rosa_acicularis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosa_acicularis) wrote2009-04-23 06:59 am
rosa_acicularis) wrote2009-04-23 06:59 am
Entry tags:
Fic: Of Monsters (Epilogue)
Title: Of Monsters
Characters: the Tylers, Mickey Smith, Jake Simmonds, the Master, others.
Rating: Adult, for language and violence.
Note: Apologies for posting this separately; the complete third chapter wouldn't fit in one post. Silly chapter.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
++
The Master stares at her. “Hold on,” he says, “let me get this straight.” A streetlamp flickers overhead. “You can’t die.”
“Nope.” The thing that was Rose Tyler sits cross-legged on the ground in front of him, her toes curling into cracks in the asphalt. “Not even a little.”
This piques his scientific curiosity, as well as an interest of a rather more morbid nature. He takes a slurp from his Big Gulp. “Intriguing. What have you tried?”
She looks up, as if consulting a mental list. “Threw myself off a building, to start with. When that didn’t take, I moved on to drowning, suffocation, electrocution, cyanide, a single gunshot wound to the head, and—”
He can move fast, when he needs to. One moment the jagged piece of scrap metal is in the skip with the rest of the rubbish, and the next it is buried in her torso, protruding obscenely from the valley between her small breasts. She looks down at the bloodless wound, then back up at him.
“—And impalement,” she finishes. She taps the piece of scrap metal with one finger and it crumbles, showering pale dust into her lap. Her chest is unmarked; her t-shirt is ruined. She tugs at the frayed edge of the hole. “Bugger,” she says. “I liked this one.”
He settles back against the cold steel of the skip. It smells like piss. “You’ve got the infinite power of time and space at your fingertips,” he points out. “Why don’t you just mend it?”
She shakes her head. “It’s easy to break things,” she says. “Gets more complicated when you try to fix them again.” She flows to her feet, the movement at once graceful and oddly disjointed. She reaches into the skip and pulls out a worn gym bag. She drops it at his feet. “There are clothes in here. You should probably put them on.”
He unzips the bag and finds a ragged pair of trainers, a sweatshirt, and grey pyjama bottoms. He holds the sweatshirt up by its hood; it is blood red. “Oh, but Grandmother,” he says, “what a tenuous grasp of irony you have!”
She gives him a little bow. “The better to dress you with, my dear.” She smirks, crossing her arms over her chest. “Would you like me to turn around? I wouldn’t want to offend your delicate sensibilities.”
He chuckles, and feels the sound grind in the back of his throat. “I wouldn’t want to offend yours.”
She rolls her eyes, but pivots in place until she faces the empty lot. He watches her turned back for a moment (as stupid as she is invulnerable, which hardly seems fair) and then he stands. The pyjama bottoms are easy enough, but after he pulls them up over his hips he needs to bend down again to get the sweatshirt. Blood rushes to his head and he sways, his legs trembling like a newborn foal’s. His new body betrays him, lurching forward, and it is only her grip on his bare arm that stops him from falling face first onto the asphalt.
They both stare at the place where her hand touches his skin.
Her fingers are hot as branding irons; he refuses to wince. He has to tilt back his head to look into her eyes. “Are you going to let go?”
Her expression is serene. “I don’t know,” she says. “Are you going to fall down again?”
He jerks his arm out of her hold and stumbles back against the skip. None of this fits, not a word of it, and he finds it infuriating. He finds her infuriating, which is the one thing that does fit, but for all the madness in her eyes she is frighteningly calm, untroubled by his presence or his touch. Amidst the storm of fury and confusion and curiosity he feels, he finds time for a moment of disappointment. He clutches the sweatshirt to his chest. “Why did you do that?”
She sighs. “It’s always why with you. Why did I bring you back from the dead, why did I stop you from eating pavement, why did I castrate you with a machete—” She pauses. “No, wait. Haven’t got round to that one yet.”
He cannot stop the look of speechless horror that crosses his face.
She grins. “Sorry. Bad joke.” She kneels and guides his feet into the trainers. “You seem to be unusually stupid about this sort of thing, so I’ll explain it to you.” She looks up from the shoelace she’s tying and meets his eyes. “You think I’m your victim, but I’m not. I’m your enemy.” She gives the knot one last tug and stands. “You’ll learn the difference.”
He doesn’t have anything appropriately insulting to say to that, so he pulls the sweatshirt on over his head. He shoves his hands into the pockets and grimaces. “Now that I’m suitably clothed, are we going somewhere?”
