Work In Progress

"Can You Pwn The Devil?"

(Note: Set between 'The Warlords of Apeshit' and 'Divine Aura # 4')


* * * * *

If God is the creator of the universe and capable of infinite miracles and goodness; then surely the Devil is capable of infinite equal and opposite. And did God banish Lucifer because they were more alike than God had always admitted to himself? Was God insecure? If so, what about? If he is so insecure, is God really the right man for the job? Does anyone really care?

That's how the Doctor had always reasoned it when mormons accosted him.

The Doctor sat alone in his vast cathedral-like library alone. That's twice as alone as he'd normally be, in his special library that differed from his normal, smaller, less-cathedral-like libraries. And he wasn't actually reading anything, he was simply sat quietly. Alone. I did mention alone, right?

"Dara, would you excuse me?" he said, which was rather odd considering he was alone. "I just need some time to myself. I'll be in the library so for once in your horrid and misbegotten life, do me a favor and please don't disturb me."

This kind of odd statement had in recent weeks proved to be not quite so odd coming from the Doctor. Because he was odd at the best of times and often made completely random requests to thin air when no one else was looking.

* * * * *

Dara held the Doctor in so low a regard that she was assured that he didn't even have a tenth of a clue as to how deeply he cared for her, even though she often needed to be reminded who the guy in the magician outfit was twice a day.

She was too busy being in love with herself. She completely adored herself. Now, there's a statement that could raise a few eyebrows, if the owners were in a strange mood and raised their eyebrows at the very slightest of provocation. And assumed that these people are somehow reading this and are amazed at her egomania. Are they reading this? Did we just break the fourth wall? Crap. Still, we best establish a context here: she loved herself as she would her idol, her role model.

The Doctor was very much her least-favorite chauffer. There's never any "romance" or anything else which might suggest the faintest of emotional connections. They were barely close travelling companions, certainly not comrades in arms and to say that they were the best of friends would cause both to collapse in paroxysms of hilarity. Dara cared for no one but herself. And that kind of love was special, deep. Her faith in her own incredible hotness was unshakable, and above all she was convinced her naked body drove everyone crazy. Which it did, but Dara assumed it left menfolk insane with desire, rather than nervous wrecks trying to rip their own eyeballs out to end the Lovecraftian horror they were witnessing. It was only the Doctor's incredible Time Lord brain that kept him going when she deliberately stalked the strange man, jumping out from behind doors and furniture, inflicting her horrors on him.

After twelve days of non-stop Benny Hill chase sequences, the Doctor still hadn't tried to kill himself or ravish her, and she assumed he was a strange old man who was past it. To her, anyone over the age of 24 was ancient, and thus she concluded the Doctor was dead from the neck up and extra dead from the waste down. Why else would a man in a time machine with a goddess like her not spend every hour of every day sexing her continuously, but instead be more interested in rabbits up his sleeve. And when she told people this - often people who had no idea who she was or why she was talking at them - she would literally mean it, even though it sounded like she was confused about "rabbits in hats" and "tricks up sleeves". Oh, what a retard she was!

Whenever they had been on some madcap adventure to save the universe, there were occasions when events and circumstances had hit home very hard for her. Like that time she stubbed her toe. Or the time the Dustbins bombed humanity back to the Stone Age and converted the survivors into brain-dead flesh-eating zombies. Or that time she got that not-so-fresh-feeling in the middle of a hostage situation. Or that time her mascara ran.

"Nil desperandum, fair Dara, for I shall show the wonders of prestidigitation, never fear your smile will be clear," the Doctor would say, his face beaming with such radiance. Then, with a few flicks of his wrist he would repeatedly slap her round the face in a bid to get her to crack her skull open until she lay, bleeding and unconscious on the floor. He would then sod off and check out some magic shows, never without a smile brought on by ABH on her person.

That was the Doctor she knew. Mind you, there was the total sad-act in the scarf, though. He was also a Doctor she knew. And that grey-haired twat in the Napoleonic gear. Or the fat, hairy, moustached lazy cunt with a walking stick. She knew a lot of Doctors, now she thought of it.

