Fic: Honeymooners (1/2)
20/1/11 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neveralarchHoneymooners
Doctor Who, Classic Series
Rating: PG-13
(off-screen sex, violence, swearing, mad science)
Characters: Ushas/Koschei or Rani/Master, Two(/Master) and Three, Braxiatel.
Wordcount: 10,500ish, separated into two posts.
Summary: The Master and the Rani had made it as far as the Monan Host's homeworld cluster before they broke up. Spanning the gap between The War Games and Terror of the Autons.
A/N: A response to this prompt on the b_e anonmeme. A prequel to The Amazon, taking off from the quote in the summary. Beta thanks to the inestimable and incomparable![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
birdsarecalling and roachpatrol !
Koschei's hands after his regeneration were long and slim and dark. He rather liked them, even marred as they were by the heavy metal cuffs around his wrists.
"Is this really necessary?" he asked the guard.
"Yes. Now shut up and wait for your work detail supervisor."
Koschei nodded amiably and sat down on the floor of the corridor, folding his knees up to his chin. The guard glared at him, but didn't move. Koschei blew out a deep breath and leaned back, still getting used to this gangly new body and his rather reduced new situation. He rubbed at his chin and was mildly disappointed to find it clean-shaven.
It wasn't as if he'd really expected the Doctor to rescue him from the Time Lords. No. That would have been too much to hope for, even - or especially - from the Doctor. But Koschei did feel as if he should be angry about the Doctor abandoning him, and he wasn't. This new self was a little mellower than he was used to, honestly. It could just be the lingering effect of a difficult and delayed regeneration, but it was odd all the same.
Footsteps sounded down the corridor and the guard stood a little straighter. Koschei thought about getting up, but it seemed like too much trouble. He played with the hem of the worn black robe he'd been given as a uniform instead.
"Right, I'm here, what?" The voice was familiar. Koschei looked up at a dark-haired woman in a uniform of her own.
"New assistant for you," said the guard. "Sign here."
"They can't have found someone- oh, it's you," said Ushas, looking down at Koschei. Her mouth twisted with an emotion that he couldn't identify. "Fine." She took a datapad from the guard and scribbled on it.
"Me," agreed Koschei, a beat too late. "I hadn't realized that they had got you as well."
"A trumped-up charge about importing exotic birds seems to be enough to put you in CIA custody these days," said Ushas. Her lips quirked again, this time in obvious amusement. Koschei felt a brief, familiar unease at the idea of being laughed at before that feeling was subsumed by the pool of calm in his stomach.
"Giant face-eating birds," muttered the guard.
"I don't recall asking your opinion," said Ushas. "Run along now, and let me start breaking him in."
The guard did so, with another mutter that sounded suspiciously like 'better him than me.' Koschei looked after him, belatedly recalling his cuffs.
"Wasn't he supposed to take these off?" Koschei asked.
"Here." Ushas produced a key from a pocket of her uniform and bent down to unlock the cuffs. "This was sent to me earlier this morning. I think they were worried you'd suborn the guard and so on." The cuffs came away and Ushas tucked them into her pocket along with the key, making an ugly bulge at her hip. "Get up, let's go."
Koschei pushed himself up slowly, ending up about a head over Ushas. Last time they'd met, she'd been taller. Was she still in the same body? She looked different, but it had been a while.
Ushas was already striding down the corridor, not looking back to see if Koschei was following. He did, in the absence of anything better to do.
"We all heard about the little affair with the War Lord, of course," said Ushas. "The Doctor got himself brought in over that as well, didn't he?"
"I don't know," said Koschei. "I was in regeneration sickness until about an hour ago. Then all I got was the 'secret prison think-tank' debriefing."
"Well, apparently the Doctor's got himself drafted for CIA service as well. Not here, thank Rassilon. I don't think I could handle both of you."
"Why am I here?" asked Koschei, his brain finally starting to tick over into curiosity. "You haven’t changed fields of study in my time away, I’m sure, and I'm hardly a biologist or a chemist."
"I've been putting in requests for a practical engineer and a general assistant since my third day here. It looks like they decided you could serve for both." They'd reached a door, and Ushas waved her hand at it, stepping in as the door pulled into a recess. "Now, Koschei-"
"Don't call me that," said Koschei. He rubbed at his wrists, feeling the raw spots where the cuffs had chafed.
"Oh, this is- fine." Ushas stopped walking and rolled her eyes, just to show him how absurd he was being. "I'm going to have to introduce you as something. What would you like to be called?"
"I-" He wasn't the War Chief anymore. And there was definitely something, but he couldn't think what, and this regeneration was really indecisive as well, wasn't it? Koschei grimaced and rubbed at his wrists some more. He thought he might have imprinted on the cuffs, having them on so soon after his regeneration. That could be a little inconvenient.
"I'll just say you're my new assistant for now, shall I?" said Ushas, already out of patience. She still had that tendency to rush, though Koschei felt sure that he’d been able to keep up with her before.
Koschei nodded vaguely, still thinking. Ushas glared at him and dragged him by the arm through the entry room and into a laboratory off to the side.
"Lideen! Lideen, they finally sent me an assistant."
The laboratory was obviously that of another chemist, this one an older-looking Time Lady with a pale coloring and wide brown eyes. Or perhaps they were only wide now, as she frowned at Ushas' bursting in.
"I'm in the midst of a delicate experiment," she said, shortly. Her hands shook slightly as they steadied a rounded flask that had nearly tipped out of its stand at Ushas' arrival. "And don't you mean they sent us an assistant?"
"If you like," said Ushas. "We'll just leave you to it, shall we?"
Koschei managed to get away with just following this time.
"Is that Lideen as in Lideenastrobia? The professor that got kicked out of the academy in our fifteenth year?"
"The same," said Ushas. "For poisoning Borusa, as it turns out. I only wish it had been fatal, and apparently so does Lideen. Not accidental, from what she tells me. Here's my lab."
It was as neat and spare as Ushas' workspaces had always been. Koschei shrugged, unsure of what he was supposed to say.
"There are cots laid out in the rooms on the other side of the entry room," continued Ushas. She went and picked up a machine from under one of her tables, laying out a set of spare parts. "Not much in the way of comforts, I'm afraid."
"I expected as much," said Koschei, shrugging again. "What's that you've got there?"
"Ah, now, this is why I wanted a technician," said Ushas. "This is our way out. I’ve been ordering pieces for a solvent phase accelerator, and-"
Koschei drifted closer, ignoring Ushas’ explanation of her no doubt ingenious machinations. The machine was obviously an early stage of something dimensionally transcendental, whatever she said. Without thinking Koschei picked up a screwdriver and started poking around.
"Careful," warned Ushas. "The compounds inside aren't very stable-"
"Because the housing isn't joined together properly," said Koschei. "What is this? It looks like a homing beacon, but it feels almost like a TARDIS."
"It's more or less both," said Ushas. "It should let us do a jump to the nearest unoccupied TARDIS and take it off-world. Since the closest ones are unmarked CIA TARDISes, we shouldn't have any trouble getting clearance, you see?"
"The relays aren't even in sync is what I see," said Koschei.
"I've already admitted that I need your help," said Ushas. "You needn't be so difficult."
