Warning: Torture

Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who

Chapter 1 – Capture

In all honesty, this trip had got slightly out of hand. It had only meant to include one destination: one trip somewhere romantic, for their anniversary – hopefully with no alien fish pretending to be vampires. Now, seven weeks later, the Doctor had been beginning to wonder if they should be heading back.

The last thing that he remembered, they had been at the seaside. That had been Amy's idea; one last place after they left 1960s Carnaby Street.

"Right!" the Doctor had exclaimed, clapping his hands together and turning on his heel so that he was standing in front of Amy rather than at her side. "Once Rory gets back, we should probably get back to your party."

A look of disappointment crossed Amy's face, but she didn't have time to complain before the aforementioned ex-Roman returned, with a new piece of attire that he hadn't been wearing when he had left them to go in one of the shops.

As soon as they saw it, each of them had a slightly different reaction: Amy burst out laughing, and the Doctor's eyes went wide.

Rory's face fell. "What?" he asked, looking from his guffawing wife to the shocked Time Lord.

The Doctor took three steps to stand in front of Rory, placing a paternal hand on his shoulder. "Rory," he began, with a small smile, "that is by far the ugliest belt in the universe, and I've seen the inside of King Thorromin of Skarnegan 7's closet."

"W-" Rory began, his face turning a rather adorable shade of red as he glanced down at the belt now circling his waist. Amy still hadn't stopped laughing. "Is it really that bad?" he asked the Doctor quietly.

The Time Lord smiled sadly and nodded. "Yes. Yes it is." He lowered his hand from Rory's shoulder. "But you like it, yes?"

"Well-" Rory began, but he was cut off.

"Then that's all that matters!" the Doctor grinned, turning back to Amy. "Now – back to your party." He walked forward purposefully, heading back to where he had parked the TARDIS, passing the redhead before being called back.

"Wait!" Amy called, and the Doctor turned back. Rory was now standing next to Amy, who had her arms crossed over her chest. "One more."

The Doctor narrowed his eyes, trying to pretend that her demand was not one that he wanted to pay attention to. In reality, he had been almost putting off going back to their world, with the cube mystery, and the humdrum, and the everyday. Even this, still a normal day with no historical figures for any of them to accidentally marry or aliens to end up getting chased by – it was still somehow better than whatever was waiting for them back in the early 21st Century. After a brief staring contest of sorts, the Doctor conceded.

"Alright. One more. But just one more, mind," he told her, still trying to maintain the illusion that he was in fact in control.

Amy grinned, jumping slightly as they began to walk back to the TARDIS.

"Where do you want to go?" the Doctor asked once they were back in the control room and he was flicking switches and pulling levers. Amy leaned against the railings with a thoughtful expression on her face.

"What about…" she began slowly, "the seaside?"

The Doctor grinned. "Ooh, I love the seaside. The smell of the sea, the sand between your toes… And I know the perfect place." He set the coordinates and was just about to take off when Amy suddenly appeared by his side and placed her hand on top of his, stopping him from pulling the last lever down. The Time Lord turned to the Scot, confused.

"What is it?" he asked, as a mischievous grin began to play on his companion's lips.

"One more thing," she began, and the Doctor inclined his head, inviting her to continue. "This is to celebrate our anniversary, yeah?" The Doctor nodded in agreement. Amy shrugged. "It should be… a family outing." She let go of his hand, and he grinned, understanding her meaning. He sidestepped across the console, and reset the coordinates for Stormcage.

Just fifteen minutes later, the four of them were sitting on the beach – which was completely deserted due to them having landed on the most freezing January morning ever recorded in human history – munching on ice creams which they had bought from a rather menacing-looking fellow and shivering furiously.

And that was the last thing that he remembered.

Now, he was lying on his back on a hard floor rather than sitting on the beach with an ice cream in his hand and a smile on his face; although, wherever it was that he appeared to be waking up, it was considerably warmer than the beach had been.

"He's waking up!"

"Doctor!"

It was only when he heard the two voices – rather far off, to his right – that he realised that his eyes were closed. That would have to be remedied. As soon as there was light hitting his eyes, he realised that he was, in fact, on the floor: of a cold, grey room with nothing else in it but a large cage, the kind that circuses of olden days would use to transport lions.

A cage that now contained the three members of his family.

