(wastedlands) Wine and Blood
Apr. 21st, 2008 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ans99Characters: The Master, Sam Tyler, Angua, Faye Valentine, Dante, Belgarath, DOCTOR Martha Jones, Rose Tyler
Rating: R
Date: Continued from the Doctor's cottage
Location: Malibu Castle
The horse's last few steps were an exhausted stumble, as it finally reached the steps to the castle. The beast wasn't meant for carrying two men, but it had managed to get them there relatively safely. By the time they arrived, the Master was delirious from blood loss. Sam had tried to ignore him most of the way. The horse waited obediently as Sam heaved himself over the side of the horse, and then pulled the Master down and into the castle.
Sam shoved the Master into the first seating he found once inside, and gave him strict orders to stay in place. Sam left him there to find something, anything to bandage the Master's arm and help cease the bleeding. He collected whatever supplies, or make shift supplies he came across, before making his way back to one of the main rooms of the castle.
Sam sauntered in, and then stopped, glancing around at the new people in confusion. He wasn't that surprised to see people here -- it was a good place to get away from the zombies. But the Master was gone. And amazingly, there wasn't a trail of blood to follow him by.
A crash-splat, and then the shattering and tinkling of glass falling.
The Master had rediscovered the wine room almost by accident, only recognizing the dimly lit, tapestried corridor when he was halfway down it. When he'd swung the door open, his grin had stretched impossibly wider and he'd flung his arms open as if greeting an old friend.
Then he'd started in on the wine, although he was having more fun throwing the bottles against the walls spitefully than actually drinking any of it.
Angua loped through the castle, looking for a room to change in. She needed to get out of wolf form, needed to get the taste of undead out of her mouth and reassure herself that she was human. Beldaran still had her dress, but she wasn't bothering with clothes right now. The wolf was too prominent in her mind for that.
She entered the room just as the first bottle hit the wall. Instinctively, she turned to face the man throwing the bottles, her lip curling as she snarled.
Wolf. Blood. And then on the tail of that, Excellent.
The Master froze for only a second before resuming his grin and lobbing the remaining wine bottle he was holding directly at the wolf's head.
Being a member of the Night Watch meant that you got a lot of practice dodging projectiles thrown by, well, just about everybody - though the citizens of Ankh-Morpork usually had more sense than to throw full bottles of alcohol.
Angua darted to one side, shaking the wine and glass from her fur and giving the man a wolfish glare. She was beginning to rethink her decision to leave the group with her "translators" behind.
He had already flattened himself against one of the wooden racks, and it was all too easy to reach back and grab another bottle in each hand by the neck. Reload. The Master giggled at that, sending his aim slightly off as he launched another bottle towards his would-be attacker.
Then he fathomed the ridiculousness of the situation-- staving off a possibly mad wolf with alcohol, and he went into hysterics, leaning back against the wine rack.
Angua dodged the second bottle with ease, then paused as the man went into hysterics, waiting to see if another projectile was imminent. She sat down on the floor, tilting her head and giving him a decidedly quizzical look that made her look more like an exceptionally large dog than a wolf.
The Master paused, his laughter dying, as he felt the thing's eyes upon him. It didn't... feel mad. Apparently quite calm, actually, given its actions under the circumstances. He relaxed and studied it further.
"You're not just a wolf," he observed.
And then he giggled again, as if that were the punchline to a joke at a party, toasted Angua, and had brought the bottle halfway to his lips before he remembered it was still corked.
Oh, good, they were finally making progress. Satisfied that she wasn't going to have anything more chucked at her, she ducked behind a wine rack - not that it gave her much cover - and, well, blurred.
And the wolf was replaced by a young blonde woman, quite naked, and looking rather tired and irritable. "And you're not human," she remarked, the exhaustion she felt evident in the slight accent she let slip out.
"Oh, very good," the Master smiled. It was ambiguous whether he was referring to her ability to tell the difference, or her current appearance.
He took one more look at the corked wine bottle and then threw it to one side, irritably. It crashed sharply somewhere off in a dark corner as he quickly approached the rack she was hiding behind.
"So. A werewolf... really?" He rested a bloodied arm against the rack, looking down at her with eager curiosity, blissfully unaware of how much in that moment he sounded like the Doctor.
She crossed her arms over her chest defensively. "Yes, really." Though werewolves were common enough where she came from - obviously - she knew from talking to Belgarath that other denizens of Wonderland might not be quite so familiar with them. "My name is Angua von Uberwald."
The Master nodded impatiently. "Good for you." Blood from his arm dripped down, some following the angles of the wine rack and seeping into the wood, some splattering directly on the floor, but he continued speaking quickly as if he wasn't aware. "Genetic inheritance? Manipulation? Viral transmission? None of the above?"
She watched the blood drip with detached interest. Her brother would have been on the wounded man instantly, but that was Wolfgang, not her. She was more civilized than that. "Genetic." She gestured toward his arm. "You seem to have a little problem there." The bleeding wound seemed to be a little more important than her lack of clothes.
The Master looked at his arms as if he'd forgotten he owned any. "Ohhhh," he murmured. "Oh, right." He looked down at Angua again. "Sorry. Big... bird." He cracked up again, bending over the wine rack and bowing his head.
"That ought to be bandaged," Angua pointed out helpfully. She wasn't sure if the man was actually mad, or if his craziness could be chalked up to blood loss. A bird? "Or...something." She was a Watch Officer, not a doctor.
"That's the first sensible thing you've said all day, Lucy." He remained slumped over the wine rack, eyes closed, a little half-smile still on his face.
Angua heaved a sigh, wishing Carrot were here. He never got mistaken for anybody else, something that seemed to be happening to her with an alarming frequency. "Angua. Not Lucy. Do I look like a Lucy?" She frowned down at him. "There's a bunch of people in the front hall. One of them ought to be able to help you more than I can - I think someone said something about a doctor."
His eyes shot open and he gripped the sides of the wooden rack tightly, his knuckles turning white and blood dripping faster.
"The Doctor." The words were choked with apprehension, or pain, or anticipation, or relief, or all of the above. Or none of the above. It was hard to say.
The way he said it made it sound more like a name than a title - but it definitely elicited a reaction. Angua cautiously walked around the rack, trying to pry his hands free. "Come on, I'll help you." She looked around at the broken glass and spilled wine. "Things aren't going to get better if we stay here."
"NO!" He straightened up, pushed back from the rack and away from her, stumbling backwards and straight into another one. The Master slumped down a little, staring at her, dazed and fearful and very pale.
Angua debated the morals of clubbing the man with a wine bottle and dragging him to the main hall. All things considered, it would probably work quite well. She sighed, deciding to give diplomacy another shot - though it was far from her strong suit. "You aren't all right," she said with a surprising gentleness. "You need someone to help you."
The Master laughed, a dark bubbling chuckle, at that. "Haven't you listened to anyone here? I'm beyond help." He frowned suddenly, looking her over with a speculative, detached air. "You're not wearing clothes."
"I've only just got here," Angua pointed out, "and I don't even know your name." She was starting to get quite irritated with him. "Yes, I know I'm not wearing clothes." At this point, she would've rather been a wolf, but that would have hindered communication.
"Sorry," he murmured, having no idea what he was continually apologizing for. He closed his eyes. After a short pause, "You're going to have to set the spatial coordinates yourself. Temporal are locked in already. She's a bit touchy, you can't botch this. Listen carefully." He began rattling off a long series of numbers and letters.
Wolf form definitely sounded like a good idea. She shifted while his eyes were closed, then sunk her teeth into his collar, dragging him in the direction of the door.
"Ten, zero, eleven, zero, zero, by zero two from galactic zero centre, ten zero, eleven..."
He didn't even appear to realize he was being moved, keeping his eyes closed, whispering the string of coordinates again and again. Something hovered about the periphery of his consciousness, something dark and heavy. Something bad.
...
The jolting sensation of being laid on the ground and
rose
His hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, his whispered mantra not ceasing, but rather increasing in urgency. "...by zero two from galactic zero center ten, zero, eleven, zero, zero..."
