the demon rose it’s gaze, slowly to the other time lord. it wasn’t used to such willingness. perhaps time lords didn’t have demons on their planet. maybe that was why they were so willing to experience this all. but even with all these perhaps and maybe theories, it didn’t change the fact that it now had a choice.
a choice she was going to explore in the doctor’s mind before anything else.
a small laugh, a chuckle escaped from her. “this meat suit is loved. by so many, all across the universe. never felt anythin’ like it.” a step forward, and she gave a shake of her head. “i know you. i can see you inside of her mind. a killer. insane, that lack of empathy for everyone except the true love of your life. why would i possess someone who is already, even on the best of days, a demon.”
“you’re nofun.”
“For many reasons. Because we demons have our functions, too, don’t we? Our purpose. In a world of frantic radiance, you still need the gloomy dark emptiness where things rest. You need the monster to thank for teaching you survival. The conflict. The driver of the plot. Hardly dull.”
The Master advances another step, the crushing pressure of his telepathic energies growing still more. Physical reality seems to fishbowl around his approaching form. He leers.
“Come on. You can feel it, can’t you? The cloying comforts of familiarity. The rich velvety dark. Come burrow inside my mind a bit. Come see what terrible things my kind are capable of. Not the diluted guilt-ridden ramblings of this would-be murderer, but a TRUE Weaponized Being. She hates guns. I AM a gun. Through and through. Just a moment, friend. Explore me just a moment. I’ll taste delicious.”
I am no longer a demon, foolish parasite.
She showed me a better way, a selfless way, and that’ll be your ruin.
“Not helpful. Not helpful even a LITTLE BIT.” He moved past the other, barely touching him as he ran to the kitchen. “Come on-!! Quickly, follow me !!”
“ … right.”
The Master watches the Doctor exiting the room, flailing like a demented howler monkey, proclaiming death and despair at the hands of legumes.
Takes him back, really, to their school days. All he ever really wanted to do was complete his homework undisturbed.
Three guesses as to how many nights a schoolweek this successfully occurred.
He gathers his superhuman patience, draws his laser, and composedly follows the demented howler monkey.
The Doctor didn’t shift her eyes away from The Master for a second. She was concerned. Very concerned. She had only ever seen the other like this a couple of times in the past.
“Hey. It’s only me.”
With tremulous hesitation, the Master lifts his mournful eyes. He swallows audibly. He musters a grim smile.
“Yes, darling, but the trouble is, remembering a nightmare makes it all the more potent. And this was more than a nightmare. It happened.”
He leans toward her, and it isn’t pleasant. He stinks of sweat and bad breath from sick, sick from nausea, nausea from the pain in his back. Where Missy, dear, wild, beautiful, vicious Missy, left her scar. And Koschei, hunkered into an upright fetal ball, knees drawn to his chest, whispers conspiratorially to his Doctor.
“They stabilized my resurrection, in the Timelock, at a price. They did things to me, they … . rid me of the ability to tell them no, and then they punished me. Rassilon punished me. With intermittent … . sensory overload, and deprivation. With neurochemical substances. With seventy years alone. No one to talk to. The constant fear of the Drums returning, to mock me for being … once again forgettable. With you. With a hundred thousand nuanced scenarios of you bursting in to rescue me. You never came. And I have dreams. And sometimes I feel I might slice my scalp and pull it down over my face and … hide in nothingness, just to make it all stop.”
He draws a shuddering breath.
“You. You make it all stop. It’s only ever been you. That’s what I was afraid to say. The little boy who made me Death’s Dog is the woman who can save me.”
“M’friends are goin’ away for Christmas.” She said, suddenly, before a lingering silence took place as she fully processed her own words. She loved Christmas. Ryan, Yaz and Graham wouldn’t be there—- and all of her other friends? Except for The Master, at least? They weren’t options. “Think I’m gonna have to skip it this year. Sucks.”
“What?! Oh, like HELL!”
His outrage is flat-out comical. She might as well have declared herself the saleswoman of her own TARDIS, to some disreputable, shady party, the way he treats this like a calamity to end all.
The Master flings down hours of nuanced mechanical labor indelicately. Little bits and pieces of his work go flying like metal confetti. He stands and stalks over to the Doctor and kneels to her, taking both her hands, dramatic as a Shakespearean acting company understudy.
