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The Doctor blinked his eyes open suddenly, avoiding, for once, the embarrassment of babbling on about Romantic poets as he came back to his senses. There was something so unserious about a prisoner who insisted they were strong and important, but who confused the present day for 1816 and the cell for Dr. Jon Polidori's (admittedly austere) room; they never believed a babbling time traveler when he said that he'd never tell, or whatever other brave claims he made. Hit a man on the head and blame him for his own addled brain…
Today was not one of those days. Today — be it by some stroke of luck that his captors hadn't chosen to knock him on the head or by way of the incredibly uncomfortable chains around his wrists and neck which had drawn him back to himself — waking up was like blinking, and he knew his own mind. He knew where he was.
It was a cell of sorts that he was in — a small room with one door and one tiny slotted window in it. The walls weren't bars, but rather some sort of synthetic metal material, all shiny and white with honeycomb pressed lightly into them. Homely. Very homely.
A small tug on the chains, which were pulling his arms out to either side of him, proved them to be too strong for him to simply break out of. His sonic was still in his pocket — he could feel the weight — but there was no way of getting to it. In fact, he could hardly move at all. The lights flickered irritatingly, his feet just barely stood on the floor, and the cell was uncomfortably cold, even for a Time Lord.
All in all, it wasn't the worst place to get captured and imprisoned in. Not the best by any means, but at least they weren't torturing him yet. Six out of ten. Lovely patterns, nice size, but the hosts were inattentive and the chains were rather tight, weren't they?
“Would you stop monologuing, Doctor?” asked, who he assumed to be, the man that put him in that cell. Some sort of speaker system, though he couldn't tell where from.
The Doctor strained against the manacles again, this time in an attempt to locate the speakers being used. If he could find them, he might get more of a sense of what kind of technology they had here and he could put to rest that nagging feeling at the back of his brain which was trying to convince him of a completely nonsensical idea. “Sorry,” he said cheerfully, “was I talking aloud? Terrible habit. Voltaire, you know Voltaire, keeps trying to tell me to quit it. Says it ruins our poker games. I just keep reminding him it's only because of me that he’s even heard of poker before.”
There was no response from his yet unseen captor. Had he really been talking aloud? He knew that an old habit could always come back, but he thought he had already stopped doing that. And, did that mean whoever had brought him here heard him going on about Romantics and cellblock interior design anyways? He'd been doing so well!
After he'd given ample time and then some for a response, he added, “Fascinating man! Great hair,” simply to break up the silence and to coax just a few more words out.
“Must you always be like this?” asked his captor. The speaker, he decided, was directly behind him, where the chains prevented him from looking. Intentionally so, he presumed. That and the man's words and…
“Have we met before?” That nagging feeling was getting stronger.
The speaker crackled as the man laughed into his microphone. “Oh, yes. Many times.”
“In my past or your past? I hate to ask, but there have been a few mix-ups the last couple centuries with people attempting to exact their revenge on me for grudges I haven't earned yet,” the Doctor said. These were the woes of being a renegade, he supposed. It was why he tried to stay at least somewhat linear when he visited Earth for extended periods of time, but it would never be enough to fully stop the Grayles and Rarkelians of the universe from, well, doing things that rather resembled this.
For a moment, the Doctor thought that he wouldn't get any response at all again, and then the door slid open and a man stepped in, holding a case. He was humanoid, leaning on the older side with white hair and a short, sparse, white beard. He wore a simple grey suit — hard to place in a specific year if this man was human. Unfortunately, despite his claims that they had met many times before, the Doctor didn't recognize the man's face. He did, however, feel a strong tug of familiarity at his hearts, so maybe he'd just forgotten again. Another renegade woe.
He closed and locked the door behind him. “Doctor,” he said, regarding him with something like admiration or kindness. Something like it.
“Well this seems a bit one-sided now. You seem like a reasonable fellow. You know my name, and apparently I've met you many times — enough to make you want to lock me up in a cell, though I admit people have known me for less time and done the same, so maybe we were friends — but, I must say, I can't remember who you are. Not at all. Have we talked? Fought? Traveled? It must be in my future, unless they did more of a number on my memories and my life than I thought.” As he spoke, he tried moving again, figured out exactly how much he could wiggle around or pull his head forward.