"Is Lideen in on this?" asked Koschei. It actually was a very clever design, despite its technical problems.
"No, she's not trustworthy."
"And I am?" Koschei took the casing off entirely, exposing the tangle of wires within.
"I trust you to want to get out," said Ushas. She smiled, thinly. "I got lucky that you were assigned - I know more about your motivations than I do about some random criminal. You'll go along with my plans for now, won't you."
"Yes," admitted Koschei. It would be far easier to take advantage of Ushas’ plan than it would be to make up his own from whole cloth.
"Good. Let's put that away for now, then. We'll work on it while Lideen is asleep, and do our assigned projects until then."
Koschei nodded, and the machine disappeared under the table again.
---
After working for the War Lord for so long, Koschei had gotten used to performing tedious tasks for superiors he didn't like or respect. As such, his work in the laboratory was achingly familiar.
Ushas did, in fact, need him to help her with the CIA projects. Koschei adapted to the work quickly, helped by the fact that it was hardly challenging.
"Pass me that test tube, Assistant," said Ushas.
"Don't call me that," grumbled Koschei, passing her the test tube. He watched as Ushas swirled the chemicals together and rubbed idly at the brass bracelets he had found to replace his cuffs.
"Have you decided on a name?" The container began to bubble and fizz, and Ushas slipped her goggles from her hair to cover her eyes. Koschei just took a few steps back, half-sheltering behind another table.
"I'm thinking," he said.
Ushas made a face at him and added something else to her concoction.
She told him what it was for, but Koschei let the words pass over him. All of their chemical work would be handed over to their CIA masters soon enough, and he couldn't bring himself to care about its purpose.
Which was wrong, somehow. Surely he should at least be interested.
"Do you feel different, here?" he asked. "Like things are, I don’t know, muffled. Unimportant."
"No," said Ushas, shortly. She started to decant the mixture into a set of smaller flasks. "Now, this is meant to be ingested by a suspected enemy agent and then, if they attempt to divulge any information, it should eliminate them. We’re having problems with the timing-"
Koschei leant against one of the wire racks of chemical supplies and tried to appear interested.
Working with Ushas left him bored and confused, but working with Lideen was excruciating in a different way.
"Give me the cycled salinic cerul solution." Lideen reached out a hand without looking at Koschei.
"Ah-" Koschei looked around at the various unlabeled containers strewn around Lideen's cluttered lab.
"It's blue," sighed Lideen.
That narrowed it down to about thirty. Koschei picked one at random.
"No," said Lideen, without even looking at him. "Try again."
This would go on for about an hour at a time. Lideen had apparently limitless patience, and though Koschei had a good memory for names, she never actually told him what anything was until he finally found the right chemical.
The best times - the only bearable times - were at night, when Koschei was able to work at something at which he was actually good. With the machine, he was in charge, and could send Ushas on hunts for tools that in no way resembled his perennial hunts for chemicals. After a week, the machine was coming along nicely, and Koschei thought that if only he didn't need to sleep, he and Ushas would be long gone.
Well, that, and Lideen.
"Can't sleep?"
Koschei only had that much warning before Lideen came wandering into Ushas' lab. The woman was far too quiet. He managed to pull a cover over the machine and tinkered with a broken test tube rack instead.
"Not really," he said.
"It's the chemicals," said Lideen. She pulled up a stool from the corner and sat down to watch Koschei fiddle with the essentially irreparable rack.
"Something you've been working with?" Koschei focused on his bracelets, glinting in the light of his dim tablelamp. "You should have warned me.”
"No." Lideen leaned forward, earnest. Her eyes were wide enough that the orbs might come free of their sockets. "No, it's what they've done to your brain chemistry. You can't expect to go through a CIA-aided regeneration and come out entirely yourself."
"You speak from experience?" asked Koschei, lightly.
"Not me. But you feel it, don't you? You're more amiable, not given to questions. Any Time Lord who went renegade wouldn't put up with half of what you take from Ushas and I."
"I do what I have to," said Koschei. He bent over the rack so he couldn't see Lideen at all. When he looked up again, she was gone.
---
The next day, Koschei was tired and a little shaky, strained from wanting to think about what Lideen had said and the bone-deep incuriosity which had sprung up in this regeneration. Or had been cultivated in this regeneration. It was easier to let himself sink into the routine of helping Lideen and Ushas, finally gathering up the samples and taking them to the entry room, where they would be collected by whatever agent had been assigned to them today.
The Doctor was in the entry room.
Koschei's arms tightened around his box of chemistry projects, but the haze made him strong in an odd way, unshakable, and he managed to walk to the table in the center of the room and set the box down.
"We've broken down and resynthesized the 'retcon' you brought us," he said, voice sounding remarkably calm. "Those are in the taller flasks - they're a clear liquid, so be careful with them. The biological weapons are still in development, but we do have a few strains for you to test-"
"Koschei," said the Doctor, his voice choked. "Do you remember me?"
Koschei paused, his fingers still on the rim of the deadly virus he'd been pointing out.
"Yes, of course," he said.
"Oh, oh, I am sorry." The Doctor tried to smile, not quite disguising his miserable look. "When you just started talking, I was afraid-"
"Well, what was I supposed to say, Doctor?" Koschei let himself really look at the Doctor, taking in the dusting of gray in his black cap of hair and the deepened lines in his face. The slumped shoulders that made the Doctor look shorter than ever. His rewards for CIA service, no doubt. "You've come for me at last? I've been waiting so long?"
"No, I don't know." The Doctor ducked his head and stepped closer. "I just wanted to make sure you were all right - I only just found out that you were still alive."
"Here I am, Doctor, I'm still alive. Now, no doubt you have to hurry away before the CIA finds out that you're here."
"They do know," said the Doctor. He took the box away from Koschei, not bothering to steady the contents. "I, ah, made a special request to pick up the results of this week's work."
Koschei nodded, numbly. He wasn’t sure whether to be thankful for CIA meddling in his brain, or to be furious that his anger with the Doctor had been ripped away with him. But he couldn’t work up thankfulness or furiousness, so it was a bit of a moot point.
"Well. Goodbye, Koschei." The Doctor reached out a hand to touch Koschei's shoulder, and then had to catch at the box as he nearly lost grip with his other hand. He careened out of the room and the door slipped closed behind him.
"Don't call me that," whispered Koschei to the empty room.
There was definitely something wrong with him. As soon as he and Ushas were out of here, he would do scans, make a drug regimen, even forcibly regenerate if he had to.
His hands hurt, and Koschei flexed them out of the white-knuckled fists they'd formed.
"Was that the Doctor?" Ushas came out of her lab, stripping off rubber gloves. "Has he been wearing that ridiculous coat the entire time?"
"We're nearly ready," said Koschei, ignoring the question. "Tonight."
"Mm? Good."
Koschei could feel Ushas' eyes on him as he went to help Lideen with her latest project.
---
The machine was indeed finished that night, or, more accurately, in the space between first and second dawn. Ushas had gone to rest a few spans before, so Koschei was alone as he taped the last few wires and slipped them into place. He screwed the housing back together and stared.
No more CIA imprisonment. No more fetching and carrying for Lideen. Probably some more fetching and carrying for Ushas, but he'd see what he could do to keep that to a minimum.
