best_enemies | Like It's 1999 4c/?: Negotiations

Like It’s 1999 Part 4b/?: Negotiation

Wordcount: 5,867 [4c + 4d (Plus the transitiony bit from 4b)]

Rating: R for references to sex, language, and drug use, eventual NC-17

Pairing: Ten/Jip, Ten/Simm!Master

Betaed by piping_hot (and in all seriousness, I could not do this without her!)

Author’s Note: An AU sort of crossover with the movie Human Traffic. Alters the Master’s timeline post Time War and the Doctor’s from the end of Gridlock onward, with references to Torchwood: Day One. Helps to have seen Human Traffic, which is available streaming on Netflix at the mo (yep, still).

Summary: The Face of Boe has different last words for the Doctor which will lead him into the world of a young man in Cardiff at the end of the 20^th Century.

Previous bits: 1, 2, 3, 4a, 4b

Jip stopped roaring as he felt the air get cold and thin, being dragged (was it still dragging if it was through the air?) to who the hell knew where. The hooded sweatshirt did precious little to protect him from the cutting wind. Eventually he managed to catch his breath enough to start begging for his life.

“Do not drop me,” he demanded hoarsely. Jip wasn’t thinking clearly; he should’ve been begging, not ordering. Then again, had he been able to think more clearly, he likely wouldn’t have needed to, since his feet would be on the ground and he’d still have his lemonade. “Do not fucking drop me until I’m a foot or less off of a solid surface that can support my weight—”

“Why the hell would I have picked you up if I intended to drop you?” a voice rumbled, quite primly. “For a senator, you’re really not bright, are you?”

“Because you can’t actually drop a person without pickin’ them up first!” Jip managed to squeak out, looking down at the fading ground as his ears popped from the change in air pressure. “And you’ve got the wrong bloke, mate, because I’m not the senator of anything!”

“Fair point,” the dragon replied, “fair point. But please don’t play the fool with me, sir, as I’m quite aware of who you are and what you represent. Morjamsen wins his election, then returns what he stole from me.”

“I’ve been on this planet for less than ninety minutes! Who the hell is Morjamsen?” Jip shouted.

This is perfect. Cracking good job. I think I preferred it when you were snogging the sex-viper girl.

“NOT! NOW!” Jip exclaimed out loud at the voice. “I’m in no fuckin’ mood, all right?”

The dragon dipped its head down, looking under its own chest to peer at Jip held in its foot. Hand. Paw. Whatever.

“Look, I realize you’re put out, but I’m afraid part of the kidnapping process is that the kidnap-ee doesn’t get to dictate the terms. I can’t really consider your mood or whether this is convenient for you!” the dragon huffed. Jip didn’t really respond, but was momentarily mesmerized by the dragon’s eyes. They were faceted, very much like the mica lanterns, but more opalescent. The dragon’s face gave an awkward little upside down twitch. “What?”

“What?” Jip asked back.

“You’re staring,” the dragon said. “Have I got something on my whiskers?”

“No no no,” Jip answered, “sorry. I just… on those big kite-puppets, they really got your eyes dead on right.”

“Ah. Yes,” the dragon agreed, facing forward again. “Funny, that.”

The dragon was silent after that, and Jip couldn’t actually get any words past his teeth, which had started to chatter from the wind and the altitude. He’d never been this high up, never taken an airplane anywhere, but he saw the flickers of orange and red below, bonfires reduced to tiny embers by the distance, shivering even harder at the thought of how warm it must be beside one. He could only look disconsolately at the ground as all those signs of life got further and further away, yelping in terror as suddenly the ground was all too close and the dragon’s hand went slack. Jip hit the floor of the cave with his teeth clattering so loudly that he might as well have had a novelty wind-up key protruding from one ear.

