The Master (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beholdthedrums) wrote2009-11-17 07:13 am
beholdthedrums) wrote2009-11-17 07:13 am
FIC: Of Egypt and Aliens (Part 2)
Community: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
justprompts
Prompt: Doppelganger
Character(s): The Master & the Doctor
Words: 3,188
Jeez, finally got part 2 finished, months later.Italics galore. Part 3 will probably be just as distant in the future :| At least I feel like I've made some vague progress when it comes to writing. Oi.
I wanted a picture of the Luxor Temple in this too but lol... when we went it was at night and all my pictures came out cruddy -.-;; So there's the Kom Ombo at the bottom.
Part 1 can be found here.
In other news, "Handlebars" by Flobots is a frighteningly fitting song for the Doctor. That is all.
Part II
“Are you ever going to stop ignoring me?” the Doctor presses. Much to the Master’s dislike, they’re still in Egypt. He thinks it’s because the Doctor can act like a tourist and use the crowds as a distraction from the Master’s silence. Three days of this; both of them are starting to grow a little twitchy. Still, the Master doesn’t reply; he doesn’t even gaze towards the other.
The Doctor sighs, rubbing a hand over his brow. “There’re mummified crocodiles here. Still well-preserved. Glad not every culture likes to mummify their enemies.” He glances to the Master, trying to be subtle about it. They left Luxor pretty swiftly, moving along to Aswan (the Doctor deciding that it was far enough to avoid trouble), and were idling at the Kom Ombo temple in their shirtsleeves.
It’s all very pointless, summed up the Master’s thoughts. Pointless, foolish, and a whole lot else. He decides to lose the Doctor amongst a crowd of obvious Americans – students, even. Easy to separate, slide away; the Doctor’s far too distracted with observing one of the temple columns, babbling aloud to anyone who would stop and listen about its structure.
He should give up traveling, let the Master take his TARDIS, and become a damn tour guide.
Finding some actual quiet is pretty difficult, of course. That’s the problem with a tourist site, especially one on Earth: humans are everywhere. Every little corner they can squeeze themselves into and not get caught.
A local tries to sell him postcards, and that’s about the last straw. He’s done. He turns and stalks off in the direction of the TARDIS, but to his surprise the Doctor is soon enough after him, exasperated. “Oh come on!” he complains. “This is getting to be a bit much, don’t you think? Will you just talk to me?”
The Master spins on a foot and stares the Doctor down. “You locked a part of my own mind from me,” he yells. “One has to wonder if you’ve done it more than once! Please excuse me for avoiding listening to you! But really, Doctor, go back and enlighten your little fan club of tourists. They may just appreciate the sound of your voice as much as you do.” He continues on his exit, body racing with angry energy.
“I’ve never done it before! There was nothing else I could do! It was to protect you!”
“Oh, thank you, Doctor,” he says mockingly. He rolls his eyes. “Is that what you want to hear? ‘Thank you for saving my life’? Well,” his voice dips low, and now he’s facing the Doctor again, skulking towards him, “if I’m so safe now, Doctor, then why not remove the block, hm? Or is it that I’m not really safe, and if so, why the hell are we still in Egypt?!”
The Doctor wavers, trying to find something to say. It’s infuriating to the Master. Well! The other wanted him to talk! And now he’s talking, and the Doctor has nothing to say.
Surprise, surprise.
Finally, after drawing in a shaky breath, the Doctor speaks. “They’re going to keep coming after you. We were at the Luxor Temple. Somehow you got this device in your hands and managed to interface with it, and let’s just say… this didn’t make these fellows very pleased, because you apparently aren’t supposed to be able to do it. Big waves of destruction, threatening their history, etcetera, etcetera!”
The Master’s eyes narrow. “You’re leaving out information.”
“Of course I’m leaving out information! I can’t… you were…” the Doctor’s expression is one of desperation, “the device and you connected. I don’t know what’ll happen if they see into that area of your mind, if they find out what they wanted, they’ll probably be able to find out anything else.”
