The Master, breathless and fatigued from running, spins with dread at the brassy female voice. Horrified alarm becomes amusement and something very implausible, coming from this particular Time Lord toward any human: admiration.
“Well I’ll be damned. You’re nothing if not persistent.”
He raises both palms in surrender.
“Honestly, Ms. Noble, I’m guessing from the fact that you know exactly who I am, and not in the standard ‘oh my God, you’re that nutter who got Prime Minister and disappeared’ fashion, it means that the Doctor spared your memories and you’re not feeling charitable toward the bloke who turned the whole planet into himself and scared the piss out of you. Long and short of it: self-preservation. Now I must warn you, if you’re armed, I shall have to do something drastic, like gnaw off your face with my bare teeth, because I’ve left my laser screwdriver in my TARDIS.
Is that dead seriousness or a truly perverse sense of humor? Rather impossible to say.
As she tried to inhale from her nose, make herself look less like she’s panting, Donna realized that she was out of shape. It had been nearly 70 years since she had any real reason to run. Her expanded lifespan due to the metacrisis was thanks to that.
“Oh your definitely a nutter.” She grumbled, looking around her for anyone that’s likely to get hurt if things got out of the way. “The Doctor didn’t spare my memories, I found my way back on my own thank you very much.” Yes, it amuses her that he was once elected prime minister, and disappeared.
“I didn’t even vote for you, wasn’t even in the country. Egypt. Not as fun as they made it out to be really. Anyway, I’ll get back to you on the whole scaring the piss out of me- as you called it.”
The sonic pen was inside of her jacket, which she had gotten from Captain handsome when she last saw him. He nicked from the trash after adipose industry happened. “Do I look bloody armed to you? Are you mad, no bleeding way you are gnawing anything you nutter. How about we settle down before one of us ends up on the wrong end of a slap.”
The Master’s seized by a combination of outrage and amusement, as the redhead pontificates. She’s certainly long-winded enough to be one of the Doctor’s pets; he leans against the side of the alleyway, hands folded inside his jacket pockets, forehead wryly wrinkled.
I either scared you, or I didn’t, he muses. It’s not a matter of degrees.
He licks his lips.
“I’ll try not to let your lack of political support keep me up at night, weeping, longing for things that might have been,” he drawls. “Anyway, Donna, Donna of the Gob, if you really traveled with my old friend, however did either of you ever get a word in edgewise, or anything done, for that matter?”
He holds up both hands, elegantly, displaying that he is indeed without a weapon. The gesture is meant to placate.
“A more pressing question, which remains unanswered: Why. Were. You. Chasing. Me?”
“Master.” The Doctor replies, schooling his features to not give away any emotion. He studies the man in front of him, his eyes tracing over his face. He clenches his jaw. There’s a million questions wanting to burst from his lips, but he stays quiet, not even sure where to begin.
Koschei lingers in the doorway with a surprisingly gentle expression.
“Nice, isn’t it? To have the perfunctory greeting out of the way. Now, to the meat of it.”
He strides authoritatively toward his counterpart, and oldest friend, and dearest enemy.
“I’ve a simple question, really.”
The expression in dark sly almond eyes is halfway between wistful and predatory. One finger reaches up to trace the contour of that clenched jaw. He knows every compulsion the Doctor combats right now. They’re mirrors.
He whispers the question, inches from the face of his other self.
“Are you happy to see me?”
The Doctor’s eyes stay locked on the Master as he makes his way towards him, and he only lets them close when he feels the Master’s finger trace his jaw.
Of course he wants to say. Of course he’s happy to see him. Especially now that they’re the last of their kind. All they have are each other, and it always brings a spark of relief to see the Master again…
But he also can’t ignore the feeling of dread that fills his stomach when his eyes fall on those of the Master. Every time he comes across him, trouble follows. He never knows what their meetings will bring, and he’s far too cautious to let his guard down easily.
“That depends.” The Doctor replies, keeping his face neutral. “Why are you here?”
The question should not be so terrifying. But it renders the Master static. Every limb locks as he contemplates the honest answer, and constructs the face-saving excuses to conceal it, and finally, calculates how great a risk to his hallowed autonomy it is to be sincere instead.
“I.”
The sacred word, that single syllable. But all it really is, is Icarus drawing too near the sun, and feeling the wax of his wings melting.
For some reason, this makes him smile.
“I dunno. Haven’t seen this face in a long time. Been places you’d scarce imagine, since that Christmas on earth. But you, you as you are now, it always draws me back like a magnetic pole. We were so close, in that wasteland. When you heard them. You know.”
He taps his temple.
“No one else had ever heard them. Until that night. But I knew it’d be you. Always did.”
The Master leaves the safety of the TARDIS threshold, and rushes out onto the hostile planet surface. Every sense thrums; he is feral. Nothing and no one will blockade the way to his Bondmate.
He crashes into the Doctor and braces his arms with surprising power, given his comparably smaller stature.
“I’ve got you, Thete, c’mon.”
He hazards a moment to press together their foreheads, and impart what clean, clear, calming energies he can.
You Are Not Alone.