“That depends,” she says. “Do you remember where you parked your TARDIS?”
++
The end of the universe has changed since he visited it last.
Professor Yana spent most of his life by the sea, not far from where he’d been found as a child. The Master is occasionally unable to separate Yana’s true memories from those the Arch had manufactured, but he knows what they should find when they arrive.
They’d never learnt the city’s true name. The language of its people had been lost for millennia, but the ruins were an ideal shelter for the refugees of a dying galaxy. They called it the Silver Devastation – a shining city, a corpse picked clean by time and the hunger of her scavengers. Yana had loved it, in his way.
It is gone.
There is no city. There is no sea. There is no sun, no light and no heat and if it were not for Rose’s hand on his elbow, for the fire in her skin and the flames in her eyes, he would freeze to death within moments. He scowls at her. “You’re a rubbish navigator,” he says, “though I don’t know why I’m surprised.” He gestures to the colourless dust around them. “I think you may have miscalculated the time of our arrival.”
Her fingers dig into his arm, but her voice is even. “You’re the driver; I’m just the petrol. It’s not my fault if you were a few thousand years off.”
He looks up. There is little left of the planet’s atmosphere, but he cannot see the stars. There are none left to see. “We were losing orbit,” he says, remembering. “Drifting away from the sun. It was going to take hundreds of years, but it felt like it was getting colder every day.”
He turns back to her and finds that she is watching him, frowning slightly. “You lived here,” she says. It is not a question.
“No,” he says, “I didn’t.” He swallows, glad of his respiratory bypass system. Glad not to breathe in the dust. “Enough gawking. The TARDIS is this way.”
They don’t need to walk far. They follow the coastline of the barren seabed, using Rose’s rather eerie glow to light their way, and after about ten minutes something tall and slender interrupts the flat monotony of the horizon. Something tall, slender, and rather leafy on top.
Rose stops walking. “That’s a palm tree.”
The palm tree sways gently, though there hasn’t been a breeze on this planet for at least half a century. Hanging just below the branches are coconuts – three of them.
“No one ever tells you,” she says, “just how exhausting it is to go mad.”
“You’re not going mad.” He glances away from the tree, down at the molten gold of her eyes. “Well, you are, but that’s not why you’re confusing a dead planet at the end of the universe with Miami Beach.” He points at the palm tree. “That, my omnipotent love muffin, is my TARDIS.”
She gives him a steady, examining look. “Let me guess. You went to Club Med and the chameleon circuit broke.”
He sniffs. “Not all of us daydreamed our way through the basic TARDIS maintenance module, thank you.” He stomps off toward the tree; he’s lucky that she decides to follow him, her hand still on his arm. “I didn’t program this disguise, obviously. The thing’s been dormant for millennia – must be a glitch in the system.” He knocks on the rough wood of the trunk.
Nothing happens. After a moment, a frond twitches – the sort of twitch that almost seems to say, Piss off. That is, the frond would’ve seemed to say piss off if fronds ever seemed to say anything at all, which they don’t. The Master finds himself longing for his laser screwdriver.
“I don’t think he likes you,” Rose says. She sounds as if she’s trying not laugh.
The Master rolls his eyes. “It’s not a he, you twit. No matter what that ferret-faced imbecile might have taught you, a TARDIS is a machine, not a pet, and telepathic or not this particular model is more tin can than time capsule.”
Two fronds shudder in the nonexistent breeze. They seem to say, I am armed, you know.
“Rose,” the Master says, “would you mind standing in front of me for a moment?”
She chuckles – a dry, dusty sound. “Nice try.” She reaches out and strokes the tree, caressing the trunk and then giving the bark a good scritch where it’s peeling. “Hello,” she says softly. “Sorry he’s such a git. You can electrocute him if you want – I know I wouldn’t mind.”
The Master grits his teeth. “This isn’t your boyfriend’s crap Type 40 TT, you know. This ship was standard issue during the War; it has weapons systems.”
She shrugs. “So? It’s not like it can hurt me.”
“It can bloody well hurt me!”
She grins. “You’ll regenerate.” She thinks about this, tapping her finger against her chin. “Maybe you’ll come back prettier.”
He makes an inarticulate sound of intense annoyance, and a door swings open in the trunk of the palm tree. The door is somehow wider than the tree itself, but it’s the sort of thing that only bothers you if you look at it for too long.