“So why are we still here?” the Master growls.
“Because that device also did something to you,” he says carefully, “probably several somethings, unless you can prove me wrong by saying that you magically have your drums resituated.” He hopes that the Master will say yes, say that they’re there, that they’ve been there for awhile now. But the other is suddenly looking at him in shock, and the Doctor flinches lightly in memory of a similar situation, back when this started. “I thought not,” he murmurs quietly. “I need to get my hands on that device.”
“You didn’t do anything to the drums?” the Master asks shakily, feeling a sudden need to bolt.
“No. That wasn’t me.”
The Master almost wishes it had been.
“So then where do we go from here, Doctor?”
“Well, they’ll come after you again eventually… and when they do, this time I’ll be ready.”
The concept is priceless at best. The Master doesn’t even bother holding back his laughter. The Doctor this whole time has been acting as though he were trying so hard to protect the Master, but all he was doing was trying to cover his tracks, since what he really intended to do was lay the Master out as bait.
“Do we know who our little friends are?”
The Doctor cringes and turns away, looking over the temple as golden light from the setting sun baths over it. “From what I was able to gather, they’re Doppelgangers, fitting name, don’t you think? They’re always taking the form of others; sort of a sin to show their true form, though I’ve heard that they’re nearly invulnerable in it. Still, sins are sins, I suppose.” He rolls a shoe over a clump of dirt, crushing it into the few flecks of grass. “Race took a bit of a hit during the Time War, like most of the universe. Why they’re in Egypt though? Oh, I donno.”
“So that’s it. Your plan is to continue to ‘sightsee’ until they come hunting again. Even at the cost of your precious humans getting in the way,” as well as the Master, “fantastic, Doctor, just fantastic.”
The Doctor groans, quite loudly, “Isn’t there anything I can say that you’re not going to get uptight about?”
“No, Doctor, which is exactly why I didn’t want to be talking to you in the first place!” It didn’t use to be this bad between them. Sure, they had their moments, their spats. But to the surprise of a certain gang of humans, it worked, and the Master hadn’t done anything ‘silly’ like try and rule over the cosmos with an iron fist again.
Though there was this one planet, but they don’t speak of that, just as they don’t speak of the Year. And there was a tiny, smidgen of a village here and there, but really those places were the last to see the Master’s terror in full.
Now he wanted to enslave the whole of Egypt just to get out of this frustration of his.
When he turns back to face the Doctor, the other is gone. Probably gave up on dealing with the Master and returned to entertaining tourists with tidbits of history. He was such a child sometimes.
But he barely makes it a few paces away before one of those irritating tourists is standing before him. “You really shouldn’t be so rude,” the Master hisses lowly at the woman. He sidesteps her, but she’s quick to readjust her own footing. “Excuse me.”
“You are at fault for our sins. We are disgraced because of you,” she remarks coldly, raising a hand to point at his forehead. “To make matters worse, you have tainted our history. How can one such as you have accessed something so precious to us, when we cannot? Explain it to me. Explain it to me before you die.”
“ – let go of me!” comes a yell from the Doctor. He shimmers into view with two other figures, each hooking arms with him and trying to hold him to the ground. Locals and tourists ignore them as if they weren’t even there. “Really, you don’t want to be doing this!” the Doctor continues, “I can help you. I’m the one you want! Leave him out of this!”
Selfless moron.
The woman holds out a cubbish device that fits between both her hands. “Let me see how you do it. You can connect with it.”
“Master, don’t touch it!”
He blocks out the Doctor’s pleads. They’re a distant sound. The other thing he hears, the only thing he feels is the drumming, suddenly echoing around him, calling to him from this device. He reaches out to take it, even just to touch it, entranced.
“MASTER!”