Sam was focused on Martha's arrival, he recognized her from the fox shop explosion and he was about to greet her when the Master spoke.
Sam spun around quickly, and he almost smiled, relieved that the man was finally waking. He didn't seem to notice that the man had grabbed Rose. "He's awake." Just in case you couldn't tell...
Sam tried to make sense of the Master's words, but failed. "What the fuck is he saying?"
"Sounds like math." And Belgarath sounds as though he has the patience of a caged animal, how about that? ...in fairness, right now that's more or less what he feels like he is.
He chooses to ignore Rose, beyond taking a shot at prying the Master off her arm. "Martha. All yours, dear, I'm at your disposal."
Martha chooses to avoid pointing out that she is, in fact, a doctor, and the most qualified person available, and a host of other things. Instead, she kneels down next to the Master, still not looking at his face - she can do this, she thinks, if she just avoids looking at his face - and takes a pair of surgical scissors from her bag, neatly slicing his shirt and peeling it back from his forearms.
The wounds are nasty, but not the worst she's seen, not by a long shot. And at least she has what she needs - excepting local anaesthetic, but, not surprisingly, she doesn't feel particularly obligated to use such things with the Master.
Martha closes her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath, and focuses. Right. First thing's first - getting the wounds cleaned of all the caked blood and shirt fibers and whatever else is in there. Water first - she grabs the jug, soaking one of the linens Hortensia gave her, and starts scrubbing (maybe not as gently as she would normally, but who's going to notice?).
"They're coordinates, I think," Rose says while gently pushing Belgarath's hands away. She glanced up at Sam, then back down at the Master. "The Doctor would know for sure, though..." She looked back toward the main group, to see if she could spot the other Time Lord, but from her kneeling position she could only see those closest to them. She sighed. With any luck, he'll find them eventually.
For now she placed her free hand on the hand the Master had clamped around her wrist, and rubbed it softly, hoping to calm him.
The Master groaned a little as Martha scrubbed his arms, quietening a little when Rose took his hand. His breathing, however, quickened into short pants.
Belgarath actually does pinch the bridge of his nose, now. With exaggerated patience -- due to the fact he currently lacks any other kind -- he says, carefully, "Girl, you're going to get in her way. Either you make him let go, or I will."
Sam glanced toward Rose's hand, and back at Rose. He tried not to make the look obvious to anyone but Rose, but he did give an audible sigh. Sam turned back to Martha. "Do you need anything else, Doctor Jones?"
Martha ignores everything going on around her. Tourniquet, you idiot, she chastises herself, angry for forgetting something important, and she tears strips off the linen, slicing the Master's jacket and t-shirt up even more to wrap the strips tightly around his shoulders. She is momentarily struck by his apparent fragility - his arms and shoulders are surprisingly thin, she thinks, for someone who took over the world single-handedly.
Next comes the antiseptic, splashed onto another linen. She dabs it on a bit more cautiously, so as not to aggravate the severed blood vessels, but it's still got to sting on the Master's exposed flesh.
Rose sighed, and continued to gently rub the Master's hand. "It's Rose. Not 'girl'. And if you try to tear him off like that, he's only going to hang on tighter." She arched her fingers to stroke his hand lightly with her fingertips, hoping to relax him further, then very carefully attempted to slip her wrist out of his grasp.
He tried to hang on, but his grip was weakened by the blossoming pain from the antiseptic. Another low groan escaped his lips, and the fervent whispering began again, more rapidly than ever. "Ten, zero, eleven, zero..."
Sam glanced around at the group. He quickly fell to his knees near the Master's head.
"Master? Master? It's Sam-- What are you talking about? What are you saying? Master?"
Paying only enough attention to be sure Rose did as he told her, Belgarath doesn't quite catch the given name -- particularly not when distracted by Sam. "Let the man be yet," he says, unraveling patience sharpening his tone of voice. "Don't agitate him any further until Dr Jones is quite done."
Martha was starting to get irritated. Well, she was already irritated - she had a pounding headache, and everything smelled of death, and the flashbacks were lurking just behind her eyelids, she could tell, and it was the Master with messy lacerations on his forearms, bone and blood vessels and muscles sliced clean through, and this was not exactly the sort of environment she was used to doing her work in.
"Would you mind giving me some room to work?" she snapped, looking up at Rose and Sam. Okay, she could apologize for being a bitch later. Generally, if someone up to her elbows in blood is pissed off, it's a good thing to listen. She bent down again, rummaging through her bag for the thread - luckily, Hortensia's medical kit had included calfgut thread, which meant she could actually stitch the muscles and veins, but it would be tricky work.
Martha sighed for a moment and drenched the last clean corner of one of the linens in water, rubbing her eyes and forehead with it.
Rose was already on her way up and stepping back when Martha snapped at her. She lifted an eyebrow, took another two steps back and crossed her arms. "No good deed," she muttered under her breath, shifting her gaze to Sam. The man seems to have become surprisingly attached to the Master, which confused Rose a bit, considering his initial reactions to the man. His manner reminded her uneasily of Dracula's servant Renfield in those old black and white movies. As if he was under the Master's spell or something.
Rose was far too familiar with what that felt like.
"I don't care if it's 'just a Type 90,' GET IT OUT THERE," the Master suddenly roared, sounding angry and afraid. Then he mumbled something and laughed, icy, careless.
What he'd said, perhaps barely audible, was quite appropriate given the circumstances: "We're all going to die."
Sam sighed, and returned Rose's glance with a raise of his eyebrows. He understood Martha's frustration, but the thought occurred to him that the Master's nonsense might actually mean something. It would have to wait, his bloodloss was probably more important.
"Alright, alright. Just tell me if you need anything." Sam shifted his weight back and stood, taking a step back to give Martha the room she required to work. He folded his arms over his chest, and kept his eyes on the Master.
Belgarath exhales and pushes himself to his feet with hands braced on his thighs, giving Martha more room to move now that he's fairly certain he's not going to have to take any matters into his own hands.
Although he'd really like to deck someone right about now; it might make him feel better.
"Someone owes me a drink," he observes mostly to himself, low and wry and tired.
Martha snorted at Belgarath's words. "I'll buy you one after this is over." Not the date sort of "I'll buy you a drink," but the kind where she knew that they both deserved one. Martha was of the belief that the Master's gibberish was just that - gibberish. She'd seen enough patients with severe blood loss to know that much, anyway. Still, getting information about his wounds might be useful...
She reached into the duffel bag again, grabbing a small vial. The odds that it would help were minimal, but it would only take a few seconds to try. She popped the top off with her thumb, holding the smelling salts under the Master's nose.
"They have a cracking wine cellar," Rose offered wryly. She was frankly fed up with this rude arrogant stuffed-shirt. Her eyes were on the Master, and she canted her head as Martha waved the vial under his nose. She glanced at Sam, wondering what sort of information he thought the Master might be trying to convey.
"'Cracked' would be the word you're looking for, my dear--"
"Not 'dear,' either," she said firmly. "Rose."
The Master's body shuddered and he drew in a deeper, gasping breath, coughing immediately afterwards, like a man who had almost drowned. He blinked his eyes at the ceiling once, twice, trying to reconcile all the information his senses were throwing at him. Lights. The Doctor. Confused scuffling. Fury. People. Too many people. Eyes on him. Hatred. Teeth in his arms.
He tried to sit up.
The Master woke, and Rose uncrossed her arms and leaned forward. She swallowed and looked up at Sam, meeting his eyes. He was looking at her closely, as if trying to read her mind. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head slightly, then looked back down at the Master.
"Master, it's Rose," she said in a clear, calm voice. "No one's going to hurt you, I promise."
Sam watched the Master as he started to wake up, and gave a small smile. He glanced at Rose, to try and gauge her reaction when something caught his attention. He spun around, trying to determine the source of the noise.
