Doctor Who fic: The Wound and the Stone Become Lovers

When the TARDIS lands in an ancient stone chamber, a creature formed of fear and cruelty seizes the Doctor's mind in a psychic trap. It's up to Missy to confront this monster and rescue the Doctor—at great risk to herself. Inspired by Shalkaverse short story "The Feast of the Stone", 1996 children's science fiction drama Delta Wave, formative Tam Lin retelling The Perilous Gard, and Dinsdale Draco's white dancing gloves.

“Look! I’m you!” The Doctor waggles his fingers, white and slender in a pair of dancing gloves. Missy, up to her elbows in a tangle of fiber and circuitry, extricates herself from the hole in the deck plating, the better to appreciate his gangly hands and cheesy smile. He’s found a top hat, too, perched at a cant with tufts of hair poking out between its brim and his ears.

Missy tilts her head and shakes it. “No...not even close. But if the glove fits…”

His face falls. He removes the hat, spinning it as he puts it on the console. “How are the repairs going?”

Missy braces the heels of her hands on the floor and arches her back in a luxurious stretch before bothering to answer him. “It’s a bit difficult to find the thing that needs repairing when you’ve made such a mess of the things around it.” The floor hums, warm, as though in agreement.

“Maybe it’s time for a break. Nardole’s made tea.”

“Oh, I suppose I wouldn't mind.” She sits up to roll her sleeves down.

“You’ve got a smudge—” the Doctor leans in and rubs his thumb against her cheek. His glove comes away with TARDIS residue on it. He turns his hand over to inspect it, the fabric stretching over his knuckles.

So that’s what this is about. The safety of putting a barrier between them, like the safety of a forcefield or of the distance of a magazine cover and a table with a thermos on it, which allows them to be close. His wrist shows under the glove and his sleeve, the only chink in this armour.

“I’m coming up the stairs, and I had better not see anything I shouldn’t see when I get to the top!” Nardole is conspicuous about clattering the tea tray, but he needn’t be. Already, the Doctor is moving away, slipping his hands into his pockets.

“What’s the sticky bun situation?” he asks, dropping sugar cubes into a cup.

“Bill’s coming with them. There’s sticky buns with jam, sticky buns with cream...”

A block of sugar strikes an off note against the pile already in the cup, tink-tinkling when it should be thunking. There’s sudden silence in the capsule, a full stop. Nardole is still listing buns, oblivious, but the silence swallows his words. Missy’s already on her feet. The Doctor stares up at the rotor.

“...typical. They’re not listening to me. Why ask? More importantly, why bother to answer?”

“Shush!”

The TARDIS hasn’t materialised, but neither is the TARDIS still in motion; they were in the vortex, now they’re not. All the mechanisms and machinery of movement--stopped. Something has pulled them out of their trajectory as though plucking a bird out of the air. Futile flutter. The Doctor flips switches and depresses keys. He turns knobs. Nothing happens. He shoots a look at Missy, all hawk and owl.

“I didn’t do this,” she says, serious.

He tugs the viewscreen around to him. The cameras work, at least. They see a long stone room, bowed edges barely discernible in the dark. A natural cave? Or was it chiseled out by hand?

The Doctor turns his head to the door.

Bill, showing up belatedly with the sticky buns, comes around to peer at the image. “What’s going on? Something felt really weird and...not-normal?”

“I don’t know.” Then, the Doctor grins, happy. “Want to find out?”

It’s his favourite pastime: a mystery, a place gone wrong, the opportunity to fix it. He never takes precautions and he doesn’t bother to pause, and maybe it’s something he’s good at, or maybe he’s just lucky. Always lucky. Missy’s hesitant about this one, but if she’s coming along, he’s going to keep her by his side, he says, and so she is second out the door, no time to retrieve her jacket from the railing, much less her umbrella from its hook.

Lucky—or foolish, and too practiced at paving over the costs, at pouring fresh material over the damage.

The stone chamber is subterranean, lightless but for the light they’ve brought with them. It smells of the stillness of deep rock, mineralised and inorganic, isolated long ago from the emissions of any star. In its centre, it’s worn as though someone once walked here and, around those paths, squared off with the precise approximation of primitive architecture—Missy is reminded at once of ancient ceremonies, of embroidered robes and decorated implements and measured footsteps heavy with import. Along its edges, the tool-touched walls turn wild again, winding into ropey, undulating surfaces, where burnish becomes gloss or sheen, and the carved space becomes raw tunnel, a great throat, an esophagus, an intestine of rock and weight.