Rose gives the tree another pat. “Brilliant,” she says, and steps inside. After a moment’s hesitation, he follows.
Inside, the TARDIS is much the same as it was. The design for this model was utilitarian, simple and clean and slightly cheap. The console, walls, and floor are a colour best described as somewhere in the unwelcoming neighbourhood between beige and grey. A narrow corridor leads to the only three other rooms on the ship – a small kitchen, an infirmary, and a toilet. It was not built for comfort.
Rose bounces up and down on the shabby paisley sofa by the console. “This is nice,” she says. Her nose wrinkles. “A bit dusty, though.”
He lingers near the open door. “I didn’t have a sofa,” he says.
She stops bouncing. “Maybe the TARDIS didn’t think you deserved one.”
He slaps his hand against the nearest roundel. “For the last time, this ship does not have thoughts, or feelings, or secret stashes of paisley sofas that it withholds from the undeserving. It is nothing more than a malfunctioning piece of equipment that, to be perfectly honest, never worked all that well to begin with, and once I gut its pitiful excuse for a memory drive I’m going to be damned certain that it never waves its fucking fronds at me ever again.”
Behind him, the door slams closed.
“Uh oh,” Rose says.
The world flares with light, and at first he thinks he has gone blind. What moments before had been a small, drab room is now an endless expanse of white, a wall-less, door-less forever that stretches in all directions without colour or shadow. They’re trapped.
“Well,” Rose says from the sofa, “doesn’t this give an exciting new meaning to bigger on the inside.”
The Master walks across white floors until he reaches the sofa. He sits down beside her and lets his head fall back against the cushions. He presses his hand over his eyes. “I wish I were dead,” he says. “Being dead was nice.”
She pats his shoulder. “Oh, pumpkin. I wish you were dead, too.”
He grabs her hand, running his thumb over the heavy silver ring she still wears. “You have a funny way of showing it,” he says.
She goes very still, her hand like stone in his. “You made me a promise. Can’t keep promises if you’re dead.”
He nods, slowly. “As far as I can recall,” he says, “I’ve only ever promised you two things.” He brushes her hair out of her face, tucking a filthy strand behind her ear. “First, that I would never lie to you. The second—”
“I want you to kill me,” she says.
The Master pauses, the tip of his tongue against his teeth. “You can’t die.”
She shrugs. “You’ll figure something out.”
“Right,” he says. “Of course I will.” He sits back against the arm of the sofa, tapping his fingers against the cushion. “But why?”
She was not beautiful, before. Was not like Lucy, with her delicate porcelain madness, or even pretty Miss Martha Jones, whose steady-handed defiance only sharpened her charms. Rose Tyler had been young and foolish and a little bit coarse, and though he had liked her perfectly well up until the moment she’d shoved him against a wall and begun to throttle him, he had never thought her beautiful.
She is not beautiful now. He looks at her smile and wonders if her teeth have grown sharper since last he saw it.
Rose stands. She seems almost unreal against the colourless horizon, a severe silhouette of dirty hair and ragged clothes and bare feet. She reaches out and places her hand on a waist-high white hexagon that was not there a moment before. It is the TARDIS console.
“The universe is dying,” she says. “I know you can feel it too, but—” Her mouth twists. “But it’s different, for me. The lights going out one by one.” She turns to him, leaning back against the console. Her hair falls into her face. “It’s natural and inevitable and by now there’s probably no one left to save, but I could, you know. I could coax fire from a thousand dead suns and breathe life into a thousand dead worlds and it would only make me stronger. It would only make me want to do more.”
“Why don’t you?” he says. “Do more.”
She looks up, and there is something ancient and laughing in her eyes. “I don’t think,” she says, “that I know how to answer that in a way you’ll understand.” She drags her fingers along the edge of the console, her eyes following the path of her hand. Her expression turns gentle. “Poor thing. He’s been alone for such a long time.”
The time rotor moves, flaring with golden light, and the room reappears. If its colour scheme is more eggshell than beige, the Master chooses not to notice. He stands. “Tell it to open the door. We’ll find another ship.”
She raises one eyebrow. “Far as I know, there’s only one other TARDIS in the universe, and it’s currently occupied.”
He steps forward, backing her against the console. “In case it’s escaped your notice, you suicidal, rot-brained freak of nature, this ship is in no condition to take anyone anywhen or anywhere. The toaster oven is broken, the shower is always out of hot water, and it’s a mutinous time-travelling sentient thing that will probably try to kill me the first time your back is turned. Also, it’s growing coconuts.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Three of them.”