The drums roar through him as his hand brushes the surface. He remembers:
Egypt. Luxor Temple. Agreeing to this little excursion was the only way to get the Doctor to shut up for once; he could talk his ear off to tourists and the Master could relax a bit, maybe even kick back. He hardly cared about ancient ruins from a bunch of humans, even if some of it was an amazing feat for them. Too bad they knocked away all that work of art and became like this.
There was traffic all around them. A temple amongst a thriving city. One of these things isn’t like the other. Even the connections between this temple and the Karnak were barely intact; rows of sphinxes were supposed to lead between the temples. It wasn’t just time that wore away at them, it was the human race.
Break apart beauty, bit by bit.
He had managed to sneak away from the Doctor to get a private look around the temple himself. Grazing a hand along hieroglyphics, crumbled areas of wall. That was when everything went downhill, quite fast. Something in the wall weaved away from it, a black blur of stone shifting into his hands. He backed away with it, eyes widening as it pulsed and continued to change, once a piece of brick, and then a small device cradled between his hands.
His body slowly goes numb, and to his despair he finds that he cannot simply let go of the device. He sways, hearing the drums tear through him and meet a new, intruding hum that dips deeper into his mind. It digs against him and merges amongst the drumbeat – the headache it causes nearly knocks him to his knees.
The device pulses a second time. He looks at it strangely, barely conscious of what was going on, slowly glancing up to see the surrounding area; it looked as though he was underwater as energy courses away from him. Parts of the other walls shimmer and then began to crumble, and then finally the Doctor comes around the line of columns, panicking as more of the temple shifts.
He hears the yell: “Master!”
He can’t move. The device whirrs loudly and people begin to run. Locals shout out angrily in Arabic, but assist hastily with the sudden evacuation… except there’s a few stationary tourists, watching the scene unfold. After a few moments, the waves of energy roll over them and they shimmer, skin and clothes fading into a dark, inky body. They turn to one another, chitter off in something that the Master can’t manage to make out, then manage to salvage the illusion of humans again.
“That is ours,” one of the people say, jerkily stepping in the direction of the Master.
The Doctor looks between the people and the Master, then bolts towards the other Time Lord, trying to find a way to get closer, but the energy is creating almost a bubble around him. “Master, snap out of it!” he yells over the sounds of the breaking temple and the gust of power.
He can’t. He would, but he can’t. He doesn’t even understand how he’s still standing, all he knows is that he’s seeing images of knowledge that he’s never even heard of, and that the drums are both letting go and yet gripping tightly to him, suffocating him.
“Leave our technology alone!” the figure continues. “You cannot be here, you cannot exist… What are you doing? You are destroying our history! Anyone that does that will be killed. You will tell us at once how you’re managing to do this, and if you do not, we will force the information from you!”
The Doctor looks frozen in place. This was not going good at all. Thankfully, as the drums begin to recede, the device begins to wind down, and the Master stumbles against part of an intact wall, dropping the device somewhere to the ground and blankly looking down at his shaking hands, confused.
More ‘tourists’ swarm around from other areas, revealing oddly shaped weapons as the Doctor rushes to the Master, grabbing him and pulling him behind a column to avoid the weapon fire.
The Master stares up at the Doctor. “What’s going on?” he slurs, “where are we?”
“Just hold on,” the Doctor tells, breathing hard, “I’m going to fix this. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to fix it.” He reaches out into the Master’s mind and cringes, suddenly understanding why the Master appeared to be in shock. “That thing did something to you,” he says aloud, “you and it are connected in some way. Oh! And guess what? You managed to piss off its owners. Imagine that.”
The Master can glimpse more thoughts than that. He catches hold of the Doctor’s worry, about the creatures getting more than just the information that they want, about the Master’s mind being more messed up than usual.
And then it’s gone. He finds himself wondering what’s going on, feeling a sense of déjà vu but not knowing the reason behind it. There’s the burn of laser sinking into stone nearby and the Doctor biting back a curse; it’s a little gang of humans that manage to separate them.
“Master, run!” the Doctor yells, in the grip of these other people, struggling with all his might.