The man sighed. “I'm surprised and rather ashamed you haven't realized it yet. I've put very little effort in to hide where you are.”
Yes, well he rather had thought he recognized where he was, but it didn't make much sense and so he'd thrown that idea out, thank you. “This looks like an old TARDIS. Type 45, maybe 50 or a retro desktop on a 63, to take a stab in the dark, but that can't be it,” the Doctor said. The partly man smiled politely. “Every TARDIS in use is meant to have been recalled to the War, even ones as obsolete as a Type 45.”
“I always thought this regeneration was much more useful for being pretty than clever, my dear boy. I hoped you'd prove me wrong for once. This is in fact a TARDIS.”
A TARDIS that hadn't been recalled, or, perhaps… one that had absconded.
Oh! Oh, oh, oh! Him! It was him. That was why it felt so familiar. And this was his old foe! The Master! He shouldn't have been nearly so happy, but he'd heard whispers on the wind of his final death or of his desertion, and the Doctor knew which one of those rumors he preferred to be true. The chains dimmed his excitement, but he was being civil with the Doctor right now, and there were always worse people to be captured by. (Whatever had the Rani gotten up to now that the War had begun?)
“I gather you understand now?” asked the other Time Lord. “Who I am?”
“Yes of course! You're the Master! My old enemy! But, tell me. How did you escape? How did you regenerate?”
The Master set the case down on the floor and opened it, blocking its contents from view with the lid. “I am from your future,” he explained, ignoring the Doctor's questions. “Not very far, but long enough into it that I've met your next regeneration. I know how it happens and who you become. I've seen what they make you do and the aftermath of it.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You can't tell me anything. The First Law of Time is —”
“— Irrelevant now,” the Master interrupted. “There is a war raging across all of time, changing history and destroying civilizations before they can even be born. Twice, the Time Lords have tried blasting Skarro out of the sky before it can begin, an attack which would create a paradox large enough to destroy everything. The Daleks are developing methods of war and temporal torture. The Laws of Time have been pushed to the wayside by every general and co-ordinator like nursery rhymes instead of rules to allow any atrocity it's deemed worthwhile to commit. Why shouldn't I take control as well? Why is it different when I choose to be selfish, Doctor? Tell me!” As he spoke, his anger bubbled up until, at last, that kind facade was gone. His eyes, wild and desperate, were trained on the Doctor's, threatening him silently. Like a hawk fixed upon its prey.
It was obvious that the War had changed him. Made him more dangerous. He was bursting with half-contained rage. Although the Doctor met his gaze with his own and tried to stay firm, he felt sorry for the Master, more now than ever. He had been forced into a war — the War — and must have seen destruction beyond the scale from both sides. Even just on the fringes, the Doctor had seen things that haunted him. All the people he couldn't save, all the planets torn apart… Neither of them were soldiers. They never had been. Something there had broken the Master and stitched him up with mania.
“It will be a shame to destroy something so nice, but I'm afraid I must do it, “ the Master said, once he'd calmed down. His nice words had something clinical about them.
The Doctor raised his eyebrows. “Don't do anything you'll regret. You're playing in forces that were never meant to be touched.”
“When you regenerate, you'll be here in my domain under my control. Doesn't that sound nice, my dear? A regeneration around another Time Lord.”
And, sure, that did sound better than what had happened the last time he regenerated, but he also really didn't want to get shot. Or used as a battery. Or held between regenerations. Or any other brutal plot he could imagine the Master coming up with. The Master's new regeneration's civility was a mask for whatever it was that had gone wrong with him in the Time War. And most notably, most obviously to where he shouldn't have had to say it, he wasn't ready to regenerate. He quite liked being alive. The Doctor’d already crossed the halfway point — only had five regenerations left and wasn't excited to use any of them up getting killed in a cell.
The Master closed the case, his newly acquired weapon in one hand, and approached the Doctor. He held it up in front of his face for him to see.
