Chapter Text
The whole time they had been on Sauria he was so on edge he couldn't enjoy the warm suns and the peaceful surroundings. The Doctor could feel each hole being punched through its walls like the sting of a wasp and it was making it hard to concentrate on anything else.
To anyone watching, it would seem he had developed a strange twitch. Every so often and apparently at random he would flinch and grimace for no readily explainable reason. He would quickly cover this by vaguely scratching or coughing once but it was becoming noticeable to the point of irritating The Master.
"Did you pick up some exotic form of lice or have you finally lost your mind?" he snapped after watching his fellow Time Lord from across the breakfast table.
"Surely you feel it too?" The Doctor asked.
"What I'm feeling is to the urge to bathe you in an industrial sized vat of sheep dip," The Master growled, "or cut your caffeine intake."
"You can't feel the holes?"
"What in Rassilon's name are you going on about?"
"The holes!" The Doctor repeated, making a circle with his fingers to illustrate the word, "something, someone? is ripping holes in the fabric of time."
"I tune that sort of thing out," The Master sniffed taking a sip of his tea, "I figure since you are here you can fuss over it so I don't have to."
"Gee thanks," the thin Time Lord grumbled, "but if you concentrate, can you feel it too?"
"Probably, but you know what?" the dark suited man leaned forward in his chair to smile at him, "I'm not going to. You want to play the cosmos' nanny you go right ahead. I have better things to do with my time."
"Have you retained anything from your days at the Academy?" The Doctor asked his voice low and dark.
The Master smiled, "of course I have. I remember what a pompous bunch of asses our teachers were, how you were considered just this short of being retarded and how I saved your hide many, many times when the thick headed bullies didn't take kindly towards your smart mouth."
"I meant the important things," The Doctor sighed, "like awareness of the threads of time, the monitoring of..."
"Oh you mean the dead boring stuff that made our race the eunuchs of the cosmos, impotent little librarians and stuffy old senators, so worried about the goings on in the universe that they couldn't get off their duffs to do anything or have a life?" The Master cut him off with a laugh, "and you seem to forget that they turned their backs on you."
"That was a long time ago. And anyway it's just you and I now, we have to find out what's doing this and stop it."
"Do what you want, I'm going to attend to my recent acquisitions and you just have fun being the cosmic seamstress or whatever you are planning on doing," The Master snorted and walked away.
Taking advantage of being left alone The Doctor headed to the console room. Punching in some information into the TARDIS' onboard computer he watched as the images flashed by with a somewhat distracted air.
The data confirmed what he had been feeling all along, something was punching holes in the fabric of time but what had felt to be completely random was quickly forming a pattern. Whoever or whatever was doing this had a particular place and even more frightening a particular person in mind.
The screen brought up a satellite view of the holes, they clustered in a pattern like a map or worse yet, he corrected himself, a net, surrounding and ever tightening around very localised area. And more frighteningly around the life of one person. Someone The Doctor knew and loved.
It was time to head back to Earth.