carmen_lj | fic: any colour you like

Title: Any Colour You Like
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters/Pairing: Lucy Saxon, Delgado!Master
Rating: PG
Warnings: References to self-harm and suicide ideation.
Word count: 2600

Summary: The Master's curious about his future wife.

Any Colour You Like

Lucy presses her hand flat against the window and closes her eyes. The glass is cold and impossible for her to break. She thinks of the pane shattered, of sharp glistening edges sliding over soft skin. Her tongue runs between her teeth and she closes her eyes and bites down, but not hard enough to draw blood. They don’t like blood. Blood brings needles and straps and stupid men with voices so soft they could choke her.

She doesn’t know how much time passes before she opens her eyes again. It doesn’t matter. One moment ticks into the next and nothing changes. She feels cold all the time but doesn’t tell anyone. They might give her more blankets or turn the heating up. Instead she perches on the edge of her bed and shivers. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap and her chin is raised. The walls wait, grey and silent, and she waits with them.

Harry is dead, they tell her, but they’re lying. She looks down at her hands as they clench, pretending to grip crimson silk, twist it round and round and round her fingers and wrists. She thinks of all the pretty dresses she once had, and all the pretty shoes. She wishes they would give her a mirror. Her skin is sickly pale and her hair is lank but she would like to see her eyes again. If only she could see them, she could see herself. Cognito ergo sum, she thinks and laughs - thin and raw - because it’s not nearly enough.

Finally, something changes.

There’s a strange cabinet sitting next to her desk. It arrived in the night to a ghastly sound, but she wasn’t going to greet visitors in the middle of the night so she turned over and kept her eyes tightly shut until she fell back asleep.

It’s morning now, but early. Breakfast hasn’t arrived yet. Lucy wonders what they’ll say about the cabinet. Maybe they’ll say nothing at all. Maybe it’s not real. It’s a sad thought; if she must imagine things, she’d much prefer her mind to come up with something more interesting than a tall grey box.

But she can’t ignore it however hard she tries. She glances at it again and again until she’s convinced it must be real. She’s almost ready to stand up, to go and try to touch it, when the cabinet doors swing open and out steps a man with a neat greying beard, dressed all in black. Lucy frowns and tilts her head so as she makes quite sure that she doesn’t know who this is. After a moment her lips form a surprised oh and she stands up. “Good morning,” she says and resists the urge to curtsey.

Before she met Harry, she would have found the way this man looks at her frightening, but now she merely offers a polite smile and waits. “Mrs Saxon,” he says, and gives her a slight bow, his eyes never leaving her face. “A pleasure to meet you at last. I must confess, I’ve been most curious about you ever since I heard of your part in, ah, bringing about the temporary destruction of Earth.”

Lucy’s eyes widen. “You weren’t on the Valiant,” she says.

His smile grows. “Temporally, that’s correct.”

She steps towards him, studying his expression carefully. She raises a hand to his face, but doesn’t touch him. He makes no move, but seems amused by her. She shivers. “Do you recognise me now?” he asks.

She wonders what he’d like her to say, then decides she doesn’t care. “You’re not Harry,” she tells him, as though that’s the only thing that matters.

“Indeed not,” he says. “But I am the Master.”

Lucy screws up her nose. “So what? Masters and Doctors and Professors too, I suppose? I didn’t much like university.”

“Neither did I.”

She opens her mouth and stops herself from asking why not. She can feel the curiosity slipping through her mind like a silky serpent. She slaps it down and looks away from him. Did he do that? Harry liked to play inside her head sometimes and he wasn’t careful about putting everything back where he found it.

“Aren’t you bored here?” asks the man-who-isn’t-Harry.

“No.”

“Then I should just leave?” There’s a low, vicious quality to his voice now, one that she recognises. Harry always liked to get his own way too.

She shrugs. Before she didn’t understand, now she doesn’t much care.

But as he turns on his heel she feels something slip away inside her head and she steps forward. One footfall: it’s enough for him to pause, his back to her. “You’re quite welcome to visit,” she says.

He makes a low noise, a snort of derision or amusement, she can’t tell, but the next moment both he and the cabinet are gone. The noise the thing makes is no better in the daytime. Lucy walks over to where the cabinet stood and crouches down, presses her palm to the ground. She closes her eyes and listens. The floor does not hum beneath her hand. She smiles.

