely the wrong period. I was the nurse matron in charge of a children’s wing during the Blitz of London.”
She nudged the biscuit plate in the Master’s direction, and he obediently took a shortbread square.
“And shall I ask the inevitable question?”
“Ah-how did we meet.” Verity smiled. “One night there was this terrible crash-I thought it was a bomb that hadn’t fully detonated. In that war the Germans started dropping Brandbomben from the air. As I understand it the explosives were supposed to open at altitude and scatter, but occasionally the priming mechanism was faulty; they wouldn’t split, and thus couldn’t be ignited by the charge they carried. The duds still had to be destroyed of course-monstrous things. And so I went to investigate. I walked all the way to the end of the hall and saw… nothing. And whoever heard of a bomb without an entry path?”
“Quite,” the Master agreed, reaching for another square of shortbread, and feeling entirely at home with a technical discussion of incendiary weaponry.
“Then this strange man stumbled out of the supply closet, wearing these ridiculous-well, I know now they were Prydonian robes, but at the time I thought he might be, er, touched, and going around in a set of curtains. He started to explain, and then I had to tell the very suspicious soldiers ,who came to clear away the bomb, that he was a clown there for the children so they wouldn’t haul him off for questioning. Luckily he could juggle quite convincingly.”
The Master managed to school his features into a polite, enquiring expression, and made a civil noise that prompted Verity to continue.
“Anyway, John was born during the last of those air raids, about nine months later. Maybe it was mad for a girl in her twenties to have a whirlwind courtship with a loveably rubbish, runaway time-traveling alien she’d just met in a broom cupboard. Maybe it was crazy to marry him when I found out I was carrying his child. But those were strange times. Half the city was in ruins-celebrating life seemed the right idea, even if in this case I was half afraid the ‘life’ in question might come with baby-tentacles that dropped off at three months, or some other nonsense my husband had entirely forgotten to warn me about.”
“We do tend to be discreet on the subject of birthing tentacles-some species, I am given to understand, find them off-putting,” the Master deadpanned.
Verity snorted. “I say half-afraid-I wouldn’t have been greatly surprised, after ‘two hearts, no really’ and ‘sometimes I go out wearing a different body.’ Now, as for the girls-when the War ended in ‘45 there were, well, a great many orphans. I asked my husband if we could take some in-clearly the money wasn’t a problem. He said a pack of developing humans running around the place might interfere with his work. I told him he was being so fastidious and non-interventionist he could run for the High Council-that shut him up.
He said one might be all right, and so I argued him up to two, and actually told the orphanage they could send over as many as four. And then five, all girls, showed up at the door, and he was having none of it. Fine, I said, tell them yourself. He stomped into the living room to do it, and five minutes later he came back out having failed to so much as glare at the poor things, and said we could make the second floor dimensionally transcendental without attracting too much notice from the neighbors.
“And so John had five little sisters, as you see.” Verity gestured to a picture in which an enthusiastic blond boy was trying to coerce a circle of dubious-looking girls into playing cricket with him. A nearby photo showed the same group in boaters and school uniforms, punting, with their mother looking beatific and their disgruntled father looking uncomfortable in professorial tweed.
“That doesn’t look like Stockbrigde,” the Master remarked.
“Oh, we lived in Cambridge back then, but we went down every summer and lived here in Stockbridge. Though the children weren’t always stuck here- when John nicked his ship from the yard he took his sisters traveling. He likes a crowded TARDIS. But they all peeled off to live their own lives, in the end-I suppose they felt they had to, like Susan giving up Narnia and growing up.”
“And since then?” the Master prompted. Unless they’d all been, like Verity, preserved beyond the natural span of their years, the children the Doctor had grown up with would have died centuries ago in his relative time line. Given the Doctor’s reverence for free will above all, the Master could extrapolate that girls had likely been allowed to choose whether they wanted to take advantage of that technology.
Looking up, the Master could see pictures of at least three of them growing up and then growing old-several in which they stood next to a strangely young brother, or a never-changing, sad-eyed mother. Respecting his sisters’ decisions to age and die would have ground the sacredness of self-determination into the Doctor’s young consciousness. It didn’t excuse his fixation on the idea, but it did go some ways towards explaining his inflexibility on that point.
