There's a trick with a knife I'm learning to do.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

It was yet another sunny morning. On the lake's grassy bank near Frontierland, Una Persson lay stretched out on her stomach on a beach towel, wearing a blue maillot and reading a pristine first edition of Du côté de chez Swann that she'd borrowed from the Doctor. A blue silk caftan lay neatly folded nearby. As she read, she ate an apple, cutting slices off with her clasp knife, and reflected that unnerving though the park's absence of insect life was, it was pleasant to not have to worry about ants for once.

She'd always wanted to read À la recherche du temps perdu, but she'd never had the time. Now, having nothing but Time of a sort and the TARDIS library at her disposal, she reckoned she should take the opportunity. But between the oddly soothing quality of Proust's prose and the soporific warmth of the day, Una soon found her eyelids growing heavy. She took off her sunglasses and put her head down, thinking to rest for just a moment. Soon she was dozing like a cat in the sun, the breeze occasionally ruffling her hair and the pages of the open book, a half-eaten apple and the open clasp knife near her elbow.

((Some small number of days after Una's latest confab with Starbuck. Closed to Una and the Master; of course, as long as they're outside, passersby who might conceivably be in the area could easily catch sight of them, but it's probably best not to interfere.  ^_^))

((ETA: *facepalm* Do I really have to say anything, warning-wise? We should know better than to leave them around sharp objects...))

Comments

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

Someone sat down next to her silently, picking up the apple and the knife and cutting a piece for himself.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

After a little while, something in Una's drowsing consciousness became aware that first, she was not sleeping in anything like her usual space and second, that there was someone or something nearby. With a little murmur and sigh, she rolled onto her side and slowly opened her eyes. And found herself looking more or less at the Master's hip.

Once the identity of the sitter registered, all drowsiness fell off very quickly, replaced by a combination of surprise, wariness, and something unsettlingly like relief. She rubbed her eyes and pushed herself up on her elbow, blinking at him.

"Hello."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

There was a whispery sound from the knife and he offered another slice of the apple to her. "It's a wonder you don't burn alive out here." He blinked up at the sun a moment, then back down at her. "How's the tan coming?"

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

She reached out to take the apple slice. At his question, she glanced down appraisingly at her shoulder and twitched the strap aside. "You tell me," she said. "Oddly, one doesn't seem to sunburn here. Unnerving like so much else, but I'm not complaining."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

He gave her shoulder a careful once over. "Darker than last time, looks like. Makes you wonder about the sun, though, doesn't it? Or the atmosphere, at any rate." He twitched her strap back into place with a wicked smirk.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"One of many things to wonder about," she murmured, smoothing the strap down. She smiled up at him, a little ironically.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"Was that an indirect inquiry, or were you being facetious?" He caught a strand of her hair as it was taken up by the breeze and wrapped it once around his finger.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Fair logic," she said. "Certainly goes some way towards explaining the various adventures you and he have told me about. Nicely tension-fraught, exotic locations, and able to be wrapped up in a few hours, at least from the viewer's perspective." Her lightly ironic tone covered a certain amount of existential dread. It'd probably all hit her much harder later.

In the meantime, it was easier to riff on the ideas with her own experiences. "You know, there's a good friend of mine, a Mr Moorcock, who's been borrowing my accounts of my own adventures and publishing them as fiction.* Obviously it all makes a much easier sell, because really, what ordinary person would believe, say, the story of an Edwardian adventurer displaced into an alternate 1976. Perhaps I'm not really me. Perhaps I'm Mr Moorcock's version of me." She shrugged; the gesture was careless, but there was a hint of that dread in her eyes. "Or does it really matter?"

*((And yes, this conceit is genuinely canon.))

((Also, this seems like a good time to point out that I've been ignoring the bit in The Condition of Muzak where someone observes that a guest at Jerry's Christmas party is "dressed as Doctor Who", and goes on to wonder if the theme of the party is characters from British folklore.))