It looked like a surgical tool of some sort. The shape of it reminded him of an Earth scalpel, but the tip of the blade was gleaming and purple.
“Don’t scream,” the Master said calmly. “It's unpleasant.”
Then he sank the blade into the Doctor's shoulder.
To the Doctor's credit, the mangled sound that came out was less like a scream and more of a very loud gasp. There was blinding pain and then there was warmth spreading out around the site and a thin trickle of blood dribbling down his chest.
“Mind the jacket,” he whispered. “It's leather and it's the best one I've got since Helen sold the warm one.”
“Say it,” the Master demanded.
“Please mind the jacket. It's leather and it's —” He sucked in air as the Master twisted the blade. Even the slight movement was staggering. The pain bloomed up again and his eyes went wide.
The Master had lost his smile entirely. “My name. Say my name each time.”
“Won't that get a bit difficult if you put enough holes in me to make me regenerate?”
“Yes, it will.” He pushed the blade deeper in.
The Doctor's hands clenched into fists and he bit back a few crude Gallifreyan words. “Master,” he said at last.
“You're going to regenerate in this room.” He pulled the scalpel out and quickly sank it into the Doctor's other shoulder. “It will be painful.”
The small, precise blade didn't leave a gaping wound like a knife or a sword would have, but it was painful and it would make him bleed. “Master, stop it.” He could feel the blood from his first wound coming out quicker without the knife there to hold it in. His shirt was ruined with red-ish copper.
The Master twisted it again. “Master only.”
“Master…”
“Good. Focus on the pain and on me. Focus on my name.”
The Master gave the blade one more push forward before quickly drawing it back out of the Doctor's skin. He had blue eyes like the sea, speckled with gold, the Doctor noticed. Pretty but haunted eyes that were so focused on the knife they didn't even see the Doctor watching them.
The Doctor could handle the pain. Probably. This was far from the first time this body had been stabbed and tortured. He just needed a distraction. Something else to focus on. Something like tragic eyes — eyes that should never have been made a soldier.
The blade dug into his upper arm next. He gritted his teeth. “Master.”
“Regeneration is a very fragile state. The first person you encounter after can greatly affect who you are. It can mould you into the person they're looking for. The person they need.” He twisted the scalpel. Blood oozed up around the blade, trickled down, and pooled below in heavy drops on the soft skin of his inner arm, ruining more of his shirt.
“I know that,” the Doctor said, fury rising under his words. “Do you think I don’t know that? I passed that class with a higher grade than you did.”
“Quiet or else this can become much more unpleasant for you.”
He braced himself for the next move — the last quick push of the knife. Eyes blue eyes. Eyes like the seas on Earth, warm sunlight glinting across the gentle ripples.
The knife slid deeper into his arm and stayed there for just a moment longer than before. Then he felt the unnatural sensation of cold metal sliding out of his flesh, from where nothing was meant to be embedded. It sank in a few inches closer to the elbow
“Master,” he choked.
“After regenerating, a Time Lord's body can be affected towards these goals as well.”
Twist, push, pull, stab, “Master.”
“Limbs can be regrown for a short time, height and appearance can be radically altered. The mind, however, is much more… fragile.”
Another twist, another push, another pull, another stab, and a shaky “Master.”
There were little flowers of pain across his arm now. Every new jolt created a daisy-chain of agony and tensing muscles. He had to keep… thinking about something else. The Master's sad eyes. He'd always had sad eyes, but they were so much worse now, weren't they. Better than the electric green they'd become when he'd taken over the body before this one, but only by a hair. Anything besides the pain.
“A Time Lord's brain is where they exist in their entirety. Even when a Time Lord expires, their mind is stored in the Matrix forever, never dying. The War, of course, has meant many Time Lords died before they could be saved properly.”
There was something going on here besides just some plot — something which the Doctor was starting to put together. First, the Master uses a surgical tool instead of something efficient like a gun or a Florentine Tetralaser. Next, the matter of the messy, yet almost ritualistic, way he was going about this. Like he’d got more in mind than sadism and blood. Each thing he said too — they were all facts that the Doctor already knew or they were instructions for him to follow. They weren’t anything, well, interesting.