“And ever since then,” Verity looked up at the photographs, “he’s managed to pick up wastrels like lint on a good black dress. Adric’s the latest I’ve met-a gifted mathematician from another universe, and an orphan. Adric traveled with him for a while, but when John came to visit us the time before last I asked him if a boy that young shouldn’t be in school. John acted as though it had never occurred to him, but now Adric’s off studying Maths at Warwick, and a good deal more settled. He visits us when he can.
“That one’s Liz-she was at Cambridge with him. And that’s his niece, Josephine. Her mother was always his favorite-the sister who traveled with him the longest. He and Jo worked together when he was trapped here after that Zodin business. Of course Jo got married not terribly long ago-poor John hasn’t quite forgiven her for ‘abandoning him for the company of a supercilious Welshman,’ as he puts it.”
“You make him sound so avuncular he could never have entertained the thought of any relationship,” the Master said, with a strange air, irony half hiding hope. Of course he recognized that the bulk of this could be deliberate evasion or misdirection on Verity’s part. But, provided she was essentially straightforward, he found it comforting that he wasn’t at the end (if even that, any more) of a long, long chain of disappointed lovers.
“Avuncular enough that I’ve seen seven centuries without so much as the hint of a grandchild out of him,” Verity groused promptly. “Gallifreyan technology had sustained my life far beyond its natural bounds, but it can do nothing to bolster my patience. He adores children, he’s so good with them-stories, sweets from Raxacoricofallapatorius, Venusian lullabies. He so enjoys being an uncle, I don’t think he could help being a good father.
“He works terribly hard, and he’s burned through so many regenerations-I can’t help but think he’d be safer, happier even, if he had someone. He tries to take care of all the young people traveling with him, and of all the places he goes, but there isn’t really anyone he lets take care of him. Perhaps he needs what Earth and I can’t readily give him-a partner. To spend his time with someone his own age, with comparable experience, who won’t be too over-awed by his brilliance and charisma to tell him when he’s being a silly ass.” She gave the Master a pointed look.
“An interesting observation,” he said sharply. “I assume you’ve told the Doctor something similar, for all the good that will do. I can’t imagine, even as a child, that the remarks on his report card included ‘responds well to criticism.’” Abruptly, the Master stood up and walked to the window. .After a moment’s stiff silence, the Master seized on the nearest passing conversational topic.
“You seem to be quite happily situated here. I’d like to know how you’ve managed it. You’re living here and now, in Stockbridge at the end of the millennia, and yet you seem to have done exactly that centuries ago in your personal timelines. Your husband’s in chronological synchronicity with the Doctor, and yet you managed to simultaneously raise a family between here and Cambridge.”
“Oh, that-I like this millennia, you see, and we like Stockbridge. We’re settled very comfortably here, I’d hate to leave. And so we’re crossing our own time stream,” she said, as if that weren’t a capital time crime. “It’s a trick of my step-son’s. When the children were grown, I suggested looping back. Besides, we’d seen ourselves doing it, we already knew it would happen at some point.
“My husband and I went back and settled in the Middle Ages, and so there have been Smiths in Stockbridge since time immemorial. Smiths that look an awful lot like the Smiths of the previous generation, but no one bothers about that in a small town like this. As I said, my husband and I look the same as we ever did, and so now that we’ve caught up with our younger selves, when we clear out to let them use the place everyone in town thinks it’s just the kids coming home for school holidays. They assume various older regenerations of my son are just other family members stopping by for a visit. It’s as easy as pie,” she said, sliding another bite of just that onto her fork.
“As pi?” The Master was completely lost now.
“As P-I-E,” Verity corrected. “A baked pastry dough shell containing a sweet or savory filling.”
“Ah yes!” The Master remembered this part. “Like the one made of shepherds.”
“Hm. Well, not-”
An explosion rattled the windowpanes. Verity calmly set her teacup down in its saucer. “That’ll be the children, then. I remember this visit-we let John drive once we got out into the country. This is about the time we discovered he’d taken that as permission to make a ‘few small modifications’ to the engine.”
In the drive, a younger voice that was nonetheless unquestionably still Verity’s shrieked, “What do you mean, ‘it runs on jam’?”
