The Doctor is immediately silenced as her eyes find the Master, and oh how she blushes besides. Not at being caught out having a row with an appliance, no, but rather because of the easy way he winks at her, the casual manner in which he strolls in and presumes to know more of the infernal device than she.
The sonic lowers just a bit but she keeps it well in hand, fingers twitching against the home-made exterior shell with her thumb poised to switch it on at a moment’s notice just in case the toaster decides to do combat with the love of her lives. One can’t be too careful with dodgy kitchen appliances.
She blinks once, twice, three times- a blink for every hard slap of Koschei’s hand against the toasty [pun very much intended] and rebellious metal -before eyebrows raise and the hand holding the sonic falls to her side. She lets out a huff of air, a combination of disbelief and appreciation. The toast isn’t even burned! Now more than ever she believes the toaster to have a personal vendetta against her, all because she chose to take it apart and put it back together again once-upon-a-pinstriped-time.
“Wha-… How did-… Oh tha’s joost not fair. I tried everythin’! Bangin’ on it, zappin’ it, tossin’ it down a fli’a stairs, givin’ it a good kick, even the sonic wasn’t workin’. Then ‘ere you coom, three slaps an’ it gives in?”
She narrows her eyes at the toaster, then turns her gaze toward her husband.
“You couldn’t’ve done tha’ two regenerationsago? Been cravin’ toast for centuries, me.”
She’s amused and impressed by his ability to intimidate the infernal appliance. Theta’s smile falters, however, the moment she steps over to the toaster to grab the perfectly toasted bread. Hand poised to grasp her long-awaited snack, fingers clasp only air as the toast vanishes down into the toaster once more, out of reach. Mouth open, Theta scoffs and looks back at Koschei with wide eyes, pointing her finger toward the menacing metal machine in an accusatory manner.
“There! Ri’ there, SEE?! Tha’s jus’ not normal!”
Koschei clicks his tongue; he’s a touch disappointed that Theta didn’t just swoon over his comedic problem-solving, but then, if she were a swooner, and not a meddlesome adventurous little gremlin, she wouldn’t be Theta.
“Well, I mean. It might joost be that after ALL YOU DID, it only needed one more bit of forceful persuading to obey,” he placates. “Anyway, I was saving the trick to have an ace oop my sleeve, keep spice in the relationship.”
He grins diabolically and it’s clear he’s trolling her.
The grin vanishes immediately as the toast retreats into the mechanism.
“OI!” he shouts, betraying every ounce the Mancunian dialect concealed behind his attempts to sound like a posh Londoner. “OI, I’ll av ya, you … . saucy piece of … of … economy-grade TIN!”
He produces his laser screwdriver, entirely too hastily.
“Believe me, it wasn’t exactly on my list of weekend plans.”
Always the ferocity, always the bravado. Ever keeping the love of his life at arm’s length because to surrender to the Doctor’s vantage point is to surrender what autonomy he has bled and hidden and rotted and suppressed and slaughtered for.
But the Master, self-proclaimed lord over death–little more than a child screaming ‘LOOK AT ME’ in order to combat the terrifying insignificance of living–finds it difficult to maintain his dignity when his oldest friend hovers over him, once again, holding him in his arms, once again, pleading for him to live, once again. The culprit, this time, is not his wife’s bullet, but a gash down his left arm with a blade laced in poison.
“This is some sort of shitty joke,” he rasps, and laughs a husky tired version of his big brave angry cackle. “Maybe this time you wanna give me true love’s kiss, as our exciting follow-up to the whole business on the Valiant.”
He holds up a trembling hand, covered in blood.
“I’m joking. Just. Whistling in the dark. Fairly sure I can beat this, if you can ah, find me some … . salt … hm, appears my cognition’s getting impaired now …”
His vision blurs, but the strangest expression of delirious affection crosses his features.
“Hoh, you know … you’re really so beautiful. Even in this weird young face … I do love chasing you, Doctor.” He swallows back his own spit, which seems to be accumulating in the corners of his mouth at a rapid rate. “Really do love it more than anything. No. No, I love something else more than anything. Give you a hint: it’s you. Did I say that aloud? Oh, Doctor, yo-you’re … the picket fence … and the wind blowing, too … you’re all.”