There was a commotion behind her. She whipped her head around and gaped to see a wolf fighting a horse. The flanks of the horse were torn open, and great shreds of flesh hung off its legs, but it was still moving.
"What the hell is that?!" Sam's face fell blank with a dumb expression. It was a little too much for him to take in, so he just nodded, pretending he accepted the fact there was a horse and a wolf fighting to the death. His brain had processed enough for the day. The wolf seemed to have it under control, but he made note of the nearest set of stairs to run from if the horse decided to bolt toward them. He turned back to his small group.
"That's not something you see everyday."
"Zombie horse," she said, turning back and glancing at her four companions. "Great."
Belgarath looks less thrilled by the Master's sudden onslaught of consciousness, pushing him none too gently back down. "Easy," he says, and if his voice is rough at least his tone is more patient than he's been. "Easy, now--oh, damn it all, that's just what we need."
Splitting his attention between keeping the Master still lest Martha accidentally do him a worse injury should he struggle and trying to see if Angua needs his assistance...well, not for the first time in the last few days he finds himself thinking with black humor that of all the familiar things he could've found himself doing this sort of thing isn't what he'd call reassuring.
Martha thumbed the cap back on the vial of smelling salts, tossing it back in the duffel bag, and picked her needle and skeins of thread back up. She wanted to ask him where the Doctor was, to throttle him till she got an answer, but she knew that wouldn't work. Unfortunately.
"Easy," she said, using her best calming doctor tone of voice. "Just calm down. It's Martha." Oh, right, like that would help calm him down. If he could remember who she was, he could probably remember her slightly homocidal feelings toward him. "Look, you've got some nasty cuts on your arms, and I'm going to stitch them back up, but you've got to hold still." She decided to avoid mentioning the lack of anaesthetic. "How'd you get these injuries?" She didn't really expect a coherent answer at this point, but since he appeared to be out of his delirious state, she was going to try to talk to him.
Oh, no, no no no. Not Martha Jones.
The Master went quite still when he caught sight of the needle and thread, eying it dubiously, ignoring everything else. "How does it feel?" he asked softly, not taking his eyes off Martha's hands and what they held. "Being on the other side of it, having all this power? You up there. Me down here. Knowing if you wanted to... if you just wanted to..."
Sam's gaze drifted back down to the Master's face, and he eyed him critically when he spoke to Martha. He was about to interject, but instead he kept his mouth shut. This was personal, and it wasn't up to Sam to solve. But if it were needed, his boot wasn't too far away from the Master's head.
Gold star, Sam. Belgarath'll buy you a drink when all this is over -- provided everyone's still alive and there are drinks to be had, of course, of course.
Angua could use a hand. Or a paw, more to the point, and he makes his decision in a split second, glancing up. "Tyler. Hold this, will you?" ...apparently he means the Master. That's charming, Belgarath. To Martha, he says, "I'll take you up on that drink later, love. Try not to need me for a bit." He grins, wild around the edges, and when he moves away he blurs midstride into the form of the wolf he's so known for elsewhere, lunging to Angua's aid.
Apparently, even when the Master is half-dead from blood loss, he can't resist theatrics. Martha rolls her eyes when he speaks to her. "I hate to break it to you, Master, but if I wanted you dead, you would already have a clip of bullets emptied into your hearts. A needle? Really? Do you think I could do anything sinister with that?" Well, she could poke him a lot, but that just seemed silly.
All right. Apparently Belgarath's left her with Sam as an assistant. "Sam, hold his left arm steady. I'll start there." The Master, as far as she's concerned, has no choice in any of this.
Tyler. She hadn't told the stuffed shirt her last name, so he must mean Sam. She had promised the Master that no one would hurt him, and she intended to make good on that. So she crossed her arms again, her eyes on the prone Time Lord.
The Master smiled and closed his eyes, trying to prepare himself. "My life in your hands, Miss Jones. The bare truth, no matter how you may try to twist it. It's got to feel nice."
Before Sam had a chance to respond to Belgarath'srequest order, he was gone in a flash. Sam took a second before hopping over diligently and taking the Master's arm. He held it firmly in place for Doctor Jones, against the floor. He glanced toward the Master. "Would you just be quiet? I think I liked you better when you were mumbling about math."
"Doctor Jones," Martha pointed out, beaming helpfully at the Master. She was pretty certain that he'd omitted her title to annoy her, and she was going to be annoying right back, damnit. "Don't worry, Sam, he's always like this." She tied a knot in the end of her calfgut thread and started sewing the severed muscles back together, possibly sticking him a bit harder than was actually necessary. Her earlier flashbacks had not made her happy at all, particularly not where the Master was concerned.
"Do you remember what you were saying, Master?" Rose asked, her arms still crossed over her chest. "When you grabbed my wrist?"
He'd had a clever and slightly off-color reply ready for Rose when he opened his mouth, but what came out was something much more like "nnNNGGRRRHGHHHHH," and he arched his back slightly as Martha began jabbing him with the needle. His other hand clutched at nothing, scrabbling uselessly at the ground.
He couldn't help it, it hurt. Well, maybe he could help it a little.
Sam held the Master's arm firmly in place, though he wanted to reach out and grab the other flailing arm. "Hey!" he cried out at him, surprised, but trying to sound calm and gentle. "Just stay still, the quicker you let her do this, the quicker it will be over."
"It's still got to hurt less than being shot," Martha muttered under her breath. "Come on, can't a centuries-old Time Lord handle a little pain?" A few more neat stitches, and that muscle was taken care of. The severed vein nearby would be a bit trickier.
Rose was on her knees beside the Master almost instantly, taking the scrabbling hand in hers and gripping it tight. "Deep breaths," she commanded. "You can do this."
The Master squeezed her hand in what must have been a painful crush, not even mindful he was doing it. Martha had woken him up to feel this, Martha, Martha Jones. Doctor Jones. The Doctor. If he lived through this, if she didn't botch something up, he would kill her. Worse. There were worse things.
Sam glanced toward Rose and nodded. "Just try and keep him calm." Sam kept the damaged arm steady, by applying all his weight onto it, pushing it hard into the floor. He turned to Martha.
"Are you going to be able to work like this?"Or should I kick him in the head?
Calm. Martha almost laughed at that - the thought of the Master being calm. She wondered about Rose's strange attachment to the man, how anybody could possibly even be fond of him. All right, so he was charismatic, but there was also the whole...evil thing. She vaguely remembered mentioning that to Rose, in the haze of her flashbacks. But that wasn't her problem. No, her problem was to keep someone who she hated - and who returned the favor - from bleeding out.
She glanced up at Sam. "Not much of a choice, yeah?" Knot, snip, tie another knot, stitch. She was nearly finished with the subcutaneous work on his left arm; the surface stitching would be a piece of cake compared to this.
Rose hissed and grimaced in pain as the Master crushed her hand. She looked up at Sam, and smiled wryly. "I'll do my best," she said.
"Telemetric spanner, please, Chantho," the Master said faintly, in a cordial, humbled voice that was very unlike him. The hand reciprocating Rose's tight grip began to relax a little, and his struggling got weaker, more periodic.
"The lady will have the torafugu," he announced.
Shitshitshitshitshit, Martha swore mentally as she finished the sutures on the Master's left arm, swiftly grabbing the scissors and slashing through the tourniquet on his shoulder. He was slipping farther and farther into hypovolemic shock, and there wasn't a damned thing she could do about it - not unless someone was hiding an oxygen tank or an IV drip somewhere, and that seemed HIGHLY doubtful.
Martha slipped the stethoscope around her neck back into her ears, pressing the bell against his chest. The right heart's beat was rapid and fluttering, a typical symptom of blood loss. The left heart - wasn't beating. Oh, that was bad. Or, well, it had to be bad, at any rate.
She looked up at Sam and Rose, her eyes dark and unreadable. "Rose, take the water, try to get him to drink some of it." All right, so it was a supremely useless action, but she figured that they might as well try to make the Master comfortable. "Sam, hold his right arm for me. I've got to get this done fast."
