With a single sweep of his arm, and a roar from the gut, the contents of his workbench clash and shatter.
For the first time since Zinnia’s birth, Koschei is the Master, a fury brimming with explosive physical violence. Entirely, irony of ironies, because of the Doctor’s accusations.
“I don’t UNDERSTAND, Thete! Why this antagonism? I give you every minute of every day of my life, if it’s not for you it’s for our baby, I let you coom and go as you please, cavort with any friends you LIKE, go on ‘SAVING’ people, one project after anootha to outrun, to outrun … that black hole in your chest, and I love even THAT part of you! What else am I meant to DO? I, I anonymously donated my own medical inventions to Martha Jones’s hospital; I wired Donna Noble’s husband a raise; I talked to Nyssa in disguise to help her cope over her father; I apologized, cried, to Jo; I got Lucy in counseling; is it Bill? Because we haven’t found Bill yet.”
Frantically, he seizes her by the arms, and shakes her, once.
“ANSWER ME, is it BILL? Is that why you’re angry? Is that why you’re DISAPPOINTED? How am I NOT trying? TELL ME WHAT TO DO!”
I am a tiger, I am an inferno, and I don’t know what to do.
“Yeh. You’re right… I can’t fix what’s been done.”
She watches as her husband sinks down onto the floor, crouched in a familiar position of self-defense. She’s seen him before, she’s FELT him before, yet she’s still not prepared for the strength with which his mind exclaims his pain and fear and hurt and guilt. The Doctor flinches as his telepathic scream rends her hearts in two.
Her hand pulls back, not so much out of fear, but out of a desire not to cause him any more pain.
It’s too much, she can tell that with ease, but as she kneels down in front of him, she offers him her hands, palm up, a sign of peace and infinite trust.
“I can’t fix it, can’t take back what I said, but I can go forward.
We can go forward and work together from here. I’m gonna touch you, alright?”
After giving him a moment to process, she slowly, gently wraps her arms around him and cradles him to her chest.
Again, it’s a familiar position, one she took a long, long time ago when the Master was cowering in front of them, and a lanky man in pinstripes held him. But this time, it’s meant to be a greater form of comfort than it ever could have been on the Valiant. The Doctor nuzzles his shoulder and closes her eyes, running her fingers through his salt and pepper hair.
“If you want to get upset, angry, if you want to lash out, that’s okay. It’s a natural thing. But if not… I’ll joost hold you until it all calms down, if that’s alright with you? Take your time, love. No rush. And then when you’re ready, we can talk. I’ll be quiet now.”
Admittedly, that’s the hard part for her. Ever loquacious, the Doctor makes an effort to provide a quiet and calming environment, her mind settling into a calm and cool atmosphere around his. There will be plenty of time to talk later. For now, he just needs her, and that’s what she’ll do.
He emerges the way a flower bends its head toward sunlight. Naturally, indubitably. Slowly but surely. He is greedy and he is jealous, yes, so he can’t help but hoard what he can reach. He can’t help but crawl all the way into her lap, cling to her dear little rainbow shirt and shove his face up beneath her chin, so forcefully that his features are squashed into her skin, hiding evidence of himself, hiding sensation of himself, eager to be within her and to be her.
He cries brokenly; it’s not even her fault. When it is too much, he rages and roars and boils over. Whether it is good or bad. It was but a single argument, and it’s not her fault that he is this destroyed. And he all but suffocates himself, trying to control the sobs, trying to keep her from feeling beholden and guilty, trying to keep her from thinking she can never speak to him crossly when he does something to bother her.
But if he could just unbirth himself, could just unmake himself, could just hide inside her existence, completely eclipsed, that would be fine. The thing he railed and fought against for eternities, it sounds like the best gravemarker he could think of now. No, the best way to LIVE. He doesn’t want to come out. Not anytime soon. He wants to just vanish in her.
‘I’m Doctor Who!’ he remembers watching Missy prance around and declare, on a tiny video monitor on Mondas, for weeks at the ship’s base, and he could almost laugh at how appropriate that wishful thinking is now.
“Don’t be quiet … please,” he finally musters the sense to murmur. “Your talking is home. Your endless talking.”
He paws for one of her wrists, and examines it. He shudders a sigh of relief to see there are no marks.
With a single sweep of his arm, and a roar from the gut, the contents of his workbench clash and shatter.