“What?” the Master asks sharply, wavering on his feet. How the hell does the Doctor expect him to run? But he does. He doesn’t know where to go, or where he even is, but he runs just as the Doctor manages to make a break for it. “Doctor, what did you do?!”
“Pinning this on me? Oh, because everything’s my fault, is it? Don’t you ever think for a moment that you could be -” he shuts himself up, skidding to a halt and hesitating. “Look, I can’t explain anything. We just have to get back to the TARDIS, alright?”
“Why the hell can’t you explain –”
Weapon fire meets them again and once more the Master manages to lose track of the other. He rolls his eyes and pulls out his screwdriver, ready to fight back when he feels a heavy weight crash down on him and he’s out.
He jerks his full body away from the woman, stumbles back and hits the ground, shaken. His body tingles, and the drums are once again gone from him. He stares up at the woman, but in her place is a black, shadowy figure, hunching over the device. Its image shimmers, and after a moment, reassumes the appearance of the woman.
She’s glaring at him now, hands tightening around the device. “How is it possible… this is not fair. A mere human capable of this? No. No.”
“I take offense to the human remark, thanks,” he says dryly. Nearby the Doctor has his head held down into dirt, and he’s moving much less than he was before. The same shadowy figures have their grip on him. The Master frowns. What happened to all that talk of being ready, Doctor? “How about you tell me what exactly is the problem here. Details, please.”
She scowls down at him, stepping closer, taking the device in one palm and reaching out with her other hand, but her fingers curl away before she touches him. “All we wanted was to reclaim our history, and you took it from us and ruined it. Swept it away and stole it as your own…” Now she reaches for him, tightly fisting his shirt and pulling him towards her. “You’re just like the Time Lords.”
The Master swallows and tries to break away from her. “Really. Right. Time Lords. Never heard of them,” he says all too quickly, for once not ready to jump in and reveal his race, considering how she was currently reacting. “What did these Lords of Time do?”
“They broke our history, they broke everything. Them and the Daleks…” she tilts her head to the side and throws him back to the ground, straightening. Her gaze falls to the device gripped in her hand. “You’ve caused us to sin. You’ve made us…” Anger crosses over her expression.
His mind is already aching; every muscle twists against him, like they were in the wrong body, like he should be someone else right now and he couldn’t get a hold of it.
“No, no, no, no, no –” the Doctor is chanting, shifting up from the ground and bucking one of the forms off of him. It’s not soon enough though, because the woman – the creature, the Doppelganger – shoves the device fully into the Master’s grip and, horrified, he watches as energy weaves wildly away. What he sees he has already seen more than he would like; the device changes the Master when it’s in his hands. He sees the other’s form flicker, appearance mutating quickly, revealing the images of his past regenerations, again and again. “Stop it, you’ll kill him!”
“You think we are concerned? He is at fault, he has committed crime,” says one of the figures holding him down.
“You won’t find out what you want if he’s dead. You’ll lose everything you’re after just because you’re overreacting. Look – if you just calm down for a moment we can sort this all out and then happily go our separate ways! Everybody wins!”
His reply is being grinded into the dirt. He spits out dust, twisting his head around to see the Master laying on his back and the Doppelganger-woman crouching over him. He hates the ideas spiking up. The Master’s mind is in terrible shape and they won’t be able to control what information the Doppelgangers get from him. There’s little to no filter.
But…
“I’ll unlock what you need in his mind,” he finally says, and despite having come to the decision, he still feels ill. “If you promise to let him live, then I’ll do it.” His skin crawls as the Doppelgangers over him relent, loosening their grip. Self-preservation wants him to bolt, but he can’t – won’t – leave the Master.
The device cools again when the leader removes it from the Master’s vicinity. She smirks lopsidedly and paces around his unmoving form towards the Doctor. “You have a deal,” she whispers.