Rose grins. “Yeah,” she says. “He’s perfect.” She reaches up and pats the time rotor. “I think I’ll call him Larry.”
He shoves his hands in the stupid pockets of his stupid red hoodie and sits down on the sofa again with a plop. “I hate you,” he says. “A lot.”
“You’re just sore ‘cause I can kill you with a wave of my hand.” She pauses. “Actually, don’t think I even have to wave my hand anymore. Bet I could just sort of squint in your general direction.”
The Master crosses his legs at the knee and folds his arms and for a moment he can almost imagine that his hoodie and trainers are a sharp black suit and tie. “I do wonder what the Doctor would say, if he could see you now. His precious lost girl, hands still wet with blood.” He grins, a vicious twist of lips and teeth. “Tell me, Rose – how many people died before you finally decided you needed to be stopped?”
He isn’t sure what he expects – denial, fury, violence. He half expects to be reduced to atoms, to crumble to ash again and join rest of the dust hiding between the sofa cushions. He doesn’t expect her to hold out her hand.
“One hundred and fifty-six,” she says. “I murdered one hundred and fifty-six people, and one of them was the first boy I ever kissed.” She wiggles her fingers. “Are you going to take my hand, or what?”
He does, and she pulls him to his feet. “One hundred and fifty-six,” he says. He is grudgingly impressed.
“If I’d done anything less, do you really think I would’ve come to you?” She tugs him over to the console and places his hands on the controls. “Larry will go wherever you like; I’ve asked nicely. He probably won’t kill you once we get there.”
“I’ll set this thing on fire before I call it Larry,” he says under his breath, but she is no longer listening. Or, at least, no longer listening to him – her gaze is fixed on a distant point, on something that is not there, and he watches as the fingers of her right hand twitch.
“Let me know,” she says, “when you’re ready to keep your promise.”
She disappears down the narrow corridor, and the Master sets the coordinates for their first destination.
++
Characters: the Tylers, Mickey Smith, Jake Simmonds, the Master, others.
Rating: Adult, for language and violence.
Note: Apologies for posting this separately; the complete third chapter wouldn't fit in one post. Silly chapter.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
++
The Master stares at her. “Hold on,” he says, “let me get this straight.” A streetlamp flickers overhead. “You can’t die.”
“Nope.” The thing that was Rose Tyler sits cross-legged on the ground in front of him, her toes curling into cracks in the asphalt. “Not even a little.”
This piques his scientific curiosity, as well as an interest of a rather more morbid nature. He takes a slurp from his Big Gulp. “Intriguing. What have you tried?”
She looks up, as if consulting a mental list. “Threw myself off a building, to start with. When that didn’t take, I moved on to drowning, suffocation, electrocution, cyanide, a single gunshot wound to the head, and—”
He can move fast, when he needs to. One moment the jagged piece of scrap metal is in the skip with the rest of the rubbish, and the next it is buried in her torso, protruding obscenely from the valley between her small breasts. She looks down at the bloodless wound, then back up at him.
“—And impalement,” she finishes. She taps the piece of scrap metal with one finger and it crumbles, showering pale dust into her lap. Her chest is unmarked; her t-shirt is ruined. She tugs at the frayed edge of the hole. “Bugger,” she says. “I liked this one.”
He settles back against the cold steel of the skip. It smells like piss. “You’ve got the infinite power of time and space at your fingertips,” he points out. “Why don’t you just mend it?”
She shakes her head. “It’s easy to break things,” she says. “Gets more complicated when you try to fix them again.” She flows to her feet, the movement at once graceful and oddly disjointed. She reaches into the skip and pulls out a worn gym bag. She drops it at his feet. “There are clothes in here. You should probably put them on.”
He unzips the bag and finds a ragged pair of trainers, a sweatshirt, and grey pyjama bottoms. He holds the sweatshirt up by its hood; it is blood red. “Oh, but Grandmother,” he says, “what a tenuous grasp of irony you have!”
She gives him a little bow. “The better to dress you with, my dear.” She smirks, crossing her arms over her chest. “Would you like me to turn around? I wouldn’t want to offend your delicate sensibilities.”
He chuckles, and feels the sound grind in the back of his throat. “I wouldn’t want to offend yours.”