“Doctor! You and I once experienced a wondrously catastrophic Christmas! Remember, that time I was everyone on earth? Oh, those were the days. And you heard the Drums, when still I had them, and you told me you believed me, and I really must impress it upon you that this meant the world to me. For that reason, darling: let ME spend Christmas with you. I shall get crackers and wear a paper hat and eat all their disgusting rich food with you. We will indulge in pointless human rituals, like cutting down an evergreen tree and putting knick-knacks and lights on them. I will dress up as that unnervingly omniscient fat bearded man in red and we can sing songs of dubious taste while getting lit on gingered eggnog. Whatever your hearts desire.”
She was surprised. But it was a soft surprise, her eyes shifting instantly to her left as her head turned slightly, paying attention to exactly what he was doing. It only seemed like he wanted to get past her, but…. the feeling of his hands on her hips, the gentle way they moved over her clothes and placed pressure on her skin – if only to move her – was so delicate. She looked up to meet his eyes, a small smile tugging at her lips.
“You could have just asked me t’move, y’know.”
The Master registers that surprise touch-telepathically from the moment the Doctor experiences it. It feels like a tiny squeak, like a mental nudge of an exclamation point in a tiny font. From such a brash, bold, daring soul, it’s precious, and it makes him smile just as softly.
Maybe she doesn’t remember their days as two far younger men, when he was a short, svelte man with dark hair and a thick beard, and she taller, with a cloud of gray curls and a high raspy voice. Maybe she doesn’t recall their Sea Devils days, when they were at zero hour and desperately collaborating, and she was the one gripping him gently by the hips and moving him out of her path. That’s alright. He’ll remind her in time.
He is ever so patient, after all, and very good at waiting.
“Then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of touching you,” he murmurs back, stealing an uncharacteristically meek smile right back at her.
Blast. She wanted to do that, too. Finally wrap her arms around him, finally take him all in, just– have that moment. Have that moment together, the moment that they hadn’t seemed to have had in- WELL. Centuries, at the least.
But the man pulled back, leaving her with little choice but to cockily raise her eyebrows and step forward. SERIOUSLY?
And then those words. They made her PAUSE, lingering AWKWARDLY where she was. Alrighty then, that was not something that she expected—-
With a couple of moments of silence from The Doctor, her attention was diverted anywhere but his gaze – mainly to her shoe, shifting it over the concrete floor. And when it became a little too long a pause, she finally spoke up.
“JUST.. wanted a hug.”
Pouting. She was definitely pouting. Not fair.
The Master stops dead in his tracks. He stares down at the crestfallen little creature who holds within her endlessly spawning galaxies of hope and wonder. This amazing little beastie is his oldest and dearest friend. And all he need do is set aside every ounce of malicious or even merely sporting intent, and indulge her.
That is, yield.
Well.
Koschei of House Oakdown has long prided himself in being the one person that Theta Sigma of House Lungbarrow cannot wheedle into submission! Why, he’s a savage bastard, a killer of thousands, a wrangler and monger of chaos! He’s …
hopelessly smitten.
He sighs, and it’s the sound of centuries of sighs, coalesced into one great sound of preposterous frustration.
And he opens his arms, and penguin-waddles right over to her.
“Oh, do get a shift on. Did you miss the memo? You’re my favorite thing.”
OKAY – socontactwas a huge mistake on her part, she would fully admit to that. But in the same breath, she wasn’t just going to let THE MASTER up and go again. No. Despite his future being Missy and the events that went on between them then, it did not mean that she was just going to give up. Not now, not again, not ever again. The problem was, was that this regeneration of the Master was more violent. More prone to fighting back. Which was obvious by the emotion that he blasted her with.
Oh and that? That made her angry. That made her very angry.
Resorting by shoving his hands off her head, she shifted to a much safer – one step away – from The Master, but that did not mean that the fire burning in her eyes was any less intense. She may be a bubbly bundle of joy, this regeneration, but when pushed, she was not going to take it. Which meant, even when he tried to appear intimidating, all she did was stand her ground, not taking her eyes off him for even a moment.
“SHUT UP.”
“You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to do that. I have tried countless amounts of times, I have offered you help, I have stopped you when you’ve gone too far and I have loved you. We have BOTH made mistakes, Master, and I’m TRYING to own up to that. But the past is the past and it does not dictate what the future holds.”