But recently she began to think that her Doctor, the magic geek, had become a totally psycho. Instead of merely groaning, "Oh, fuck, you're STILL alive!" and running away in the mornings when he saw her, he had started to simply chloroform her unconscious whenever she spoke. Just the other day she had woken up in the middle of the night to discover she had been doused in petrol and the Doctor crouched at the end of the bed, trying to light a match and muttering "Burn! BURN!" to himself. It was amazing how tolerant she was, really. Still, they had been through a lot. It was true, the Warlords of Apeshit had taken a lot out of him, but he had faced gods before. He lived with HER divine radiance for crying out loud. What was so different now?

As ever, Dara's deep-rooted psychosis made it utterly impossible for her to accept what a malodorous bitch she was and thus she would need to find a scapegoat for her own actions - and she knew exactly who to lay the blame on:

The Bastard!

An evil twisted man who this time had gotten away three times over without once sleeping with her. This boiled her blood to the core. He had invaded her mind but gone absolutely nowhere near her body, no, he had saved that for the Doctor, he done untold damage. But she always wondered...

Didn't he think she was hot?!

* * * * *

"How does he get away with it?" the Doctor would ask himself constantly about a variety of people, from the President of the United States of America to a passing taxi driver. "How is it that wherever and whenever we go, he's there, with that dark-bearded face pulsing with unceasing evil? OK, he's regenerated into a ginger-haired twit with a completely new face, but it's a face that had haunted my dreams. In the few times that I do sleep. So it doesn't actually haunt me at all. Why the hell am I driveling on like this?" he wondered to himself. But he didn't answer. No one did. He was alone. Did I mention that?

These thoughts would constantly revolve again and again in his head which is what "constant" means now I come to think of it. And the more the Doctor thought, the more angry he became, and he didn't want Dara to see that. He was not going to give the bitch the satisfaction. He had long held the conviction that, since he regenerated right in front of Dara's eyes and the bimbo hadn't even noticed, the dominant factors of his new persona had formed an image, and he didn't want to shatter that image. Not that Dara would notice. Or care. In fact, he could shatter it every single day and no one would be any the wiser. For the love of Led Zeppelin, all this constant skulking in secret was probably doing him no good either, but it was the lesser of two evils. He didn't know what the greater was, but statistically speaking, it was very likely it was the lesser if you looked at it to the right angle.

That last thought sent a shiver through him, which was really stupid as the thought barely made sense, let alone was worthy enough to be scared of. Had someone had just walked over his grave, twelve times over? Who the hell was this wanker pacing back and forth on his grave? Didn't they have something better to do? Were they illiterate? Could this disrespectful myopic malinger not see the gravestone marked "THE DOCTOR, A FRIEND TO THE EARTH!"?!

More thoughts and memories bobbed to the surface of his mind in that nebulous activity known as consciousness. There were a lot of things that the Bastard had said on Dead Parrot 5 in the games of the Apeshit, about his plans and schemes being not so far grandiose as those of the Doctor. And what frightened the Doctor more was that the guy had actually believed that cheap chat-up line; he had even said to himself that he could almost forget how great the sex was... ALMOST forget, that is. But the Doctor shrugged it off. That was another problem for the Bastard to discuss with his psychiatrist. The point - if indeed, there WAS a point - was, when would their next encounter to be? Actually, that was less of a point and more of a question. Oh there would be one, there would always a fight between them usually once every other season. Wherever you find the Doctor, you will find the Bastard. Or the Dustbins. Or Cybermen. Or Trods. But it had always confounded the Doctor as to how the Bastard had survived.

At one point he would always just see the Bastard escape to safety, laughing in knowledge that he had confounded the Doctor and UNIT in their prudish, melon-fetishist ways. But those were younger and far more innocent days of unargued canonicity amongst the fan base. The next time they met, the Bastard was a crippled emaciated creature resembling a sea-bound mammal. But how did he do it? How the hell does a life of crime lead to you turning into a sea-lion?