Sam nodded, and grabbed the Master's arm. He watched the Master's face, the blood seemed to be draining visibly from his skin, and his complexion was pale and ghost like. He glanced toward Martha, but wasn't able to tear his eyes away from the familiar face for very long. "How bad is it? I mean...beside the obvious." Sam swallowed back the hard lump in his throat, visibly effected by the situation. "Tell me the truth."
If this were going to go down badly, if the Master was going to die, Sam couldn't stay here. He couldn't watch the life drain out of his own face.
Rose did as Martha asked, grabbing the water and kneeling so that she could cradle the Master's head in her lap. "Master," she said softly, evenly, as she held the bowl to his lips with one hand and smoothed his forehead with the other. "Drink this."
He shook his head feverishly. "Don't. Can't..." But he opened his mouth obediently, like a hungry bird.
"Honestly? I don't know enough about Time Lord biology to make that diagnosis." Martha frowned as she stitched muscle and sinew back together deftly, deciding against mentioning that one of his hearts wasn't beating at all, and the other was barely there. "If he were a human, he'd probably be dead by now. As it is, even once I patch him up, it'll be touch and go, just 'cos of the sheer amount of blood he's lost." Finish one set of stitches, cut the string, start on another. It was a rhythmic pattern, a race against time. At least the tourniquets had helped to stem the flow of blood - he'd just lost entirely too much before he'd gotten help.
Rose carefully tilted the bowl to pour the water into the Master's mouth, trying to do so slowly enough to not choke him, still smoothing her hand over his forehead. "He can regenerate, can't he?" She looked at Martha, her brow furrowed. "Can't all Time Lords?"
The Master did choke a little as the water hit the back of his throat, shocking him back to semi-consciousness. He did the only thing he could; he drank, tentative swallows giving way to more eager gulps.
"He didn't last time," Martha said quietly. Though she thought that had been more a matter of circumstance, but she wasn't sure - to be fair, she was still rather unclear on the whole process of regeneration. "And with all the strange things going on here? Who's to say it would work like normal? I mean, the TARDIS is a police box on the inside right now. Something in Wonderland obviously causes things to behave abnormally." A sobering thought - what if something had happened to the Doctor?
She cursed as she pricked her finger with the needle, in a rush to finish her work. "Don't die on me, you bastard," she muttered under her breath. "That wouldn't be fair." She was almost done with the last subcutaneous wound...there, and she cut the thread deftly, then threaded her needle with the silk thread before grasping the edges of the first laceration and drawing them together.
That's right... Jack had been surprised that the Master was alive.
Rose was thinking the same thing as Martha. If the Master was prevented by something in Wonderland from regenerating, then the Doctor might also be in danger of dying for good.
The Master drank the water in gulps, and Rose eased up a bit, not wanting him to make himself sick drinking too much too fast. "Good," she murmured, her hand still on his forehead.
She leaned down a little closer. "Don't die. Please."
Sam finally had to turn away from the Master's face. He thought it was a good sign he was drinking, but he didn't look any better, and it probably didn't help with the blood loss much.
Sam turned instead to the wounds Martha was repairing. It was a bit hypnotic watching the needle slip in and out quickly by her skilled hand. He glanced up at Martha again, but then also at Rose. "Regen--What? What the hell are you talking about?"
Yes, his body knew what it was doing, and as it felt the intravenous pressure stabilizing, the Master's left heart stirred and fluttered weakly, trying to regain its former rhythm, pumping what little there was left.
Thing was, it wasn't as pleasant as how he'd learned in Academy. Not nearly. He convulsed a little, grimacing, pressing against Rose's hand.
Only a couple more left now...she hoped the Master's movements weren't a sign that he was slipping deeper into shock. She stitched with one hand for a moment, pressing down on his arm with the other for extra stability. Though slipping and stabbing him with the needle had seemed humorous earlier, it had quickly lost its amusement.
"I don't know much about the process," Martha said, "but apparently, instead of dying, Time Lords can, well, change bodies, sort of. He did, right after I met him." It had barely come up in passing, really - just the barest mention in an attempt to explain to her how the Master had gone from looking like Professor Yana to being Harold Saxon.
"It's a way of cheating death," Rose said, echoing what the Doctor had told her. The bowl of water was empty, so Rose put it aside and dedicated both hands to soothing and steadying motions on the Master's forehead and temples. She looked at Sam. "That's why there are two Doctors here. They're the same person, but at different times."
She turned her head and scanned the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Doctor's worn leather jacket, to know he was all right.
Sam sighed a little with a small nod. "Yeah, I guess I knew...I just didn't know--" he didn't finish his sentance, figuring it wasn't really relevant anyway. This wasn't exactly the time or place to make small talk.
"...can. ROT... down there!" the Master forced out between clenched teeth.
Sam looked at the Master when he sputtered his angry words. Sam's eyes narrowed critically. "What are you talking about now? Do you even know what's going on, Master? Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?"
Sam's last question was tinted with the utmost importance and hope, like it would offend or crush him if the Master couldn't answer it correctly.
"Just ask what he's talking about," Martha suggested. Okay, so establishing that he wasn't delirious was important, but they could do that later. Besides, it was the Master; insanity was already a given.
She finished the last few stitches on the last slash and cut her thread off neatly, then severed the other tourniquet. "Rose," she said, "get me the gauze and antibiotic ointment out of the bag. My hands are too bloody to do it." Yeah, she'd forgotten surgical gloves. Whoops.
Rose nodded and lowered the Master's head to the ground. She was also curious what he meant by his last outburst, but having multiple people grilling him at the moment was unlikely to be helpful. She crawled quickly to the bag to retrieve the items, handed them to Martha, and then repositioned herself at the Master's head. Once there she shifted her glance to Sam, waiting for him to ask.
Sam glanced at Martha, and nodded once. He adjusted his weight on the Master's arm, enabling himself to lean in toward the Master's face.
"Master?" Sam spoke calmly, slowly and clear. "What are you talking about?"
The Master gave a low, mournful chuckle. "All your fucking fault, realize," he hissed intermittently. "Your fault you. complete failure. Tearing everything to pieces. Best part? always. best part. think you can fix it."
Martha let out a small sigh. She was almost positive the Master had something to do with the fact that the Doctor had completely disappeared after that day in the fox shop - it was far too coincidental for her liking, especially because the Master was involved - but they weren't likely to get any useful information out of him anytime soon, it seemed like.
She took a moment to straighten up and stretch, the muscles in her back protesting, then bent over the Master again, carefully wrapping his arms in the gauze.
Rose's jaw tightened, and she glanced at Martha. The Master was certainly talking about the Doctor, but the Time Lords had known each other for hundreds of years. It was anyone's guess whether this was recent.
She was sure they'd find out later. For the moment she continued her soothing motions.
The pain had begun to subside as the left heart settled into something like regularity-- something that would have to do for now, at any rate. As the pain ebbed, so did what remained of his consciousness, and he sighed resignedly as he let go of it.
Restorative Sleep! The Doctor's hopeful face goggled in front of him, and then mercifully, nothing.
Sam's face twisted up in confusion, and then slowly, his eyes narrowed into something of a glare toward the Master.
"I think he's being vague on purpose. He's an asshole." Sam leaned back into his sigh as he finally let completely go of the Master. He glanced toward Martha as he spoke again.
"Thank you, Dr Jones...for doing that for him. I'll keep an eye on him until he wakes up." Sam missed a single beat before adding, with a touch of sarcasm. "And after he wakes up, I'm sure. I'll make sure he doesn't get into any trouble when he starts feeling better." Sam wasn't sure the Master was unconscious again, and he almost hoped he wasn't so that the other man was aware Sam was going to be watching his behavior closely.
Martha swore as the Master passed out, dropping the gauze and grabbing her stethoscope again. His right heartbeat, though, seemed to have stabilized, and the left one was weak, but there. His respiration sounded normal - it seemed almost as if he was sleeping. She narrowed her eyes at him; at this point, where she was half-delirious herself, she fully expected him to do things like this just to fuck with her.