Somehow, he doubts they do. He doubts any of this will go in favor of them. Her race are bitter about the Time Lords; what happens when they find out that they have the last of the Time Lords amongst them, nearly at their mercy?
Kom Ombo Temple, Aswan
justpromptsPrompt: Doppelganger
Character(s): The Master & the Doctor
Words: 3,188
Jeez, finally got part 2 finished, months later.
I wanted a picture of the Luxor Temple in this too but lol... when we went it was at night and all my pictures came out cruddy -.-;; So there's the Kom Ombo at the bottom.
Part 1 can be found here.
In other news, "Handlebars" by Flobots is a frighteningly fitting song for the Doctor. That is all.
“Are you ever going to stop ignoring me?” the Doctor presses. Much to the Master’s dislike, they’re still in Egypt. He thinks it’s because the Doctor can act like a tourist and use the crowds as a distraction from the Master’s silence. Three days of this; both of them are starting to grow a little twitchy. Still, the Master doesn’t reply; he doesn’t even gaze towards the other.
The Doctor sighs, rubbing a hand over his brow. “There’re mummified crocodiles here. Still well-preserved. Glad not every culture likes to mummify their enemies.” He glances to the Master, trying to be subtle about it. They left Luxor pretty swiftly, moving along to Aswan (the Doctor deciding that it was far enough to avoid trouble), and were idling at the Kom Ombo temple in their shirtsleeves.
It’s all very pointless, summed up the Master’s thoughts. Pointless, foolish, and a whole lot else. He decides to lose the Doctor amongst a crowd of obvious Americans – students, even. Easy to separate, slide away; the Doctor’s far too distracted with observing one of the temple columns, babbling aloud to anyone who would stop and listen about its structure.
He should give up traveling, let the Master take his TARDIS, and become a damn tour guide.
Finding some actual quiet is pretty difficult, of course. That’s the problem with a tourist site, especially one on Earth: humans are everywhere. Every little corner they can squeeze themselves into and not get caught.
A local tries to sell him postcards, and that’s about the last straw. He’s done. He turns and stalks off in the direction of the TARDIS, but to his surprise the Doctor is soon enough after him, exasperated. “Oh come on!” he complains. “This is getting to be a bit much, don’t you think? Will you just talk to me?”
The Master spins on a foot and stares the Doctor down. “You locked a part of my own mind from me,” he yells. “One has to wonder if you’ve done it more than once! Please excuse me for avoiding listening to you! But really, Doctor, go back and enlighten your little fan club of tourists. They may just appreciate the sound of your voice as much as you do.” He continues on his exit, body racing with angry energy.
“I’ve never done it before! There was nothing else I could do! It was to protect you!”
“Oh, thank you, Doctor,” he says mockingly. He rolls his eyes. “Is that what you want to hear? ‘Thank you for saving my life’? Well,” his voice dips low, and now he’s facing the Doctor again, skulking towards him, “if I’m so safe now, Doctor, then why not remove the block, hm? Or is it that I’m not really safe, and if so, why the hell are we still in Egypt?!”
The Doctor wavers, trying to find something to say. It’s infuriating to the Master. Well! The other wanted him to talk! And now he’s talking, and the Doctor has nothing to say.
Surprise, surprise.
Finally, after drawing in a shaky breath, the Doctor speaks. “They’re going to keep coming after you. We were at the Luxor Temple. Somehow you got this device in your hands and managed to interface with it, and let’s just say… this didn’t make these fellows very pleased, because you apparently aren’t supposed to be able to do it. Big waves of destruction, threatening their history, etcetera, etcetera!”
The Master’s eyes narrow. “You’re leaving out information.”
“Of course I’m leaving out information! I can’t… you were…” the Doctor’s expression is one of desperation, “the device and you connected. I don’t know what’ll happen if they see into that area of your mind, if they find out what they wanted, they’ll probably be able to find out anything else.”
“So why are we still here?” the Master growls.