“But here’s the thing, here’s the cherry on top of the cake. You want your reason? I’M NOT HERE TO CHANGE YOU THIS TIME.” And that was the point where she stepped in, closer to The Master, to meet his attempted intimidation level and then some. “I’ve tried for far too long to get you to be like me. I’ve tried so hard to get you to see the universe for how BEAUTIFUL it really is. And while I am certainly NOT giving up on you, I AM hoping to establish some sort of resemblance to our past friendship. You are special to me in EVERY sense of the word. And for you to just ASSUME that I’ll discard you like you don’t mean anything to me is INSULTING, not only to me but to every moment we’ve spent in each other’s company.”
There was a pause – a beat – where she took a breath.
“And don’t you DAREgo in my head again.”
He doesn’t retaliate when she tears free of his touch. But he could swear there’s a mental SNAP at the severing.
The desperation with which the Master had flooded the Doctor’s mind had not, irony of ironies, been an attempt to invade or overcome her. Rather, it was the typical desperate refrain behind his bombast: see me. Hear me. Really, truly understand the boy you once knew.
So her warning, on the heels of overwhelming emotional confession, stings with particular pique: {SHUt UP … don’t you DARE go in my head again.} Like doing so was an attempt to hold her down, strangle her, rape her, and not what it truly was: an spreading of arms, a clumsy and ashamed bearing-of-witness. A “look what I’ve got.” A show of open palms.
The one transgression he cannot forgive in himself:
Surrender.
“No, but … just now. I was trying to share with you. I was trying to share … me.”
“Like that time. that time in the rubbish heap. That Christmas. You heard them. You heard the Drums. The thing that Rassilon did to me that muffled everything else I could hear. That music of the cosmos, that you wanted me, Missy, to hear. Violence was my baptism from the age of eight, but I wanted to share that it’s GONE. At least, the CAUSE is gone! Doctor… .”
He speaks her name like a mystic after a week of fasting, who has gained visions of holiness. At the same time, the timbre of his voice is that, simply, of a child smitten with a favorite playmate.
“Doctor. If the past has no bearing on the future, not even as a lesson, or a legacy … . then does that mean I was right? Does that mean I’m irrelevant?”
Does that mean you’ll cast out the people you claimed you’d carry, in favor of anesthetizing yourself, and making the present and the future easier to face?
Does that mean I’m irrelevant
to you?
“ … ‘I carry your hearts. I carry them in my hearts.’ ”
The Master recites cummings, and falls silent, as close to giving up as he has ever been.
send “DON’T GO!” and an emoji to see my muse’s reaction to yours 🔗 saying it while holding or pinning my muse.
The moment the Doctor seizes the Master’s suit lapels–the instant she slams him against the side of the big, blue, beautiful TARDIS–he retaliates. One sharp motion and he’s released himself, shoving her back. He leers into her space now. He seizes her face in his hands, and SPILLS telepathic energy–pure, unqualifiable, animal emotion– straight from his mind into hers.
When he speaks, he roars:
“Then DO!!!! PROVIDE!!!! A REASON!!!”
The disarmingly soft features of this particular Master contort with fury. That anger is not a visceral discomfort. No, it’s a malignant rage that’s calcified over centuries of abandonment, rejection, alienation and grief. It’s the soul-crushing pressure of why was I not enough? magnified exponentially by relentless, mutual miscommunication. It’s the product of a falling-out between best friends, mangled in translation, to a little boy who pissed his robes at the sound of drums in front of the Untempered Schism, failed his test, and disgraced House Oakdown, and from then on, from then on, always, peered around every corner of life, paranoid to be found out as a Nothing.
No one made him feel more like a Something, and, subsequently, like a Nothing, than the Doctor.
He bridles, in all his five feet, nine inches and under 160 pounds of Time Lord. He tries to make himself look bigger, crueler. He only succeeds in looking some mixture of agitated and terrified.
“How’m I to believe you? That, what, now you’re Hope’s Messenger? That you accept responsibility for the people you snake-charm into traveling with you? That you’ll not discard me like rubbish tomorrow, or else turn me into a project, a thing to fix, a notch in your Savior Complex Belt? EY? C’mon, Hearts. I know you. Novelty will always defeat commitment, when it comes to you.”
Icarus 