"Too bad we couldn't get anything useful out of him." She scowled down at the Master's prone form. "Still, his vitals are stabilised, at least. That's something. Means we can find out more later on."
....
Rating: R
Date: Continued from the Doctor's cottage
Location: Malibu Castle
The horse's last few steps were an exhausted stumble, as it finally reached the steps to the castle. The beast wasn't meant for carrying two men, but it had managed to get them there relatively safely. By the time they arrived, the Master was delirious from blood loss. Sam had tried to ignore him most of the way. The horse waited obediently as Sam heaved himself over the side of the horse, and then pulled the Master down and into the castle.
Sam shoved the Master into the first seating he found once inside, and gave him strict orders to stay in place. Sam left him there to find something, anything to bandage the Master's arm and help cease the bleeding. He collected whatever supplies, or make shift supplies he came across, before making his way back to one of the main rooms of the castle.
Sam sauntered in, and then stopped, glancing around at the new people in confusion. He wasn't that surprised to see people here -- it was a good place to get away from the zombies. But the Master was gone. And amazingly, there wasn't a trail of blood to follow him by.
A crash-splat, and then the shattering and tinkling of glass falling.
The Master had rediscovered the wine room almost by accident, only recognizing the dimly lit, tapestried corridor when he was halfway down it. When he'd swung the door open, his grin had stretched impossibly wider and he'd flung his arms open as if greeting an old friend.
Then he'd started in on the wine, although he was having more fun throwing the bottles against the walls spitefully than actually drinking any of it.
Angua loped through the castle, looking for a room to change in. She needed to get out of wolf form, needed to get the taste of undead out of her mouth and reassure herself that she was human. Beldaran still had her dress, but she wasn't bothering with clothes right now. The wolf was too prominent in her mind for that.
She entered the room just as the first bottle hit the wall. Instinctively, she turned to face the man throwing the bottles, her lip curling as she snarled.
Wolf. Blood. And then on the tail of that, Excellent.
The Master froze for only a second before resuming his grin and lobbing the remaining wine bottle he was holding directly at the wolf's head.
Being a member of the Night Watch meant that you got a lot of practice dodging projectiles thrown by, well, just about everybody - though the citizens of Ankh-Morpork usually had more sense than to throw full bottles of alcohol.
Angua darted to one side, shaking the wine and glass from her fur and giving the man a wolfish glare. She was beginning to rethink her decision to leave the group with her "translators" behind.
He had already flattened himself against one of the wooden racks, and it was all too easy to reach back and grab another bottle in each hand by the neck. Reload. The Master giggled at that, sending his aim slightly off as he launched another bottle towards his would-be attacker.
Then he fathomed the ridiculousness of the situation-- staving off a possibly mad wolf with alcohol, and he went into hysterics, leaning back against the wine rack.
Angua dodged the second bottle with ease, then paused as the man went into hysterics, waiting to see if another projectile was imminent. She sat down on the floor, tilting her head and giving him a decidedly quizzical look that made her look more like an exceptionally large dog than a wolf.
The Master paused, his laughter dying, as he felt the thing's eyes upon him. It didn't... feel mad. Apparently quite calm, actually, given its actions under the circumstances. He relaxed and studied it further.
"You're not just a wolf," he observed.
And then he giggled again, as if that were the punchline to a joke at a party, toasted Angua, and had brought the bottle halfway to his lips before he remembered it was still corked.
Oh, good, they were finally making progress. Satisfied that she wasn't going to have anything more chucked at her, she ducked behind a wine rack - not that it gave her much cover - and, well, blurred.
And the wolf was replaced by a young blonde woman, quite naked, and looking rather tired and irritable. "And you're not human," she remarked, the exhaustion she felt evident in the slight accent she let slip out.
"Oh, very good," the Master smiled. It was ambiguous whether he was referring to her ability to tell the difference, or her current appearance.
He took one more look at the corked wine bottle and then threw it to one side, irritably. It crashed sharply somewhere off in a dark corner as he quickly approached the rack she was hiding behind.
"So. A werewolf... really?" He rested a bloodied arm against the rack, looking down at her with eager curiosity, blissfully unaware of how much in that moment he sounded like the Doctor.
She crossed her arms over her chest defensively. "Yes, really." Though werewolves were common enough where she came from - obviously - she knew from talking to Belgarath that other denizens of Wonderland might not be quite so familiar with them. "My name is Angua von Uberwald."
The Master nodded impatiently. "Good for you." Blood from his arm dripped down, some following the angles of the wine rack and seeping into the wood, some splattering directly on the floor, but he continued speaking quickly as if he wasn't aware. "Genetic inheritance? Manipulation? Viral transmission? None of the above?"
She watched the blood drip with detached interest. Her brother would have been on the wounded man instantly, but that was Wolfgang, not her. She was more civilized than that. "Genetic." She gestured toward his arm. "You seem to have a little problem there." The bleeding wound seemed to be a little more important than her lack of clothes.
The Master looked at his arms as if he'd forgotten he owned any. "Ohhhh," he murmured. "Oh, right." He looked down at Angua again. "Sorry. Big... bird." He cracked up again, bending over the wine rack and bowing his head.
"That ought to be bandaged," Angua pointed out helpfully. She wasn't sure if the man was actually mad, or if his craziness could be chalked up to blood loss. A bird? "Or...something." She was a Watch Officer, not a doctor.
"That's the first sensible thing you've said all day, Lucy." He remained slumped over the wine rack, eyes closed, a little half-smile still on his face.
Angua heaved a sigh, wishing Carrot were here. He never got mistaken for anybody else, something that seemed to be happening to her with an alarming frequency. "Angua. Not Lucy. Do I look like a Lucy?" She frowned down at him. "There's a bunch of people in the front hall. One of them ought to be able to help you more than I can - I think someone said something about a doctor."
His eyes shot open and he gripped the sides of the wooden rack tightly, his knuckles turning white and blood dripping faster.
"The Doctor." The words were choked with apprehension, or pain, or anticipation, or relief, or all of the above. Or none of the above. It was hard to say.
The way he said it made it sound more like a name than a title - but it definitely elicited a reaction. Angua cautiously walked around the rack, trying to pry his hands free. "Come on, I'll help you." She looked around at the broken glass and spilled wine. "Things aren't going to get better if we stay here."
"NO!" He straightened up, pushed back from the rack and away from her, stumbling backwards and straight into another one. The Master slumped down a little, staring at her, dazed and fearful and very pale.
Angua debated the morals of clubbing the man with a wine bottle and dragging him to the main hall. All things considered, it would probably work quite well. She sighed, deciding to give diplomacy another shot - though it was far from her strong suit. "You aren't all right," she said with a surprising gentleness. "You need someone to help you."
The Master laughed, a dark bubbling chuckle, at that. "Haven't you listened to anyone here? I'm beyond help." He frowned suddenly, looking her over with a speculative, detached air. "You're not wearing clothes."
"I've only just got here," Angua pointed out, "and I don't even know your name." She was starting to get quite irritated with him. "Yes, I know I'm not wearing clothes." At this point, she would've rather been a wolf, but that would have hindered communication.
"Sorry," he murmured, having no idea what he was continually apologizing for. He closed his eyes. After a short pause, "You're going to have to set the spatial coordinates yourself. Temporal are locked in already. She's a bit touchy, you can't botch this. Listen carefully." He began rattling off a long series of numbers and letters.
Wolf form definitely sounded like a good idea. She shifted while his eyes were closed, then sunk her teeth into his collar, dragging him in the direction of the door.
"Ten, zero, eleven, zero, zero, by zero two from galactic zero centre, ten zero, eleven..."
He didn't even appear to realize he was being moved, keeping his eyes closed, whispering the string of coordinates again and again. Something hovered about the periphery of his consciousness, something dark and heavy. Something bad.
...
