My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart.
You’re a genius. You’re stone cold brilliant, you are, I swear, you really are. But you could be so much more. You could be beautiful. With a mind like that, we could travel the stars. It would be my honour.”
Koschei picks up the chocolates and grins at the real evidence of his husband’s doting: the note, which declares him unequivocally, unquestionably, needed.
The note, which states that he is a source of something good and healing, rather than something violent and destructive.
That he offers happiness to his beloved.
Secretly, there is nothing else in the world that he needs more, than to be essential to someone.
He stands and tucks the flowers into his shirt pocket, and trots to the kitchen, and then the dining room, and then the deck, where he finds his Sam.
“This gift isn’t complete until you feed me one, or several, of these,” he purrs, leaning across him from behind, placing the chocolates on his chest and kissing his ear.
The Doctor is buried in his work, a pile of cables and wires at his feet. For that reason, he doesn’t even address the Master when he arrives. Not until, that is, he steps in front of him and disrupts his work.
“Somethin’ I can help you with?” he asks a bit stiffly. He hadn’t felt much like sleeping lately. There wasn’t much point when the other side of the bed was so often empty.
“I know you’re cross with me. But I missed you and I wanted to hold you for a while.”
“Well, I’m busy at the moment. You’ll have to wait.” And depending on his mood, he might make the Master wait a long time indeed.
“Convenient of you, missing me now.”
“Oh, dar-ling.”
The Master sighs indulgently, and apologetically, awakening more fully, now, from his slumber.
He steps out of the path of the Doctor’s labors, stands on his tiptoes and pecks the side of his neck. He knows: he knows all the potential ways that timelines can unfurl from any given moment, and he knows that his husband can do the same, and he knows that the Doctor has seen other futures, in which they are not together, and the Master has found an earlier or later Doctor with which to nest. He could, at this moment, tell his Theta that he has seen the same disturbing things transpire, and not always even with other versions of Koschei. But that will not ease the gloom and irritability that have descended on his best and oldest friend.
“Here. Let me bring you the reason why I’ve been away so mooch.”
He pads back out of the Console Room.
He returns less than five minutes later, aided by a TARDIS that wishes to see Her thief in better spirits. What he holds is a very young coral from another TARDIS entirely, and it’s mounted onto a strange chrome-like piece of unmistakably Gallifreyan tech. Any child of the Great Houses would recognize that material: a piece of the Untempered Schism.
“Alright, Oscar the bloody Grouch: yes I’ve seen Sesame Street, you think I’d only watch Teletubbies? Bad for the brand to admit it, but there you go. Now listen here: I’ve been to Gallifrey behind your back, which was exceedingly hard to do when you were always on board with me, and don’t ask how, but I’ve stolen two things: a piece of the place where you married me, and a baby TARDIS to mark our new lives together. Because we’ve got a kid under our wing now, albeit an adult, and she’s having a kid, and well, maybe one of these days you an’ me’ll have a kid too, you never know. Or maybe it’ll have nothing to do with children. But it’s gonna grow oop and maybe it’ll merge with your Old Girl, or maybe it’ll carry a member of our budding family to someplace else entirely. But it’s an investment I’ve made in us. Us as we are now, two children of war who are healing from its scars, you big-earedidiot.”
“I assure you, It’s not what it looks like!” The Doctor said, almost embarrassed, “There is an explaination!
The Doctor was standing her TARDIS, absolutely naked. Well except for a pair of underwear that matched her skin tone.
It’s only with the slim hope of convincing the Doctor that he has acquired a greater understanding of respect for personal boundaries that the Master tears his gaze away from her form.
“How disappointing to hear,” he chortles, while blindly side-stepping toward her and handing her his black overcoat, aromatic of cinnamon and his musky clean aftershave. “Please regale me with the … .” He can’t help a glance at her pantied ass. “ … backstory.”
Icarus 