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The Doctor sits cross-legged on the barn floor, with her coat off and sleeves rolled up, dismantling the Dalek’s casing by hand. The sonic stopped working long ago. But that’s alright. There are plenty of ways to skin a Dalek.
She talks to it. Chats. While it shouts and screams at her and vows its revenge. Her ears focus in on the plink, plink, plink of screws being removed one at a time, like metallic drips on the floor. The sound blends together with the rain outside.
There is a 0.000024% chance that the Dalek will be struck by lightning indoors. This could force a regeneration or kill her outright, and the Dalek might survive re-energised. But what sort of monster would she be if she didn’t give it a sporting chance.
It can’t move. She’s long since immobilised the tank; and the Dalek within - so desperate and foolish - had all but fused itself to it to make its homemade battle-armor work.
She’s made the merciful decision to let it live out the rest of its natural life - about 663 seconds by her estimation.
It was less merciful to cut off its legs, but you see this isn’t their scrap metal now, is it? Someone’s gonna want that back.
Two things the Doctor is not built for: Washing stains out of baby clothes, and chipping bits of charred Dalek tentacle off of a rusty, dented hubcap.
It’s a toothless viper - more scared of her, than she is of it. Which is sensible.
It tells her about the Dalek fleet that is coming for it.
She tells it how to overload a Dalek ship’s system with a single looping query.
It doesn’t understand.
The Dalek threatens her with the might of an army, while there’s nothing left of it but a splat on the ground, twitching in the dust.
The Doctor pulls the last bit of framework from the remains of a tentacle, and it screams. It’s delicate work. The frame that is. There’s a tiny silver bolt she doesn’t recognise, with a hole like a star, and a short length of thin glittering wire.
She discards the rest, and steps carefully over the stack of panels that when she threw them down made a metallic screech that could drown out even a Dalek.
Even this Dalek, with its endless taunting and shrieking.
Setting up the burner - little more than a clamped blowtorch - takes only a moment. While the Doctor puts on her too-large safety gloves and briefly holds the shining metal in the fire, she tells the Dalek some more interesting facts.
The Doctor tells it the melting temperature of Dalek flesh, as she carefully turns the tongs in the flame.
Tells it the many and varied ways to make Skaro’s sun turn supernova, while she twists the wire into shape.
The Doctor tells it that nobody knows that it’s here. Nobody cares that it’s here. And nobody is coming to rescue it.
The Dalek is silent. The Doctor wonders when it stopped talking.
It occurs to her that a Dalek is not truly psychic. Not capable of speech without a host or a voice synthesiser. Which she removed straight after the gun. And its eye.
The Dalek is silent. The Doctor wonders when it started talking.
With her gloved hand, the Doctor picks up the rubbery mess. Its skin splits at the press of her thumb. About 793 seconds exposure to air with no life support.
It could use some moisturiser.
She drops it in the chest-freezer humming in the corner, on top of a pack of frozen peas. Dead men eat no vegetables. It’ll keep here until she can decide how to dispose of it. Ice is good like that. She could leave it here forever.
It’s a difficult decision.
There is no smell worse than a dead, rotting Dalek. And also none sweeter.
The Doctor looks at her pretty twist of metal and fiddles about with her earlobe until she successfully attaches it. It gives her an excuse to stick her finger in her ear for a moment, but the noises don’t stop.
The screaming doesn’t stop. Yaz’s frightened little gulps of breath don’t stop. The pounding from inside the freezer doesn’t stop. And nor does the voice hissing triumphantly in her ear through its sharp, broken teeth:
“A warrior wears their conquests.”