For the first time since Zinnia’s birth, Koschei is the Master, a fury brimming with explosive physical violence. Entirely, irony of ironies, because of the Doctor’s accusations.
“I don’t UNDERSTAND, Thete! Why this antagonism? I give you every minute of every day of my life, if it’s not for you it’s for our baby, I let you coom and go as you please, cavort with any friends you LIKE, go on ‘SAVING’ people, one project after anootha to outrun, to outrun … that black hole in your chest, and I love even THAT part of you! What else am I meant to DO? I, I anonymously donated my own medical inventions to Martha Jones’s hospital; I wired Donna Noble’s husband a raise; I talked to Nyssa in disguise to help her cope over her father; I apologized, cried, to Jo; I got Lucy in counseling; is it Bill? Because we haven’t found Bill yet.”
Frantically, he seizes her by the arms, and shakes her, once.
“ANSWER ME, is it BILL? Is that why you’re angry? Is that why you’re DISAPPOINTED? How am I NOT trying? TELL ME WHAT TO DO!”
I am a tiger, I am an inferno, and I don’t know what to do.
Koschei is breathless with pain. Horror tightens his features as he immediately drops his hands off his wife.
“I’m sorry, I’m …very sorry …” he gasps, feebly, stepping back, averting his eyes, the picture of submissive shame. The mess of his lab is no longer testimony to his formidable ire, but rather, a mockery, a humiliating witness that he is raw and childish and stupid. Everything about Koschei Oakdown that makes him a bad habit to hide; a disgrace to the name of Lungbarrow; an unfortunate chapter in a life best closed and shelved and abandoned and forgotten.
None of this softens the Doctor, but then that’s one reason why he loves her so much. She is not soft. She is not nice. Not always.
She throttles him with words he never thought he’d hear. This, this, this is why he never fully relaxes, not months, not even years, into their reconciliation. She goes about the verbal beating with dazzlingly systematic, efficient litigation.
“That’s not what I meant… !” he tries, but her volume and ferocity swallow his words. He’s in tears and he hates himself for it. He hates himself, hates himself, his ugly fat baby face, his freak exuberance and enthusiasm and his weird tics and habits and his childish propensity to overwhelmed overstimulation; his idiot bouts of naivety; his egomaniacal overcompensation for being constantly scared shitless; god, can he really be such a disappointment? What is the point of him?
He treats her like a possession. { No! I meant I shouldn’t see you that way, and I was behaving accordingly! } He sees her desire to save and fix the wounded and disenfranchised as a “bad thing.” { No! I meant we’re at philosophical odds, yet I value your point of view, even if I don’t agree! } His efforts to do better are self-important. { No! I … } His efforts to do better are simplistic and childish. { I … } His efforts to do better are lazy. { … I …} He is pompous, tyrannical, and jealous. { … . I am pompous … tyrannical … and jealous.}
Oh Doctor. The POWER you wield.
“I’m not …sure . .. what more you can . . . s … say to hurt me, but. I don’t have what you have, I … don’t have … I don’t have the reference, or the skills, required to be desirable to many people. And … and I don’t say that to excuse my behavior. I DON’T say it to fish for pity or even for forgiveness, but there are simply people in this world, Doctor, in this universe, who are not well equipped to be sources of goodness. Or comfort. We are not built to deserve love. And some of us are cursed with knowing that. Knowing that to our marrow,day in and out, no matter what we do to fightit.”
He smacks a hand over his chest, and swallows audibly.
“But I fight it anyway. I fight what I’m best at: I fight being jealous. I fight being notorious for the one thing I do right.
I fight it for you. ”
{ There are two schools of thought in ethical discourse.
One school posits that those who are born good are superior beings. The other school posits that those who are born wicked, but try very, very hard, to be better, are, instead, superior. I don’t know if I’m superior at, or to, anything, Doctor. But I hope you’ll consider the latter school of thought. I hope you’ll stop looking at me like I repulse you. }
“I’m sorry, I. Please, I need. Excuse me.”
For once it is the Master who runs away.
The Doctor’s anger lashes out like flames licking at an already scorched building. There’s no fuel to her fire, and it dies out very quickly as Koschei backpedals, his expression horrified, tears rolling down his face.
