He closes the piano lid just as she utters her final line, and shakes his head, and shakes it again, almost so violently that it should do damage to his neck and shoulders. Almost like a child banishing a poltergeist.
He shudders and it seems exorcized, the mood, the memories.
“Oh, enough,” he sighs, turns and seizes her against him. “We’re both so stupid, Doctor.”
The fingers of one hand dig into her scalp, the others into the back of her little rainbow shirt, pulling it tight, clutching a fist full of thick soft bleached hair, evidence that she is real and she is present, evidence that centuries of fruitless struggle, cycling a highway ramp with no exits, have ended.
“I love you. Say you love me. It’s that simple and that complex.”
He smiles at the ceiling.
“Aren’t you proud of me? See, I learn. I even learn fast. You know what I think you should do? What we should do?”
He peels himself off her with great effort, and rests his palms on her youthful, elfin face.
“Let’s demolish this room. Don’t ask the TARDIS to do it. Do it manually. Let’s do a … a cleanse, hm?”
A pause, as his eyes rove the room.
“Except I wanna keep the piano. I like the piano. And. I want a kangaroo. And a license to be a brain surgeon. And … maybe some Jelly Babies.”
Echoes of Missy, who is, somewhere, smiling.
Her hands slide away the moment the piano lid closes, harmonious in the way that it all seems to stop at once. Her singing, the fog around them, the last humming tune of the piano strings resonating inside the instrument. It all just stops, still, silent, peaceful. Then he’s shaking his head next to her and she understands, and he shudders and she does as well.
In tandem, it seems, they release what it was that had been holding them moments ago. She can feel it leaving him, leaving herself, like a breath held betwixt them. Like the past, over and done.
She leans into his arms as they surround her, solid and sure, real- an anchor as they’d always been and would always be. Her own arms circle his abdomen, smaller frame settling perfectly against his as she buries her face against his throat. She inhales deeply and her eyes roll shut, letting the scent of home wash over her. He’s her home now. He has been since they’d met, and lost though they both had been they’d finally found their way back.
The closeness, the way he clings to her and she to him, her smaller fists clenching the fabric of his shirt and only a little satisfied in knowing it will leave wrinkles behind, it makes her blood tingle. She doesn’t interrupt him once the entire time he’s speaking, not even as he peels himself from her and her from him- not as he cups her cheeks against his own palms, her hands finding purchase this time in the fabric at the front of his shirt, unwilling to let go.
Instead she waits with a smile on her face and her watery eyes filled with affection. She waits until his eyes wander through corridors of the past, echoes of the future, both at once or none at all. They’d changed their fate together but the memories remained at the epicenter, the causal nexus. Them. Then her hands untangle from his shirt and lift to mirror his position, cupping his face with slender fingers trailing the skin atop his cheekbones. Her left ring finger still holds a crimson band with golden writing, only smaller than it had been, scaled down to fit properly.
“I love you, too. I’ll say it every minute’a every day, f’I ‘ave to, but I love you, husband. Both my ‘earts are yours, forever, jus’ like they always ‘ave been. An’ look’it us now. Together, an’ happy. Married. Properly bloody married, can y’believe it? The Doctor an’ the Master in the TARDIS, as it should be.”
She lets out a soft, watery chuckle and her eyes turn upward.
“Think a cleanse sounds brilliant. Can relocate the piano, tear the rest to bits with our bare hands, f’you like.”
Her eyes eventually came full circle and she looks at him full on once more, chuckling softly again at his list of demands- an echo, just as those corridors had been. Just as the room itself, the Vault, currently was.
“First off y’ve already got a license t’be a brain surgeon, just not on Earth. Second, there’s a stockpile’a Jelly Babies in the galley an’ you’re welcome to ’em any time. Third… I’m not gettin’ you a kangaroo, but I might be persuaded t’get you a… k o a l a b e a r.”
Her grin at those last two words is positively impish.
“ … SO? I want another. I want a double-M.D. And maybe a few PhD’s. The sky’s the limit when you’re as smart and evil as I.”
The Master’s petulance is perhaps a welcome transition from the somberness of moments past, and what’s more, it’s a sure sign that he is truly well.
He climbs into the Doctor’s lap, laying on the entitlement thick, along with pretense of daintiness. Unfazed by this role reversal of expected gender norms, Koschei bats his black-lined lashes at his wife. His entire goal, at this juncture, is to ham it up, and make her laugh, and banish the shadows of regret and sorrow altogether.
“ ‘The Doctor and the Master in the TARDIS,’ sounds like a kid’s show I’d watch. Or maybe a sitcom.”
He flashes teeth in an irrepressible grin, with elastic energy that well suits her sunny enthusiasm. He kisses her full on the mouth.
“Now, Doctor: wow me, make me swoon, by swinging a jackhammer at the walls of this room.”
Icarus 