Two days later the cabinet reappears. Lucy sits on the bed and kicks out her heels and doesn’t pay it the least bit of attention. It doesn’t have to be real, not to her.

“I brought you a gift,” he says - when he finally decides to appear - and hands her a small blue box with a white ribbon tied around it. She tugs at the bow and tosses the ribbon aside. Inside the box, there’s a pendant: it’s circular and silver, a pattern of shining white crystals spiral across its surface. She pulls it out by the chain and lets it swing, once, twice, before she looks up at him.

“Harry bought me gifts,” she says.

“I didn’t buy it,” he tells her. “I stole it.” She detects a hint of pride in his voice.

“They won’t let me keep it,” she says, her fingers tightening around the pendant. It’s very pretty. And such a solid weight in her palm. The crystals (are they diamonds? Oh, she hopes that they’re diamonds) glisten like a tiny constellation trapped in a perfect silver sky, just for her.

“Then don’t let them find it.”

Once he leaves she curls up on the bed and cradles the pendant in both hands. When she hears the footsteps in the corridor outside, she slips it under her pillow and sits up, hands resting on her lap, eyes glazed into the distance. Her face is a mask of pale flesh and dull eyes. Inside, a warm glow rests comfortably in her chest.

The next time he visits, the cabinet has materialised in the corner, but she only sees him when he enters her room by a more conventional route. Just after Doctor Parsons - who is not Doctor Parsons after all but a wrinkly old alien wearing Doctor Parsons as a suit – has dashed in, not bothering to knock, but smashing the door open with a horrid splintering noise that makes Lucy shriek.

The alien turns to her, snarling syllables that make no sense, but she understands the weapon in his hand well enough. She feels herself start to slip away from the world, back into the blankness of her own mind when, quite suddenly, the alien is no longer towering over her but is lying on the floor and is no bigger than a doll.

She stares down at the tiny corpse and touches her fingers to her lips, trying to stifle a giggle.

He appears in the doorway and she applauds. “Oh, that’s very clever,” she says. She looks at the weapon in his hand. “Harry never had one of those.” It didn’t look flashy at all, this marvellous shrinking ray, not like Harry’s silly laser toy that made pretty lights and could never kill that awful captain who smiled with his teeth and didn’t know how to keep quiet.

“Do you still have the pendant?” he asks. She nods, retrieves it from under her pillow. “Excellent,” he says crisply. He opens the cabinet door and steps aside. “I don’t imagine UNIT will take kindly to this little incident. Shall we go or would you prefer to be left to their tedious mercies?”

Lucy smiles and walks into the cabinet as though she’s walking into a wonderful dream.

-

“You can sleep here.” He opens the door and Lucy isn’t sure what to expect. She isn’t sure if she’s a prisoner or a guest or a curious specimen on a slide.

The room is comfortable and warm. A tall heavy wardrobe stands in the corner, a bureau sits in the middle of the far wall. The bed is large, with a beautifully crafted wooden headboard. It looks deliciously comfortable. Lucy rushes to the mirror and stares at herself, into her eyes. They are still perfectly, beautifully blue. She breathes a sigh of relief, and then remembers that he’s still there.

She straightens up, schools her face into an expression of polite interest. “Very nice,” she says.

“I’ll see you in the morning, Mrs Saxon.” He gives her a short bow. “Good night. I hope you sleep well.” The door shuts softly behind him.

She expects him to return, despite his words, but he doesn’t. Eventually, she crawls under the blankets and she sleeps.

-

He refuses to let him call her Harry. She asks twice, to make sure that he really isn’t Harry, and while he is certainly irritated at her repeating the question – and she isn’t sure she’d dare ask a third time – his temper is held carefully in check.

She deliberately tries to annoy him. Little things, things she can deny: misplaced Zeus plugs or a dial on the console accidently turned the wrong way. She feels him watching her out of the corners of his eyes and she wonders how much he knows and how much he guesses. She doesn’t understand much about time travel, but she knows paradoxes can be very dangerous, very powerful things.

She spends most of her time wandering the ship, one hand trailing along the wall as she moves along corridors wending from room to room. Lights gently brighten as she approaches and dim as she passes. She rather likes that and whispers her thanks to the ship. It hums beneath her fingers and she knows it’s alive.

