Send “I’ve got you” to help my muse wash off blood from their body.
The Doctor doesn’t remember coming home. She doesn’t remember Koschei slowly peeling her layers off, grimacing at the stickiness of dried blood coagulating on her skin. She doesn’t remember his expression of remorse, of all consuming guilt.
All she remembers are the screams.
Even now, she’s not entirely sure what happened. Was it her mistake, or his? Which one of them missed it? A hidden trigger on a timer they’d already disarmed. One moment, the captives were there, breathing a sigh of relief and thanking their rescuers, then the next…
She remembers the smell of smoke, of singed flesh and hair. She remembers the sharp pain of debris cutting at her skin.
What she doesn’t remember is her husband helping her into the bath, or the water trickling down her back. She is hardly cognizant even now of him gently sponging her down and whispering soft reassurances.
It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. You did your best.
But your best wasn’t good enough. They’re all dead because of you. You might as well have set it off yourself.
You should have been in their place.
Hell, you should have died eons ago.
“I dunno how.”
“I dunno how, my sweet girl, I dunno. I just know when it’s you, I can. When it’s you, I rage and rampage till I chafe myself raw, for hundreds of years, trying to hate you, and it’s always just! Pointless. I can’t. Because when I see you I see the flaws and the blessings. I see the whole gamut. And the good bits are always bigger and brighter.”
He looks down and he sees the bathwater too, and it hardly fazes him, and he fears that as much as he fears her despairing forever.
Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with him, what’s always been wrong with him, and can he outrun it forever, and make her proud?
“C’mere, let’s get in the shower, okay? No leftover carnage, just. C’mon.”
He takes her upper arms and guides her to her feet; he was always the one better at surviving.
“Let’s go, here, I’ll help you. I don’t have the answers, Thete. I’m not a moral philosopher, I never could be. But I’ll always help you.”
She allows her husband to lift her up and drain the bath, the luke-warm shower water rinsing the last vestiges of their miserably failed adventure down the drain. The Doctor can’t do much more than stand there as he rinses her off and gentle runs a washcloth over her skin. She feels raw, from the inside out, blistered and bloody, dirty and the exact opposite of what Koschei describes. It’s the Time War all over, a decision, a failure, and the blood of so many people left staining her hands.
“You always could see past the worst of me… I never was certain that was a good thing. Certainly a flaw in your survival instinct, I think… Or perhaps a benefit. You always have seen yourself as worse than me, more dangerous, more steeped in blood and death and destruction. But that’s not really true, is it?”
The Doctor is spiraling, and she can feel it, her mind sinking into the darkness even as he tries to hold her head above those murky waters. She looks up at him, and her hazel eyes are sharp and focused, though lacking the usual warmth that fills them.
“I missed the wire. I was hasty and vain. Already celebrating my victory because I always win… I’m the Doctor, so I always win. But this time it went to my head. I’m supposed to HELP people, Koschei! They needed my help and now they’re dead and it was my fault. Don’t you see that? I’m not always the glorious hero, I’m stupid and selfish and I make mistakes and I HURT people just like I hurt you! Does it make up for it when I tell you I’m proud of you and you’re good and beautiful? Because I can’t imagine it does… I thought I’d learned my lesson, but I’m still the most dangerous thing this universe has to offer…”
She steps away from his touch and exits the shower, grabbing her ruined clothes and leaving the room. She’ll burn the bloodstained evidence, dress in clean clothes and disappear for a while. That’s all she can do.
He knows what she’s seeing and feeling. He was there, too. He was mired in the corpses of their fallen, too. Only instead of a savior, impossible and unfathomable, a god to end it all, Koschei was just a cockroach in the woodworks, just the “perfect warrior,” resurrected for the purpose of glorified, slaughter, just a weapon, making “practical use” of his long-marked degeneracy, and nothing, nothing, more.
He knows. Long before the Time War, they stood on opposite sides of that needless, fruitless, artificial divide, called “good” and “bad.”
It’s only been since coming to travel, and weep, and laugh, and eat, and sleep, and fuck, and live, with her once more, that he’s learned things are far more complicated, and far simpler, than “good” and “bad.”
One does one’s best, voluntarily, for the sake of doing one’s best, and no other motive, and that is the only thing that can be asked of anything living.
She’s taught him that. She’s the one, of all faces of the Doctor, who finally unlearned for him centuries of clusterfucked mental abuse.
And, he realizes, gathering about him all the vestiges of his indomitable will, that refusal to surrender that marks him apart from all Time Lords before or since: it’s payback time.
The Doctor isn’t the Master’s greatest enemy. The Doctor’s self-loathing is.
“ … That’s not true. No wait. Really.”
The Master lets the Doctor pass him by, but only when her words first sting him with the weight of his uselessness. It’s only when he’s past caring about his own worth, his own value or lack thereof, and only blindly desperate to help her, that he regains his voice.
It is soft and it shakes, but he speaks again, and it’s firmer.
He gets directly in her way, and juts his jaw.
“That’s all horse shit. You taught me that. It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you’re trying to do now. It’s what you try very hard never to do again. It’s being sorry, it’s being really, properly sorry, by changing your behavior forever. How many times did you tell me that? How many times d’you STILL tell me that? And who says you’re exempt? Ey? You don’t have the right to exempt yourself. Not when I love you. Not when WE love you. You don’t GET to do that, Thete. It’s just another way to run and you don’t GET to be CRUEL to yourself!”
He seizes her hands, and places each cold limp lifeless thing on each of his hearts.
“Here’s your proof! Feel? I’m ALIVE because of YOU. Me. Proud, scary Master, ME, I’d be DEAD without YOU. Maybe that’s NOT MUCH in the grand scheme of things, but it’s SOMEthing. Yes, yes, you’re stupid and selfish, you’re proud and brash and disorganized and impulsive and pedantic and vain! And yes, YES. Guess WHAT. When you tell me I’m beautiful, it IS worth it! When you coom and sit with me when I’m past despair, and hold my hand and say nothing at all, it IS worth it. When you make love to me and I feel connected to all of space and time and the universe, it IS worth it. When you laugh like an idiot and gasp like a child and show me all the new things that excite and please you, it IS worth it. I never called you a ‘hero’! Did I ever ONCE call you a ‘hero’? NEVER! I’d NEVER call you something so REDUCTIVE! You’re my WIFE. You’re my BEST FRIEND. You’re the only person I’ve ever known who’s like ME. You are the good, you are the bad, you are all the mundanities in between, you are EVERYTHING. I don’t know if you’re ‘worth it’ to anyone else, and I don’t care! You’re MINE, and you’re worth it to ME, and this life? With you? Mistakes and all? It is ALL I will EVER need. Do NOT leave me. Do NOT listen to the voice in your head that HATES you!”
Icarus 