She regrets her propensity to jump to conclusions, to wield those things that would hurt him most as a devastating weapon. She regrets… Ah yes, Doctor, you’re no stranger to regret, are you?
Impulsive, reckless, childish thing that you have always been.
As her husband flees, her hearts, her other half, her BEST FRIEND flees from the sting of the words she’s flung at him, her hearts drop hard into the pit of her stomach.
“Shit–”
The Doctor’s hands come up to her hair, tugging roughly on blonde strands as if she can somehow rip out the last thirty seconds and cast them aside, leaving them where they were before this whole thing started. She drops into a crouch, holding her head in her hands, because she can feel him; she can always feel him, her beloved bondmate, and while that is usually a comfort and a source of joy, she now finds it a reminder of how cruel she can be.
She can feel him.
She can feel his pain that she caused.
She can feel his self-loathing and hatred blossoming into a hideous weed she’d spend so long trying to stamp out.
She can feel his guilt, his heartsbreak, and she knows it’s all her doing.
She pulls once more on her hair and scrubs her hands roughly over her face until her skin is red as her eyes, so very close to the edge of tears.
But then she moves, takes action, because that is one of the very few things she can do now.
“Koschei– Koschei, wait!”
Getting to her feet, she bolts out of the room behind him and follows him to his hiding place. Perhaps it would be better to leave well enough alone, but she can’t leave him like this to fester… she knows him to well, and he will destroy himself from the inside out.
“Koschei, shit, Koschei, Please–”
Her voice cracks as she catches up to him and reaches out to touch his hand. The contact is brief and gentle, enough only to catch his attention, but not enough to assume control over his actions; she won’t stop him if he wants distance from her, but she hopes he’ll turn and listen to her.
“I– I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I– I didn’t mean those things the way they came out. I was just angry and hurt and–”
Excuses, Doctor, you’re ever so good at those.
“No, no, I’m sorry. Those things that I said… were designed to hurt you. I’ve fallen back into old habits too, Koschei, and I am SO sorry.”
I hope you know how impossibly proud of you I am.
I hope you know that you are the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me.
I hope you know that there is not a force in this universe that would tear me from your arms.
“Even if it doesn’t come naturally to you, you are TRYING. That’s the point of it, isn’t it? You keep trying and you haven’t given up… in all this time, you haven’t given up and I need you to know how proud of you I am for that… You’re allowed to get discouraged, to get angry, to be JEALOUS. But even so… you’ve never stopped trying and–”
Her voice broke off and she looked down, ashamed of herself and the cruelty she had rained down upon him without so much as a second thought.
“I’m the one who stopped trying. For a minute, I went back to the way I never want things to be, ever. I hurt you, and I did it on purpose and– I understand if you need time, but I… I love you. I love you very, VERY much, and I am proud of you, proud of who you are and what you’re trying to do. I’ve never been so proud.”
God, is there anything I can do to fix this? Some magical combination of words?
I need to go back. I need to hold you, to comfort you, to tell you it’s okay to me angry and jealous and tell you I’m proud…
Because I am. Proud. Proud of you, my husband, my soulmate. Proud of us.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
Running is difficult for someone who ordinarily has no concept of relinquishing anything. Giving up anything. Dropping anything. Someone who’d rather bathe a white flag in his own blood than surrender. But here he is, he muses, in the most peculiarly detached way. Here he is, blundering down the hall of their merged TARDIS, clueless as to his own direction.
It’s probably because of the aberrations that are native to his brain, across all his faces, but particularly keen in the present: but Koschei’s peripheral vision is gone. He’s stumbling down a black suffocating tunnel. He reaches out calmly as he’s able, to steady himself against a wall. The TARDIS pities him, and bends the halls for his benefit. He can’t see, but even while this distraught, he recognizes it’s as much tears and psychosomatic symptoms as it is anything truly physiological.
Then it occurs to him, as he hears his wife’s voice somewhere behind him. This is his mind self-defending. The way he forced his too-permeable psyche, year by year, to become an impenetrable fortress. But it’s more than that. A stone wall keeps monsters out, but it also keeps monsters in.
Even now, the Master is protecting the Doctor.
Realization strikes.Koschei sinks to sit on the floor, somewhere in the center of the TARDIS, near Zinnia’s room. Theta Sigma apprehends him then. Her hand brushes his and he could S C R E A M at the sensation, so fucking INTENSE, just a tickle-together of skin cells for half a second, but it’s HER, and so she’s through his stone wall in that instant.