Night after night, she expects him. During the day, she realises it’s not just that he doesn’t ever touch her like Harry did, but he seems averse to touching her at all. He’s never kissed her, never even taken her hand. In all her time on the TARDIS, she can’t recall him even taking off his gloves.

Sometimes she secludes herself in her room, the TARDIS providing everything she needs to survive. Sometimes she spends days exploring without ever seeing the same part of the ship twice. Sometimes she’s alone because he’s gone and she doesn’t know where and there’s no way for her to get out.

One day, she wants to get out.

The TARDIS won’t help. She doesn’t know if it can, if it wants to. She doesn’t understand the console but she knows the control that opens the doors and it doesn’t work. She presses every button, turns every dial, pushes every lever and none of them seem to do anything. She’s locked in and trapped and alone.

She hits the doors, again and again. She hits them until she doesn’t know how to stop. Panic has swelled inside her chest dissolving reason and she has to get out, she has to get out so she can breathe before the monster inside her chest swallows her whole.

Her fists are raw and bleeding and the blood is slippery and she can smell it. She screams and sobs herself into exhaustion. Her bloodied hands disgust her, too much red, too much red, and she feels sick as she stumbles back and falls softly to the floor.

She is aware of the door finally opening, of being stepped over, and of a huff of irritation. She is still. Her eyes, she thinks, are open.

“Lucy?” The voice is gentle. He crouches next to her, one gloved hand strokes her hair off her face.

She’s too tired to move. She doesn’t want to. Maybe, maybe if she is very still it will all stop.

She realises she’s looking into his eyes and she can hear him speaking, but the words don’t make sense and she realises that that’s okay even though she knows it’s not. He’s doing this, not her, it’s his fault and she’s so tired. She feels warm and safe and it’s so easy to go to sleep now.

When she wakes, she finds herself in her bed. She’s scared to move. Her hands are sore but she sees that the wounds have been cleaned and bandaged. Carefully she swallows and thinks back. She feels like herself, her memories feel like she thinks they should, but then that’s the trick, isn’t it? His trick.

She dresses calmly and brushes her hair methodically, counting the strokes of the brush. There is nothing safe here, she knows that, but she did sleep well.

The Master’s in the console room. There’s no sign of her blood.

“How do you feel this morning?” he asks.

“Like I’ve forgotten something,” she says.

“You haven’t, you know.” He folds his arms. She nods slightly and feels a pinch of anger because, damn it, she believes him. “Do you want to go home?” he asks.

“No.”

He looks down at the console, at a scanner screen, and she can see he’s reading something off it. “Tell me what you know about Daleks.”

“I know you’re afraid of them.”

“I see,” he says evenly, and she wonders what feeling he’s trying to hide. Harry, even when still, had always been running. The Master moves like a knight on a chessboard.

“I can’t stay locked up here,” she says. “One prison is much the same as another.”

“The humans would say they locked you up for your own good.”

She tilts her chin up. “Is that what you’d say?”

“No, you stayed in the TARDIS for my own good. You were a liability.”

“Past tense,” she murmurs.

“Indeed.”

-

The Master invites her to dinner and she accepts graciously. She wears black and drinks too much wine. Nobody dies. It makes a novel change.

She discovers that there are more ways to destroy suns and planets and galaxies than she could ever have imagined. The Master doesn’t often try to actually use such doomsday weapons, but he seems to delight in their discovery, in taking them apart and putting them together again.

Twice she catches site of a white-haired man in a velvet coat and the Master has rushed her back to the TARDIS and dematerialised with no explanation.

In Vienna, on Draconia and Marinus, in Buenos Aires she dances, because she can. She’s always liked to dance. But she’s never understood why.

“This is why,” the Master says and she follows him out onto a dead world with a starless sky; the only source of light comes from the console room inside the TARDIS.

“I’ve been here before.” She looks up. Blackness, the abyss: eternity looks a lot smaller than it used to.

“This is always the destination,” he says. “Matter decays, entropy increases. Why not take what you want when there can be only one end to it all?” He takes her hand. “What do you want, Lucy?”

She thinks about Martha Jones and all her clever words, about the Doctor and his silence. She thinks about Harry. She thinks for a long time before she replies.

“An open sky,” she says. “Preferably in silver.”