She rolls her eyes, but pivots in place until she faces the empty lot. He watches her turned back for a moment (as stupid as she is invulnerable, which hardly seems fair) and then he stands. The pyjama bottoms are easy enough, but after he pulls them up over his hips he needs to bend down again to get the sweatshirt. Blood rushes to his head and he sways, his legs trembling like a newborn foal’s. His new body betrays him, lurching forward, and it is only her grip on his bare arm that stops him from falling face first onto the asphalt.
They both stare at the place where her hand touches his skin.
Her fingers are hot as branding irons; he refuses to wince. He has to tilt back his head to look into her eyes. “Are you going to let go?”
Her expression is serene. “I don’t know,” she says. “Are you going to fall down again?”
He jerks his arm out of her hold and stumbles back against the skip. None of this fits, not a word of it, and he finds it infuriating. He finds her infuriating, which is the one thing that does fit, but for all the madness in her eyes she is frighteningly calm, untroubled by his presence or his touch. Amidst the storm of fury and confusion and curiosity he feels, he finds time for a moment of disappointment. He clutches the sweatshirt to his chest. “Why did you do that?”
She sighs. “It’s always why with you. Why did I bring you back from the dead, why did I stop you from eating pavement, why did I castrate you with a machete—” She pauses. “No, wait. Haven’t got round to that one yet.”
He cannot stop the look of speechless horror that crosses his face.
She grins. “Sorry. Bad joke.” She kneels and guides his feet into the trainers. “You seem to be unusually stupid about this sort of thing, so I’ll explain it to you.” She looks up from the shoelace she’s tying and meets his eyes. “You think I’m your victim, but I’m not. I’m your enemy.” She gives the knot one last tug and stands. “You’ll learn the difference.”
He doesn’t have anything appropriately insulting to say to that, so he pulls the sweatshirt on over his head. He shoves his hands into the pockets and grimaces. “Now that I’m suitably clothed, are we going somewhere?”
“That depends,” she says. “Do you remember where you parked your TARDIS?”
++
The end of the universe has changed since he visited it last.
Professor Yana spent most of his life by the sea, not far from where he’d been found as a child. The Master is occasionally unable to separate Yana’s true memories from those the Arch had manufactured, but he knows what they should find when they arrive.
They’d never learnt the city’s true name. The language of its people had been lost for millennia, but the ruins were an ideal shelter for the refugees of a dying galaxy. They called it the Silver Devastation – a shining city, a corpse picked clean by time and the hunger of her scavengers. Yana had loved it, in his way.
It is gone.
There is no city. There is no sea. There is no sun, no light and no heat and if it were not for Rose’s hand on his elbow, for the fire in her skin and the flames in her eyes, he would freeze to death within moments. He scowls at her. “You’re a rubbish navigator,” he says, “though I don’t know why I’m surprised.” He gestures to the colourless dust around them. “I think you may have miscalculated the time of our arrival.”
Her fingers dig into his arm, but her voice is even. “You’re the driver; I’m just the petrol. It’s not my fault if you were a few thousand years off.”
He looks up. There is little left of the planet’s atmosphere, but he cannot see the stars. There are none left to see. “We were losing orbit,” he says, remembering. “Drifting away from the sun. It was going to take hundreds of years, but it felt like it was getting colder every day.”
He turns back to her and finds that she is watching him, frowning slightly. “You lived here,” she says. It is not a question.
“No,” he says, “I didn’t.” He swallows, glad of his respiratory bypass system. Glad not to breathe in the dust. “Enough gawking. The TARDIS is this way.”
They don’t need to walk far. They follow the coastline of the barren seabed, using Rose’s rather eerie glow to light their way, and after about ten minutes something tall and slender interrupts the flat monotony of the horizon. Something tall, slender, and rather leafy on top.
Rose stops walking. “That’s a palm tree.”
The palm tree sways gently, though there hasn’t been a breeze on this planet for at least half a century. Hanging just below the branches are coconuts – three of them.
“No one ever tells you,” she says, “just how exhausting it is to go mad.”
“You’re not going mad.” He glances away from the tree, down at the molten gold of her eyes. “Well, you are, but that’s not why you’re confusing a dead planet at the end of the universe with Miami Beach.” He points at the palm tree. “That, my omnipotent love muffin, is my TARDIS.”
She gives him a steady, examining look. “Let me guess. You went to Club Med and the chameleon circuit broke.”