Koschei stretched, finally looking up from his machine, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness away from the circle of light made by his lamp. Then he yelped as a sharp pain stabbed at his neck.
"Should pay more attention to your surroundings," hummed Lideen, behind him. Koschei started to fall forward, and she caught him, lowering him gently to the table. Koschei blinked, slowly. His brain felt like it was beginning to run out his ears. Lideen set down a syringe on the table, coming around to pick up the machine.
"It was nice of you to help me put this paralytic together. Not that you knew what you were assisting me with. And it was very nice of you to put all this time into your little machine, just so I could escape," Lideen grinned, and patted Koschei on the shoulder, just where the Doctor had touched him before. "Your sacrifice is appreciated."
Koschei nodded, watching the color drain from his vision. He should probably be upset, but, well.
"This button here, is it?" asked Lideen. "Thanks, kid."
"Don't call me kid," mumbled Koschei. He was going to die without having had a proper name this regeneration.
"Sorry, what was that?" Lideen leaned in close, her brown eyes widening, filling up her face in a way that was possibly a hallucination. Koschei could tell from the way the rest of her face was starting to stretch and melt. "Was that important, or are you just refusing to die quietly?"
"Cycled salinic cerul solution," mumbled Koschei.
"What?"
The blue vial crashed over Lideen's head as Ushas let go of it. Lideen screamed as the liquid bubbled, an acidic smell suffusing the room. She let go of the machine and Koschei caught it instinctively, clutching it as Ushas pried Lideen away from him. Drops of the acid spattered on Koschei's face from Lideen's convulsions next to him, but the pain was dull and distant.
"Right," said Ushas, utterly unconcerned. "Hit the button."
It was the last thing Koschei ever did in that body.
---
When Koschei came to, he was in a TARDIS. He sat up gingerly, his neck aching from where his head had been poorly cushioned by a toolbox. He brushed his suddenly long hair out of his eyes with hands that were, he was displeased to note, significantly coarser than last time. His wrists pinched slightly where his now-too-small bracelets bit into them.
"You're awake?" called Ushas, from around the console.
"More or less." Koschei stood up. The TARDIS was a stripped-down CIA model - adequate, but hardly luxurious. It was also shaking in a fairly unsettling way.
"Good, come help me with the dematerialization. I got us into free space, but we're still being pursued."
Koschei nodded and fell to the controls, coordinating his efforts with Ushas. They came out into the void, then back again, then the void and then out, the sensor indicating the pursuit still winking dully. Koschei growled and pulled a lever down hard, accelerating their transitions through the random coordinates Ushas was keying in.
He could feel his emotions again, a raging heat in his face and his stomach that made his previous paucity of reaction all the more horrifying. It was good to feel horrified. The fear of losing that ability again spurred his hands to move faster, buttons pressed and dials spun in a flurry of evasive maneuvers.
Finally they materialized and the radar registered no pursuit. They held, tense and silent for a moment, and still nothing happened.
"Right," Koschei said. "Right, let's see what's out there, shall we?"
"Scanner says Earth," said Ushas. "Opening the doors."
The air that filtered in was warm and dry. Koschei stepped out into a busy marketplace filled with chattering humans in a mix of colorful robes and drab shirts and trousers.
"This is India," he said, wondering. "The Doctor always-"
"Yes, yes, the Doctor," said Ushas, stepping out as well. They were of a height this time, Koschei noted with disappointment. He'd enjoyed looking down on Ushas.
"Tell me," she continued. "How easy would it be to take this place over?"
"I can't imagine it would be that difficult," Koschei said, considering. "We've arrived relatively early in Earth's development. Perhaps a little under a half-century after the harnessing of nuclear power. There’s been no official contact with off-world sentience, yet, but there are dozens of aliens landing every year. We'll simply need to arrange an alliance with a sufficiently powerful alien and then suborn one of the native power centers - the government, or a religious sect, perhaps." He eyed the passersby, who were more or less ignoring the two raggedy-looking foreigners, and started to make calculations. "We'll need to disguise ourselves as contemporaries, if not compatriots, and infiltrate some group in order to gain information about how things are run around here-"
"I’m not interested in an alliance, and the rest sounds far too complicated," said Ushas. She pulled a vial out of her pouch and swirled the contents around, thoughtfully. "Why don’t we just walk into this alley?”
"Ushas, dark alleyways are hardly the wisest choice of locale for newly arrived foreigners." Koschei sneered at her. "Weren't you paying attention on any of our schooltrips?"
"Come on," said Ushas, rolling her eyes. She wandered into a disgusting-looking alley. Koschei followed, not wanting to stand around in the open alone either. They loitered around, looking vulnerable - not difficult for him, still woozy from regeneration - until a hungry-looking young tough snuck out of the shadows and threatened them with a knife. Koschei fought back instinctively, and Ushas wet her sleeve with the vial, holding the cloth over the tough's nose as Koschei pinned his arms. The tough's eyes went blank and his breathing turned shallow.
"What did you do to him?" Koschei passed his hands in front of the tough's face, evoking no reaction.
"Weren’t you paying attention to any of my CIA projects?" said Ushas, mocking. "He'll take our orders now. Won't you?"
"I obey," said the tough.
"And he'll tell us exactly what we want to know," said Ushas. "So we can conquer this area without having to bother with any of your sociology-student nonsense."
Koschei glared at Ushas as she questioned the tough. He only felt somewhat mollified when she had to look to Koschei to understand what a 'parliament' was and what it had to do with them.
---
Mumbai in 1985 wasn't the safest or the wealthiest place on Earth, but it did afford a number of opportunities to a pair of scientifically-minded foreigners. Ushas was quickly hired by a pharmaceuticals company, and seemed well on the way to acquiring her own lab and her own funding. Koschei left her to it.
He himself got part time employment as a translator for businessmen. It was easy work, given the immediate fluency afforded by the TARDIS' translation field, and left him plenty of time to improve the TARDIS and study his surroundings.
He dressed to fade into the mass of people, rather than to stand out, as he would if he had any authority. He wore trousers and collared shirts, and let his beard grow, though not into the stylized spikes he had once preferred. He was a little too pale to be really unnoticeable in this time and place, but his hair was brown and his eyes were brown, and his features were dull and unremarkable. The brass bracelets didn’t look too out of place, and Koschei couldn’t get them off without some trouble, so he let them tarnish and forgot about them.
Armed with time and anonymity, Koschei set out to soak up the culture. He followed crowds, trusting them to lead him to what was popular and informative. It was perhaps inevitable that they would lead him to the cinema. If he recalled correctly, Mumbai was the seat of the local film industry, though he didn’t know anything beyond that.
Koschei glanced up at the marquee and picked a name at random, handing his money to the woman selling tickets.
"Good choice," she said, grinning. "That's very popular. Begins in five minutes, have a nice time!"
Koschei nodded and went to go wait.
First there was darkness. Then there was a flickering light, and then color. Koschei paused for a moment to marvel at the novelty of two-dimensional moving pictures, and then he was absorbed.
He was spat out three hours later in a crowd of fellow viewers. He was grinning, vaguely.
"Good show?" The ticket-woman was standing outside when Koschei came out, her hands cupping a surreptitious cigarette.
