The Master leaves a trail of things from the entrance of the TARDIS to where he eventually settles; a discarded glass with melting ice cubes and the remnants of scotch on the console in the control room, his tie draped over the door knob of the doors leading into the TARDIS interior, his jacket in the hallway, shoes right outside the bedroom door. Annoyingly, it's the Doctor's bedroom door and he sprawls himself proprietarially across the neatly made bed, shirt unbuttoned halfway and cufflings clattered onto Theta's bedside table. How stupidly intimate.

He settles back with his - appropriated from the Doctor's library, but still his - copy of The Art of War, dogeared once again (as it was in a timeline that has since ceased to exist), and flips to the page he'd been reading before the Doctor's lesser alternate interrupted him. Patience, as he told that poor pathetic alternate, is a virtue. He'll wait here all night, rather than go looking for the Doctor, just to let him know the news. Deals with the devil are always so gossip-worthy.

At first, he dreams of nonsensical things.

The grass is red beneath him, warmed by twin suns in an orange sky. And he's just a child observing the turn of the universe through the in-and-out focus of his eyes on the too-close blades of grass he's lying face down in. Beside him, sprawled in the close and innocent comfort of children, is his best - perhaps only - friend. The other boy's blond hair mingles with the grass, skews his own observation of how the universe turns, while he stares up at the sky and finds non-existent constellations in the clouds.

The comfort of his dreams is fleeting, the innocence, and soon that awful noise is at the forefront of his subconscious mind. The pounding, drumming, unrelenting and constant. Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap.

His dreams never gain coherence, never cohesively fit together into something he can call a story, but he feels that they progress in a non-linear fashion from the beginning to the end - several ends - and he is always the Master seeking to control some elusive thing just beyond his reach. It slips through his grasp, always so close and yet so very far away, leaving him needlessly frustrated when he wakes, irritable and disappointed in himself.

More times than he can count, he dreams of destroying everything - the universe and all that's in it - and once of almost succeeding. Death, destruction, fire and ice, the way the center of the universe burns and how time swirls around it all, pointless and supreme. At times he gasps for air he can't have, at others he's enlivened with energy closely bound with death and rebirth and flames that he can almost taste and feel coursing through the blood pumped by twin hearts. And once he dreams of unnatural cold and darkness at the corners of his waking vision, of being the tiniest grain of awareness in a discarded husk, of being nothing more than an animated corpse. It's maddening, all of it.

John is there, always, and it frightens him more than just a little. It isn't later, not until Captain Harkness finds them and the truth is revealed, that he understands his dreams - his nightmares, the awful stitching together of chaotic story after chaotic story - and how John, the Doctor, fits into them.

Now, roaming around in a blue box (like the one in the Sanctuary, except not, he realizes) that's much larger on the inside, everything feels less real. The world, despite taking yet another turn towards the fantastic and holding something so unbelievably familiar tantalizingly at arm's length, seems like a painting made in muted colors left to yellow with time and disrepair. Harry only feels truly awake when he isn't, delving into the imperfect world of night terrors - power and control and hatred and rage - that comprise the man, the alien, the Doctor wishes him to become - to be again. It seems like his dreams, despite every horrible thing in them or because of it, are the only place he can really feel John again, even knowing it's just the Doctor, the ancient and forever Lord of Time, skewed by his own human perspective. This is something they shared, the odd sense of connection that brought them together and kept them there, but he's stopped exploring the depths of the dreams altogether. It's pointless, he already knows the story, and it seems hollow now that John is ... gone.

Harry sits in one of the kitchens in the blue box - the only one that actually seems to have tea - for lack of anything better to do for the hours between the stretch of painfully real images most people call 'awake.' He doesn't roam far between this kitchen and the room he dreams in because it upsets Captain Harkness - and now, after so many nights of dreams, he understands why. Ridiculously, he keeps looking at his hands around the warm mug of tea and expecting them to still be bloodstained.

No wonder they're shaking.

Doctor.

Very fitting, isn't it, that the single word used to bring me down is the one you chose for yourself?

Doctor.

I had anticipated your every move this time. You were mine, at long last, to do with as I wanted. To bend and break. To defeat, finally. I had you. I would have had all of you - every single of inch - if it weren't for that one, damnable word.

Doctor.

Do you think the tables have turned? Do you think you've won? Here I am, defeated and in chains, at the mercy of your precious humans, but no. I know the truth. I can hear it, past the steel and cement and distance between us, pounding in that brilliant head of yours. The only one left in the universe - you saw to that - and so fitting, so perfect that it's the only one worthy of my attention. You still have the little gift I gave you. Your own personal set of drums, beating at my tempo.

Doctor.

It isn't over. You're as much my prisoner as I am yours.

It's good, isn't it?

It's lonely here, there's no one left to torture.


Chances are good this is not the Master you're looking for. He isn't camp, he isn't fluff, and he sure as hell isn't obsessed with children's television programs (apart from a very fleeting and sarcastic fancy). Also, just for good measure, he doesn't shrink people anymore, though he agrees that it was a most awful way to kill folk - compress them to death, ouch.

This Master, for the purposes of the alternate universe (deviating wildly from canon, that is) storyline in medias res, is utterly and quite completely mad. Off his rocker. Batshit crazy, if you please. While his plans for universal domination haven't changed, his methods of obtaining said control quite radically have. Like I've said, he's no longer shrinking people.

While, given the nature of the current storyline being played (see renegade outpost for more detail), you are not likely to see this Master in an open role play setting, I feel the nature of his deviated characterization is rather worth a mention. Adult material will be in frequent address, I'm certain, and much of it will be omnisexual friendly* - it goes without saying that a lot of said material will be on the darker side. Mostly, folk, he's being played in a Torchwood centric storyline; naturally, Torchwood deals with darker themes and is aired post-watershed, so none of this will be rated for people not of the age of consent.

End rant.

* Omnisexual Friendly: Considering the fact that I also play Captain Jack Harkness, it seems more politically correct to coin this term than to simply say "slash." The Master is an equal opportunity Time Lord, so long as the ends justifies his means, and that could be slash, het, non-human sentient lifeforms (as in the only other Time Lord in the universe), and every flavor in between. People get squicked by all manner of things, so this is a general warning. There will likely be a little bit of everything here.


( need-to-know, prior to play )


Any questions, comments, or concerns may be directed to the comments of this post (out of character, naturally) and will be answered as directly as possible without giving away un-give-away-able information pertaining to currently unrevealed plot points. And so on.

Thank you.

- the Management.