He sniffs. “Not all of us daydreamed our way through the basic TARDIS maintenance module, thank you.” He stomps off toward the tree; he’s lucky that she decides to follow him, her hand still on his arm. “I didn’t program this disguise, obviously. The thing’s been dormant for millennia – must be a glitch in the system.” He knocks on the rough wood of the trunk.
Nothing happens. After a moment, a frond twitches – the sort of twitch that almost seems to say, Piss off. That is, the frond would’ve seemed to say piss off if fronds ever seemed to say anything at all, which they don’t. The Master finds himself longing for his laser screwdriver.
“I don’t think he likes you,” Rose says. She sounds as if she’s trying not laugh.
The Master rolls his eyes. “It’s not a he, you twit. No matter what that ferret-faced imbecile might have taught you, a TARDIS is a machine, not a pet, and telepathic or not this particular model is more tin can than time capsule.”
Two fronds shudder in the nonexistent breeze. They seem to say, I am armed, you know.
“Rose,” the Master says, “would you mind standing in front of me for a moment?”
She chuckles – a dry, dusty sound. “Nice try.” She reaches out and strokes the tree, caressing the trunk and then giving the bark a good scritch where it’s peeling. “Hello,” she says softly. “Sorry he’s such a git. You can electrocute him if you want – I know I wouldn’t mind.”
The Master grits his teeth. “This isn’t your boyfriend’s crap Type 40 TT, you know. This ship was standard issue during the War; it has weapons systems.”
She shrugs. “So? It’s not like it can hurt me.”
“It can bloody well hurt me!”
She grins. “You’ll regenerate.” She thinks about this, tapping her finger against her chin. “Maybe you’ll come back prettier.”
He makes an inarticulate sound of intense annoyance, and a door swings open in the trunk of the palm tree. The door is somehow wider than the tree itself, but it’s the sort of thing that only bothers you if you look at it for too long.
Rose gives the tree another pat. “Brilliant,” she says, and steps inside. After a moment’s hesitation, he follows.
Inside, the TARDIS is much the same as it was. The design for this model was utilitarian, simple and clean and slightly cheap. The console, walls, and floor are a colour best described as somewhere in the unwelcoming neighbourhood between beige and grey. A narrow corridor leads to the only three other rooms on the ship – a small kitchen, an infirmary, and a toilet. It was not built for comfort.
Rose bounces up and down on the shabby paisley sofa by the console. “This is nice,” she says. Her nose wrinkles. “A bit dusty, though.”
He lingers near the open door. “I didn’t have a sofa,” he says.
She stops bouncing. “Maybe the TARDIS didn’t think you deserved one.”
He slaps his hand against the nearest roundel. “For the last time, this ship does not have thoughts, or feelings, or secret stashes of paisley sofas that it withholds from the undeserving. It is nothing more than a malfunctioning piece of equipment that, to be perfectly honest, never worked all that well to begin with, and once I gut its pitiful excuse for a memory drive I’m going to be damned certain that it never waves its fucking fronds at me ever again.”
Behind him, the door slams closed.
“Uh oh,” Rose says.
The world flares with light, and at first he thinks he has gone blind. What moments before had been a small, drab room is now an endless expanse of white, a wall-less, door-less forever that stretches in all directions without colour or shadow. They’re trapped.
“Well,” Rose says from the sofa, “doesn’t this give an exciting new meaning to bigger on the inside.”
The Master walks across white floors until he reaches the sofa. He sits down beside her and lets his head fall back against the cushions. He presses his hand over his eyes. “I wish I were dead,” he says. “Being dead was nice.”
She pats his shoulder. “Oh, pumpkin. I wish you were dead, too.”
He grabs her hand, running his thumb over the heavy silver ring she still wears. “You have a funny way of showing it,” he says.
She goes very still, her hand like stone in his. “You made me a promise. Can’t keep promises if you’re dead.”
He nods, slowly. “As far as I can recall,” he says, “I’ve only ever promised you two things.” He brushes her hair out of her face, tucking a filthy strand behind her ear. “First, that I would never lie to you. The second—”
“I want you to kill me,” she says.
The Master pauses, the tip of his tongue against his teeth. “You can’t die.”
She shrugs. “You’ll figure something out.”
“Right,” he says. “Of course I will.” He sits back against the arm of the sofa, tapping his fingers against the cushion. “But why?”