A boy laughed awkwardly. “Mum… Really, it’s-”
The Master pulled back the curtains, taking a look at the gangly blond teenager making the excuses. He was comically swallowed up by his large black tailcoat, but handsome enough when he shrugged it off his shoulders, revealing a waistcoat, pin-striped trousers, wing collar and bow tie. Some form of school uniform, the Master supposed. Clearly this was the foundation of his peculiar predilection for stripy trousers. The boy shoved his hands in his pockets defensivly. He frowned severely in response to an amused accusation from one of his sisters, the frown deepening almost into a pout. The Master missed him suddenly and bitterly. He turned around at a cough from Verity.
“I’m afraid we’d better clear out,” she said quite gently. “I’ve got to drag my contemporary Sydney out of his lab, though heaven knows how I’ll manage to pry him off that neutrino-sorter you’ve patched up for him.
“Of course,” the Master conceded, allowing Verity to show him the back door, and Sydney to shake his hand more firmly than might have been expected of someone so frail-looking.
Standing at the edge of the wood where he had hidden his TARDIS, the Master looked back at the house. The drive was empty now, the family having apparently gone in as he himself left. Then the front door slammed, and the Doctor, so unbelievably young, bounded outside again and down the steps. He threw open the boot of the car, sorting through the parcels there. The Master wanted to shake him, grab him, kiss him, steal him away-but for the sake of their Time Streams he didn’t dare even wish him a forgettable ‘good day.’
Besides, the Master reminded himself, he was just a child. Though, he mused, they had been born the same year in relative Gallifreyan time. Had they grown up together, the Master supposed this was about the age they might have begun to first consider each other as more than innocent playmates. He gave the boy a searching look, trying to see him through his own fifteen-year-old eyes. Brash, arrogant and unconventional. Decidedly handsome, in lean, laughing sort of way. Achingly, obviously still the Doctor.
The Master concluded he would have been just as devastatingly taken with him as he found himself now. He felt cheated of those years, even as he was grateful for the ignorant autonomy he’d enjoyed while never suspecting that such a person as the Doctor existed. He’d been the master of his own will and desires until very recently-he suspected he’d never have been, had his thoughts been fixated on this ‘John’ from an early age.
The Master waited for ‘John’ to select an assortment of bags, to slam the boot shut and to head into the house before he turned away. Back in his TARDIS the Master flicked the fast-return switch. Though this effort had met with failure, he was not without alternative means of attaining what he wanted. A slow smirk spread across his face as he contemplated his next move. He even cheered up so far as to chuckle softly when he imagined the moment the Doctor realized his ex-lover had put a contract out on him. His expression of delicious dismay alone would be beyond price.
***
At first, the Emperor of Hestin’s orders specified that the Doctor be taken alive and unharmed. After two months, they more curtly requested that he be returned alive. This had its effect.
The Master was nothing short of gleeful when his night staff put through a transmission from the Koban High Command. The Command had called to let the Emperor know that a man calling himself the Doctor was being held on one of their frigates and could be picked up at his convenience. They had a visual link-did the Master wish to confirm the identity of the prisoner?
He dressed hurriedly, and was still straightening his collar when he walked into the command center. “Put it on screen,” the Master waved his hand at a young ops officer, taking the command chair from the security division head, who rose to make way for him. The Master leant forward, tapping his fingers on the arms of the chair, impatient for the signal to come through. With a few keystrokes a hologram snapped on, illustrating the frigate’s bridge in shallow relief. Three people, unaware of their observers, were being restrained by uniformed Koban troopers. The Master’s attention immediately fixed on the man on the far left. The picture was grainy, but it was unmistakably the Doctor.
“Him again?” a red haired girl asked incredulously, evidently responding to something the troop commander had just told her. She craned her neck to look over at the Doctor. “This must be the fourth time-what did you do to this guy, Doc?”
The Doctor had the decency to look chagrined. “I’d rather not discuss it,” he said primly, struggling in the grasp of his guards. “Could I ask you to move your hand? You’re cutting off the blood flow. Ah, thank you, there’s a good chap.”