The dragon had a cave, which sort of disturbed him. It did not, however, have a pile of gold and treasure, or a pile of humanoid bones. The cave almost seemed like it was made of glass, like it had been hollowed out by fire itself. Jip tried to get up, but was shivering so badly that he couldn’t quite get purchase on the slick floor, and wound up in a pile of shuddering limbs on the ground. The cave mouth was an imperfect circle, about thirty meters across, and the sunlight poured back in through the opening as the dragon moved further into the cave.

“What’s the matter with you?” the dragon frowned.

“I’m freezing my ass off,” Jip replied, the f’s stuttering through his lips.

"Oh, are you? I thought your kind was warm blooded!" the dragon exclaimed with mild surprise, curling around itself.

Jip would've rolled his eyes, but his teeth were vibrating his head too hard to really make it worth the effort.

"I yyyam but there's a lllimit," he chattered, forcing enough coordination out of one hand to zip his sweatshirt and yank the hood over his aching ears, "and I'm not a senator!"

"Terribly sorry," the dragon apologized. "Politics are such a filthy business, makes monsters of all of us, really. If you like, I'd suggest getting into the ov- of course, you've no idea what that means- into that divot in the floor. I'm sure Vereda will be glad for the company."

The dragon raised one claw, and Jip looked at the indicated spot, which appeared to be a pockmark in the cave floor. It glowed faintly, and within it there was a flat black sphere with lighted orange stripes, like a coal that had cooled to a cinder.

"What, you want to cook me?" Jip exclaimed. The dragon's mica eyes went wide.

"That's disgusting!" it sneered, looking a big nauseated at the thought, coiling tighter.

"Well what do you eat, then?" Jip asked, forgetting the chill in the face of his alarm.

"Cloud plankton, of course!" the dragon answered. "I'd choke if I tried to eat anything larger than a pebble."

Jip was about to say that that was obviously bollocks, because how in the hell did something grow so large when it could only eat creatures the size of dust, but then he remembered his friend Nina’s brief obsession with saving the whales, at which point he’d learned far, far too much about baleen.

"So why are you trying to get me to snuggle up to that cinder?" Jip asked, frowning dubiously at the sphere. The dragon gave a fatigued sigh.

"Look, just feel the floor near it. There's a geothermal vent below that spot; warms the ground. And I'll thank you not to call my daughter a cinder."

Jip's eyebrows tried to join the rest of his hair, and he approached the divot slowly, feeling the floor warm the closer he got, but never to the point that it caused him to do more than sweat slightly.

"That's your egg!" he exclaimed, startled with the idea that he was seeing a dragon egg face-to-shell.

"Vereda, yes," the dragon said. Jip sat down on the edge of the indentation, staring in wonder. "You can touch her to say hello."

Jip reached out, then hesitated.

“Aren’t you worried I’m going to hurt her?” Jip asked. The dragon snorted.

“Don’t be absurd. You’re not strong enough to crack her shell. You’d need two men and a saw to get in there,” he sighed, worry creasing the scaly flesh around his faceted eyes. “Which means Vereda is quite safe, but my son is not.”

Jip’s fingers brushed the warm surface of the egg. He heard a faint gurgling noise from within it, and yanked his hand back. The dragon rumbled, apparently a chuckle.

"No need to fear, senator. She just misses her brother. She gets a bit talkative when she's lonesome."

Jip groaned, giving the dragon a frustrated look at hearing the word ‘senator’ again.

"You've got the wrong guy, mate. I'm just an earth lad on vacation," Jip pleaded, getting fully into the warm space, elbows resting on the flat of the floor as he tried to reason with the dragon. "I wasn't even a class officer, let alone some political whatever."

The dragon frowned.

“‘Senator Haufstedder will likely arrive early at the grounds before the fireworks. He will be wearing a ceremonial robe, striped in two shades of green. Take him there, in full view of the townspeople,’” the dragon recited. “Those were Morjamsen’s instructions, followed to the letter.”

Jip sputtered.