As the Doctor blinked away the last vestiges of his unconsciousness, he realised that the cage had been created by building the bars up from the floor: it was stuck, static, and the locked door was on the opposite side to that facing the Doctor. About a foot in front of the cage, a white line had been drawn on the ground.

Amy, Rory and River were sitting at the side of the cage, kneeling – for it was not tall enough for them to stand – with their hands curled around the bars. They appeared relieved that he had finally opened his eyes, but there was still worry present in their expressions.

Once the Doctor was fully aware, he leapt to his feet, ignoring the head rush it caused, and realised for the first time that the four of them were not the room's only occupants: leaning against the far wall that the Doctor was now facing was a man slightly taller than the Doctor, with pockmarked skin and short, sandy hair. He was wearing a scruffy blue t-shirt under a slightly cleaner black jacket, and a pair of denim jeans.

The ice cream vendor from the beach.

He had drugged them.

"Hello," the ice cream vendor grinned, pushing himself off of the wall and walking over to the Doctor.

"Who are you?" the Doctor demanded, earning a vicious smile from the ice cream vendor. "Why did you drug us?"

"My name," the ice cream vendor began, "is Butham. And I am a scientist." As if to prove his testimony, Butham reached into the back pocket of his jeans and retrieved a thick, black box. On the front was a large dial with a line curved across the top, indicating how strong the signal it beamed was transmitting at any one time. At the moment, it was off.

The Doctor's eyes flicked to the remote briefly then back to Butham's face, still marred with that unnerving smile.

"And what is that?" he asked, shifting slightly on his feet and tucking his hands in his pockets.

Butham smirked. "It's a weapon," he explained smugly. "Designed to target a single person at a time. Works on every species in the universe."

"You can't possibly know that," River interrupted, and Butham turned to her for the first time. At first, he appeared slightly surprised, as though he had – up to this point – forgotten that he and the Doctor were not the only ones in the room. "You'd have to try it out on every species that had ever lived, across the entire universe."

"Indeed, I have," Butham grinned, regarding River briefly before turning his attention back to the Doctor. "Except one."

The Doctor's eyes narrowed. "Except Time Lords."

"Indeed," Butham repeated. "I had hoped to run into one of your earlier selves; then maybe I could have found a way to Gallifrey before it got destroyed, but…" Butham trailed off, shrugging. "I couldn't pass up the opportunity to test it on a real, living Time Lord while I had the chance."

"So what exactly does this weapon do?" the Doctor asked nonchalantly.

"It's a weapon of torture," Butham explained, "linked up to you directly."

"How?" the Doctor snapped, now feeling himself growing considerably angrier.

Butham said nothing; he merely rolled up his sleeves – the Doctor noticed that he had a Vortex Manipulator tied to his wrist – and tapped his arm with his forefinger and middle finger, just below the crease of his elbow.

Confused, the Doctor pushed up his own sleeves, and noticed that a silver patch had been applied to his skin, just below the creases of his elbows. They looked rather like nicotine patches, but they were obviously made out of metal and had some kind of circuitry in them.

"I couldn't develop the technology until I had tested it on every known species, but once I have, I can get to work on changing it so that the target doesn't need the patches," Butham explained as he rolled down his sleeves.

But the Doctor was only half-listening; he scrabbled at the patches on his arms, trying to rip them off of his skin, but they had been applied too closely to the surface of his skin and his nails weren't long enough to get underneath them to remove them. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Butham place his forefinger and his thumb carefully around the dial, and slowly turn it a fraction of an inch.

The effect was immediate: an intense pain shot through his entire body, feeling as though it had originated from the spot between his hearts rather than the patches that had been applied to his arms. He gasped instinctively, stumbling slightly as he tried to take a step nearer to Butham to try and snatch the remote away from him, though he mercifully stayed upright.

After a second or two, Butham turned the dial again, shutting the weapon off. He had a wide grin on his face, now confident in the knowledge that his weapon worked on the Last of his last species.

The Doctor took a few deep breaths, trying to fight down the residual pain that thrummed through his entire body, and trying to ignore the trembling of his fingers as his arms hung by his sides. He glared at Butham from where he stood, feeling an intense hatred for the man standing before him.

"Okay," he breathed, attempting to keep his voice steady despite his vocal chords' apparent desire to waver, "you got what you wanted. Your… device works on Time Lords. Now you can go back to your buyer and tell them that you have a universal method of torture." The Doctor raised his right arm – with some difficulty, he found – to point at his wife and in-laws in the cage next to him. "Now let them go."

