#the marks

Be honest

So I have another Scream of the Shalka fanfic running up at AO3 besides The Accidental Ambassador. This one’s called Hold Me Fast, and it’s the same characters [mostly], same personalities [mostly], same obsessions [mostly], with one key difference. Everyone’s happier! And the Doctor isn’t a shit! "Second 'verse, same as the first / A whole lot funnier / and a lot less worse!"

Anyway, here’s Alison, who accidentally experienced one of the Master’s memories during the psychic vampire attack, remembering a key moment in his early life with the Doctor. Yes, they’re both such ham and cheese sandwiches that of course a significant moment in their lives takes place on a dark and stormy night in a cemetery where life hangs in the balance.

Most of all, though, she remembers something that never happened to her. She was younger, maybe in her mid-teens, and she sat on the floor of a granite mausoleum at night. She held the Doctor in her arms, as wind thrashed the trees outside and lightning sent jaundiced moments of illumination through the diamond grilled windows.

Alison was freezing. Her clothes, sodden with mud and blood, dripped steadily. She felt like she was fusing to the mausoleum floor, which was as cold and wet as an iceberg. Though the Doctor covered much of her body with their own narrow, knobby form, they gave her numb legs, rather than insulation. The noise of her chattering teeth sounded through her skull, but she could not warm herself. She had wrapped her cloak around the Doctor, who was shivering even more than she.

Water -- or maybe blood -- trickled down her forehead, and she swiped it away before it hit the Doctor. She looked down on them. Just minutes ago, she had wrested them from their tormentors’ grasp, standing between the Doctor and almost certain death. She drew her power from her rage and lashed out at the assailants. So strong was her mental assault on them that they fell to their knees as they tried to obey her and vacate. Then, as they fled, her telekinetic power just happened to shift the foundation of a particularly unstable tomb. She didn’t intend for five of them to be crushed, but she can’t deny that it was worth it.

--Because now she has the Doctor. She and they may both be among the Deca, the most avoided students of the academy, and even then among the Marks, the most despised subgroup of the Deca, but still the Doctor has been elusive till now. Whether they were perched in a tree, kneeling down in a flower bed, or carried away by a song, she could hold neither their eyes nor their mind nor their hearts. It wasn’t that they were looking at other people. It was just that they were two steps left of the communal reality.

She, someone who naturally commanded recognition, found the Doctor’s apparent obliviousness baffling and infuriated. For her, the worst thing in the universe, besides being told to Use your words!, was being ignored. Thus, as much as she essayed to gain the Doctor’s notice, she hated them for refusing her satisfaction.