Category: Uncategorized

mostincrediblechange‌:

The universe is a delicate balance. Everything in it has an
equal and opposite to keep existence from spiraling out of control. It is much
the same for the Doctor and the Master as well. Never in all her lives has she
been so happy, so whole… but that is not to say there aren’t things on the
other end of the scale. The Master’s nightmare puts into sharp relief one of
these.

The Doctor wakes before he does, hazel eyes wide and terrified.
But it is not her terror. It is secondhand, shared through their bonded minds
and made all the more powerful by the skin to skin contact of their ankles
entangled together beneath the bedsheets. She is paralyzed by his nightmare,
paralyzed by the same imagined blade that pins him to the ground in his dream.
She stares blindly at the ceiling, unable to see anything but what he is experiencing.

They say dreams happen in a matter of seconds before waking, a
flash of consciousness as the mind begins to stir, but this is different. This… 

It feels real.

Somehow she knows what is coming before it does. Her gut churns
and she tastes bile in her throat. Still, it doesn’t lessen the shock when she
hears her daughter’s voice filtered through the robotic intonation of a Cyberman.

Thank God, she thinks briefly as her husband lurches, drags them
both out of the nightmare and stumbles into the bathroom, all but tripping on
the sheets. She hears him, smells the stench of urine soaking the mattress, but
she still can’t move. Her hearts are pounding, her ears are ringing, and it’s
all she can do not to vomit herself.

The Doctor takes a few steeling breaths and pushes herself up
into a sitting position, her entire body trembling as she gets out of bed and
follows her best friend, her husband, her Koschei, father of her children into
the bathroom where he’s curled around the basin of the toilet. One step, two,
and she lets herself fall to her knees, wrapping her arms around his sweat-soaked,
sobbing form. He stinks of fear and vomit and piss and sweat, but she clings to
him, trembling almost as hard as he is.

“I—” She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, for once at a
loss as to what she could say to help him.

The Doctor is a creature born of hope, and as such it is one of
her most defining traits. Yet… she struggles to find it now. Her hands shake as
she runs her fingers through his hair, wipes a tissue across his mouth and
tends to him in the little ways she can that don’t require words. Her faith in
him has been unwavering. Her pride in him, in his progress, in his commitment
to do good for goodness sake. Since the day he asked her to help him, never once
has she doubted him.

And perhaps that is her own failing.

The Master doubts.
He has always doubted, and she has been
steadfast in the fact that she doesn’t. But… for the briefest of moments, she
is afraid. She is afraid not of him or what he is capable of, but of the fact
that perhaps she should not be so absolute in her conviction. She is afraid of
the idea that maybe, just maybe, she could be wrong about her unending faith in
him.

But even as that seed of doubt is dropped, the Doctor
consciously tries to grind it into nonexistence.

The Master doubts.
He has always doubted, and she has been
steadfast in the fact that she doesn’t. Now, perhaps more than ever, he needs
her to continue that belief, that strength. She knows his fears as intimately
as her own, and knows what it would do to him if he felt that she imagined for
even a millisecond that he could be capable of that, of harming even a hair on
their baby girl’s head.

She takes that seed, now pulverized into a ghost of itself and
locks it away in a box in her mind, and then locks that box in a chest, hides
that chest in a locked room, and seals that room in a vault. Only then does she
speak, dabbing the sweat from his brow and rubbing his back.

                      “It was a nightmare, love. Just a horrible, terrible nightmare.

                       I’m here. Zinnia is safe and sound in the other room.
                       You are safe. You are
loved. You are home. 

                      It’s going to be all right, I swear to you.”

But it happens.  The doubt she feels in her own faith.  It happens.  She cuts it off like the head of a snake and she shoves it in her dark corner and puts a deadbolt lock on it, but it already happened, and he already saw it.  He saw it.  It’s like when you’re a child watching a magic show and the magician’s hand slips and you see the trick coin, just a flash, a flicker, of it, and the illusion bursts into a thousand tiny shards, and you watch, you stare blankly, and a chain reaction of lost belief, in that particular charlatan, then in magic, then in Santa Claus, then in God, then in Heaven, sets off like a hundred thousand little explosions of broken glass in your mind, and your world has fallen apart, because of one flicker of one trick coin.  It only takes a millisecond to lose your whole world.    

Koschei doesn’t realize the pure betrayal on his face.  Doesn’t realize he’s lifted his face from the toilet bowl and he’s staring with horror and fear and loss into his Theta’s eyes.  He’s clambering to seize onto the magician’s crafty hands, to hear the “it’s going to be alright,” to feel her pride and her joy in his efforts, to know that she trusts he would never harm their child, and not see the trick coin of her self-doubt.  But, fuck, fuck, it’s there.  For one fleeting instant, the Doctor wondered if she was right to place her faith in the Master.  

Suddenly he is so keenly aware of his own stink, of the entire lifelong litany of his crimes and mistakes, of embarrassing foolish awkward mistakes he made, wrong answers he blurted out in class at the Prydonian nearly a thousand years ago; putting Zinnia’s–oh Christ, Zinnia’s–first diaper on backwards; talking too much and too loudly; dancing badly; failing his initiation before the Untempered Schism; all the times the Doctor foiled his stupid convoluted schemes and made him look like a coward and an imbecile.  

Every way in which he has ever fallen short now litigates itself against him.  

FIX IT!!!!!!

The self-inflicted command ricochets like bullets inside his skull.  

      “I’m sorry.” 

The words aren’t a Shakespearean tragedy; they’re terrifyingly robotic and banal.  He cannot even place to which shortcoming, flaw, or sin he refers.  Maybe all of them.  Who cares?  Who even cares.  

He stands, flushes the toilet, rushes out to the bed and grinds his teeth while stripping it of all the evidence of his mess.  He lashes off the covers and drags them all toward the trash chute, and stuffs them in.  He doesn’t even realize he’s crying; he’s wild, lost, desperate to conceal the evidence of his own treasonous brain.  

     “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”  

He storms past her and strips naked, and steps into the shower and runs the water scalding.  He scrubs himself head to toe with excessive soap.  He’s a ridiculous sudsy mess in the shower, cleaning, cleaning.  

He steps out and seizes a towel and wraps it around his frame like armor, and it’s only then that he turns to her, and demands, desperately,

      “Don’t you EVER get TIRED of it? DON’T YOU GET TIRED OF ME?! I wanna be more than the person you save! I wanna SAVE YOU TOO! 

              I don’t want you to REGRET banking on me!”