Work Text:
When he turns, the entrance has blinked out of existence. Low bed with soiled sheets. Oil lamps, cracked floorboards. Yellowed, uninterrupted walls—no door.
The Doctor walks around the room, tracing a hand over the plaster. His hearts slow. How long has he been running? Hours? Weeks? His timesense is blotted out. The restrained pace forces relaxation. Still, he takes quick breaths, holding the room in sharp focus.
There really isn’t a door. Rose petals litter a bureau in front of a cracked mirror. When he takes one between his fingers, the temperature abruptly drops. A refracted figure stands behind him. He whirls.
“Well, well,” the Toymaker croons. “I’ve caught you. Now.” He crosses the room, pretending to brush off the lapel of his tuxedo. “Remind me how this goes.”
The Doctor’s mouth goes dry. There’s something sickening underlying the words. “What does that mean?” he demands. He’s backed against the wall, still holding one hand behind him, feeling for some crack that could allow him to escape. The room narrows. He can hear the floorboards whine.
The Toymaker exhales, amused. “Do I frighten you, Doctor?” He’s close, leaning into the Doctor’s space. It’s not like facing a monster—he’s too vast for that. The Toymaker’s eyes are as empty as the edge of the universe. As hungry. Of course the Doctor is frightened.
“Tell you what, give this room a door and I’ll answer you. Just one little door.” He sounds light and false, unconvincing.
“How coy,” the Toymaker purrs, slipping into crisp-edged parody. The Doctor takes the accent for British at first, then realises with a chill that it’s something else: a cheap imitation of High Gallifreyan.
The Toymaker takes hold of him. His hands are hard, ice-cold, impossibly strong. They grasp the Doctor’s shoulders, slide down his arms, fiddle with his cuffs. He shudders. He stands very, very still. The Toymaker could kill him, might be about to kill him—but he’s still alive. Which means there’s a way out, but where? He needs time, he needs to think, and even he can’t do that when gripped by this kind of danger. The intent touch strikes him, sets his head spinning. Every brush is like a knife scraping over the Doctor’s wrists. White teeth flash, burning in the dim.
“Say something, Time Lord. Don’t ruin the moment.”
“Alright. Let’s talk,” he tries—steady, reassuring. If he can keep the Toymaker calm, he can hang on to a particle of control. “Why that accent?”
“What accent?” he asks, perfect this time. The Capitol intonation sits like silver filigree over his English. He smiles wider, licks the glinting surface of an upper tooth. And then his hands seize the front of the Doctor’s trousers, wrenching open the button. When the Doctor startles, shocked, and tries to twist away, the Toymaker flourishes an arm like a conjurer and the barrel of a gun bites into the Doctor’s low belly, pinning him in place against the wall.
“You’re beautiful,” the Toymaker sings out. Like “check.” The Doctor flushes, swallowing back saliva. Terror binds him where he stands.
“Please,” he whispers, because it’s worth a try. The Toymaker’s smile extends into the creases around his eyes. There’s no door. Arms encircle the Doctor and then he’s swept off his feet, made weightless. The Toymaker’s world moans discordantly. There is a kind of dance.
*
On the bed, flat on his back, his trousers are pulled down to his knees. He lies frozen as the Toymaker’s stony fingers drag over his stomach, his chest. Shudders when they meet his neck, choking on a silent stream of protestations.
The Toymaker snaps with theatrical flair and the gun stretches, flickers. The weapon that drags over the Doctor’s hip, lifting his shirt, is changed—a TCE. Searing arousal seeps like poison through his body as his hearts pound a slow, frightened rhythm. The outline of his erection is plain beneath white fabric.
The Toymaker rolls him onto his front, and the Doctor shivers. He lies still. He is bared. When he feels viselike hands grip him, drawing him open, he breaks, can’t help but make one last stupid attempt to stop it.
“Please. You don’t want this,” he begs. “You don’t want like this, it’s—beneath you. It’s small. “
“It’s your game, dear Doctor.”
“No. No, you can’t say that, I—”
“Animals. You’ll play with anything. Your minds, your bodies—like a kind of … mm, cat’s cradle. You pull yourselves taut.” A too-large hand claws between the Doctor’s legs, and as he moans the Toymaker is still speaking. “Would you like to know what I did to the Master? I found him, and I beat him, and then I tore his mind apart synapse by synapse. And what do you think I found at the bottom? Come on,” he demands, suddenly harsh, “take a guess.” The Doctor’s stomach turns over. He’s breathing hard, nearly panting. Through tears, he tries to focus on the mattress below him, on the copper stain that looks like a mountain, on the wispy clouds that move around it, anything to keep the words out.
“A game, ” the Toymaker laughs. “A violent game. What a delight.” The words that come next bloom beyond harshness, the Toymaker’s voice echoing, warping into something cosmic. “I tried it all on him, of course. Until he broke.”
The Doctor stops breathing.
Pain breaches him, splits him, sends his vision boiling black with stars. What penetrates him is not a cock. It’s deeper than touching minds, a force that’s far too large, filling him completely. It takes hold of each atom inside of him. The pain moves through his abdomen in an approximation of fucking. The Doctor’s vision is taken by it. Sine waves of red static pulse in time to the force tearing him apart.
He could die. Outside, he knows, his mouth is open against a mattress, saliva pooling below his open jaw. There’s a sound. His voice, maybe.
But there’s comfort in this level of debasement, of pain, freedom in knowing there’s nothing he can do but endure it. He doesn’t have to think. He lets sensation take him like a river, and as it carries him he twists against the mattress, gasps for air, feels a sick pleasure course through him, stronger than anything, obliterating the map of his body.
Tell me you love me, mocks a voice that burns out his mind like a sun.
The words are engraved inside his skull. Reduced like this, having forgotten where he is, having forgotten the face of his attacker, it’s easy to let them free. His voice tangles up and there’s Master, Master, maybe in his head or clotted against the mattress, but even this pathetic unreal expression is enough to slice through the skin of his wanting and let him come for what feels like eternity, losing all sense, dying into a noiseless, touchless blank.
*
He returns to consciousness like a castaway. There’s barely any pain. He touches himself gingerly, expecting damage, but the ache he feels in his entrails is like a memory. No, like something imagined—then a half-forgotten dream.
“Well done,” coos the Toymaker, brushing stardust from the front of his trousers. He finishes doing up the zip. “Let’s call it a tie.”
There’s an automatic process underway in the Doctor’s mind, a wave that will take the memory away until he’s ready for it. Once, he would have wrestled with it, clinging to the pain, telling himself there was something important to remember here. Some shame. No longer.
As he sits up, it’s already passing. The Toymaker is gone. The Doctor rises from the bed, steady on his feet, and finds the door.