Fic: "Pets" (xover w/Doctor Who)

Title: Pets
Rating: G
Word Count: 683
Characters: Steel, 4th Doctor
Summary: After a draining assignment, Steel seeks out a pair of old friends for a little comfort. Post-Assignment #3.
Author's Note: Just a What if? I wrote this back in September on someone's (don't remember who) suggestion and then forgot about it until now. My bad. :(

Pets

It was a comfort, after such an assignment, to take refuge in a contraption that was neither machine nor animal but a harmonious combination of both. The lack of malevolence was soothing in the extreme. Steel laid his hands upon the soft-white walls, feeling the gentle reverberations hum through his blood. "Humans," he said to the Doctor, "are terrifying creatures."

There was little the timelord could do but agree with that. He pushed the brown curls from his eyes and stared at his sudden visitor from his vantage point beneath the console of the TARDIS. "They certainly have their moments," he said carefully. "Although you might have knocked."

"I did. The girl in the lab let me in."

"Sarah Jane?"

"I suppose. I said I was a friend of yours."

"And how exactly did you get into UNIT headquarters?"

Steel flashed a small, feral grin. "Persuasion."

Wiping engine grease from his nose with a handkerchief the size of a young flag of truce, the Doctor hauled his lanky body to its feet. "You look awful," he said cheerfully. "Not altogether, mind you. The last five hundred years or so have been very kind to you. But in a general sort of way—"

"I'm tired."

"A kip would do you a world of good."

"I don't sleep."

"You should try it sometime, it's very restful—"

"Have you been to this planet, fifteen hundred years in the future?" asked Steel shortly.

The Doctor's merry, manic eyes faded, as he accessed that sinister time. "I have. I wish that I could say I had not."

"No animals? Not a one?"

"Not unless you count the laboratory specimens."

"The pieces," Steel spat.

The Doctor stared at the small blond man in the sober gray suit. Five hundred years before, the newly-minted Operator had stumbled into the TARDIS, driven by curiosity and personal demons to flee his own people for a time, and the Doctor had taken in his fellow exile, despite their great differences in philosophy. He had a brilliant mind for temporal mechanics, though he seemed afraid to let his talents have free rein, and he had been good company for Susan, in the early days before the Doctor had somehow gotten himself roped into babysitting those two schoolteachers... Despite being a good three centuries older than the Doctor, his white-blond hair and lost eyes had caught Susan's hearts, and she had loved him dearly.

In the time that he had traveled with them, Steel had changed greatly, and he had clearly changed even more in the past five centuries, but one thing had obviously not mellowed with time: the Elemental's vindictive nature. Steel did not forgive.

"What happened?"

Steel stroked the TARDIS gently. "We were assigned to escort a time capsule back to the thirty-fifth century."

"We?"

"Sapphire—my partner—and I. But it proved more difficult than we had anticipated. The capsule was... a kind of amalgam of animal and machine—living animal... It was alive and it was angry. It wanted revenge."

"I don't blame it."

"Neither could I." Steel rested his cheek against the smooth, warm wall. "I didn't want to send it back. I didn't want to send it back with its crew because I couldn't be certain the crew would arrive alive. And... I didn't want to send the capsule back because I know they are going to destroy it."

He sounded so forlorn that the Doctor couldn't help but smile in remembrance. "You always had a horrible habit of acquiring pets."

"You've developed the same bad habit, so I've heard," Steel shot back. Then he shook his head. "It tried to destroy me. It made me nearly kill Sapphire. Heaven only knows what it did to Silver—not that he didn't deserve it," Steel added, with a hint of mischief. "But it wasn't evil. Just... angry. I felt sorry for it."

"Then why did you send it back?"

"Sapphire made me. As she pointed out... it was their problem." The Elemental closed his eyes and simply absorbed the warm energy from the sentient time-ship.

Comments plz!!!! :D