“Because that device also did something to you,” he says carefully, “probably several somethings, unless you can prove me wrong by saying that you magically have your drums resituated.” He hopes that the Master will say yes, say that they’re there, that they’ve been there for awhile now. But the other is suddenly looking at him in shock, and the Doctor flinches lightly in memory of a similar situation, back when this started. “I thought not,” he murmurs quietly. “I need to get my hands on that device.”
“You didn’t do anything to the drums?” the Master asks shakily, feeling a sudden need to bolt.
“No. That wasn’t me.”
The Master almost wishes it had been.
“So then where do we go from here, Doctor?”
“Well, they’ll come after you again eventually… and when they do, this time I’ll be ready.”
The concept is priceless at best. The Master doesn’t even bother holding back his laughter. The Doctor this whole time has been acting as though he were trying so hard to protect the Master, but all he was doing was trying to cover his tracks, since what he really intended to do was lay the Master out as bait.
“Do we know who our little friends are?”
The Doctor cringes and turns away, looking over the temple as golden light from the setting sun baths over it. “From what I was able to gather, they’re Doppelgangers, fitting name, don’t you think? They’re always taking the form of others; sort of a sin to show their true form, though I’ve heard that they’re nearly invulnerable in it. Still, sins are sins, I suppose.” He rolls a shoe over a clump of dirt, crushing it into the few flecks of grass. “Race took a bit of a hit during the Time War, like most of the universe. Why they’re in Egypt though? Oh, I donno.”
“So that’s it. Your plan is to continue to ‘sightsee’ until they come hunting again. Even at the cost of your precious humans getting in the way,” as well as the Master, “fantastic, Doctor, just fantastic.”
The Doctor groans, quite loudly, “Isn’t there anything I can say that you’re not going to get uptight about?”
“No, Doctor, which is exactly why I didn’t want to be talking to you in the first place!” It didn’t use to be this bad between them. Sure, they had their moments, their spats. But to the surprise of a certain gang of humans, it worked, and the Master hadn’t done anything ‘silly’ like try and rule over the cosmos with an iron fist again.
Though there was this one planet, but they don’t speak of that, just as they don’t speak of the Year. And there was a tiny, smidgen of a village here and there, but really those places were the last to see the Master’s terror in full.
Now he wanted to enslave the whole of Egypt just to get out of this frustration of his.
When he turns back to face the Doctor, the other is gone. Probably gave up on dealing with the Master and returned to entertaining tourists with tidbits of history. He was such a child sometimes.
But he barely makes it a few paces away before one of those irritating tourists is standing before him. “You really shouldn’t be so rude,” the Master hisses lowly at the woman. He sidesteps her, but she’s quick to readjust her own footing. “Excuse me.”
“You are at fault for our sins. We are disgraced because of you,” she remarks coldly, raising a hand to point at his forehead. “To make matters worse, you have tainted our history. How can one such as you have accessed something so precious to us, when we cannot? Explain it to me. Explain it to me before you die.”
“ – let go of me!” comes a yell from the Doctor. He shimmers into view with two other figures, each hooking arms with him and trying to hold him to the ground. Locals and tourists ignore them as if they weren’t even there. “Really, you don’t want to be doing this!” the Doctor continues, “I can help you. I’m the one you want! Leave him out of this!”
Selfless moron.
The woman holds out a cubbish device that fits between both her hands. “Let me see how you do it. You can connect with it.”
“Master, don’t touch it!”
He blocks out the Doctor’s pleads. They’re a distant sound. The other thing he hears, the only thing he feels is the drumming, suddenly echoing around him, calling to him from this device. He reaches out to take it, even just to touch it, entranced.
“MASTER!”
The drums roar through him as his hand brushes the surface. He remembers:
Egypt. Luxor Temple. Agreeing to this little excursion was the only way to get the Doctor to shut up for once; he could talk his ear off to tourists and the Master could relax a bit, maybe even kick back. He hardly cared about ancient ruins from a bunch of humans, even if some of it was an amazing feat for them. Too bad they knocked away all that work of art and became like this.
