blondechav:

masterfulxrhythm‌:

   “ … ah.”  

Rose can’t know that her words are a sharp backhand across the face.  Or perhaps she can, and she conceals her schadenfreude considerably well, but that’s the rub: the Master highly doubts she has any notion of how dismissive she’s being.  Her compassion is legendary.  

No, she can’t know what she’s confirmed.  While the Doctor literally crafted the Master like a chisel to marble with a single childhood act of (understandable, so bloody understandable) selfishness, and another single adulthood act of (understandable, so bloody understandable) abandonment … . in the reverse, the Master is just one of many important people in the Doctor’s orbit, relegated to a place of convenience when all other options have grown too angry, disillusioned, or hurt by the Doctor’s actions.   The slight owes little to the Doctor having thought himself the last of his kind in Rose’s company.  After all, who can justify failing to ever mention an old friend, or a notorious enemy? Even once, over a fire, for nostalgia’s sake?

God, there are moments when the Master can fool himself that the Doctor is as infatuated with him as he is with her. 

This is not one of those moments.  

So wounded is he by Rose’s casual brush-off that he scarcely registers the intentional insult that follows.  He staggers for dignity, scrambling for a riposte, cheeks on fire.  

    “Well, my dear, that … happens to be the currency of Time Lords: we are affected and vain.”

He smiles thinly.  

     “It would seem that you could ask her all these things in person.”  

               oh.

it occurs to her ( rather too late to properly do anything about it, of course ) that she’s just said entirely the WRONG thing to him. worse than that, even, she’d gone beyond the sort of cheeky rudeness that had ( for the MOST part ) been intentional &. ventured into the cruel. his deflation is visible, &. the sheer amount of emotion &. history that he confirms in that one-word response tugs at her heart.

she knows exactly what it’s like to be &. feel abandoned by the doctor. she remembers looking at sarah jane &. realizing that THAT was the sort of future she had to look forward to — being left, forgotten, &. never mentioned again — &. lashing out at the woman as a result of it. while she by no means knows the full extent of the master’s relationship with the doctor, it’s fair to say that there’s even MORE history there than there had been with her &. the doctor, &. she’d just put him in the same position.

sarah jane. france. pete’s universe. the metacrisis. if there was one DARK TRUTH that she’s been forced to confront about the doctor, it was that they had a nasty little habit of leaving people &. never looking back.

rose itches to apologize for the unintended slight, but since she doesn’t know how without putting the master in even MORE of an awkward position already, she dons a tentative ( if slightly forced ) smile &. opts for the only other route she can think of.

               pretending it hadn’t happened ENTIRELY.

           “ ‘m probably the LAST person she’d want to see. you know how the doctor is. doesn’t like to look back. ”  &. even if she did, there’d be questions that rose just didn’t know how to answer. they’d made their choice in leaving her with the metacrisis. wasn’t it for the best if that was where the doctor thought she was, still? god knows the TRUTH would break her heart.

           “ ‘sides. she has you now… doesn’t she? ”  at least, that was the vibe she’d gotten from the brief interaction. whatever issues they’d had before, rose imagines they’d resolved MOST of them already, at least besides the ones she’d unintentionally dredged back up.  “ you’re very different than wha’ i expected. unit talks, but you’re… ”

softer. not something so black &. white as ‘good’ now ( even the doctors she’d known hadn’t been all good, though she liked to think they at least tried to be ), but the master SHE’D been told about would have lashed out at her for her slight, not deflated as if disappointed but resigned to a rather harsh reality.

           “ ‘m glad she has you. ”

He laughs bitterly now.

      “She always has me. She always did, she always does, she always will.” 

No matter what; that’s my blessing and my curse. 

      “Rose, I killed myself for her.  She’s dangerous.  She has power over people that I, with my ‘pretentious’ title and my crimes, things that I KNOW you know of, from the look on your face when I said my name, could only DREAM to possess.  She makes people think they can be ‘heroes,’ doesn’t she?  She ‘inspires’ them to suicidal acts–trust me, I KNOW–because she’s ever so eloquent, ever so clever, and then once she’s transformed them such that they don’t fit the mold they were born into anymore, she turns ‘round and RUNS, and leaves them to be hurt, like exposed nerves, like … planting a flower in winter and expecting its beauty to last when you set it outside the greenhouse. And THEY clean up the mess, don’t they? DON’T they?”  

Don’t WE? 

But it’s in that moment that the Master realizes none of this is Rose’s fault.  Rose is collateral, like he is collateral, like the constellation of bright faces from the Doctor’s long twisted history with Earth are collateral. 

A peculiar sense of camaraderie sprouts from that epiphany: this girl is owed what information he can provide. 

     “Yes, she’s a woman now. Five foot six, blonde with brown roots, hazel eyes, dresses like a bloody hipster, has the whole Holzmann from Ghostbusters vibe.”