“Master, what do you consider the defining moment that made you who you are? Was it failing to capture the Doctor in order to garner a promotion as a Truant Officer by the Council after the whole Destination incident? Was it the temptation of the Darkheart device and discovering that Ailla was a spy? And why, once you became ‘The Master’, did you swear vengeance on the Doctor himself and not Gallifrey, or the Council? The Doctor only broke a promise. Your people are the ones who betrayed you.”
“How dare you, you tick? You flea sucking on a dungfly. Who do you think I am? A piece of meat for your latest tabloid thrill? BACK OFF.”
It’s with a stage actor’s gut-based projection that the Master thunders these words. After a moment of morbidly curious consideration, however, he drops his laser hand to his side.
“First of all, mention Ailla again, and I will flay you with a dull spoon. She was only the confirmation of suspicions I held already, about my place in the cosmos; all that she did was allow me to realize that I was safer traveling alone. Don’t bore me with the tediousness of recalling her. I became the Master for all intents and purposes when I was a small child and I believed I had murdered a schoolyard bully who was trying to drown my best friend. That was the germ. The seed. The soil had already been tilled to a fertile state by my failure to pass the Test of the Untempered Schism. I stood before it, heard nothing but the Drums that so long plagued me thereafter–furbished by Rassilon himself, ruining my young mind for his own skin’s sake–and wet myself. I was dragged off that mountainside ill with fear, and my looming parents? Oh, if you can even call them parents, and not donors, sponsors. They made it clear that I had also failed to serve my purpose for being born. It was on a bribe to a High Council elder that I was admitted into the Prydonian Academy at all. And oh, the whole of House Oakdown made certain I knew this every day my hearts beat from that moment on. We were already newbloods, you see: we had much to prove, and I had not pulled my weight. So I spent every second of every hour of every day studying, practicing, reciting, learning. Perfecting myself.
“Combine those two early experiences, and I suppose you had the brain-cocktail that made me so very desperate to reject the gnawing futility, the pointlessness, the smallness, of my existence, or anyone else’s. Conflate that with my seeming capacity to harness death from a young age, and I learned that the way that I could become notorious was through infamy: through the resolute conquest of mortality itself.
“I am Master, then, over Death.
But if you’re asking for the moment that I decided to don that moniker, it was not any shallow act of self-promotion within or without the Academy. It was not the day I became a Time Lady for the first time, and married for status, and loomed a daughter; it was not the day, earlier even than that, that the Doctor did the same. It was not the day the Deca disbanded. It was not various temptations, not the Darkheart device. It was the day he left Gallifrey, and didn’t take me with him. Because you see, there’s a flaw in your logic. You want me to hate the Council, the Elders, the whole of Time Lord society, even the whole of Gallifrey, because they gave me the Drums, and targeted me incessantly as a scapegoat for their corruptions, and captured and executed and resurrected and experimented on me. But that’s the very rub: I knew all along they were worthless. I knew all along they were rotten, and stifling, and cruel. I knew it from youngest childhood, thanks to my ‘family.’
“I never loved those people. Never pinned my hopes on them. Never took their hand in a red field of grass, never met them under cover of silver trees to tinker with contraband pieces of TARDIS or with a thing lesser species called ‘physical affection.’ Never spent hours entwined limbs and minds with them, exploring the euphorias of touch telepathy. Never played with them, ran with them, made plans with them, charted stars with them, danced with them, dreamt with them. That was all Him. He was my sole antidote to that desperate scheme to control mortality itself. And when He left, I realized there was no alernative. When He left, I grasped hold of my madness and made it my sole badge of honor.
“That was the day I burned the prints off my fingers and had my birthname expunged from all public records.
Icarus 