“This isn’t a robe; it’s a hooded bloody jumper!” He held up one of the drawstrings on the hood, waving them in little circles. “Does this look ceremonial?!”

“I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of Briedean fashion,” the dragon sniffed. “I rather doubt anything is available in my size.”

Jip sat back.

“So that’s it, then? You’re gonna kill me because I borrowed the wrong color hoodie?” he asked hollowly. The dragon shifted.

“Who said anything about killing?” he asked, looking at the floor. Jip let out a slightly hysterical giggle.

“You won’t look me in the face right now,” he pointed out. “And come on. If you kidnap a senator so some other bastard can win an election, you don’t tell him about it unless you’re plannin’ on making sure he can’t tell anyone else.”

The dragon swallowed and said nothing. The posh voice decided to fill the silence itself:

Brilliant. Let’s do our very best to convince our captor that we shouldn’t be allowed to live. Aces.

“I could place you on the other side of the world. Out of the country. You’d make your way back eventually,” the dragon said, his inflection rising at the end of the sentence, like it was a question.

Oh, certainly, I’m sure that would work. Not like he’d ask to see a body.

Jip silently agreed, but didn’t tell the dragon that, now keenly aware that his position was more precarious than he’d wanted to admit. The Doctor had said that he’d had no way to find him if he got lost, and he was most certainly extremely fucking lost.

“I am awfully sorry about the whole affair,” the dragon added softly. Jip just shrugged.

The silence was borderline agonizing, the dragon’s guilt almost palpable in the air, clashing with Jip’s fear like two contradictory smells. Jip pushed his sleeves up a bit, pressing his hands against the warm cavity in the ground to try to get the feeling back in his fingertips. The dragon, just sitting around, drumming his claws on the ground unwittingly in time to the sound of the drums in Jip’s head, looked up.

“What a peculiar tattoo…” he commented. Jip glanced at his arm, still covered in red song lyrics.

“Oh, it’s just some song lyrics I was writing down so I could find the song again,” he answered dully. “It was a really good song.”

“Did you hear it at the festival?” the dragon asked, a forced cheeriness in his voice.

“Nope,” Jip said, reading his own arm. “Fella I’m staying with, travelling with, has the most brilliant music collection I’ve ever seen. Knew if I didn’t write something down, and if I forgot about it, I’d never find it again, and it was such a good song.”

Jip paused, tugging his sleeves back down and pulling the cuffs all the way over his hands, his fingertips finally warm and wanting to keep them that way.

“Of course,” Jip continued, “you don’t believe me. You think that I heard it over the senate radio station or something, because clearly I’m a political mastermind, and we just happened to be out of paper in the senate that day, so I wrote on my arm.”

The dragon frowned, not rising to the bait.

“So what now?” Jip asked after another silence.

“Now we wait for Morjamsen to return my son, or give further instructions.”

Jip gritted his teeth, biting back the vicious things he wanted to say about just how fucking gullible you had to be to buy that line. He wanted to scream that he was the son of a whore and a hustler, and he knew a thing or two about getting conned. The posh voice wanted him to scream elaborate death threats that sounded a bit Spanish Inquisition-y.

“I don’t suppose he gave you any sort of time frame on that,” he said instead. The dragon’s whiskers twitched uncomfortably, and Jip sighed. “Thought not.”

Both lapsed into a much steadier, heavier silence that seemed to extend all the way to the child inside the egg as the sun continued setting outside the cave. For a few minutes, it was full of red light. Jip basked in it, thinking that the Doctor had been right. It was quite a slow sunset. The angle of the light changed, and the red receded as though the mountain was slowly bleeding out, the cave going dim. The only light now came from the walls themselves, the accompaniment to the heat in the divot.

When Jip’s stomach growled, it echoed twice as loud as it really should have, causing the dragon to startle.

“What in heaven’s name…?”

Jip sighed, reaching into the pocket of his sweatshirt.