She sees him for a second, stock-still and stiff with pain, and has time to think how familiar a sight it is, the Doctor with his back like a mast straining under rigging taut with sail, before it has her too. It wants—it’s known them before, and it has riffled, heedless of reality, patiently and comprehensively through all the sheaths of all the universes to find them.

They’ve changed so much. It tastes her and discards her. Wraps a line of silk around her and saves her for later.

Him, though...

[11,000 words (what??? how??) shameless Twelve/Missy porn with an evil rock]

Doctor Who fic: Pounds Per Square Inch

(It looks like I’m two behind! Sneaking this one in...) 

The Master had enjoyed this in the past, with Lucy’s help. He’d had to force the Doctor, then, had to get the goons to hold him down, pull his ratty trainers from him as he struggled, kicking, goaded out of his endlessly provocative patience only with enough cruelty, enough second-hand pain that even he couldn’t look silent and tight-lipped away.

The Doctor, barefoot, vulnerable: the Master’s only regret had been that he couldn’t risk taking him on a walk along the rubble of the planet below, leashed and bleeding and carrying his own water bowl between his teeth like a dog or in his cupped hands as a mendicant--on display, always on display, and always made to see.

Nominally, this was a punishment, a price, a demonstration. The Master had made sure everyone was watching, and then he’d brought Lucy in, Lucy with her prim skirt and her perfect court shoes, still, in those days, wearing the costume of the politician’s wife, Lucy of the exposed calf, the ankles and the knees, Lucy, human form and human mind, representative of the human race.

A single goon had held him, selected especially for his size and because the Master had noted the trace of compassion or desire or interest in him; whatever it was it caused him to react with a richness absent in the other bodyguards. He’d been instructed to move in close and tight, arms looped and locked (“for security”), pressed up behind him chest to back, so that when Lucy stamped on his foot the Doctor recoiled into the body supporting him, curling. Then pulled upright again, as though flipped inside out, because there was still the other foot and the Master helping Lucy to balance, with her hand on his as she lifted her exquisite leg…

And now, and now--it’s just the two of them. It is neither better nor worse. Each sound echoes in the vault, it is so empty, but to the vault he comes willingly, a volunteer. My altar, she calls it, so that he must do what one does before an altar, especially if one is the Doctor: either genuflect or desecrate.

[1660 words, Twelve/Missy in spite of appearances]

Doctor Who fic: But the Way She Catches Light

Oh, the light, always the light—

The explosions are still flashing in photonegative afterimages when the light begins its insistent chorus, wordless against the rumble and the thunderclap, and as always these days this is the bright thing that he’s running away from, knowing all the wide-eyed while that the song isn’t anywhere: the song is in him. His cellular messengers, his macromolecules, his organelles and his enzymes and the protein train tracks of his being begin to dance to it, the migration, the remaking, so bright as it fills him it’s leaking through his skin. He is like a lighthouse, his eyes are the lamp, and the tempest in the dark of the sea trembles and shrinks from him, cowering into shadow in the corner of the universe.

See me! the light says, because in this moment it is all that anyone can see, and he is all the bandwidth, every frequency, and continuation is the signal and the medium, the message and the signified. To be, to be, to be...

The Doctor will return—the Doctor is in—

The light! The unraveling! The bursting unmaking that makes it possible; no, no, no!

To be undoes, to be destroys. To be scours clean the plane of personhood to prepare it for the promise of tomorrow. It razes the crucial counterpoint, the inconvenient condition: that already, still, he is.

And it is one thing to let go of being. Quite another to yield existence to yet another reconfiguration. What kind of resolution, what kind of ending doesn’t let you stop when you’ve finally figured out the answer?

But his body is a crucible, now, though he might douse the flame as much as he likes. He can hold the surface together, yet the heat is in his core, and already he is expanding too quickly to contain.

This will be quite the catastrophe.

He throws his head back. He roars his denial into the air. The air is hot, and tree ash litters his face, settling only long enough to be blown away again in the second explosion, alien, miraculous, new. The light sears. The chorus shouts. For a moment, everything is visible, everything can be seen.

~

Take a breath. Take another. Remember that this is what it means to have lungs, and a body.

~

This is a forest. Or it was a forest. It looks like something really extreme has happened to it recently, which is not at all surprising.

Metal husks dot the landscape. They’re inert shells now, bereft of programming, machines emptied in the heat that passed through, knocked off their feet into purposelessness.

It’s sad.