"It was- there was so much," said Koschei, unable to really explain. "The music-"
"I hear there's a scene where you can see Mandakini's breasts," said the woman. "How do you think they got that past the censors?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Koschei. "I didn't really understand that part of the plot."
"Well, plot." The woman laughed. "I don't know if nudity has to be part of the plot. But it is based on one of Kalidasa's works, isn't it?"
"Mm," said Koschei, the default noise of someone who doesn't want to admit to his own ignorance. The woman snuffed her cigarette and tucked the stub behind her ear, waving as she went back to work.
Koschei resolved to be better informed, next time.
---
Ushas started calling herself the Rani, in an astounding feat of hubris.
"You haven't even got any power," pointed out Koschei. "You've only just gotten a source of funding."
"With this grant, it's only a matter of time," said the Rani, complacently. "Especially since the number of my controlled Humans is always increasing."
"The drugs you're giving them can't be healthy," said Koschei. "How many have you lost this week?"
"Fewer than I've gained," snapped the Rani. “It’s not my fault that I have to use inferior components. If only I still had my lab back home, not just an empty TARDIS and the meager resources of Bombay, I could-" She stopped, and visibly calmed herself.
“Well, we can never go home again now,” pointed out Koschei in the space that followed.
“I know that, of course I know that,” said the Rani, and Koschei interrupted rather than listen to her rationalizations.
“And it’s Mumbai, not Bombay.”
“A detail,” said the Rani, waving a hand. She turned back to the experiment she was conducting on the kitchen table. “All of my co-workers say Bombay.”
“That’s because you’re working with non-residents,” explained Koschei. “It’s actually a relic of a foreign occupation – the city is officially termed Bombay, but the locals all call it Mumbai-“
“It is actually impossible for me to care less,” said the Rani. “What were we talking about, before you derailed us into minutiae?”
“Your name,” said Koschei, scowling. It had taken ages to track down the distinction between Mumbai and Bombay. “Your absurd, arrogant name.”
"At least I have a new name. Did you ever decide what to call yourself?"
"Kalid," he said, immediately. "That's how I've been introducing myself, now."
"That's not one of your tedious native writers, is it?" The Rani made a face. "Pass me that test tube, will you?"
"Here," said Kalid, dodging the question.
The Rani needn't know that he'd been staying up late at night, reading of the troubled love of Shakuntala and Dushyanta. It was instructive to compare the literary traditions of different cultures and planets, and the sad yet hopeful story by Kalidasa was far more vibrant than the dull, legalistic affairs that Kalid remembered from his childhood. The level of emotion in Kalidasa’s prose spoke to Kalid, telling him something about Mumbai, and India, and the Human race.
He wasn’t sure what the Rani would find more pathetic – that he’d been reading classic theater, or that he’d been analyzing the plays in a cultural context. Probably, Kalid thought, the idea of appropriating another man’s passion for his own would make the Rani laugh outright. She’d make snide remarks about ‘learning to feel again.’
"Kalid," said the Rani. "Hm."
Kalid narrowed his eyes at her and decided he didn’t care what she thought.
---
Kalid took to going to the cinema every week, seeing a film, and then spending much of the rest of the week researching every part he didn't understand. He soon gained a working knowledge of the criminal culture, of politics, of the caste system, of the various religions. Working knowledge wasn't the same as an understanding, but it was better than anything the Rani had.
"How was your week?" Shree, the ticket lady, was having another cigarette outside.
"Rather tiring," said Kalid. "And yours?"
"Busy," she blew out smoke. "Your girlfriend still giving you trouble?"
Kalid had had to explain the Rani away as his significant other in order to keep complaining about her.
"She's researching how to make people more... suggestible by altering their brain chemistry," said Kalid, the need for discretion overwhelmed by the need to vent. "It’s probably only a matter of time before she tries to experiment on me."
"Chemical hypnosis, huh?" Shree made a face. "I thought the normal kind was bad enough. I just saw some British film about mind games – bizarre stuff."
"Well, the Rani's hardly equipped to hypnotize someone without chemicals," said Kalid, making a face to match Shree's. He dropped it as she laughed.
"Pet names, huh? Pretty cute. My boyfriend makes up the worst pet names-"
The rest of Shree's story was lost on Kalid as he shuddered in disgust at the thought of giving the Rani a pet name.
---
After a few months, the Rani and Kalid were firmly ensconced as well-off residents of Mumbai. Kalid even had hopes of actually subverting the government through finesse, rather than by just drip-feeding the Prime Minister the Rani's control chemical. Those hopes ended when the CIA finally tracked them down.
"This is your fault," shouted Kalid as he and the Rani dodged staser bolts, the normal crowds scattering as they ran down the street to where their TARDIS was still standing where it had landed. "I told you we had to be more inconspicuous!"
"You're the one who told me about their fish-people gods! I was simply trying to recreate-"
"Matsya is an avatar of Vishnu, and-"
"It hardly matters now." The Rani ducked into an alley, pulling Kalid behind her. "Here, shortcut."
"Your ignorance is incredibly offensive in someone attempting to be a ruler," hissed Kalid, as they stumbled through the narrow corridor. "Leaving aside the fact that you’ve probably heightened religious tensions – tensions which I’m sure you’re completely unaware of – even if you had succeeded, what would have been the point?"
"Well, the primitives would have bowed down to their god, and, by extension, me." The TARDIS was only a few feet away from the other side of the alley, but the CIA agents were nearing it, still periodically firing staser bolts into the air to no apparent purpose.
"The number of misconceptions in that sentence is absurd," said Kalid.
"I think we should make a break for the TARDIS," said the Rani. "We can get there before they hit us, can't we?"
"Just wait for the local authorities," said Kalid. "We'll get out under the cover."
"Your local authorities may never come." The Rani fingered her pouch. "Your single-mindedness is occasionally useful, but I'm afraid that right now we need a backup plan."
"Renegades, give yourselves up," shouted one of the agents. "Under the authority of
Coordinator Azmael, I am willing to be merciful to either of you, if you only surrender."
Kalid was tempted. The CIA would surely be able to tell that he had little part in this disaster. In fact, he'd been kidnapped while regenerating in the first place, hadn't he?
He might even be able to serve an exile here, in Mumbai. Bollywood movies and chats with Shree were infinitely preferable to another prison sentence with the Rani, or worse.
Kalid caught the Rani's eye, but she was too far away to stop him. He began to edge out of the alley.
Which was when the fish-monster rounded the bend.
"Agh!" screamed the CIA agent, crushed under its glistening scales.
"Right, let's get out of here, before they send reinforcements," said the Rani.
"Also, Matsya is not six meters long with a thirst for blood," said Kalid, staring blankly as the CIA agent's partner tried to help her fallen comrade.
"Yes, yes, but you have to admit the self-moisturizing field was an astounding technical achievement," said the Rani. "Now, let's get out of here.
They made it to the TARDIS just as the police finally arrived. The police seemed unable to do much but gibber as Kalid and the Rani snuck into their ship.
"Possibly I placed too much faith in the authorities," said Kalid, setting the TARDIS into flight.
"Possibly," agreed the Rani, injecting something into his neck.