She was not beautiful, before. Was not like Lucy, with her delicate porcelain madness, or even pretty Miss Martha Jones, whose steady-handed defiance only sharpened her charms. Rose Tyler had been young and foolish and a little bit coarse, and though he had liked her perfectly well up until the moment she’d shoved him against a wall and begun to throttle him, he had never thought her beautiful.
She is not beautiful now. He looks at her smile and wonders if her teeth have grown sharper since last he saw it.
Rose stands. She seems almost unreal against the colourless horizon, a severe silhouette of dirty hair and ragged clothes and bare feet. She reaches out and places her hand on a waist-high white hexagon that was not there a moment before. It is the TARDIS console.
“The universe is dying,” she says. “I know you can feel it too, but—” Her mouth twists. “But it’s different, for me. The lights going out one by one.” She turns to him, leaning back against the console. Her hair falls into her face. “It’s natural and inevitable and by now there’s probably no one left to save, but I could, you know. I could coax fire from a thousand dead suns and breathe life into a thousand dead worlds and it would only make me stronger. It would only make me want to do more.”
“Why don’t you?” he says. “Do more.”
She looks up, and there is something ancient and laughing in her eyes. “I don’t think,” she says, “that I know how to answer that in a way you’ll understand.” She drags her fingers along the edge of the console, her eyes following the path of her hand. Her expression turns gentle. “Poor thing. He’s been alone for such a long time.”
The time rotor moves, flaring with golden light, and the room reappears. If its colour scheme is more eggshell than beige, the Master chooses not to notice. He stands. “Tell it to open the door. We’ll find another ship.”
She raises one eyebrow. “Far as I know, there’s only one other TARDIS in the universe, and it’s currently occupied.”
He steps forward, backing her against the console. “In case it’s escaped your notice, you suicidal, rot-brained freak of nature, this ship is in no condition to take anyone anywhen or anywhere. The toaster oven is broken, the shower is always out of hot water, and it’s a mutinous time-travelling sentient thing that will probably try to kill me the first time your back is turned. Also, it’s growing coconuts.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “Three of them.”
Rose grins. “Yeah,” she says. “He’s perfect.” She reaches up and pats the time rotor. “I think I’ll call him Larry.”
He shoves his hands in the stupid pockets of his stupid red hoodie and sits down on the sofa again with a plop. “I hate you,” he says. “A lot.”
“You’re just sore ‘cause I can kill you with a wave of my hand.” She pauses. “Actually, don’t think I even have to wave my hand anymore. Bet I could just sort of squint in your general direction.”
The Master crosses his legs at the knee and folds his arms and for a moment he can almost imagine that his hoodie and trainers are a sharp black suit and tie. “I do wonder what the Doctor would say, if he could see you now. His precious lost girl, hands still wet with blood.” He grins, a vicious twist of lips and teeth. “Tell me, Rose – how many people died before you finally decided you needed to be stopped?”
He isn’t sure what he expects – denial, fury, violence. He half expects to be reduced to atoms, to crumble to ash again and join rest of the dust hiding between the sofa cushions. He doesn’t expect her to hold out her hand.
“One hundred and fifty-six,” she says. “I murdered one hundred and fifty-six people, and one of them was the first boy I ever kissed.” She wiggles her fingers. “Are you going to take my hand, or what?”
He does, and she pulls him to his feet. “One hundred and fifty-six,” he says. He is grudgingly impressed.
“If I’d done anything less, do you really think I would’ve come to you?” She tugs him over to the console and places his hands on the controls. “Larry will go wherever you like; I’ve asked nicely. He probably won’t kill you once we get there.”
“I’ll set this thing on fire before I call it Larry,” he says under his breath, but she is no longer listening. Or, at least, no longer listening to him – her gaze is fixed on a distant point, on something that is not there, and he watches as the fingers of her right hand twitch.
“Let me know,” she says, “when you’re ready to keep your promise.”
She disappears down the narrow corridor, and the Master sets the coordinates for their first destination.
++
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(It's greedy of me to beg for moarrrr right now, isn't it?)
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Is it normal to laugh while feeling vaguely queasy for having laughed? it's a beautiful fic, beautiful and unsettling in the way coming into contact with an untranqued jaguar is. The jaguar looks at you and thinks, "Food", and for the tiniest fraction of a second, you find yourself thinking, "Yes."
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I love Rose with the Master. They're both just unhinged enough to be hysterical together. You could do an entire series with just them traveling round with Larry, and I would reread every one four times. At least.
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Mooooooooooooooore.