He revels in it, the comfort that briefly distracts his mind. Perhaps it was the dull red grass of this planet or the way two suns could be seen high above the clouds. Though if enough attention was paid, a third could be seen above the pair. Even so. The simple way this planet both was and was not like the home they could never return to had cut him to his core. The renewal of a pain he had long pushed to the back of his mind had trampled any resolve. The bracing arms of his bondmate were all that kept him steady now.
“Why couldn’t I save them Kos?…”
These words, these melancholies they betray, terrify the Master, because they always signify the Doctor teetering over a ledge. And each time it happens, the Master’s rescue mission grows more precarious.
“Because, my darling: look at me. Say it with me: the thing I’ve told you for years, centuries, millennia: you can’t save everyone.”
How hilariously, chillingly ironic that once, he hammered this home to the Doctor by being proof that not everyone wanted to be saved. And now, he’s the one lifting his oldest friend up out of the whitewater rapids of his pain, and guilt, and shame.
He scours the planet that is so like, and unlike, Gallifrey. Like a favorite song in a discordant key. It’s more wrong for being so close. He understands. And he holds his beloved tighter still.
“Come inside with me. Come away. You still have to rest. To do your best next time around, ey?”
Hands grip the Doctor’s tormented young face; his face used to be that young, too. Ah well. He shelters him now with a piercing stare, that draws him into a safe place: within their two minds.
“You could fail them all and I’d still love you. Idiot: You don’t need to be the Doctor in front of me.”
“Well then, I guess you’re in luck, aren’t you, darling?”
“Extremely lucky, as always,” he says, a mellow smile on his face as he reaches out for Koschei. “Come here, I need you closer.”
“Well who wouldn’t, I mean LOOK at me.”
The Master throws back his head and bawdily laughs, hands on hips, some sort of darkly seasoned Peter Pan, as he saunters over to his husband. All jokes are propped against the door to their intimacy, however, as he curls up in a feline ball against Jack’s side, head on his chest.
A dull patina of melancholy and regret descends over the Master. He catches his own transparent expression of despair. He smiles grayly at Graham.
He knows what the old mortal is thinking. It sears him with shame, and with anger, with the urge to flare you don’t understand, but weariness wins today.
“There are many reasons, but none of them would formulate an excuse you’d accept. We are friends before we are enemies or even lovers. I would adore her, in any face, any gender, any age, and I would follow her over the impossible edge of the ever-expanding universe. I would wish to consume, to demolish, anything between us, for eternity. But occasionally all that ardor gets converted into toxic energy, and we fight. And she certainly gets in her punches.”
His smile grows a little more wan.
“I just realized. You don’t know. You’ve never seen her really lose herself to her temper, have you? Never seen people disregard her sermonizing and her interfering, and seen her,” his teeth grate on edge with the word, “sna-p.”
A hushed laugh escapes. Hushed, or breathless, with a knowing pain.
“Oh, my friend. None of you lot had better leave her when you see it. Or I will be the one to come for you.”
Graham has a ready platitude on his lips when suddenly, the whole demeanour of this other Time Lord changes. It nearly sends a shiver down his spine, and that glint in his eye tells the retired bus driver exactly why this man chose the moniker Master.
“No, can’t say I’ve seen her completely lose it. Gotten close a time or two, I wager, but never ‘snap,’ as you call it. Even when it happens, takes a lot more to scare me off than you might imagine. I might not be as experienced as you and the Doc in all this alien nonsense, but Sheffield on a Saturday night ain’t exactly all sunshine and daisies.”
He can’t promise that the other two will stay, especially if it comes to a point where it’s too dangerous for them to stay – in fact, Graham would be the first one pushing them out the door, in that case – but as for him, he’s been around the block a time or two. He’s seen desperate people lose their temper and their will to live, and he’s had to stand between them and tragedy more than once.
The Master leans in closely as Graham rattles off his truths with surprising aplomb, for a man of such a common trade. Sharp almond eyes narrow to slits. There are volcanoes behind his irises.
The interval passes. Koschei “resets” himself, twisting his head in an almost mechanical circle on his long neck. He shudders, and his feverish features settle into a mask of composure. He nods once, sharply.
“Graham O’Brien, I like you,” he renders his verdict.
For the past twenty minutes, while the Doctor’s been preoccupied flying about the Console Room inputting destination points and monologuing about what intrigues her, the Master has been assembling a holly, ivy, and mistletoe wreath. Every time she flurries past chattering, he’s wordlessly applied another piece of the wreath to her hair, with wry determination.
Ultimately, the entire crown adorns her head, and he smugly lifts a mirror for her perusal.
“Happy Christmas, I now have an excuse endorsed by your beloved humans to kiss you at all hours.”
Needless to say, she enjoys him playing with her air when they pass each other. She’s noted an especial liking to tactile affection in this body. Massages, hugs, cuddles, and kisses— and the ever-so-lovely playing with of her hair.
Once the mirror came to her, she laughed, grinning wildly. “You already had my approval”
Her words are simple but stop him temporarily in his tracks.
“ … yeah, well.”
As usual, words fail him in the sincerest moments, and he’s left scrambling for actions that even convey a pale imitation of what he feels.