---
Continued here
Doctor Who, Classic Series
Rating: PG-13
(off-screen sex, violence, swearing, mad science)
Characters: Ushas/Koschei or Rani/Master, Two(/Master) and Three, Braxiatel.
Wordcount: 10,500ish, separated into two posts.
Summary: The Master and the Rani had made it as far as the Monan Host's homeworld cluster before they broke up. Spanning the gap between The War Games and Terror of the Autons.
A/N: A response to this prompt on the b_e anonmeme. A prequel to The Amazon, taking off from the quote in the summary. Beta thanks to the inestimable and incomparable
birdsarecalling and roachpatrol !Koschei's hands after his regeneration were long and slim and dark. He rather liked them, even marred as they were by the heavy metal cuffs around his wrists.
"Is this really necessary?" he asked the guard.
"Yes. Now shut up and wait for your work detail supervisor."
Koschei nodded amiably and sat down on the floor of the corridor, folding his knees up to his chin. The guard glared at him, but didn't move. Koschei blew out a deep breath and leaned back, still getting used to this gangly new body and his rather reduced new situation. He rubbed at his chin and was mildly disappointed to find it clean-shaven.
It wasn't as if he'd really expected the Doctor to rescue him from the Time Lords. No. That would have been too much to hope for, even - or especially - from the Doctor. But Koschei did feel as if he should be angry about the Doctor abandoning him, and he wasn't. This new self was a little mellower than he was used to, honestly. It could just be the lingering effect of a difficult and delayed regeneration, but it was odd all the same.
Footsteps sounded down the corridor and the guard stood a little straighter. Koschei thought about getting up, but it seemed like too much trouble. He played with the hem of the worn black robe he'd been given as a uniform instead.
"Right, I'm here, what?" The voice was familiar. Koschei looked up at a dark-haired woman in a uniform of her own.
"New assistant for you," said the guard. "Sign here."
"They can't have found someone- oh, it's you," said Ushas, looking down at Koschei. Her mouth twisted with an emotion that he couldn't identify. "Fine." She took a datapad from the guard and scribbled on it.
"Me," agreed Koschei, a beat too late. "I hadn't realized that they had got you as well."
"A trumped-up charge about importing exotic birds seems to be enough to put you in CIA custody these days," said Ushas. Her lips quirked again, this time in obvious amusement. Koschei felt a brief, familiar unease at the idea of being laughed at before that feeling was subsumed by the pool of calm in his stomach.
"Giant face-eating birds," muttered the guard.
"I don't recall asking your opinion," said Ushas. "Run along now, and let me start breaking him in."
The guard did so, with another mutter that sounded suspiciously like 'better him than me.' Koschei looked after him, belatedly recalling his cuffs.
"Wasn't he supposed to take these off?" Koschei asked.
"Here." Ushas produced a key from a pocket of her uniform and bent down to unlock the cuffs. "This was sent to me earlier this morning. I think they were worried you'd suborn the guard and so on." The cuffs came away and Ushas tucked them into her pocket along with the key, making an ugly bulge at her hip. "Get up, let's go."
Koschei pushed himself up slowly, ending up about a head over Ushas. Last time they'd met, she'd been taller. Was she still in the same body? She looked different, but it had been a while.
Ushas was already striding down the corridor, not looking back to see if Koschei was following. He did, in the absence of anything better to do.
"We all heard about the little affair with the War Lord, of course," said Ushas. "The Doctor got himself brought in over that as well, didn't he?"
"I don't know," said Koschei. "I was in regeneration sickness until about an hour ago. Then all I got was the 'secret prison think-tank' debriefing."
"Well, apparently the Doctor's got himself drafted for CIA service as well. Not here, thank Rassilon. I don't think I could handle both of you."
"Why am I here?" asked Koschei, his brain finally starting to tick over into curiosity. "You haven’t changed fields of study in my time away, I’m sure, and I'm hardly a biologist or a chemist."
"I've been putting in requests for a practical engineer and a general assistant since my third day here. It looks like they decided you could serve for both." They'd reached a door, and Ushas waved her hand at it, stepping in as the door pulled into a recess. "Now, Koschei-"
"Don't call me that," said Koschei. He rubbed at his wrists, feeling the raw spots where the cuffs had chafed.
"Oh, this is- fine." Ushas stopped walking and rolled her eyes, just to show him how absurd he was being. "I'm going to have to introduce you as something. What would you like to be called?"
"I-" He wasn't the War Chief anymore. And there was definitely something, but he couldn't think what, and this regeneration was really indecisive as well, wasn't it? Koschei grimaced and rubbed at his wrists some more. He thought he might have imprinted on the cuffs, having them on so soon after his regeneration. That could be a little inconvenient.
"I'll just say you're my new assistant for now, shall I?" said Ushas, already out of patience. She still had that tendency to rush, though Koschei felt sure that he’d been able to keep up with her before.
Koschei nodded vaguely, still thinking. Ushas glared at him and dragged him by the arm through the entry room and into a laboratory off to the side.
"Lideen! Lideen, they finally sent me an assistant."
The laboratory was obviously that of another chemist, this one an older-looking Time Lady with a pale coloring and wide brown eyes. Or perhaps they were only wide now, as she frowned at Ushas' bursting in.
"I'm in the midst of a delicate experiment," she said, shortly. Her hands shook slightly as they steadied a rounded flask that had nearly tipped out of its stand at Ushas' arrival. "And don't you mean they sent us an assistant?"
"If you like," said Ushas. "We'll just leave you to it, shall we?"
Koschei managed to get away with just following this time.
"Is that Lideen as in Lideenastrobia? The professor that got kicked out of the academy in our fifteenth year?"
"The same," said Ushas. "For poisoning Borusa, as it turns out. I only wish it had been fatal, and apparently so does Lideen. Not accidental, from what she tells me. Here's my lab."
It was as neat and spare as Ushas' workspaces had always been. Koschei shrugged, unsure of what he was supposed to say.
"There are cots laid out in the rooms on the other side of the entry room," continued Ushas. She went and picked up a machine from under one of her tables, laying out a set of spare parts. "Not much in the way of comforts, I'm afraid."
"I expected as much," said Koschei, shrugging again. "What's that you've got there?"
"Ah, now, this is why I wanted a technician," said Ushas. "This is our way out. I’ve been ordering pieces for a solvent phase accelerator, and-"
Koschei drifted closer, ignoring Ushas’ explanation of her no doubt ingenious machinations. The machine was obviously an early stage of something dimensionally transcendental, whatever she said. Without thinking Koschei picked up a screwdriver and started poking around.
"Careful," warned Ushas. "The compounds inside aren't very stable-"
"Because the housing isn't joined together properly," said Koschei. "What is this? It looks like a homing beacon, but it feels almost like a TARDIS."
"It's more or less both," said Ushas. "It should let us do a jump to the nearest unoccupied TARDIS and take it off-world. Since the closest ones are unmarked CIA TARDISes, we shouldn't have any trouble getting clearance, you see?"
"The relays aren't even in sync is what I see," said Koschei.
"I've already admitted that I need your help," said Ushas. "You needn't be so difficult."
"Is Lideen in on this?" asked Koschei. It actually was a very clever design, despite its technical problems.