If this is it, I guess at least I found my harbor, before the end.
“Mmmmguess you could kiss me ‘f you wanted …”
That pure desperation had crept back into his tone because once again he was faced with his worst nightmare. Of course he begged, begged to not go through this hell for the second time. That mantra in his head of, not again, not again, not again; is deafening. The situation was so painfully similar to last time but instead of a human’s bullet it’s something much more. Instead of a refusal to regenerate it’s a struggle to live.
The familiar joking nature of the Master is a partial comfort to the Doctor’s panic. “If this was someone’s idea of a joke it’s not funny. Not ever.” His lips twitched in an effort to smile but it just wouldn’t stick. No instead a creaky laugh escapes, amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes. “I’ll kiss you all you like if you pull through this.”
The word salt had struck a chord, throwing him back through the memories of his own detox. The highly unpleasant sensation he had endured after consuming cyanide. Scoffing he shook his head and smirked. “Salt is too salty. I need to get you into the TARDIS. I have everything there. I promise you’ll be safe, not a prisoner, not trapped.” The desperate pleading tone had returned. He didn’t want to make the Master think he’d trap him but he couldn’t do much without the supplies inside his TARDIS.
Staring at the wound he pressed his lips in a thin line. There was one other thing he could do. While the Master rambled a series of delirious affection, the Doctor was focusing. Moving one hand he hovered it over the wound, his skin gleaming with a soft gold hue. Regeneration energy, he could heal him, he could fix this.
Drawing in a ragged breath the Doctor let his dark eyes fix upon the Master’s face. “Don’t be cross with me for this..” Leaning his head down he pressed a lingering kiss upon his lips. His hand settled on the wound, sending soft gold light across the Master’s skin. He only hoped it would work, that it would be enough. Losing the Master simply wasn’t an option. He couldn’t, wouldn’t fail him again.
“L-listen. I don’t want to go before you know, it was such a good ride, such a good life. You an’ me, all we did. I wanted more but don’t I always.”
Blood drizzles down the Master’s right nostril; saliva down the corners of his mouth. Speaking becomes impossible. His body convulses at erratic intervals.
That is when the Doctor kisses him, spit and blood, poison and all, and the Master’s eyes, still grimaced in agony, peer open.
His face is still a mask of pain-wrinkles, but he’s watching the face upon which he’s fixated with equal parts hatred and adoration, watching it as one watches an unexpected beauty, an unexpected rapture of meteor showers under a crystal clear night sky. It’s that sudden and beautiful. And as it so often does, the affection and the nostalgia and the admiration and the raw adoration all eclipse the contempt and the rage.
And, exactly according to the Doctor’s plan, the Master falls perfectly still, in unwitting compliance.
The regeneration energy–robbing the Doctor of unknown years of his life–has seeped into Koschei’s pores before he can protest.
The fury is back, boosted perhaps by the fact that he is again in robust health. He sits up, a mess of sweat and blood and wrinkled suit, so rapidly that he looks like a vampire emerging from its coffin at midnight. Under other circumstances, it would be hilarious.
“How COULD you! You think I want YOU to die? Who’m I gonna hound to the brink of hell if YOU’RE gone?”
Who’m I gonna love?
No. Don’t utter any ‘ last words ‘ yet.
The convulsions caused ripples of panic to claw through him, digging deep into his flesh. His plan had to work, he couldn’t go through the pain of seeing him die again. Couldn’t handle another burial. Couldn’t face life utterly alone, with not a soul to understand all that he was so entirely as the Master does.
The regeneration energy leaving felt wrong, he fought the instinct to pull back. Tears slid down the Doctor’s face falling to the space between them, he didn’t care enough to brush them away.
When the Master sat up he felt like the air had been pulled from his lungs. The anger barely registering due to the sheer relief he felt in the moment. Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe. His mind thrumming with the knowledge the Master was well and truly alive.
A shaky smile dawned upon his lips, dark eyes a bit duller.