The jolting sensation of being laid on the ground and
rose
His hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, his whispered mantra not ceasing, but rather increasing in urgency. "...by zero two from galactic zero center ten, zero, eleven, zero, zero..."
Sam was focused on Martha's arrival, he recognized her from the fox shop explosion and he was about to greet her when the Master spoke.
Sam spun around quickly, and he almost smiled, relieved that the man was finally waking. He didn't seem to notice that the man had grabbed Rose. "He's awake." Just in case you couldn't tell...
Sam tried to make sense of the Master's words, but failed. "What the fuck is he saying?"
"Sounds like math." And Belgarath sounds as though he has the patience of a caged animal, how about that? ...in fairness, right now that's more or less what he feels like he is.
He chooses to ignore Rose, beyond taking a shot at prying the Master off her arm. "Martha. All yours, dear, I'm at your disposal."
Martha chooses to avoid pointing out that she is, in fact, a doctor, and the most qualified person available, and a host of other things. Instead, she kneels down next to the Master, still not looking at his face - she can do this, she thinks, if she just avoids looking at his face - and takes a pair of surgical scissors from her bag, neatly slicing his shirt and peeling it back from his forearms.
The wounds are nasty, but not the worst she's seen, not by a long shot. And at least she has what she needs - excepting local anaesthetic, but, not surprisingly, she doesn't feel particularly obligated to use such things with the Master.
Martha closes her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath, and focuses. Right. First thing's first - getting the wounds cleaned of all the caked blood and shirt fibers and whatever else is in there. Water first - she grabs the jug, soaking one of the linens Hortensia gave her, and starts scrubbing (maybe not as gently as she would normally, but who's going to notice?).
"They're coordinates, I think," Rose says while gently pushing Belgarath's hands away. She glanced up at Sam, then back down at the Master. "The Doctor would know for sure, though..." She looked back toward the main group, to see if she could spot the other Time Lord, but from her kneeling position she could only see those closest to them. She sighed. With any luck, he'll find them eventually.
For now she placed her free hand on the hand the Master had clamped around her wrist, and rubbed it softly, hoping to calm him.
The Master groaned a little as Martha scrubbed his arms, quietening a little when Rose took his hand. His breathing, however, quickened into short pants.
Belgarath actually does pinch the bridge of his nose, now. With exaggerated patience -- due to the fact he currently lacks any other kind -- he says, carefully, "Girl, you're going to get in her way. Either you make him let go, or I will."
Sam glanced toward Rose's hand, and back at Rose. He tried not to make the look obvious to anyone but Rose, but he did give an audible sigh. Sam turned back to Martha. "Do you need anything else, Doctor Jones?"
Martha ignores everything going on around her. Tourniquet, you idiot, she chastises herself, angry for forgetting something important, and she tears strips off the linen, slicing the Master's jacket and t-shirt up even more to wrap the strips tightly around his shoulders. She is momentarily struck by his apparent fragility - his arms and shoulders are surprisingly thin, she thinks, for someone who took over the world single-handedly.
Next comes the antiseptic, splashed onto another linen. She dabs it on a bit more cautiously, so as not to aggravate the severed blood vessels, but it's still got to sting on the Master's exposed flesh.
Rose sighed, and continued to gently rub the Master's hand. "It's Rose. Not 'girl'. And if you try to tear him off like that, he's only going to hang on tighter." She arched her fingers to stroke his hand lightly with her fingertips, hoping to relax him further, then very carefully attempted to slip her wrist out of his grasp.
He tried to hang on, but his grip was weakened by the blossoming pain from the antiseptic. Another low groan escaped his lips, and the fervent whispering began again, more rapidly than ever. "Ten, zero, eleven, zero..."
Sam glanced around at the group. He quickly fell to his knees near the Master's head.
"Master? Master? It's Sam-- What are you talking about? What are you saying? Master?"
Paying only enough attention to be sure Rose did as he told her, Belgarath doesn't quite catch the given name -- particularly not when distracted by Sam. "Let the man be yet," he says, unraveling patience sharpening his tone of voice. "Don't agitate him any further until Dr Jones is quite done."
Martha was starting to get irritated. Well, she was already irritated - she had a pounding headache, and everything smelled of death, and the flashbacks were lurking just behind her eyelids, she could tell, and it was the Master with messy lacerations on his forearms, bone and blood vessels and muscles sliced clean through, and this was not exactly the sort of environment she was used to doing her work in.
"Would you mind giving me some room to work?" she snapped, looking up at Rose and Sam. Okay, she could apologize for being a bitch later. Generally, if someone up to her elbows in blood is pissed off, it's a good thing to listen. She bent down again, rummaging through her bag for the thread - luckily, Hortensia's medical kit had included calfgut thread, which meant she could actually stitch the muscles and veins, but it would be tricky work.
Martha sighed for a moment and drenched the last clean corner of one of the linens in water, rubbing her eyes and forehead with it.
Rose was already on her way up and stepping back when Martha snapped at her. She lifted an eyebrow, took another two steps back and crossed her arms. "No good deed," she muttered under her breath, shifting her gaze to Sam. The man seems to have become surprisingly attached to the Master, which confused Rose a bit, considering his initial reactions to the man. His manner reminded her uneasily of Dracula's servant Renfield in those old black and white movies. As if he was under the Master's spell or something.
Rose was far too familiar with what that felt like.
"I don't care if it's 'just a Type 90,' GET IT OUT THERE," the Master suddenly roared, sounding angry and afraid. Then he mumbled something and laughed, icy, careless.
What he'd said, perhaps barely audible, was quite appropriate given the circumstances: "We're all going to die."
Sam sighed, and returned Rose's glance with a raise of his eyebrows. He understood Martha's frustration, but the thought occurred to him that the Master's nonsense might actually mean something. It would have to wait, his bloodloss was probably more important.
"Alright, alright. Just tell me if you need anything." Sam shifted his weight back and stood, taking a step back to give Martha the room she required to work. He folded his arms over his chest, and kept his eyes on the Master.
Belgarath exhales and pushes himself to his feet with hands braced on his thighs, giving Martha more room to move now that he's fairly certain he's not going to have to take any matters into his own hands.
Although he'd really like to deck someone right about now; it might make him feel better.
"Someone owes me a drink," he observes mostly to himself, low and wry and tired.
Martha snorted at Belgarath's words. "I'll buy you one after this is over." Not the date sort of "I'll buy you a drink," but the kind where she knew that they both deserved one. Martha was of the belief that the Master's gibberish was just that - gibberish. She'd seen enough patients with severe blood loss to know that much, anyway. Still, getting information about his wounds might be useful...
She reached into the duffel bag again, grabbing a small vial. The odds that it would help were minimal, but it would only take a few seconds to try. She popped the top off with her thumb, holding the smelling salts under the Master's nose.
"They have a cracking wine cellar," Rose offered wryly. She was frankly fed up with this rude arrogant stuffed-shirt. Her eyes were on the Master, and she canted her head as Martha waved the vial under his nose. She glanced at Sam, wondering what sort of information he thought the Master might be trying to convey.
"'Cracked' would be the word you're looking for, my dear--"
"Not 'dear,' either," she said firmly. "Rose."
The Master's body shuddered and he drew in a deeper, gasping breath, coughing immediately afterwards, like a man who had almost drowned. He blinked his eyes at the ceiling once, twice, trying to reconcile all the information his senses were throwing at him. Lights. The Doctor. Confused scuffling. Fury. People. Too many people. Eyes on him. Hatred. Teeth in his arms.
He tried to sit up.
The Master woke, and Rose uncrossed her arms and leaned forward. She swallowed and looked up at Sam, meeting his eyes. He was looking at her closely, as if trying to read her mind. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head slightly, then looked back down at the Master.
"Master, it's Rose," she said in a clear, calm voice. "No one's going to hurt you, I promise."
Sam watched the Master as he started to wake up, and gave a small smile. He glanced at Rose, to try and gauge her reaction when something caught his attention. He spun around, trying to determine the source of the noise.