He starts by tossing aside the mirror, scooping her up, hoisting her high overhead, and simply staring at her: how a child stares at the star atop a Christmas tree. Yet there’s more seasoned warmth in his eyes, like the flavor of cinnamon roasted nuts or the scent of a fire after hours of trudging in the cold and dark. It’s very much the look of a homecoming.
“I did, did I. Me, with your approval? Since we were teenagers? You sure you’re feeling well?”
Before she can protest he presses his lips to hers, and inhales at the incredible flush of pleasure it grants. The soft pliancy of her mouth, the notion that the Oncoming Storm is allowing her small peahen of an acolyte best friend to manipulate any part of her body, it’s intoxicating. It’s a privilege. It’s a sacred rite.
The kiss lasts until he has to part for a gasp of breath.
“Oh God, Thete. You still taste so good.”
He rests his forehead against hers, while still holding her aloft.
//Y’all it’s been too long since I’ve written a thread showing the Master’s capacity for darkness. He may be situationally “reformed” but there’s always the chance for him to go batshit on someone who threatens a loved one….takers? Hmu.
The Master says nothing, and has at least the social acuity to know not to stare. So the mercurial scientific prodigy imitates the quiet, no-nonsense bus driver’s exact stance, and waits.
At length, he smiles, and the bitterness is actually not nearly so pronounced as the grief. So perhaps, despite being an intergalactic criminal genius versus an everyman, they are exactly the same person in this moment.
“You think we’re alike … . because we both have a ‘her’ in our lives whose light is indescribable. Yes? But, hhhhah. Graham, I AM the Solitract, to the Doctor’s Universe. The time will come, if it hasn’t already … when she finally sheds me completely, and I’ll have to tell her, too, ‘I will dream of you out there without me.’”
He does regard Graham, now, with muted suffering.
“Your Grace might not be here in tangible form, but she would never have had to willingly leave you. You’re not corrosive and clinging. You’re good. Take refuge in that.”
He’ll dwell on what the Master has said about Grace at another time, because right now, he’s too focused on what the other man is saying about him and the Doctor. And it’s making him proper upset.
“Are you joking with me, mate? After all your high ‘n mighty speeches about how you two need each other, about how you’ve spent centuries bein’ on again, off again but you’re not gonna waste this chance, that is what you have to say? That one day, she’s gonna leave and you’re just gonna accept it?” He shakes his head.
“Nah, I don’t buy that. I’ve seen the pair of you, seen how you two are lighter when the other is in the room. And what you two need right now is to have your heads knocked together so you both understand how much you mean to each other. Yeah, the Doc is better than probably any of us deserve, but she’s also just a person. A Time Lord, maybe, but she still needs people, she still needs you. And deep down, you know that too.”
“Hm! Sounds like the acme of hypocrisy when you put it that way.”
Koschei’s torn between itemizing for Graham the list of the Doctor’s deeds which fall far short of “better than probably any of us deserve” … . and agreeing with Graham breathlessly. Either way, he loves her, in a way that transcends any Companion’s understanding, because he knows what it is to live the span of a life that’s unfathomably long and alinear. And because he knows each of her faults as intimately as each of her blessings. And he loves each one, the way you take pieces of fine jewelry out of an armoire and polish them, and hold them up to the light at every conceivable angle.
He stretches his legs out, and uncurls his toes within his boots. He leans back and really acclimates himself to the comfy seat next to the old bus driver.
“ … . you’re right, of course. Regardless of what she deserves. I’m not going anywhere. But back to you, mate.” There’s a roguish glint in his black eyes. Under other circumstances, it’d be a touch too sharp for comfort. Even frightening. But right now, it’s the look of a friend. “Don’t deflect just because I was having an angst-ridden moment. The Solitract showed you a very convincing Grace, I take it. Dangled the carrot, as it were.”
Koschei hoards his Theta close. He shifts to slide his legs around his waist, and his arms around his shoulders. He rubs his back while bunting the side of his face into the crook of the Doctor’s neck.
“You, bumping into me on that hillside on Mount Perdition, when we were little kids: that’s still the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Forever sounds good.”
Home, home, I’m home.
He cuddles tightly with both arms, holding him as close as possible.
“I love you. I know I keep saying it, but I do, I love you so much. You, and this, all of this, makes me so happy. I’ve got you, and you’re mine. This wonderful creature, this masterpiece…loves me. That’s why I’m the luckiest person in all the universe. Because I have you.”
Theta turns his head and kisses Koschei’s cheek.
“You make me excited to live,” he whispers. “And that’s not something I thought I would ever say.”
“That, my beauty, was the plan.”
From the moment he espied fizzling gold at the Doctor’s fingertips, and knew the forces against which his old friend struggled: the plan was to impart some of the Master’s own tenacity to live upon his far more self-destructive counterpart.
Hands callused by millennia of mechanical work feel for the honest wrinkles and weathered spots of the Doctor’s face, as though to memorize it for the millionth time. The Master takes his time fondling the features of his beloved.
“Now you’ve got to repay me by doing it. By living as long as you can. Promise me.”
Icarus 