He knew that he really shouldn't have been encouraging a lunatic such as Butham to leave them behind as he was doing right now, but his main focus at the moment was not for the rest of the universe: it was for his family, being held captive behind bars – for he knew what it was like to lose his entire family in exchange for saving the universe, and, selfish though it may be, he had no desire to go through the same thing again.

Butham chuckled: a low, sadistic sound rumbling from his chest, his lips curling back over his teeth and a malicious glint twinkling in his eye. He said one word in response: "No."

In a single, swift motion, he turned the dial to the centre of the arc, forcing the Doctor to his knees. Tears were beginning to prickle in the corner of his eyes, and in his efforts to not make a sound, he found that he couldn't breathe.

When Butham released him the second time, he fell forwards onto his hands then sideways, so that he was facing the cage that his three companions had been locked up in. All of them were staring at him: Rory in disbelief, River with that reassuring look that she used to tell him that everything would be alright in the end, and Amy with tears running silently down her face. The Doctor gave them a small smile, even though it felt like it took an unnecessary amount of effort to do so, before his view of them was obscured by Butham's feet.

The scientist raised his boot to the Doctor's shoulder, pushing him onto his back. The light on the ceiling shone down into the Doctor's eyes, making him blink furiously against it. Butham leaned over him, holding the dial so that he could see it, and turned the dial up all the way.

The Doctor screamed.

He was sure that no pain – no physical pain, at least – that he had ever endured in his ridiculously long life had ever compared to this. Not even the two times that he had been shot by a Dalek had ever hurt quite this much: it was as though someone had replaced his blood with molten lava and charged it with electricity. He wasn't sure how long it had lasted when it finally disappeared.

He lay on the floor, unable to move except for the large gasps of breath that he was taking: the sudden intake of oxygen was almost as disorientating as the weapon itself, but he could vaguely make out the heavy footsteps of Butham walking away, and – from somewhere far off to his left – a single, stricken sob.

There was a moment of relative peace: he breathed slowly, attempting to regain some of his strength, all the while expecting the weapon to be turned on again at any moment – yet it never was. He was faintly aware of someone calling his name, yet whoever it was appeared to be 'shushed', and all was silent once more.

Suddenly, a loud sound of a sole stamping on the floor thudded near his ear, and he realised that Butham was standing next to his head. An irrational surge of fear washed through him that he was about to be subjected to the weapon once more, yet no such thing happened. Instead, only a single command reached his ears.

"Get up."

The Doctor chuckled at that, a single exhale of indignant breath. There was absolutely no way that he would be able to get up until he had had at least a few hours to recover from that onslaught.

Somewhere above him, he heard the sound of Butham rummaging around for something – something that seemed to be made of metal. His blood ran cold when he realised what it was; as the sound of the safety being taken off of a gun reached his ears.

He licked his lips as he prepared himself to talk. "I'll regenerate," he told Butham, his words slurring slightly as his vocal chords ached from screaming.

A chuckle reached his ears. "Open your eyes, Doctor," Butham ordered, a hint of amusement in his voice.

The Doctor forced his eyes open, fighting the headache that pressed against the inside of his skull as the light from the outside world hit his retinas. Sluggishly, he turned his head to the left, and saw that Butham was indeed holding a gun – but it wasn't pointed at him: it was aimed at the spot right between River's eyes.

"Get up," Butham repeated authoritatively, "or I'll shoot."

For what it was worth, River showed no sign of fear. She stared Butham down – as well as she could when the cage that she was being held in wasn't tall enough for her to stand – with that usual steely expression that even the Doctor was scared of sometimes (though he would never let her know that).

But the reality of this situation was worse than merely the prospect of River dying, despite her courage in the face of death and the Doctor's sheer terror at the thought of losing her. It was the simple fact that River didn't die here: the Doctor knew when River died, he had seen it, and it wasn't here, and it wasn't now.

If Butham killed her here, a fixed point in time would be rewritten, and he could only guess at the chaos that would ensue. Maybe the Reapers would return, cleansing the wound by consuming everything in it, and there would be no way to get rid of them this time – there was no Pete Tyler who could die to restore order again. They wouldn't be able to bring River back to life to stop the bacteria from consuming the entirety of reality. Everything would end; everything would die.

The entire universe was depending on him getting up.

And he wasn't sure he could do it.