Sagging forward he leans into the Master, burying his face against the
crook of his neck. His arms curling around the other time lord, holding
him.
They spent the whole of a week conversing quietly about painful truths. The whole of a week, while the Master chose to sit by the Doctor’s side, and honor the bond of their childhood, and tend to him without glory, or even hope of a happy ending.
So it’s with these thoughts in his hearts that he reaches his oldest and dearest friend–the one person he might place before himself–and rushes to his side.
He kneels. And then he lies down. And takes his hand.
“Come with me and I’ll show you a different perspective.”
A pause, and he turns to look at the Doctor’s profile. He beholds age and weariness and regret. These will simply not do.
“I’m sorry, Hearts,” he breathes, and means it, and hopes that the strength of that voluntary contrition will empower the Doctor to stand and follow him to safety.
The Doctor’s eyes are closed now, but he’s conscious. His fingers curl slowly around the Master’s.
“I don’t think I can stand yet,” he murmurs. There’s a crucial word there. Yet.
He needs to move a little bit, keep his body going. He bends his free arm, lifting his forearm up off he ground and repositioning it, hand resting on his middle. There’s a pain there, where the Cyberman shot him. It was an old one, not quite strong enough to kill him. The pain sears through him very suddenly, rising in intensity. He takes a shuddering breath, tensing his whole body and gripping the fabric of his clothes tightly with cold fingers. His other hand squeezes the Master’s.
It passes after a moment or two of agony. It’s his body trying to heal itself. It’s working, sort of. He needs a zero room really, if he’s to recover from this. It’s possible. He just needs to get there.
“It hurts,” he says quietly, opening his eyes once more. A second surge of pain forces him to close them again just as he tries to push himself onto his side, and he cries out this time. The first one, he’d been expecting the whole time he’d been lying here. The second has come sooner than he thought, and it catches him off guard.
He clutches the Master’s hand with both of his own now, trying again to force his injured body to move the way it’s supposed to. “Zero room,” he tells him. He can do this, for him. For his best friend. He’ll keep living, for him. Or trying to, at the very least.
“If we don’t make it there, I just- I just want you to know-” he coughs as he tries to sit. “-That I love you. Without hope, without witness, without reward. I still love you.”
The Master sits up with some strain, but succeeds. He turns and rests his hands beneath the Doctor, as though his old friend were floating on the surface of water, and he standing, and supporting him afloat.
Yet, yet. Good, progress. A sacrifice, an allowance, for once not in vain.
“I’ve got you,” he responds, without even being conscious of his words, the moment the Doctor voices his pain. “Zero room, a martini, a soft pillow, one of my life cycles, you name it, you old fool.”
If Bill bloody Potts can carry the person Koschei has known and loved longest, the person about whom he could write an anthology of novels, or to whom he could dedicate a newly discovered galaxy, then the Master certainly can do the same.
He steels himself, and presses his forehead to the Doctor’s. Eyes close, and for once there is something like humility, and something like a great deal of vulnerability.
“Surely you know. Surely. That I never stopped either.”
And I never will.
He’s kissing the Doctor’s eyelids without thought, as though by instinct.
“You know, you know. Come on. Here we go.” And again, “I’ve got you.”
He stands and lifts the Doctor into his arms, and begins to carry him across the smoking fields of Mondas, to safety.
A few steps in, and he scoffs, and speaks with characteristic indelicacy:
“Golly, Thete, you’re a stick, how can you be this heavy?”
“Oh? Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but eating people’s body parts won’t make you grow any taller. Must be true, what they say about short people being the angriest.”
He inches closer, daring, and quickly kisses the end of the Master’s nose. The speed of his movement is a tell; he wouldn’t move so fast unless he knew he was playing with fire. This isn’t the same, though. He almost wants to be caught. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
This feisty verbal bandying is a new development of their maturing, strengthening reconciliation. It invigorates Koschei, and he grows louder and more boisterous by the minute.
“Oh, very well, you pedantic bastard! See if I let you spoon me again for the next fortnight! No, no, don’t coom a drop closer, you can’t seduce me into compliance again!”
Icarus 