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Desperate Measures
By Taleya
He'd expected pain. He'd expected blood.
He just hadn't expected so much.
His hands were slimed with it, making purchase on the scalpel near-impossible
and he grasped it in a clumsy fist, digging awkwardly into his own flesh. Pain
was a constant, steady shrill along his arm, drowned out by his own desperation
as he gouged at his wrist again and again. It was messy work. Imprecise. It
would have been difficult enough with his dominant hand, with his left it was
damned near impossible. But even a rat will chew its own leg off to escape a
snare.
The Doctor had said it was over.
The Doctor had said he could go home.
The Doctor said a great many things.
The Doctor didn't . Have. The. Faintest. Idea.
His grip on the scalpel slipped, driving it further than he'd meant and he
couldn't stop the animalistic noise of pain that broke from his lips. More blood
poured from his mangled wrist, brighter, thicker, faster than it should have. It
frightened him but he ignored it, committed, set to his course and shoved the
blade even deeper, digging viciously at his own flesh before throwing it aside
and driving his fingers into the gaping wound, feeling his own blood, hot and
slippery coat his fingers. He was sweating freely now, droplets mingling with
the blood. Smearing his shirt, turning his pants ever blacker as it sloughed
down his thigh, staining the small, neat bed of the TARDIS medbay. Lifeblood,
sweatblood, he didn't know, didn't care, teeth gritted and chest heaving with
silent, desperate screams, oblivious to all else as he tore at himself again and
again.
And then his hands were pulled apart, blood-slicked fingers sliding all too
easily from the torn wreck his right forearm had become, hands clasping brutally
about him, holding them apart as he fought to continue. Someone was shouting in
his face, shouting his name.
"Turlough!"
He knew exactly what it must have looked like. The panicked grip on his wrists
told him as much.
"It’s not what you think." The words sounded small, pathetic. He couldn’t meet
the other man’s gaze, staring at the wall, the floor, the way his own blood
spilled gently out over the other man’s slender fingers, anything but the
terrible, crippling concern on the Doctor’s face. He didn’t want to see the hurt
confusion in those blue eyes. Didn’t want to answer the questions forming behind
them, the foolish assumptions his mind was leaping to all too readily. It was
something he could use, something he could exploit, but not here, not now. He
had to do this. He needed to do this, now more than ever – or they would all be
damned with him.
But the Doctor wasn’t a fool or idiot, despite the human company he kept. And he
rarely took matters on face value. Turlough felt the other man’s eyes boring
into him, and then the hand on his left wrist loosened, released, the other
keeping a tight, painful grip around the ragged wound on his right wrist as
long, nimble fingers crept along the inside of his forearm, pressing lightly,
carefully. Searching….and finding.
The redhead couldn’t hold back the twitch in his fingers as the Doctor pressed a
little harder against the lump under his skin with curious fingers, couldn't
read the expression behind the usually guileless blue eyes as they studied him.
This wasn't the Doctor he knew, this was something else, something darker
slipping and sliding under the blonde hair and pleasant demeanour and he jerked
away instinctively as the Doctor reached for him. He felt long fingers at his
throat, working nimbly at the knot of his tie, the tail of it slithering around
his neck like a dead snake as it was pulled free. His lips opened around a
question he didn't quite dare ask, then closed with a spasm that locked his jaw
as the striped cloth was drawn brutally tight around his arm below the elbow.
The blood flow from his damaged wrist slowed to a sullen trickle, then to a stop
as long fingers bit viciously into the pulse point just below the makeshift
tourniquet, making him flinch…or maybe it was the way those damning eyes never
left his face.
The press of a hypo against his bicep almost made him laugh as his arm went
numb. He could tolerate the pain. He’d taken far worse in his time. He didn’t
like it, but he could take it. It spread through his system quickly, and he
watched with a detached, lazy lassitude as the other man bent over his wrist
with a clean scalpel in his quick, skilled hands. Precise work, neat, clean
incisions, a far cry from his own botched efforts.
Glasses perched on his nose, coat draped across the back of his chair and
sleeves neatly rolled back, the Time Lord was silent as he worked. Almost
damningly so, brow furrowed in concentration as he deftly avoided further damage
to the Trion's already mangled wrist, probing gently with a pair of sterile
forceps.