There’s smoke and steam everywhere. Trees stand stripped of leaves. The principal colour is grey. The sun is flickering. This is because it isn’t a sun, and also because it has been damaged.

Never stare into the sun. Always wear sunscreen. Don’t panic. Don’t eat any pears.

Always be kind.

The nearest Cyberman is an actual body, less metal than rubber, one of the early models, fully intact. Person-shaped, so it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that this was a person once, a person who was cared about, and loved, with dreams and desires and emotions that were all ground away in the processing plant long before the resulting automaton was sent to the battlefield. It’s the Cyberman promise—that there wouldn’t have been any fear left, or grief or pain by the time of the cataclysm. Still...

There’s probably nothing to be done, but someone’s got to try.

“Uh, uh, uh, don’t touch that!”

The warbled warning is too late. Or rather, it’s completely disregarded, regardless of its timing. Ouch. Scorched fingers. Suck on those. Right into the whatsit, the soothing wet with them.

Now, who was it tried to give the warning?

A very purple lady is peering around the trunk of an inadequate tree. Funny how she hadn’t been noticeable until she was. She emerges from her hiding place, wavering and shimmering as she approaches in the heat distortion of the small fires between them that don’t seem to want to go out. She tuts.

“I told you not to touch the scrap.” Her hands are cool and precise and somehow her touch is more soothing than a mouth. (Mouth! That was the word!) “It’s a good thing you’re not done knitting yet. Damaging yourself so early.”

Something warm and bright tingles between their palms. The glow sets off a tremor of feeling somewhere deep below the skin, seismic.

An echo of a stammer bubbles up. “I’m...sorry, I’m sure I know you, but...who are you?”

A smirk—or a shadow—crosses the sharp features, otherwise a picture of nurturing concern. The eyes go big and round and lash-lined.

“Why, I’m your girlfriend. You call me Master.”

There’s going to be a What We Do In the Shadows show, and I didn’t know.

Doctor Who fic: Positional Tolerance of the Positive Terminal

What he doesn’t remember. Before the ashes. Before the dancing. Before the grip of the Cyberman and the charged fire of its unbreakable embrace.

If he could hear them speak of him--

“You won’t kiss me, but you’ll kiss him?”

“You made yourself your very own wrinkly version, and enjoyed him very much! As I recall, even when he was all just eyes and skin…”

The Master grimaces. “That one was under my control.”

“Or so you thought, until he went all fairy lights and Messiah complex on you. And what makes you think this one hasn’t been under mine?”

“Just look at you.”

“I knocked him out for you, didn’t I?”

“It doesn’t mean I trust you. Can’t tell whose side you’re on.”

In the pause, the Doctor floats into consciousness, the precision of Missy’s thump on the chest perfectly calibrated to knock him out and then allow him to surface gradually, clandestinely.

“Look, do you want me to show you?”

“Yes.”

A purple shadow moves across his field of vision. Missy slaps him the rest of the way awake, the flats of her fingers only just enough of a sting to startle him, to cause him to bridle, blinking up at her. She curves them around his cheek, cradling him, tilting his head by moving her hand below his jaw.

She smiles the same preparatory smile as she had once, in the beginning, and yet he’s just as surprised this time when she kisses him: all this time in the vault, and they have never allowed each other any nearer than a heartsbeat’s hand against a hand. With some concentration, he can almost hear her thoughts, but try as he might, he can’t understand the whisper, only respond the way he’s always wanted to respond, his mouth, slack, obeying hers.

As Missy pulls away, she rubs her thumb across his lower lip. It comes away dark with her lip gloss, and she smears it onto his shirt as though applying oil paint to a canvas or sauce to a plate.

“He’d look good in that colour,” the Master notes.

[~2,500 words, Missy/Twelfth Doctor/Simm!Master]

Doctor Who fic: Just a Painting on a Ceiling

He loves an audience. Why else the pontifications, the lectures and the speeches, why the little friends hanging onto his every word?

But the Master loves to watch, so… There’s the phase with the CCTV. The endless fascinated psycho-holographic replays, coaxed out of a captive TARDIS. There’s the Mistress moving through the shadows all along the Doctor’s timeline, eyes alight and attentive and sharp.

She's the one who puts the notion of a security camera into Nardole’s removable head. It's easy to work around the surveillance when she's alone, to face habitually away from its unsuspecting eye, to fool the lens with a hypnotic suggestion. Easy, too, to draw the Doctor’s attention to its presence, to make him feel the pervasiveness of its regard.