“He’s never been anything but polite to me,” said a brunette girl -surely that wasn’t Nyssa of Traken? The brunette looked resigned to being captured, as if it were a regular occurrence in her life. “Before he became our Keeper my father conducted trade negotiations with him. I’ve been a guest in his Palace many times.” She looked over at the Doctor. “Perhaps we should arrange a meeting to clear up the misunderstanding you mentioned.”
The Doctor winced for reasons entirely unrelated to issues of blood flow. “No, Nyssa, I don’t think that would be-”
A sudden explosion rocked the deck, and the Doctor was slammed to the floor. He caught himself with his hands and looked up at the ship’s captain. “I told you the gravity well was too intense. Your systems can’t handle the pressure. Listen, you must let me fix the dampeners, and to do that you have to let me into the engine room! Everything depends on it! Please!” There was a second explosion, and the Doctor struggled to his feet, gripping the console nearest to him. The emergency claxons kicked on and the feed cut out. The Master leaned back in his chair.
“Trying to re-establish, sir.” The technician worried the keys. When, ten minutes later, she managed to get the image back, the bridge was conspicuously empty. His expression unreadable, the Master stood.
“Call me when further word comes through,” he said. He turned and walked back to his bedroom. When, early in the morning, the Koban High Command communicated their deepest regrets that the prisoner had managed to escape, the Master cut the connection mid-apology. He lay back down, acutely conscious of the bed’s largeness. Naturally the Doctor had managed to save the crew of the frigate and secure his own liberty-he’d done much the same on every occasion on which he’d seemed close to capture. The Monin Host, for example, had only relented in their quest to tie him up in ribbons and leave him on the Master’s doorstep once he’d saved their world from a devastating temporal paradox.
As infuriating and, the Master sometimes admitted to himself, painful as it was to watch the Doctor squirm out of his clutches time and again, it was also undeniably impressive.
To the best of his admittedly incomplete intelligence, while on the run the Doctor had managed to avert no less than three major inter-stellar wars. He’d also helped the Skelarri rebel faction gain a key tactical victory, foiled a planned Cyberman invasion of Earth, and, through an amusing series of mistakes, won a Xeraphin beauty contest. This was not as much of a credit to his appearance as it might have been, given that, due to a recent, thoroughly unamusing series of mistakes, the Xeraphin now found themselves a single bioplasmic gestalt intelligence. As such they were formless, and largely incapable of competing in any contests of a physical nature-not even their own.
If the Doctor had been fetchingly capable and dynamic whilst his prisoner, he was infinitely more so given free reign of the wider universe. The Master had appreciated what he knew of the Doctor’s accomplishments, but he could admit now that it had been a fond, patronizing sort of appreciation, based on a clearly insufficient estimation of the Doctor’s talents. He had considered the Doctor his equal, but now the Doctor was manifestly exactly that, and it required no such declaration from the Master to make it evident.
Of course, this still didn’t justify his absurd escape. The Master would dearly love to wring a few regenerations out of his impressive little neck. As the weeks of humiliating, pining celibacy dragged on into months, his desire to do so grew stronger. The more he valued what he’d lost, the more keenly he wanted it back, and the more viciously he begrudged its absence. If the Doctor assumed the Master was calming down or forgetting him, he was sorely mistaken.
A screeching Dalek voice interrupted his reverie, and the Master rolled over, pushing his face down into his pillow with a growl. When that wasn’t enough to block out the noise, he squirmed under the pillow. His technicians had yet to comprehend, let alone undo, the clever trick the Doctor had managed with the sensor ghosts. At random intervals a faux invasion force squawked and blustered over the communication system, and the sensors detected a variety of nonexistent Dalek incursions. It was absolutely maddening. As if he weren’t dwelling on it already, the breakdowns served to constantly remind the Master not only of the Doctor’s absence, and the added horror of his lover having jilted him quite visibly before the entire Palace staff.
The Master himself had been too preoccupied (with hunting the Doctor, rather than the state business he knew he’d been neglecting of late) to take a proper look at the fault. Besides, he was at a disadvantage to the saboteur-it was always easier to break something than to repair it.
The alarms silenced, and the Master irrationally hoped they’d finished for the night. He poked his head out from under the pillow tentatively.
“SURRENDER!! SURRENDER TO THE-”
The Master groaned, grabbed his pillow, and stomped off into his TARDIS to sleep, vowing to follow up on the lead Nyssa of Traken had presented him with in the morning.