There was a commotion behind her. She whipped her head around and gaped to see a wolf fighting a horse. The flanks of the horse were torn open, and great shreds of flesh hung off its legs, but it was still moving.
"What the hell is that?!" Sam's face fell blank with a dumb expression. It was a little too much for him to take in, so he just nodded, pretending he accepted the fact there was a horse and a wolf fighting to the death. His brain had processed enough for the day. The wolf seemed to have it under control, but he made note of the nearest set of stairs to run from if the horse decided to bolt toward them. He turned back to his small group.
"That's not something you see everyday."
"Zombie horse," she said, turning back and glancing at her four companions. "Great."
Belgarath looks less thrilled by the Master's sudden onslaught of consciousness, pushing him none too gently back down. "Easy," he says, and if his voice is rough at least his tone is more patient than he's been. "Easy, now--oh, damn it all, that's just what we need."
Splitting his attention between keeping the Master still lest Martha accidentally do him a worse injury should he struggle and trying to see if Angua needs his assistance...well, not for the first time in the last few days he finds himself thinking with black humor that of all the familiar things he could've found himself doing this sort of thing isn't what he'd call reassuring.
Martha thumbed the cap back on the vial of smelling salts, tossing it back in the duffel bag, and picked her needle and skeins of thread back up. She wanted to ask him where the Doctor was, to throttle him till she got an answer, but she knew that wouldn't work. Unfortunately.
"Easy," she said, using her best calming doctor tone of voice. "Just calm down. It's Martha." Oh, right, like that would help calm him down. If he could remember who she was, he could probably remember her slightly homocidal feelings toward him. "Look, you've got some nasty cuts on your arms, and I'm going to stitch them back up, but you've got to hold still." She decided to avoid mentioning the lack of anaesthetic. "How'd you get these injuries?" She didn't really expect a coherent answer at this point, but since he appeared to be out of his delirious state, she was going to try to talk to him.
Oh, no, no no no. Not Martha Jones.
The Master went quite still when he caught sight of the needle and thread, eying it dubiously, ignoring everything else. "How does it feel?" he asked softly, not taking his eyes off Martha's hands and what they held. "Being on the other side of it, having all this power? You up there. Me down here. Knowing if you wanted to... if you just wanted to..."
Sam's gaze drifted back down to the Master's face, and he eyed him critically when he spoke to Martha. He was about to interject, but instead he kept his mouth shut. This was personal, and it wasn't up to Sam to solve. But if it were needed, his boot wasn't too far away from the Master's head.
Gold star, Sam. Belgarath'll buy you a drink when all this is over -- provided everyone's still alive and there are drinks to be had, of course, of course.
Angua could use a hand. Or a paw, more to the point, and he makes his decision in a split second, glancing up. "Tyler. Hold this, will you?" ...apparently he means the Master. That's charming, Belgarath. To Martha, he says, "I'll take you up on that drink later, love. Try not to need me for a bit." He grins, wild around the edges, and when he moves away he blurs midstride into the form of the wolf he's so known for elsewhere, lunging to Angua's aid.
Apparently, even when the Master is half-dead from blood loss, he can't resist theatrics. Martha rolls her eyes when he speaks to her. "I hate to break it to you, Master, but if I wanted you dead, you would already have a clip of bullets emptied into your hearts. A needle? Really? Do you think I could do anything sinister with that?" Well, she could poke him a lot, but that just seemed silly.
All right. Apparently Belgarath's left her with Sam as an assistant. "Sam, hold his left arm steady. I'll start there." The Master, as far as she's concerned, has no choice in any of this.
Tyler. She hadn't told the stuffed shirt her last name, so he must mean Sam. She had promised the Master that no one would hurt him, and she intended to make good on that. So she crossed her arms again, her eyes on the prone Time Lord.
The Master smiled and closed his eyes, trying to prepare himself. "My life in your hands, Miss Jones. The bare truth, no matter how you may try to twist it. It's got to feel nice."
Before Sam had a chance to respond to Belgarath's
"Doctor Jones," Martha pointed out, beaming helpfully at the Master. She was pretty certain that he'd omitted her title to annoy her, and she was going to be annoying right back, damnit. "Don't worry, Sam, he's always like this." She tied a knot in the end of her calfgut thread and started sewing the severed muscles back together, possibly sticking him a bit harder than was actually necessary. Her earlier flashbacks had not made her happy at all, particularly not where the Master was concerned.
"Do you remember what you were saying, Master?" Rose asked, her arms still crossed over her chest. "When you grabbed my wrist?"
He'd had a clever and slightly off-color reply ready for Rose when he opened his mouth, but what came out was something much more like "nnNNGGRRRHGHHHHH," and he arched his back slightly as Martha began jabbing him with the needle. His other hand clutched at nothing, scrabbling uselessly at the ground.
He couldn't help it, it hurt. Well, maybe he could help it a little.
Sam held the Master's arm firmly in place, though he wanted to reach out and grab the other flailing arm. "Hey!" he cried out at him, surprised, but trying to sound calm and gentle. "Just stay still, the quicker you let her do this, the quicker it will be over."
"It's still got to hurt less than being shot," Martha muttered under her breath. "Come on, can't a centuries-old Time Lord handle a little pain?" A few more neat stitches, and that muscle was taken care of. The severed vein nearby would be a bit trickier.
Rose was on her knees beside the Master almost instantly, taking the scrabbling hand in hers and gripping it tight. "Deep breaths," she commanded. "You can do this."
The Master squeezed her hand in what must have been a painful crush, not even mindful he was doing it. Martha had woken him up to feel this, Martha, Martha Jones. Doctor Jones. The Doctor. If he lived through this, if she didn't botch something up, he would kill her. Worse. There were worse things.
Sam glanced toward Rose and nodded. "Just try and keep him calm." Sam kept the damaged arm steady, by applying all his weight onto it, pushing it hard into the floor. He turned to Martha.
"Are you going to be able to work like this?"
Calm. Martha almost laughed at that - the thought of the Master being calm. She wondered about Rose's strange attachment to the man, how anybody could possibly even be fond of him. All right, so he was charismatic, but there was also the whole...evil thing. She vaguely remembered mentioning that to Rose, in the haze of her flashbacks. But that wasn't her problem. No, her problem was to keep someone who she hated - and who returned the favor - from bleeding out.
She glanced up at Sam. "Not much of a choice, yeah?" Knot, snip, tie another knot, stitch. She was nearly finished with the subcutaneous work on his left arm; the surface stitching would be a piece of cake compared to this.
Rose hissed and grimaced in pain as the Master crushed her hand. She looked up at Sam, and smiled wryly. "I'll do my best," she said.
"Telemetric spanner, please, Chantho," the Master said faintly, in a cordial, humbled voice that was very unlike him. The hand reciprocating Rose's tight grip began to relax a little, and his struggling got weaker, more periodic.
"The lady will have the torafugu," he announced.
Shitshitshitshitshit, Martha swore mentally as she finished the sutures on the Master's left arm, swiftly grabbing the scissors and slashing through the tourniquet on his shoulder. He was slipping farther and farther into hypovolemic shock, and there wasn't a damned thing she could do about it - not unless someone was hiding an oxygen tank or an IV drip somewhere, and that seemed HIGHLY doubtful.
Martha slipped the stethoscope around her neck back into her ears, pressing the bell against his chest. The right heart's beat was rapid and fluttering, a typical symptom of blood loss. The left heart - wasn't beating. Oh, that was bad. Or, well, it had to be bad, at any rate.
She looked up at Sam and Rose, her eyes dark and unreadable. "Rose, take the water, try to get him to drink some of it." All right, so it was a supremely useless action, but she figured that they might as well try to make the Master comfortable. "Sam, hold his right arm for me. I've got to get this done fast."
Sam nodded, and grabbed the Master's arm. He watched the Master's face, the blood seemed to be draining visibly from his skin, and his complexion was pale and ghost like. He glanced toward Martha, but wasn't able to tear his eyes away from the familiar face for very long. "How bad is it? I mean...beside the obvious." Sam swallowed back the hard lump in his throat, visibly effected by the situation. "Tell me the truth."