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"He came up with a theory," the Master said suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere. "In our universe, what is commonly thought of as the devil is actually a rather vicious alien entity who was trapped on a planet stuck at the edges of a black hole. Being near that black hole caused what we call a bleed-through, a dispersal across the universe, containing certain subconscious frequencies. Which explained why Satan looked so similar between so many planets and species across the universe."

He leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the sky, staring directly into the sun for longer than any human should. "Bleed-through can be pan-dimensional, far as we know. Maybe in some other universe, that gentleman you're talking about has never actually met you. He only claims he has in writing because another version of him did, and he experiences that. Sometimes when he dreams. Sometimes in random waking moments he just goes away for a while." He looks back down at her. "Or you're right. Suppose it's anyone's guess."

((Aaaaahahahaaaa. Of course, it might just be that Una's not too familiar with the show, and the guy was dressed as a Doctor she's never seen clothes for before. ^_^))

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

It was a surprisingly poetic image, and Una found she liked it, and that it eased the dread somewhat. "So the dream becomes the artist's way along the moonbeam roads, across the multiverse. They're travellers too, dreamthieves, even though they don't realise it." She twisted around to recline on her side again, facing him. "It's a good theory. Not least because it allows us to maintain a belief in free will."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"And belief in, oh, reality," the Master pointed out. "Though we were having a laugh trying to reconcile so many years of hostility for the sake of petty entertainment of the masses. Not sure that anything could surprise me, at this point."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Feels vaguely insulting, when you put it that way," Una observed. "Trivialising of one's own experiences. I wonder if that other Mr Moorcock, wherever he might be, is using my friends and me to advance a political agenda. Given the sorts of things I've been through, I can't imagine what else he'd do with it."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"He also might just like shocking people." The Master turned the knife over in his hand again. "Seeing as the relationships you engage in are scarcely the society-accepted sort. More than anything, it just leads to a desire to question every action you take, so it's not very useful."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

The really worrying thing was that with anything she was doing along the body-language train of thought, she wasn't even trying. It was as if it had all become second nature to the way she acted on him, and as with most alarming thoughts, it was less a warning than a further incitement. As she listened to his explanation, she pushed herself up so that she was half-sitting, half-lounging, but still not disengaging from him or attempting to push him back. She met his gaze evenly, inscrutable again, albeit with a gleam in the eye that might have been mischief or fever.

She let him finish talking and was quiet for a moment, processing what he'd said. Trying to get her own trains of thought properly sorted.

"That's like the Lords of Law and Chaos in the Multiverse," she said. "Gods or guardians or whatever you might call them. Your Toymaker ... that's the sort of thing Arioch of Chaos would do if he could, but—" An appalling possibility suddenly occurred to her. "But in a parallel or dimension where Chaos was stronger or where it had more power at its disposal, then the Lords could—They—" Calm inscrutability was slowly being replaced with growing alarm. "'Gets to keep you'?" she exclaimed.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"Mm-hm," the Master confirmed, grinning in a way that was highly disturbing considering the topic of conversation. "Tin solider in the Toy Room forever. He loves a challenge, though. Interesting opponents." He drew a hand up her arm, brushing hair away from her shoulder.

And now the body language had taken on more than one meaning, and tied itself into the conversation to confuse matters. He was enjoying the duality a bit too much.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

Una sat up a little straighter and rubbed both hands over her face, trying to clear her head. Suddenly there was far, far too much going on at once, and she was having to try not to feel outmatched.

"And you think this would be just his sort of thing, then? The interesting match-ups from the same time-streams, the little humiliations...? All right." Rather than shying away from the touch to her arm, she leaned forward a little. "Let's assume that what you're saying is true, then. Might as well, as we've little enough else to go on. If there's a game, what is it? And is it usually this ... subtle?"

Another appalling thought occurred to her. If you accepted "tin soldier in the Toy Room", then Leon Orcot's ramblings about ducks suddenly seemed less mad...