"No, she's not trustworthy."
"And I am?" Koschei took the casing off entirely, exposing the tangle of wires within.
"I trust you to want to get out," said Ushas. She smiled, thinly. "I got lucky that you were assigned - I know more about your motivations than I do about some random criminal. You'll go along with my plans for now, won't you."
"Yes," admitted Koschei. It would be far easier to take advantage of Ushas’ plan than it would be to make up his own from whole cloth.
"Good. Let's put that away for now, then. We'll work on it while Lideen is asleep, and do our assigned projects until then."
Koschei nodded, and the machine disappeared under the table again.
---
After working for the War Lord for so long, Koschei had gotten used to performing tedious tasks for superiors he didn't like or respect. As such, his work in the laboratory was achingly familiar.
Ushas did, in fact, need him to help her with the CIA projects. Koschei adapted to the work quickly, helped by the fact that it was hardly challenging.
"Pass me that test tube, Assistant," said Ushas.
"Don't call me that," grumbled Koschei, passing her the test tube. He watched as Ushas swirled the chemicals together and rubbed idly at the brass bracelets he had found to replace his cuffs.
"Have you decided on a name?" The container began to bubble and fizz, and Ushas slipped her goggles from her hair to cover her eyes. Koschei just took a few steps back, half-sheltering behind another table.
"I'm thinking," he said.
Ushas made a face at him and added something else to her concoction.
She told him what it was for, but Koschei let the words pass over him. All of their chemical work would be handed over to their CIA masters soon enough, and he couldn't bring himself to care about its purpose.
Which was wrong, somehow. Surely he should at least be interested.
"Do you feel different, here?" he asked. "Like things are, I don’t know, muffled. Unimportant."
"No," said Ushas, shortly. She started to decant the mixture into a set of smaller flasks. "Now, this is meant to be ingested by a suspected enemy agent and then, if they attempt to divulge any information, it should eliminate them. We’re having problems with the timing-"
Koschei leant against one of the wire racks of chemical supplies and tried to appear interested.
Working with Ushas left him bored and confused, but working with Lideen was excruciating in a different way.
"Give me the cycled salinic cerul solution." Lideen reached out a hand without looking at Koschei.
"Ah-" Koschei looked around at the various unlabeled containers strewn around Lideen's cluttered lab.
"It's blue," sighed Lideen.
That narrowed it down to about thirty. Koschei picked one at random.
"No," said Lideen, without even looking at him. "Try again."
This would go on for about an hour at a time. Lideen had apparently limitless patience, and though Koschei had a good memory for names, she never actually told him what anything was until he finally found the right chemical.
The best times - the only bearable times - were at night, when Koschei was able to work at something at which he was actually good. With the machine, he was in charge, and could send Ushas on hunts for tools that in no way resembled his perennial hunts for chemicals. After a week, the machine was coming along nicely, and Koschei thought that if only he didn't need to sleep, he and Ushas would be long gone.
Well, that, and Lideen.
"Can't sleep?"
Koschei only had that much warning before Lideen came wandering into Ushas' lab. The woman was far too quiet. He managed to pull a cover over the machine and tinkered with a broken test tube rack instead.
"Not really," he said.
"It's the chemicals," said Lideen. She pulled up a stool from the corner and sat down to watch Koschei fiddle with the essentially irreparable rack.
"Something you've been working with?" Koschei focused on his bracelets, glinting in the light of his dim tablelamp. "You should have warned me.”
"No." Lideen leaned forward, earnest. Her eyes were wide enough that the orbs might come free of their sockets. "No, it's what they've done to your brain chemistry. You can't expect to go through a CIA-aided regeneration and come out entirely yourself."
"You speak from experience?" asked Koschei, lightly.
"Not me. But you feel it, don't you? You're more amiable, not given to questions. Any Time Lord who went renegade wouldn't put up with half of what you take from Ushas and I."
"I do what I have to," said Koschei. He bent over the rack so he couldn't see Lideen at all. When he looked up again, she was gone.
---
The next day, Koschei was tired and a little shaky, strained from wanting to think about what Lideen had said and the bone-deep incuriosity which had sprung up in this regeneration. Or had been cultivated in this regeneration. It was easier to let himself sink into the routine of helping Lideen and Ushas, finally gathering up the samples and taking them to the entry room, where they would be collected by whatever agent had been assigned to them today.
The Doctor was in the entry room.
Koschei's arms tightened around his box of chemistry projects, but the haze made him strong in an odd way, unshakable, and he managed to walk to the table in the center of the room and set the box down.
"We've broken down and resynthesized the 'retcon' you brought us," he said, voice sounding remarkably calm. "Those are in the taller flasks - they're a clear liquid, so be careful with them. The biological weapons are still in development, but we do have a few strains for you to test-"
"Koschei," said the Doctor, his voice choked. "Do you remember me?"
Koschei paused, his fingers still on the rim of the deadly virus he'd been pointing out.
"Yes, of course," he said.
"Oh, oh, I am sorry." The Doctor tried to smile, not quite disguising his miserable look. "When you just started talking, I was afraid-"
"Well, what was I supposed to say, Doctor?" Koschei let himself really look at the Doctor, taking in the dusting of gray in his black cap of hair and the deepened lines in his face. The slumped shoulders that made the Doctor look shorter than ever. His rewards for CIA service, no doubt. "You've come for me at last? I've been waiting so long?"
"No, I don't know." The Doctor ducked his head and stepped closer. "I just wanted to make sure you were all right - I only just found out that you were still alive."
"Here I am, Doctor, I'm still alive. Now, no doubt you have to hurry away before the CIA finds out that you're here."
"They do know," said the Doctor. He took the box away from Koschei, not bothering to steady the contents. "I, ah, made a special request to pick up the results of this week's work."
Koschei nodded, numbly. He wasn’t sure whether to be thankful for CIA meddling in his brain, or to be furious that his anger with the Doctor had been ripped away with him. But he couldn’t work up thankfulness or furiousness, so it was a bit of a moot point.
"Well. Goodbye, Koschei." The Doctor reached out a hand to touch Koschei's shoulder, and then had to catch at the box as he nearly lost grip with his other hand. He careened out of the room and the door slipped closed behind him.
"Don't call me that," whispered Koschei to the empty room.
There was definitely something wrong with him. As soon as he and Ushas were out of here, he would do scans, make a drug regimen, even forcibly regenerate if he had to.
His hands hurt, and Koschei flexed them out of the white-knuckled fists they'd formed.
"Was that the Doctor?" Ushas came out of her lab, stripping off rubber gloves. "Has he been wearing that ridiculous coat the entire time?"
"We're nearly ready," said Koschei, ignoring the question. "Tonight."
"Mm? Good."
Koschei could feel Ushas' eyes on him as he went to help Lideen with her latest project.
---
The machine was indeed finished that night, or, more accurately, in the space between first and second dawn. Ushas had gone to rest a few spans before, so Koschei was alone as he taped the last few wires and slipped them into place. He screwed the housing back together and stared.
No more CIA imprisonment. No more fetching and carrying for Lideen. Probably some more fetching and carrying for Ushas, but he'd see what he could do to keep that to a minimum.