If this were going to go down badly, if the Master was going to die, Sam couldn't stay here. He couldn't watch the life drain out of his own face.
Rose did as Martha asked, grabbing the water and kneeling so that she could cradle the Master's head in her lap. "Master," she said softly, evenly, as she held the bowl to his lips with one hand and smoothed his forehead with the other. "Drink this."
He shook his head feverishly. "Don't. Can't..." But he opened his mouth obediently, like a hungry bird.
"Honestly? I don't know enough about Time Lord biology to make that diagnosis." Martha frowned as she stitched muscle and sinew back together deftly, deciding against mentioning that one of his hearts wasn't beating at all, and the other was barely there. "If he were a human, he'd probably be dead by now. As it is, even once I patch him up, it'll be touch and go, just 'cos of the sheer amount of blood he's lost." Finish one set of stitches, cut the string, start on another. It was a rhythmic pattern, a race against time. At least the tourniquets had helped to stem the flow of blood - he'd just lost entirely too much before he'd gotten help.
Rose carefully tilted the bowl to pour the water into the Master's mouth, trying to do so slowly enough to not choke him, still smoothing her hand over his forehead. "He can regenerate, can't he?" She looked at Martha, her brow furrowed. "Can't all Time Lords?"
The Master did choke a little as the water hit the back of his throat, shocking him back to semi-consciousness. He did the only thing he could; he drank, tentative swallows giving way to more eager gulps.
"He didn't last time," Martha said quietly. Though she thought that had been more a matter of circumstance, but she wasn't sure - to be fair, she was still rather unclear on the whole process of regeneration. "And with all the strange things going on here? Who's to say it would work like normal? I mean, the TARDIS is a police box on the inside right now. Something in Wonderland obviously causes things to behave abnormally." A sobering thought - what if something had happened to the Doctor?
She cursed as she pricked her finger with the needle, in a rush to finish her work. "Don't die on me, you bastard," she muttered under her breath. "That wouldn't be fair." She was almost done with the last subcutaneous wound...there, and she cut the thread deftly, then threaded her needle with the silk thread before grasping the edges of the first laceration and drawing them together.
That's right... Jack had been surprised that the Master was alive.
Rose was thinking the same thing as Martha. If the Master was prevented by something in Wonderland from regenerating, then the Doctor might also be in danger of dying for good.
The Master drank the water in gulps, and Rose eased up a bit, not wanting him to make himself sick drinking too much too fast. "Good," she murmured, her hand still on his forehead.
She leaned down a little closer. "Don't die. Please."
Sam finally had to turn away from the Master's face. He thought it was a good sign he was drinking, but he didn't look any better, and it probably didn't help with the blood loss much.
Sam turned instead to the wounds Martha was repairing. It was a bit hypnotic watching the needle slip in and out quickly by her skilled hand. He glanced up at Martha again, but then also at Rose. "Regen--What? What the hell are you talking about?"
Yes, his body knew what it was doing, and as it felt the intravenous pressure stabilizing, the Master's left heart stirred and fluttered weakly, trying to regain its former rhythm, pumping what little there was left.
Thing was, it wasn't as pleasant as how he'd learned in Academy. Not nearly. He convulsed a little, grimacing, pressing against Rose's hand.
Only a couple more left now...she hoped the Master's movements weren't a sign that he was slipping deeper into shock. She stitched with one hand for a moment, pressing down on his arm with the other for extra stability. Though slipping and stabbing him with the needle had seemed humorous earlier, it had quickly lost its amusement.
"I don't know much about the process," Martha said, "but apparently, instead of dying, Time Lords can, well, change bodies, sort of. He did, right after I met him." It had barely come up in passing, really - just the barest mention in an attempt to explain to her how the Master had gone from looking like Professor Yana to being Harold Saxon.
"It's a way of cheating death," Rose said, echoing what the Doctor had told her. The bowl of water was empty, so Rose put it aside and dedicated both hands to soothing and steadying motions on the Master's forehead and temples. She looked at Sam. "That's why there are two Doctors here. They're the same person, but at different times."
She turned her head and scanned the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Doctor's worn leather jacket, to know he was all right.
Sam sighed a little with a small nod. "Yeah, I guess I knew...I just didn't know--" he didn't finish his sentance, figuring it wasn't really relevant anyway. This wasn't exactly the time or place to make small talk.
"...can. ROT... down there!" the Master forced out between clenched teeth.
Sam looked at the Master when he sputtered his angry words. Sam's eyes narrowed critically. "What are you talking about now? Do you even know what's going on, Master? Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am?"
Sam's last question was tinted with the utmost importance and hope, like it would offend or crush him if the Master couldn't answer it correctly.
"Just ask what he's talking about," Martha suggested. Okay, so establishing that he wasn't delirious was important, but they could do that later. Besides, it was the Master; insanity was already a given.
She finished the last few stitches on the last slash and cut her thread off neatly, then severed the other tourniquet. "Rose," she said, "get me the gauze and antibiotic ointment out of the bag. My hands are too bloody to do it." Yeah, she'd forgotten surgical gloves. Whoops.
Rose nodded and lowered the Master's head to the ground. She was also curious what he meant by his last outburst, but having multiple people grilling him at the moment was unlikely to be helpful. She crawled quickly to the bag to retrieve the items, handed them to Martha, and then repositioned herself at the Master's head. Once there she shifted her glance to Sam, waiting for him to ask.
Sam glanced at Martha, and nodded once. He adjusted his weight on the Master's arm, enabling himself to lean in toward the Master's face.
"Master?" Sam spoke calmly, slowly and clear. "What are you talking about?"
The Master gave a low, mournful chuckle. "All your fucking fault, realize," he hissed intermittently. "Your fault you. complete failure. Tearing everything to pieces. Best part? always. best part. think you can fix it."
Martha let out a small sigh. She was almost positive the Master had something to do with the fact that the Doctor had completely disappeared after that day in the fox shop - it was far too coincidental for her liking, especially because the Master was involved - but they weren't likely to get any useful information out of him anytime soon, it seemed like.
She took a moment to straighten up and stretch, the muscles in her back protesting, then bent over the Master again, carefully wrapping his arms in the gauze.
Rose's jaw tightened, and she glanced at Martha. The Master was certainly talking about the Doctor, but the Time Lords had known each other for hundreds of years. It was anyone's guess whether this was recent.
She was sure they'd find out later. For the moment she continued her soothing motions.
The pain had begun to subside as the left heart settled into something like regularity-- something that would have to do for now, at any rate. As the pain ebbed, so did what remained of his consciousness, and he sighed resignedly as he let go of it.
Restorative Sleep! The Doctor's hopeful face goggled in front of him, and then mercifully, nothing.
Sam's face twisted up in confusion, and then slowly, his eyes narrowed into something of a glare toward the Master.
"I think he's being vague on purpose. He's an asshole." Sam leaned back into his sigh as he finally let completely go of the Master. He glanced toward Martha as he spoke again.
"Thank you, Dr Jones...for doing that for him. I'll keep an eye on him until he wakes up." Sam missed a single beat before adding, with a touch of sarcasm. "And after he wakes up, I'm sure. I'll make sure he doesn't get into any trouble when he starts feeling better." Sam wasn't sure the Master was unconscious again, and he almost hoped he wasn't so that the other man was aware Sam was going to be watching his behavior closely.
Martha swore as the Master passed out, dropping the gauze and grabbing her stethoscope again. His right heartbeat, though, seemed to have stabilized, and the left one was weak, but there. His respiration sounded normal - it seemed almost as if he was sleeping. She narrowed her eyes at him; at this point, where she was half-delirious herself, she fully expected him to do things like this just to fuck with her.
"Too bad we couldn't get anything useful out of him." She scowled down at the Master's prone form. "Still, his vitals are stabilised, at least. That's something. Means we can find out more later on."
....