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“No one ever tells you,” she says, “just how exhausting it is to go mad.” is rather gorgeous and feels somehow Douglas Adams-ish. The interaction with Rose, the Master and Larry (hee!) is wonderful.
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“You know, I’m not quite sure.” She leans down, hands on her knees, and smiles at him. “But whatever I am, I’m a lot fucking scarier than you.”
Best. Line. Ever.
I also LOVE the fact that you brought in Nine and Ten. It was very satisfying. As was your interaction with Matthew and Rose. And of course, Rose and the Master talking inside a TARDIS palm tree called Larry is just made of win.
There must be another story to this series, right?
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I am very, very glad I waited.
The level of creepy you achieve is remarkable. The flow of the bus warping, the light, the voice of the story between the story, the creatures; all of it. And then there's Matthew and he hits me right where it hurts because he's a five-year-old brother. He really, really is. It's not that he's properly written or just really well thought out - he's a little brother, and he's five. I mean, I know that kid.
So really, more than the lyrically disturbing words, more than that little thing that keeps edging you off balance a bit more and a bit more and a bit more, more than that, your characterization is incredible. Their understanding of each other builds on their understanding of themselves and they all fit in a way that is terribly, tragically real. I love that Jake and Mickey set up backup explosives. I love that Mickey refused to live. I love that strange, haunting scene with the Doctor and the uncertainty of it. Really, I love that - even when I have no idea what's going on - I feel like I should because though it's so surreal, it's so real in the way imaginary things are.
On the more whimsical side of things, I adore Larry and I adore the Master's protestations of Larry. Three random coconuts at the end of the world. It's hard not to love.
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*sings*
I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts, (deedeeleedeedee)
There they are a-standing in a row.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head.
*silence*
*skedaddles*
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HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE. Man, I just hate you so much.
Sunday-Morning-Lie-In-Due-To-Universe's-Worst-Hangover Master, traveling about with Blonde-Female-Version-of-Discworld's-Death-With-Added-Rose-Flavor, and Larry, The Heavily-Armed Gilligan's Island Day-Player.
So, the hate continues.
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And, also, I just learned that I shouldn't read your fics before going to bed.
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I don't have an icon appropriate enough. Sexy Rose will have to do. Because, damn.
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Awesome, awesome fic.
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smokingthinking when he mapped out Rose’s post-season-one storyline. Seriously.)And I kind of love that you killed Mickey. Of course I hate that he’s dead, but… I think the worst thing about “Journey’s End,” for me (and there were so many worst things), was Rose being trapped in Pete’s World without Mickey. Without even a goodbye. It felt like the writers didn’t think her friendship with Mickey mattered. This (she killed a hundred and fifty-six people! she almost committed genocide!) feels a lot closer to the mark.
But I think my favorite part was all the references to “Father’s Day.” There’s a reason why Pete Tyler feels like a major character in Doctor Who—it’s because that episode was so huge it practically had it’s own gravity.
I’m looking forward to the sequel.
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I echo EVERY WORD everyone above has said!!
As an author, YOU, my dear, are made of ... WIN!!!
*Awards you Medal of BEST Creepiest Storyline EVER!*
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And I'm not even sure which idea I'm referring to at the moment...Is it Rose/the Master/the Club Med TARDIS floating in space like crazy things? Immortal!Rose bringing BACK the Master after committing genocide just so he can finally kill her?...another one that I can't think of right now, but is definitely also cracktastic/disturbingly realistic? :D Who knows. But I'll just end with this = WIN. WIN WIN WIN WIN. \o/ \o/ \o/ \o/ \o/ \o/
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And Nine! This fic made me realise how much I'd missed him and his Northern ways. I love the way you capture his voice, and how subtly that shifts when he morphs into Ten. ♥
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I'm not sure thats true...I thought Rose was very beautiful!
But I still loved it!
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By the way, have you written any published works? I really love your fanfic, and I would love to read more of anything you write. So I was just wondering if you'd written any novels that might be floating around that I could buy.
Again, this is gorgeous, will probably read it again soon. Thanks for being awesome!
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(Anonymous) 2009-09-04 07:29 am (UTC)(link)no subject
I still wish I could half do as much with fairy tales and riddles and children's rhymes as you do in Good Night!
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your dialogue is also fantastic. reminds me a bit of joss whedon/ cassandra claire's (plagiarized or not). witty banter.
no chance of continuing this?