The Master twisted the scalpel. “Quiet. Focus on the pain.”
“I didn't say anything,” stammered the Doctor. “I know that I didn't say anything.”
“Focus.”
“You're in my head! You're in my head with no warning, no permission, not so much as a knock on the door. You have been since I woke up. That's very impolite, you know.” It was a very good thing for the Doctor that his babbling never made much sense to begin with. It always made it easier to go on as usual while being actively tortured and losing blood.
“I'm only on the edges. You simply think too loud, and you never guard your thoughts.”
He wouldn't have to guard them if people had the manners to ask before sinking their neurons into his grey matter. Still. He had a hypothesis forming. The Master's plan for what he was going to do with him, since he hardly thought it was just killing him for the sake of watching him regenerate. Not this time.
He screwed his eyes closed. “You're doing something to me. You're… You're… Moulding me, is that how you put it?” The Doctor paled. “Tell me you're not trying to do what I think you're trying to do!”
The Master smiled pityingly and pulled the blade out just enough to turn it and sink it back into the Doctor's arm, perpendicular over the last cut. The sudden break from pattern made it hit harder. “A fascinating theory, Doctor.”
“Then what? What are you going to do with me? Make me like you? Turn me into your servant? You can't do this to me!”
“I think you'll find that I can.”
“And the scalpel — all this — is for what? Making me associate pain with you? Your plan is flawed. If you want me subservient and agreeable, the very last thing you should be doing is having me say your name every time you stab me.”
The blade sliced back across his arm towards where his other cuts had been made. The Doctor cried out and his legs tried to give out under him. The Master gripped his arm in his free hand, his leather-clad fingers digging into the sensitive skin, pressing the fabric of his clothes against it. His sleeve clung to the blood.
The Master pulled the knife out. The Doctor gasped and shook, but he put his feet back under himself eventually and swallowed air. His head felt light and empty while his arm was burning.
“You're wrong, Doctor. It'll be the last thing left that you can think of as you regenerate. It'll make what comes after so much easier.”
Of course. The Master only needed his next regeneration to be loyal to him. This one could suffer as much as he needed to carve that idea into his mind.
The Master met his eyes. “You'll make a fine companion.”
“Where did your mercy go?”
The scalpel suddenly burrowed into his other arm.
“Master,” he whispered, not sure what he could even say to the monster his friend had become.
“The time for mercy is over. This is war.”
“Not here,” the Doctor insisted, even as the Master began to saw the blade up and around. “Please. No war. Not us. Not here.”
He flicked the blade up as he pulled it out. The tip tore at his skin and the fabric of his clothes. “I said be quiet, you fool! I am the Master and you will —”
“No! No I won't!” He twisted his arms in the chains, struggling to get free. It was hopeless, but he wouldn't surrender or let his own mind become captive to the Master. If he gave in, he was a dead man.
The idea of him, forgetting who he was and doing as he was told, not in control of his own mind, horrified him. To be made into the Master's pet? Fear pumped through his blood, literally oozing out of him with every hard won breath. It mixed with the pain and anger. His control began to melt away, the Master's eyes fading as his own vision blurred.
“I am the Master and you will obey me.”
A blanket settled over his mind. The Doctor opened his mouth to protest, but could only let out a small, pathetic whine. His voice had gone, or rather wasn't his to control anymore.
Another stab. “Master,” He managed. The accompanying ’stop this at once’ died on his lips.
The attacks became more random — different movements of the blade, different places. Any pattern was gone. Any time he thought that he'd begun to understand, that he could brace himself, it shifted again and he was left unprotected. His mind clouded with that pain and fear and the image of his oldest friend standing in front of him.
“Master.”
Once upon a time, the man in front of him had been his safe haven, the eye of the storm. They'd been there for one another when the worst of the world came at them. Time had changed that, of course, and there was only an archaic echo of security left.
“Master.”
They'd spent the last few centuries trying to stop or kill one another. The Master had even succeeded.