There was traffic all around them. A temple amongst a thriving city. One of these things isn’t like the other. Even the connections between this temple and the Karnak were barely intact; rows of sphinxes were supposed to lead between the temples. It wasn’t just time that wore away at them, it was the human race.
Break apart beauty, bit by bit.
He had managed to sneak away from the Doctor to get a private look around the temple himself. Grazing a hand along hieroglyphics, crumbled areas of wall. That was when everything went downhill, quite fast. Something in the wall weaved away from it, a black blur of stone shifting into his hands. He backed away with it, eyes widening as it pulsed and continued to change, once a piece of brick, and then a small device cradled between his hands.
His body slowly goes numb, and to his despair he finds that he cannot simply let go of the device. He sways, hearing the drums tear through him and meet a new, intruding hum that dips deeper into his mind. It digs against him and merges amongst the drumbeat – the headache it causes nearly knocks him to his knees.
The device pulses a second time. He looks at it strangely, barely conscious of what was going on, slowly glancing up to see the surrounding area; it looked as though he was underwater as energy courses away from him. Parts of the other walls shimmer and then began to crumble, and then finally the Doctor comes around the line of columns, panicking as more of the temple shifts.
He hears the yell: “Master!”
He can’t move. The device whirrs loudly and people begin to run. Locals shout out angrily in Arabic, but assist hastily with the sudden evacuation… except there’s a few stationary tourists, watching the scene unfold. After a few moments, the waves of energy roll over them and they shimmer, skin and clothes fading into a dark, inky body. They turn to one another, chitter off in something that the Master can’t manage to make out, then manage to salvage the illusion of humans again.
“That is ours,” one of the people say, jerkily stepping in the direction of the Master.
The Doctor looks between the people and the Master, then bolts towards the other Time Lord, trying to find a way to get closer, but the energy is creating almost a bubble around him. “Master, snap out of it!” he yells over the sounds of the breaking temple and the gust of power.
He can’t. He would, but he can’t. He doesn’t even understand how he’s still standing, all he knows is that he’s seeing images of knowledge that he’s never even heard of, and that the drums are both letting go and yet gripping tightly to him, suffocating him.
“Leave our technology alone!” the figure continues. “You cannot be here, you cannot exist… What are you doing? You are destroying our history! Anyone that does that will be killed. You will tell us at once how you’re managing to do this, and if you do not, we will force the information from you!”
The Doctor looks frozen in place. This was not going good at all. Thankfully, as the drums begin to recede, the device begins to wind down, and the Master stumbles against part of an intact wall, dropping the device somewhere to the ground and blankly looking down at his shaking hands, confused.
More ‘tourists’ swarm around from other areas, revealing oddly shaped weapons as the Doctor rushes to the Master, grabbing him and pulling him behind a column to avoid the weapon fire.
The Master stares up at the Doctor. “What’s going on?” he slurs, “where are we?”
“Just hold on,” the Doctor tells, breathing hard, “I’m going to fix this. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to fix it.” He reaches out into the Master’s mind and cringes, suddenly understanding why the Master appeared to be in shock. “That thing did something to you,” he says aloud, “you and it are connected in some way. Oh! And guess what? You managed to piss off its owners. Imagine that.”
The Master can glimpse more thoughts than that. He catches hold of the Doctor’s worry, about the creatures getting more than just the information that they want, about the Master’s mind being more messed up than usual.
And then it’s gone. He finds himself wondering what’s going on, feeling a sense of déjà vu but not knowing the reason behind it. There’s the burn of laser sinking into stone nearby and the Doctor biting back a curse; it’s a little gang of humans that manage to separate them.
“Master, run!” the Doctor yells, in the grip of these other people, struggling with all his might.
“What?” the Master asks sharply, wavering on his feet. How the hell does the Doctor expect him to run? But he does. He doesn’t know where to go, or where he even is, but he runs just as the Doctor manages to make a break for it. “Doctor, what did you do?!”