***
According to the gossip a Traken Council member had leaked to the Master’s ambassador, the Doctor had managed to talk the Keeper of Traken out of holding him. Hestin was Traken’s principal trading partner, and such strong ties should have prevented Traken from acting expressly against the Emperor’s interests. Tremas, however, had always been a willful man, even before he became the supreme authority of the Union.
The Master tapped his foot impatiently. Ravel’s Bolero was stuck in his head, and it was working its way out through his body. A human composer-the Doctor truly had infected him. When at last the Keeper shimmered grandly into visibility before him, the Master glared at the aged reflection of his own face.
“Ah,” the Keeper studied him, not without amusement. “I trust you’re here about that Doctor fellow who came calling.”
“What part of ‘detain him at all costs’ did you interpret as ‘send him on his merry way with a fresh assistant and sandwiches for the road’? I was under the impression that you and I had something of an understanding, Tremas.”
The older-looking man chucked. “Don’t look so put out-you resemble me at that age having a strop. I can’t take you seriously at all.”
The Master grit his teeth. “I hardly chose to regenerate in the manner I did.”
“No,” Tremas smirked, “but I think it suits you remarkably well. Besides, I’ve chosen to interpret it as flattery. And as to our understanding-come now, Master. I like you a great deal and consider you a good friend and ally, but you are a dictator, and as such your personal vendettas are hardly a trustworthy means of identifying public enemies. In this case, quite the opposite. I found the Doctor very agreeable. He managed, in the course of his stay here, and with the assistance of my wife Cassia, to put an end to a most barbaric ancient practice of ours which had long been a blight on the serenity of our capital. Perhaps, in your haste to accuse me of abetting your fugitive, you did not notice that the Melkur grove has been abolished? The Doctor took objection to the practice and argued passionately against it. I took his counsel to heart.”
“I’m amazed your ossified society managed to change so much as its letterhead, let alone anything which ‘tradition’ had managed to encrust with dignity,” the Master growled. He was frustrated by the Keeper’s attempts to shift the discussion, but unable to avoid putting in a bid for the position he normally took in such arguments with Tremas.
“Well, this Doctor of yours is a rather remarkable man. Rumor has it you thought so as well.”
The Master gave him a poisonous look and opened his mouth to respond, but Tremas cut him off. “Don’t be so vexed, you know how difficult it is to keep the goings-on in a palace the size of yours a secret-and by all accounts you were hardly interested in discretion. The situation is as I expected, and I’ve no intention of interfering in a lovers’ quarrel, on either side.”
“You’ve already interfered, Keeper. I leave you empty-handed,” the Master pointed out. “The Doctor managed to pick up a new traveling companion during the encounter. For all your talk of neutrality, I doubt he counts his visit here as a loss.”
Tremas raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid my Nyssa has had a difficult time adjusting to my assumption of the Keepership. I can no longer be simply her father, and while she and her step-mother are fond of each other, there is little for her here now. The Doctor offered her a chance to further her education, and to travel. He admitted there might be danger in accompanying him, but Nyssa believed she would be working in the service of something greater than her own life, and so she chose to encounter it. Though as her father I might have wished to keep her here, as her Keeper I could only honor her decision. She is a woman grown now, but even still-tell me honestly. Can you think of any reason I should not have entrusted the Doctor with my child?”
“Why I should tell you?” the Master sneered.
“Perhaps you have a point,” Tremas admitted, “I have not been generous to you. But despite having known the Doctor only a short while, I felt I could not betray him. That was unfair to you, and I am sorry for it. But I cannot be ashamed of it.”
The Master glowered at the base of Tremas’s golden throne for a while before speaking. “Your daughter is quite safe. The Doctor is what he seems-an insufferably good man.” The Master did not add that he had hoped to entrust his own children to him.
Watching him, and recognizing the lost look on his face in a way no one else could have, Tremas took pity-of course the Master could never simply ask how his lover had seemed, and if Tremas didn’t volunteer the information, in all likelihood he’d just steal security camera footage and comb the grainy holofeed for clues.
“Tell me Master, do you think of this Doctor of yours as having a melancholic temperament?”