“Master.”
He blinked tears away. Being used as a pin cushion had to be one of the more unpleasant types of torture he'd experienced. It made it harder and harder to think and the more he fought for lucidity, the more he could feel the pain and each cut bleeding and the knife…
“Master.”
Dangerous eyes locked onto his face. A hand on his neck, just above the chains, checking his pulses. Another sharp pain.
“Master.”
Dorian amethyst. The blade was dorian amethyst, he thought softly. in seventeenth galaxies for the incredibly sharp edge it could be sharpened to.
The blade caught on a delicate nerve. The Doctor's entire body rocked with pain. His head slammed into the wall behind him. The room resounded with the loud crack as his skull connected with the metal. What was left of the Doctor's vision went white. “Master!”
“Ah. The chains will prevent you from pitching forwards, but you should be careful about going back.”
“Why are you doing this?” he rasped, finally feeling his voice returning to him.
The Master stepped back. “You don’t know what's coming. You never will.”
“Whatever I do to you —”
“It's what they do to you, Doctor. They make you into a monster. They force you to do things which you would never do. I'm trying to prevent that future.”
His hearts were racing. This wasn’t right! This wasn't right at all! “You can't change what happens. You can't torture me until I become a different me than the one you met,” the Doctor said. “Even if that were possible, you'd jeopardize all of time and space.”
“I don't care about time and space,” the Master hissed. “I'm saving you.”
“You're killing me.”
As if to prove the Doctor's point, the Master drove the blade into him again. The Doctor screamed an awful, broken scream that ebbed into sobs. His legs gave out again and he hung there. “Master,” he whimpered.
“I'm saving you,” repeated the Master.
“I don't want this,” the Doctor said.
The Master pulled the scalpel back out. “Of course you don't, fool.”
“Don’t put me through this.”
“Would you hide from it with me? I have a plan to go away to the end of the Universe where they can't find me. It's your only chance to stop what they do to you.”
The Doctor didn't say anything. He couldn't. There was no reality where the Doctor could agree to that, and the Master knew that. It was why he was doing all of this. To make the Doctor into the perfect partner to avoid it all.
“You see why I had to do it.”
“Please, old friend,” he begged, “let me take my own path. I promise you that I have no plans to fight in the War.”
The Master sighed and set his tool down on top of the case. “Do you miss our friendship, Doctor?”
“Every day,” he said.
“Then, I'm sorry, but this is for your own good!” He grabbed the Doctor's shoulders and pressed them back against the wall. The Doctor didn't even fight back.
“Unlock the chains,” he asked. “Your spell is broken already.”
The Master stared at him. “They will destroy you.”
“So will this. Unlock them. That's an order.” His voice was quiet and breathy and broken, but he still managed to put enough command into them that the Master drew a heavy wrought iron key from his pocket and undid each chain.
The Doctor collapsed to his knees. He was a mess, all bloody, crying, and raging all the while. He leaned his back on the wall. “Thank you,” he breathed.
“Run, Doctor, before I change my mind.” The Master turned his back on him.
The Doctor shook his head. “Contact.”
“What?”
“Contact.”
There went the Doctor — still sticking to childish rules when they'd both outgrown the need to say it. “I'm already in your head.” Still, the Master conceded. “Contact.”
He got a small wave of gratitude from the Doctor, wrapped up in some other emotion he'd long thought dead and an only half-meant-to-be-said, ancient name. There was a warm feeling. Then there was pain. Unrelenting and unending.
The Master stumbled and caught himself on the wall, clutching his head. He tried to pull away. But the Doctor wouldn't let him. This was why he'd tried to stay on the outside. It was the pain he'd given to the Doctor being thrust back into him, all at once in a concentrated burst. For just a moment, his eyes were wide and betrayed and almost innocent as he looked back at the heaving, half-alive Doctor. Like they used to be, long ago.
Finally, everything went dark.
The Doctor pulled himself up and stumbled over to the Master. “I'm so sorry, old friend. I hope the war never finds you again.”
Then he slowly left that cursed place.