“Pinning this on me? Oh, because everything’s my fault, is it? Don’t you ever think for a moment that you could be -” he shuts himself up, skidding to a halt and hesitating. “Look, I can’t explain anything. We just have to get back to the TARDIS, alright?”
“Why the hell can’t you explain –”
Weapon fire meets them again and once more the Master manages to lose track of the other. He rolls his eyes and pulls out his screwdriver, ready to fight back when he feels a heavy weight crash down on him and he’s out.
He jerks his full body away from the woman, stumbles back and hits the ground, shaken. His body tingles, and the drums are once again gone from him. He stares up at the woman, but in her place is a black, shadowy figure, hunching over the device. Its image shimmers, and after a moment, reassumes the appearance of the woman.
She’s glaring at him now, hands tightening around the device. “How is it possible… this is not fair. A mere human capable of this? No. No.”
“I take offense to the human remark, thanks,” he says dryly. Nearby the Doctor has his head held down into dirt, and he’s moving much less than he was before. The same shadowy figures have their grip on him. The Master frowns. What happened to all that talk of being ready, Doctor? “How about you tell me what exactly is the problem here. Details, please.”
She scowls down at him, stepping closer, taking the device in one palm and reaching out with her other hand, but her fingers curl away before she touches him. “All we wanted was to reclaim our history, and you took it from us and ruined it. Swept it away and stole it as your own…” Now she reaches for him, tightly fisting his shirt and pulling him towards her. “You’re just like the Time Lords.”
The Master swallows and tries to break away from her. “Really. Right. Time Lords. Never heard of them,” he says all too quickly, for once not ready to jump in and reveal his race, considering how she was currently reacting. “What did these Lords of Time do?”
“They broke our history, they broke everything. Them and the Daleks…” she tilts her head to the side and throws him back to the ground, straightening. Her gaze falls to the device gripped in her hand. “You’ve caused us to sin. You’ve made us…” Anger crosses over her expression.
His mind is already aching; every muscle twists against him, like they were in the wrong body, like he should be someone else right now and he couldn’t get a hold of it.
“No, no, no, no, no –” the Doctor is chanting, shifting up from the ground and bucking one of the forms off of him. It’s not soon enough though, because the woman – the creature, the Doppelganger – shoves the device fully into the Master’s grip and, horrified, he watches as energy weaves wildly away. What he sees he has already seen more than he would like; the device changes the Master when it’s in his hands. He sees the other’s form flicker, appearance mutating quickly, revealing the images of his past regenerations, again and again. “Stop it, you’ll kill him!”
“You think we are concerned? He is at fault, he has committed crime,” says one of the figures holding him down.
“You won’t find out what you want if he’s dead. You’ll lose everything you’re after just because you’re overreacting. Look – if you just calm down for a moment we can sort this all out and then happily go our separate ways! Everybody wins!”
His reply is being grinded into the dirt. He spits out dust, twisting his head around to see the Master laying on his back and the Doppelganger-woman crouching over him. He hates the ideas spiking up. The Master’s mind is in terrible shape and they won’t be able to control what information the Doppelgangers get from him. There’s little to no filter.
But…
“I’ll unlock what you need in his mind,” he finally says, and despite having come to the decision, he still feels ill. “If you promise to let him live, then I’ll do it.” His skin crawls as the Doppelgangers over him relent, loosening their grip. Self-preservation wants him to bolt, but he can’t – won’t – leave the Master.
The device cools again when the leader removes it from the Master’s vicinity. She smirks lopsidedly and paces around his unmoving form towards the Doctor. “You have a deal,” she whispers.
Somehow, he doubts they do. He doubts any of this will go in favor of them. Her race are bitter about the Time Lords; what happens when they find out that they have the last of the Time Lords amongst them, nearly at their mercy?
Kom Ombo Temple, Aswan