Koschei stretched, finally looking up from his machine, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness away from the circle of light made by his lamp. Then he yelped as a sharp pain stabbed at his neck.
"Should pay more attention to your surroundings," hummed Lideen, behind him. Koschei started to fall forward, and she caught him, lowering him gently to the table. Koschei blinked, slowly. His brain felt like it was beginning to run out his ears. Lideen set down a syringe on the table, coming around to pick up the machine.
"It was nice of you to help me put this paralytic together. Not that you knew what you were assisting me with. And it was very nice of you to put all this time into your little machine, just so I could escape," Lideen grinned, and patted Koschei on the shoulder, just where the Doctor had touched him before. "Your sacrifice is appreciated."
Koschei nodded, watching the color drain from his vision. He should probably be upset, but, well.
"This button here, is it?" asked Lideen. "Thanks, kid."
"Don't call me kid," mumbled Koschei. He was going to die without having had a proper name this regeneration.
"Sorry, what was that?" Lideen leaned in close, her brown eyes widening, filling up her face in a way that was possibly a hallucination. Koschei could tell from the way the rest of her face was starting to stretch and melt. "Was that important, or are you just refusing to die quietly?"
"Cycled salinic cerul solution," mumbled Koschei.
"What?"
The blue vial crashed over Lideen's head as Ushas let go of it. Lideen screamed as the liquid bubbled, an acidic smell suffusing the room. She let go of the machine and Koschei caught it instinctively, clutching it as Ushas pried Lideen away from him. Drops of the acid spattered on Koschei's face from Lideen's convulsions next to him, but the pain was dull and distant.
"Right," said Ushas, utterly unconcerned. "Hit the button."
It was the last thing Koschei ever did in that body.
---
When Koschei came to, he was in a TARDIS. He sat up gingerly, his neck aching from where his head had been poorly cushioned by a toolbox. He brushed his suddenly long hair out of his eyes with hands that were, he was displeased to note, significantly coarser than last time. His wrists pinched slightly where his now-too-small bracelets bit into them.
"You're awake?" called Ushas, from around the console.
"More or less." Koschei stood up. The TARDIS was a stripped-down CIA model - adequate, but hardly luxurious. It was also shaking in a fairly unsettling way.
"Good, come help me with the dematerialization. I got us into free space, but we're still being pursued."
Koschei nodded and fell to the controls, coordinating his efforts with Ushas. They came out into the void, then back again, then the void and then out, the sensor indicating the pursuit still winking dully. Koschei growled and pulled a lever down hard, accelerating their transitions through the random coordinates Ushas was keying in.
He could feel his emotions again, a raging heat in his face and his stomach that made his previous paucity of reaction all the more horrifying. It was good to feel horrified. The fear of losing that ability again spurred his hands to move faster, buttons pressed and dials spun in a flurry of evasive maneuvers.
Finally they materialized and the radar registered no pursuit. They held, tense and silent for a moment, and still nothing happened.
"Right," Koschei said. "Right, let's see what's out there, shall we?"
"Scanner says Earth," said Ushas. "Opening the doors."
The air that filtered in was warm and dry. Koschei stepped out into a busy marketplace filled with chattering humans in a mix of colorful robes and drab shirts and trousers.
"This is India," he said, wondering. "The Doctor always-"
"Yes, yes, the Doctor," said Ushas, stepping out as well. They were of a height this time, Koschei noted with disappointment. He'd enjoyed looking down on Ushas.
"Tell me," she continued. "How easy would it be to take this place over?"
"I can't imagine it would be that difficult," Koschei said, considering. "We've arrived relatively early in Earth's development. Perhaps a little under a half-century after the harnessing of nuclear power. There’s been no official contact with off-world sentience, yet, but there are dozens of aliens landing every year. We'll simply need to arrange an alliance with a sufficiently powerful alien and then suborn one of the native power centers - the government, or a religious sect, perhaps." He eyed the passersby, who were more or less ignoring the two raggedy-looking foreigners, and started to make calculations. "We'll need to disguise ourselves as contemporaries, if not compatriots, and infiltrate some group in order to gain information about how things are run around here-"
"I’m not interested in an alliance, and the rest sounds far too complicated," said Ushas. She pulled a vial out of her pouch and swirled the contents around, thoughtfully. "Why don’t we just walk into this alley?”
"Ushas, dark alleyways are hardly the wisest choice of locale for newly arrived foreigners." Koschei sneered at her. "Weren't you paying attention on any of our schooltrips?"
"Come on," said Ushas, rolling her eyes. She wandered into a disgusting-looking alley. Koschei followed, not wanting to stand around in the open alone either. They loitered around, looking vulnerable - not difficult for him, still woozy from regeneration - until a hungry-looking young tough snuck out of the shadows and threatened them with a knife. Koschei fought back instinctively, and Ushas wet her sleeve with the vial, holding the cloth over the tough's nose as Koschei pinned his arms. The tough's eyes went blank and his breathing turned shallow.
"What did you do to him?" Koschei passed his hands in front of the tough's face, evoking no reaction.
"Weren’t you paying attention to any of my CIA projects?" said Ushas, mocking. "He'll take our orders now. Won't you?"
"I obey," said the tough.
"And he'll tell us exactly what we want to know," said Ushas. "So we can conquer this area without having to bother with any of your sociology-student nonsense."
Koschei glared at Ushas as she questioned the tough. He only felt somewhat mollified when she had to look to Koschei to understand what a 'parliament' was and what it had to do with them.
---
Mumbai in 1985 wasn't the safest or the wealthiest place on Earth, but it did afford a number of opportunities to a pair of scientifically-minded foreigners. Ushas was quickly hired by a pharmaceuticals company, and seemed well on the way to acquiring her own lab and her own funding. Koschei left her to it.
He himself got part time employment as a translator for businessmen. It was easy work, given the immediate fluency afforded by the TARDIS' translation field, and left him plenty of time to improve the TARDIS and study his surroundings.
He dressed to fade into the mass of people, rather than to stand out, as he would if he had any authority. He wore trousers and collared shirts, and let his beard grow, though not into the stylized spikes he had once preferred. He was a little too pale to be really unnoticeable in this time and place, but his hair was brown and his eyes were brown, and his features were dull and unremarkable. The brass bracelets didn’t look too out of place, and Koschei couldn’t get them off without some trouble, so he let them tarnish and forgot about them.
Armed with time and anonymity, Koschei set out to soak up the culture. He followed crowds, trusting them to lead him to what was popular and informative. It was perhaps inevitable that they would lead him to the cinema. If he recalled correctly, Mumbai was the seat of the local film industry, though he didn’t know anything beyond that.
Koschei glanced up at the marquee and picked a name at random, handing his money to the woman selling tickets.
"Good choice," she said, grinning. "That's very popular. Begins in five minutes, have a nice time!"
Koschei nodded and went to go wait.
First there was darkness. Then there was a flickering light, and then color. Koschei paused for a moment to marvel at the novelty of two-dimensional moving pictures, and then he was absorbed.
He was spat out three hours later in a crowd of fellow viewers. He was grinning, vaguely.
"Good show?" The ticket-woman was standing outside when Koschei came out, her hands cupping a surreptitious cigarette.