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

Throwing her off balance was helping him, really. So was having an idea, even an inkling. Tracing his old familiar patterns, making connections within his own frame of reference. "From what I've heard, his games tended to be less subtle in the past. Comical, even. Capture the Flag, that sort of nonsense. No reason to think he couldn't have changed. Maybe he's another version of the same figure. Bringing people together like this certainly sounds like something he or one of his cousins would do." He snuck a hand under her leg, teasing at the back of her calf, while the other hand traced the shell of her ear.

"They haven't been seen in our universe for some time," he said, and his smile vanished. "There was a... well, a war, and couldn't stand the carnage, so they left. They could have always come back, I suppose." He had probably rushed that part a bit.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

She laughed suddenly, incongruously. The caress against her calf had something to do with it. "Bleed-through again, or something like it. What looks like a Lord of Chaos to me looks like a Black Guardian or Toymaker to you, and ... oh, who knows, perhaps the Great Cthulhu to another. But they all have a common source, and the thing that's got us here is another aspect or variation." Almost absentmindedly, she caught the hand at her ear, trapping his little finger and holding him there as if she wasn't sure what to do, or possibly wasn't even aware that she had him.

Then a careful, searching glance. "Must have been pretty bad," she said.

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"It would certainly explain the three of us," he decided, but didn't expand on that theory. Funny enough, the three that he was referring to was himself, the other and the Rani. Average run of mill Time Lords would have been out of the question. And what better than to throw the old crew together, to see if something would piece back together or simply shatter in new places.

When she caught his hand, his eyes followed the movement, then traveled back to her eyes, her lips, the curve of her neck and down. He could wait or move again. Either was still an option, but then that cautious comment brought it up short. "Yes," he said slowly, drawing the syllable out as he waited for inspiration to show him where to take it. "Long and brutal thing. Changed the shape of the universe as it was known." And there was the Rhythm, drowning that place they had taken up in his head, a sort of emptiness he had never planned for.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"There's any number of time streams where the society I knew failed to flourish," she said with a slight shrug. She was looking off at some point in middle distance, seeming to have forgotten about his hand on her ankles. "So. Surely, then, there's got to be some way to communicate with the—the Toymaker or whatever it is." She remembered the Doctor shouting in his console room and her mouth twisted wryly. "And I expect simply standing up and shouting 'You, whoever you are, I want to talk to you' isn't going to cut it."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"No, as that would imply that you had the right to speak with them," the Master agreed. "Still, it's too bad something more dramatic wouldn't work. Like a challenge. I suppose we'd have to get good enough at disturbing the balance of this place before that happened."

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Then perhaps you need to follow through on that plan to take over the park with the Rani and the T-Rex," she said. Perfectly straight-faced, that, with only a tiny quirk of a smile on the end betraying her intense amusement at the concept. "That might catch their attention effectively, if done well."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

"It true." Though he looked more than a little chagrined to admit it. "Of course, if it didn't work, not only would it have been a waste of time and effort, but I'd probably wind up imprisoned by this lot. Or put under 'house arrest' as they'd likely put it, since they don't have a backbone between two dozen of them." He crossed his wrists like one condemned.

[una-harlequin.livejournal.com]

"Perhaps they haven't been pushed hard enough," she mused, wondering exactly what it would take to shove the rational, pacifistic, make-nice sorts over the edge. She caught hold of his crossed wrists with one hand, absent-mindedly as she shaded her eyes with the other hand and blinked up at the sun. "Getting warmer out here," she said. "You can't be comfortable. Perhaps we should continue this conversation indoors."

[hear-the-drums.livejournal.com]

Truth was, it was warm. Unbearably so for him, which was why he generally avoided the hottest parts of the day in this place. Easy enough to tell already from the sweat trickling down behind his ear. But bringing the whole thing up in that particular manner wasn't quite the best way to get compliance out of him. "Oh, you needn't jeopardise your leisure for my sake. Unless, of course, I'm... worrying you."