The hairs on the back of his head stand on end under her fingertips, cloud-spun as if by static. He all but squirms under that impassive, swallowing scrutiny, warming nonetheless to his performance.

More tricky, getting her hands on the footage. Worth the trouble, though, like catching the Doctor under a slide, herself the bait in the trap. She replays it over and over, filling the long days with a better kind of contemplation.

Days of silence, sat in chairs, thermos of tea cooling between them. Terse debates pressed up against the bright windows, his back like a taut string, she, barely visible beneath the spare bulk of his body. The piano, when it arrives. Sandwiches. Swords.

Had Nardole been watching? Or was the attention she felt merely her own?

When they were children, they had always been watched. There was the thrill, of course, of sneaking away, out into the open beyond the protected spaces, where it was possible to pretend that nobody could see. Performances, then, for one another--jokes, dreams, intellectual acrobatics as they'd been taught, prodigal progeny of a grand tradition, megalomaniacs all.

The holding pen is a perfect candidate for the Doctor’s exhibitionism, the security field tinged, tingly, tinted. Tangy. Oh, he longs to be contained in it even as he chafes at his confinement by her side. How hard it is not to run. How much easier it would be to be in chains, as she is, safe and seen in the tank, up on the pedestal, behind the glass.

She could shut him inside and throw herself, sprawling, into his favourite chair, refuse to let him out until he releases himself against the dimpled leather of the piano bench on which she herself has spent so many hours.

[~2600 words, Twelfth Doctor/Missy]

Say, in this version, she keeps the child. Say the child survives. They all survive, which is a sort of unexpected and perhaps not entirely welcome pardon, and emerge, incredulous, on the far side of the all-encompassing war. What then? What is she to do? Remain in England, a married woman with a child? Sophia. No longer a baby. Wrapped around herself in a coat too tight across her shoulders. Hungry constantly for every scrap of attention either parent can spare her in between the demons and the follies and the work that keeps them safe from all of it. Randall should be in Paris and Lix should be in the field, anywhere, but instead they're stuck in London knee-deep in a domesticity of ration cards and compromises. It had been all right while the war made every act an heroic one, the home desk a dangerous post, when risks of the type that kept her spirit alive were permissible, even necessary. Before there had been real consequences to the choices she’d made. In peacetime, picking up the pieces, Lix looks around her to see that she's fought to survive by putting herself in a cage. And yet. Lix can hardly bear to imagine the alternative, as though allowing the possibility such traction might still bring it to pass, so fragile is the membrane of her world. When she thinks of it the guilt that seizes her is a vine with deep barbs, and she tries anything, everything to dig them out. And yet. And yet Lix loves.

This was not what I was looking for, but I don’t think I care.

@theuncertainhour Of course. Of course.

“The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it WOULD twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing” - Alice in Wonderland

Tag your OTP: Which one is Alice, and which the flamingo?

Doctor Who flashfic: The Precipitation of Matters

In the glass, it’s a clear, if cloudy liquid.

The Doctor had watched as the Master crushed the tablets into fine powder in his hand, thumb grinding methodical circles against the pads of his middle and pointer fingers. Pill by pill, they had collapsed under the inexorable pressure into clumps and dustings that he sprinkled into lukewarm water.

“A painkiller,” he had said, the command dangerously imprecise. The attendant, one the Doctor hadn’t seen before, had returned with a tray--tall glass of water, steaming, tablets bare and unidentifiable on a plate.

The Master sits at table, preparing the silty suspension. From his accustomed position on his knees, his head below the plane of the table’s surface, the Doctor sees the light refract through the glass, layers of sediment dimming it to the menace of a murky pond. The Master picks up a glass rod and stirs his medicine. The liquid swirls into a narrow, milky vortex. He flicks the tip of the rod, and droplets fly through the air. White grit sticks to the Master’s fingers.

The Doctor can still feel the quickness of the Master’s hand around his throat, the cradle of the curve of his thumb against his larynx, knuckles on the blade of his jaw. He can’t stop thinking about how he had felt his own hips lift to relieve the force around his neck, and how he had resisted it. How after that the Master had let him go.

But now he puts a hand to the back of the Doctor’s neck. Now he propels him away from the table to a spot of open floor, pristine and smooth and slick with the wax of the morning’s polish. The Doctor scrabbles under the awkward momentum, bruises his knees as always. The Master holds up the glass, still spinning, and waits for it to still.

“Shall we play a game?” he asks. “You’ll like this game.”

[~1500 words, Tenth Doctor/Simm!Master]