“It’s just my stomach. I’m hungry. We can’t all eat clouds,” he muttered. He took out his little parcel of grapes that weren’t grapes and started popping them into his mouth a few at the time.

“I apologize,” the dragon said miserably. “I really don’t know what’s taking so long.”

You’ve been had, that’s what’s happened, Jip thought. The posh voice grunted agreement. Jip just kept eating, pausing in mid-chew as the dwindling pile of grapes revealed what he’d used to wrap them up. He crammed the remaining fruit into his mouth and held up the flyer frantically, waving it, trying to speak with his mouth full.

Chew, idiot, then speak! the posh voice snapped. Don’t choke now of all times.

Jip felt a vague mental twitch at the entire concept of choking, like it was something that happened to other people, but managed to swallow the grapes.

“Look! I can prove that I’m not Haufstedder!” Jip insisted, leaping to his feet and shoving the flyer under the dragon’s nose.

“Can’t see that close up…” the dragon muttered, scooting back. “Oh. Oh dear.”

“You see?!” Jip crowed, jumping up and down, snapping his fingers. “I told you!”

“Well of course you told me, but… oh hell and damnation,” the dragon moaned. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Jip threw his hands in the air.

“So we’ll go back and we’ll explain, we’ll get the right person, or, I dunno, you could just tell people the truth and they’d probably help you!” he ranted. The dragon gave him a withering look.

“Oh dear, I certainly never thought of that. Why do you think he left my daughter and only stole my son? I can’t abandon Vereda to go looking for Prymic! It was an enormous risk to leave long enough to snatch you! The egg has to be turned every hour at the absolute most, the heat monitored—”

“Don’t you have any dragon friends? What about their dad?” Jip interrupted. The dragon growled softly in frustration.

“I am their father. Dragon mothers don’t remain with their young once the eggs are laid, so I’ve got no idea where she is. We live far apart; we’re big creatures, and we need a lot of territory,” the dragon rattled off, looking around frantically. Jip felt his stomach lurch as the dragon’s eyes settled on him.

“What?” Jip cringed.

“What’s your name?” the dragon asked. Jip narrowed his eyes cautiously.

“Jip,” he said, then yelped as the dragon lunged forward and licked his head. “What is it with aliens spitting on me today?!”

“That’s how we say hello. I’m Utherion. Now. Every fifteen minutes or so, you turn that egg one hundred and eighty degrees, slowly. Don’t jar her or shake her,” the dragon ordered, frantic, nuzzling the egg.

My god, someone’s going to leave an infant with you? Seriously?

“Talk to her, tell her stories, don’t you dare frighten her, little songs are good, stimulation is very important at this age,” Utherion said, voice trembling, and then looked up, staring Jip down. “If anything happens to her, I will kill you. I know your scent now; I can find you again if I have to.”

“Wait, I can’t look after a kid!” Jip exclaimed, a visual in his head of feet breaking through the shell, the baby dragon able to blindly toddle around.

“You’d better figure it out!” Utherion roared, the walls shaking, then he took a breath, exhaling slowly. “Just turn her, talk to her, and sing to her. It’s not that bloody complicated.”

Jip fought the ill feeling that overtook him, but nodded, and Utherion visibly relaxed.

“Thank you. Oh, thank you,” Utherion sighed, and licked the egg, then Jip. He tried to school his face into a more serious expression. “Er… or else. Back in a tick.

He uncoiled out of the cave like a rope with an anchor attached, his narrow tail making a whip crack noise as it snapped outside. Jip regarded the egg, and after a moment without her dad’s voice, Vereda made a fussy, pouty noise from within.

“Oh, no no no, sweetheart, don’t cry, your da’ll be back soon,” Jip soothed, scooting forward and wrapping his arms around the egg as best he could. “And he’ll have your brother back to you soon, he’ll probably have brought you a souvenir, and it’ll be all happy family again.”

The movement within the egg felt less restless, so Jip took Utherion’s advice and started singing.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…”

On to 4d