"It was- there was so much," said Koschei, unable to really explain. "The music-"
"I hear there's a scene where you can see Mandakini's breasts," said the woman. "How do you think they got that past the censors?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Koschei. "I didn't really understand that part of the plot."
"Well, plot." The woman laughed. "I don't know if nudity has to be part of the plot. But it is based on one of Kalidasa's works, isn't it?"
"Mm," said Koschei, the default noise of someone who doesn't want to admit to his own ignorance. The woman snuffed her cigarette and tucked the stub behind her ear, waving as she went back to work.
Koschei resolved to be better informed, next time.
---
Ushas started calling herself the Rani, in an astounding feat of hubris.
"You haven't even got any power," pointed out Koschei. "You've only just gotten a source of funding."
"With this grant, it's only a matter of time," said the Rani, complacently. "Especially since the number of my controlled Humans is always increasing."
"The drugs you're giving them can't be healthy," said Koschei. "How many have you lost this week?"
"Fewer than I've gained," snapped the Rani. “It’s not my fault that I have to use inferior components. If only I still had my lab back home, not just an empty TARDIS and the meager resources of Bombay, I could-" She stopped, and visibly calmed herself.
“Well, we can never go home again now,” pointed out Koschei in the space that followed.
“I know that, of course I know that,” said the Rani, and Koschei interrupted rather than listen to her rationalizations.
“And it’s Mumbai, not Bombay.”
“A detail,” said the Rani, waving a hand. She turned back to the experiment she was conducting on the kitchen table. “All of my co-workers say Bombay.”
“That’s because you’re working with non-residents,” explained Koschei. “It’s actually a relic of a foreign occupation – the city is officially termed Bombay, but the locals all call it Mumbai-“
“It is actually impossible for me to care less,” said the Rani. “What were we talking about, before you derailed us into minutiae?”
“Your name,” said Koschei, scowling. It had taken ages to track down the distinction between Mumbai and Bombay. “Your absurd, arrogant name.”
"At least I have a new name. Did you ever decide what to call yourself?"
"Kalid," he said, immediately. "That's how I've been introducing myself, now."
"That's not one of your tedious native writers, is it?" The Rani made a face. "Pass me that test tube, will you?"
"Here," said Kalid, dodging the question.
The Rani needn't know that he'd been staying up late at night, reading of the troubled love of Shakuntala and Dushyanta. It was instructive to compare the literary traditions of different cultures and planets, and the sad yet hopeful story by Kalidasa was far more vibrant than the dull, legalistic affairs that Kalid remembered from his childhood. The level of emotion in Kalidasa’s prose spoke to Kalid, telling him something about Mumbai, and India, and the Human race.
He wasn’t sure what the Rani would find more pathetic – that he’d been reading classic theater, or that he’d been analyzing the plays in a cultural context. Probably, Kalid thought, the idea of appropriating another man’s passion for his own would make the Rani laugh outright. She’d make snide remarks about ‘learning to feel again.’
"Kalid," said the Rani. "Hm."
Kalid narrowed his eyes at her and decided he didn’t care what she thought.
---
Kalid took to going to the cinema every week, seeing a film, and then spending much of the rest of the week researching every part he didn't understand. He soon gained a working knowledge of the criminal culture, of politics, of the caste system, of the various religions. Working knowledge wasn't the same as an understanding, but it was better than anything the Rani had.
"How was your week?" Shree, the ticket lady, was having another cigarette outside.
"Rather tiring," said Kalid. "And yours?"
"Busy," she blew out smoke. "Your girlfriend still giving you trouble?"
Kalid had had to explain the Rani away as his significant other in order to keep complaining about her.
"She's researching how to make people more... suggestible by altering their brain chemistry," said Kalid, the need for discretion overwhelmed by the need to vent. "It’s probably only a matter of time before she tries to experiment on me."
"Chemical hypnosis, huh?" Shree made a face. "I thought the normal kind was bad enough. I just saw some British film about mind games – bizarre stuff."
"Well, the Rani's hardly equipped to hypnotize someone without chemicals," said Kalid, making a face to match Shree's. He dropped it as she laughed.
"Pet names, huh? Pretty cute. My boyfriend makes up the worst pet names-"
The rest of Shree's story was lost on Kalid as he shuddered in disgust at the thought of giving the Rani a pet name.
---
After a few months, the Rani and Kalid were firmly ensconced as well-off residents of Mumbai. Kalid even had hopes of actually subverting the government through finesse, rather than by just drip-feeding the Prime Minister the Rani's control chemical. Those hopes ended when the CIA finally tracked them down.
"This is your fault," shouted Kalid as he and the Rani dodged staser bolts, the normal crowds scattering as they ran down the street to where their TARDIS was still standing where it had landed. "I told you we had to be more inconspicuous!"
"You're the one who told me about their fish-people gods! I was simply trying to recreate-"
"Matsya is an avatar of Vishnu, and-"
"It hardly matters now." The Rani ducked into an alley, pulling Kalid behind her. "Here, shortcut."
"Your ignorance is incredibly offensive in someone attempting to be a ruler," hissed Kalid, as they stumbled through the narrow corridor. "Leaving aside the fact that you’ve probably heightened religious tensions – tensions which I’m sure you’re completely unaware of – even if you had succeeded, what would have been the point?"
"Well, the primitives would have bowed down to their god, and, by extension, me." The TARDIS was only a few feet away from the other side of the alley, but the CIA agents were nearing it, still periodically firing staser bolts into the air to no apparent purpose.
"The number of misconceptions in that sentence is absurd," said Kalid.
"I think we should make a break for the TARDIS," said the Rani. "We can get there before they hit us, can't we?"
"Just wait for the local authorities," said Kalid. "We'll get out under the cover."
"Your local authorities may never come." The Rani fingered her pouch. "Your single-mindedness is occasionally useful, but I'm afraid that right now we need a backup plan."
"Renegades, give yourselves up," shouted one of the agents. "Under the authority of
Coordinator Azmael, I am willing to be merciful to either of you, if you only surrender."
Kalid was tempted. The CIA would surely be able to tell that he had little part in this disaster. In fact, he'd been kidnapped while regenerating in the first place, hadn't he?
He might even be able to serve an exile here, in Mumbai. Bollywood movies and chats with Shree were infinitely preferable to another prison sentence with the Rani, or worse.
Kalid caught the Rani's eye, but she was too far away to stop him. He began to edge out of the alley.
Which was when the fish-monster rounded the bend.
"Agh!" screamed the CIA agent, crushed under its glistening scales.
"Right, let's get out of here, before they send reinforcements," said the Rani.
"Also, Matsya is not six meters long with a thirst for blood," said Kalid, staring blankly as the CIA agent's partner tried to help her fallen comrade.
"Yes, yes, but you have to admit the self-moisturizing field was an astounding technical achievement," said the Rani. "Now, let's get out of here.
They made it to the TARDIS just as the police finally arrived. The police seemed unable to do much but gibber as Kalid and the Rani snuck into their ship.
"Possibly I placed too much faith in the authorities," said Kalid, setting the TARDIS into flight.
"Possibly," agreed the Rani, injecting something into his neck.
---
Continued here
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Date: 2011-01-27 02:36 am (UTC)Great line!