The Master was taken aback. “Somewhat reserved, perhaps, but hardly melancholy.” The Doctor’s joie de vivre was one of his most attractive qualities.
“Hm.” Tremas pursed his lips. “Suppose I told you that the man I met was positively grave? He seemed pleasant-short tempered at times, but otherwise infallibly polite. But he was withdrawn. As if determined to bear some great disappointment. A man who had reconciled himself to never being entirely happy.”
The Master started. “I’d say we were speaking of different people.”
Tremas raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think he could be mistaken for anyone else?”
“No,” the Master conceded. “He’s…” maddeningly incomparable, the Master thought. “Distinctive in his dress, if nothing else.” He drew himself up and said sharply, “And you have no further information regarding his whereabouts?”
Tremas gave him a dubious look, as though they’d already cleared this point up-he hadn’t given the Doctor away earlier, and he had no intentions of rectifying his error.
The Master signed. “I only intend to speak to him, Tremas. He has nothing to fear from me.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it, though I’m sure he’d feel differently. As it happens, I believe you. But I’m afraid I cannot help you. You’ll simply have to attempt to contact him through other means.”
***
Dressed as always in black, the Master paced back and forth in front of yet another row of bounty hunters. The Doctor would have made a joke about how this was very Star Wars, the Master mused, but the Doctor wasn’t here.
The Master had redoubled his efforts after his spectacularly unsuccessful interview with Tremas of Traken. He’d charged Hestin’s internal security forces to find the Doctor with little result, and so the Master was holding this briefing to acquaint the absolute best people in the field with the problem. He was offering a king’s ransom-enough to buy two goodish star systems, or perhaps one outstanding one.
Of course the Master knew he’d do a better job tracking the Doctor himself, but he ran an empire, and an empire’s influence stretches even further than its actual borders. If the Doctor wanted to travel anywhere within a wide sector of space he had to visit the time period the Master occupied, due to his TARDIS’s unwillingness to violate the two Time Lords’ chronological synchronicity. And the Doctor had been cleverer than to leave Hestin’s sphere of influence for long. While he remained in temporal synchronicity with the Master’s Empire, the Master couldn’t run off to chase him without abandoning his throne for however long the pursuit took. He’d lose everything he’d worked towards for centuries, his lives’ ambition, and when he finally attained his prize he would be incapable of offering the Doctor so much as a square meter of land as a bridal gift. The Master hoped he could never be reconciled to giving the Doctor that satisfaction, but the calculus of desperation’s results were looking grimmer by the day.
And so it seemed the Master would have to subcontract out to professionals. If the Doctor felt the insult of being fetched like a runaway pet picked up by the pound rather than personally pursued, so much the better.
He knew that those professionals would be able to track the Doctor more easily if they knew they were hunting a Time Lord, but if he made that common knowledge, listed it as another bullet point on the wanted posters, he would be betraying the Doctor to the CIA. Lifetimes’ carefully guarded anonymity could be spoilt. The paranoid, controlling CIA, which prided itself on keeping Gallifreyans in line even more than it did on keeping the rest of the universe similarly in order, would feel had, would feel like rubes, and would pursue the Doctor with a vengeance to assuage that embarrassment.
Such a disclosure would make the galaxy a more dangerous place for the Doctor to roam without the Master’s protection, and could force him to return home. It would also put the Doctor in danger, and if he was more stubborn than prudent, as per usual, the CIA might catch up with him before the Master could. As furious as he was, and as much as he wanted the Doctor to suffer for having made a fool of him and abandoned him, a cosmos without the infuriating bastard scarcely bore thinking about. No, the Master had no intention of ever publicizing the Doctor’s background.
“My once-and-future chief scientific adviser is not to be taken lightly,” he concluded, looking around at the motley group. “He may look young. He may seem disarmingly innocuous. But trust me, for I have the benefit of considerable experience with the man-if he is allowed the slightest slack, he will wriggle through your nets, no matter how capable you consider yourselves to be. And his technical expertise-” the faux Dalek sensor ghosts flared to life, predicting four simultaneous Dalek incursions, interrupting the Master, alarming the assembled bounty hunters, and prompting the Master’s staff to wearily pull out and don thick headphones to continue about their business, “is without parallel,” the Master finished with grim bitterness.
***
Chapter 7, Part II