Turlough fisted his free hand in the fabric of his trousers, feeling every inch
the schoolboy caught out and disgraced. He fidgeted nervously despite himself
and the Doctor shot him a dark glance over his half-moon glasses, killing the
motion stillborn even as he returned the hard look, no artifice, no simpering,
ingratiating performance. Not any more.
The Doctor's gaze pushed past his eyes, past flesh and bone, cleaving into his
brain and reading every thought, leaving him transparent and naked. There was no
point in continuing the charade. No more playing the innocent schoolboy, no more
gentleman of the universe fallen on ill fortune…no more masks, no more games.
There couldn't be, not when the Doctor -
He couldn’t meet the Time Lord’s eyes, gaze faltering and falling as the tracker
was finally pried free from his arm, shiny surface wet with gore. Small. Hard.
Brutally functional. There were no more secrets now. No more hiding. There was
nothing else that lump of metal could be but a tracking device for a dangerous
criminal.
He'd been tagged and marked like a wild animal. Like the brand on his arm, it
was a primitive, mocking insult to everything he had been, pushing him down,
shoving him in place, watching him, stalking him, everywhere he went, everything
he did. He stared at it in loathing for a long moment, hating it, hating
everything in that single, savage instant before his eyes skittered nervously up
to the other man’s face.
The Doctor was looking at him steadily over the chunk of metal clamped between
the forceps, his other hand still holding Turlough’s damaged wrist in an iron
grip. And something in his eyes had changed.
It wasn’t the mildly pitying look he’d come to expect from the Time Lord of
late. Not something he could twist, not something he could pander to…it was
older. Darker. The gaze of an equal, of someone who knew what it felt like to be
exiled, to be hunted like an animal by their own people. Deep secrets and hidden
sorrow swam below the surface of those blue eyes, reflection of a shared pain,
hardening to a sudden anger that flared and died as the Doctor deliberately
dropped the tracking device on the floor between them and crushed it savagely
under his heel.
Something shuddered loose in Turlough’s chest at the crunch of fragile circuitry
breaking and he stared disbelievingly at the twisted metal and shattered
crystal. He was free. It was as simple as that. He was free. Untraceable.
Untrackable. They’d never find him now. He stared at it with a numb sort of
shock, barely aware of the Doctor’s hands on his wrist as the other man busied
himself with tissue repairers and dermal regenerators.
He felt blank, hollowed out. Lost. All his efforts, all his desperate work so
effortlessly superseded by a gentle manner and quiet voice. A sting against his
skin brought him back, feeling quiet and small, watching silently as the Doctor
carefully mopped the blood from his wrist, the dermal regenerator finishing its
work and leaving nothing but a small, angry line, as if drawn by a vicious
child. His fingers twitched unconsciously as the Doctor pressed a healing pad
over it, holding it in place with a loose bandage. Even that small flaw would be
gone by morning. Tegan would never know.
He flexed his hand slowly, feeling thoughts slide thick and slow through his
mind as his gaze returned inexorably to the shattered remains of the tracker on
the TARDIS floor. Free. Completely. Free. It was an odd idea, foreign, he'd
spent so long running he wasn't sure he could stop. He had nothing to cling to
now, nothing to set his path, the thought terrifying him and he wondered in a
wild moment if it could be repaired, if it could be put back...
And then the Doctor was kneeling in front of him, gentle hands resting on his
knees, soft voice calling him back. The Time Lord looked older than Turlough
could ever remember seeing him, every inch his seven-hundred odd years, no
longer youthful and enthusiastic, but with the ancient eyes of an old, old man,
the sole survivor of some terrible, undeclared and forgotten war.
"They won't find you, Turlough." Even the voice was old, withered leaves and the
death of youthful ideals torn by a cold wind. "Not now. Not ever again."
And yet, somehow there was still hope there. The promise of a single candle
flickering against the darkness.
For an instant he thought the Doctor knew. Everything. What he was. What he'd
done. And then that thought was slammed away by the realisation that the Doctor
didn't care.
Turlough's hand moved of its own volition, like a tiny, frightened animal,
hesitant, uncertain, closing briefly over the other man's and squeezing in a
gesture whispering a thousand words too huge for his mouth to form. They watched
each other for a long moment, still, silent, gazes far older than they should
have been locking and understanding in true equality. The pain of exile.
And then they were gone, replaced by the usual guileless, innocent gaze, met and
matched by a sardonic smirk.
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