It hits her fully, brain to brain, that soundless scream. ‘A whole screaming world on fire.’ Tens of hundreds of years of Not Enough, and Why Didn’t You, and Nothing Matters, and You Disappoint Me.
Koschei sobs and recoils. He cradles his head in his hands.
“Don’t . . .!” he warns her, lungs airless.
When the Doctor speaks, she speaks at length; it’s her way. And when she’s done speaking aloud, she speaks between their minds. Her words matter, and percolate through ten thousand layers of grief and self-doubt and shame. Slowly. But Koschei is still on the ground cowering, afraid not of the Doctor, but of his own compulsion to cruelly retaliate. He has never looked more like Harold Saxon cowering from a rejuvenated, youthful Doctor on board the Valiant, whimpering of unfairness and of his “children” the Toclafane. But it’s her, her, he’s protecting this time, not himself.
She tells him she loves him, and asks whether there’s a magic fix.
“You said yourself there’s no magical fix,” he croaks.
She tells him she’s sorry.
He wants to tell her to go to hell, just to spare her, but he is selfish, so instead, he bunts his forehead against her leg.
With a single sweep of his arm, and a roar from the gut, the contents of his workbench clash and shatter.
For the first time since Zinnia’s birth, Koschei is the Master, a fury brimming with explosive physical violence. Entirely, irony of ironies, because of the Doctor’s accusations.
“I don’t UNDERSTAND, Thete! Why this antagonism? I give you every minute of every day of my life, if it’s not for you it’s for our baby, I let you coom and go as you please, cavort with any friends you LIKE, go on ‘SAVING’ people, one project after anootha to outrun, to outrun … that black hole in your chest, and I love even THAT part of you! What else am I meant to DO? I, I anonymously donated my own medical inventions to Martha Jones’s hospital; I wired Donna Noble’s husband a raise; I talked to Nyssa in disguise to help her cope over her father; I apologized, cried, to Jo; I got Lucy in counseling; is it Bill? Because we haven’t found Bill yet.”
Frantically, he seizes her by the arms, and shakes her, once.
“ANSWER ME, is it BILL? Is that why you’re angry? Is that why you’re DISAPPOINTED? How am I NOT trying? TELL ME WHAT TO DO!”
I am a tiger, I am an inferno, and I don’t know what to do.
The Master’s fury is enough to make any storm seem pitiful in comparison, but the Doctor stands her ground as he rages like a howling wind. He shouts, upends his workbench and leaves the room an utter disaster, yet she stands there, staring at him with narrowed eyes and a frown line between her brows.
It’s only when he touches her that she reacts. His grip is violent and something she is utterly unused to when Koschei touches her. When the Master shakes her roughly, she shoves him away out of reflex, eyes flashing dangerously.
“Don’t TOUCH me!”
A sick feeling forms in the pit of her stomach and she stares at him as if she doesn’t recognize her own husband.
The tension in the room crackles as if with electric energy, but really this is an argument that is long in coming. And now that they’ve let it loose, it will take the force of both their wills to contain it.
“You say you LET me come and go, as if I’m some sort of property, that what I do is even remotely up to you! Cavorting and saving people! Like it’s a bad thing!”
She glares at him and takes a step closer to him, every bit as intimidating as the Master in full fury.
“It’s not just Bill! It’s everyone! Everyone you’ve ever hurt, the lives you’ve destroyed, the people you’ve killed! You’re trying to fix it, trying to be better, but when it’s not enough, you get angry! You smash things and go right back to the way you have always been! You get mad at me for having friends, for doing what I HAVE ALWAYS DONE.“
“When will you see that it’s not just going to magically get better? There’s not going to be some COSMIC SCALE that suddenly tips in your direction and absolves you of your crimes! I can’t even do that for you, it’s YOU! You have to do it for yourself! Just like you tell me to when the guilt gets too much, but you can’t just SHOUT and BREAK THINGS when it doesn’t go your way! The truth of it is simple enough, Master.
It all boils down to the same thing, over and over.
You’re JEALOUS.”
Koschei is breathless with pain. Horror tightens his features as he immediately drops his hands off his wife.
“I’m sorry, I’m …very sorry …” he gasps, feebly, stepping back, averting his eyes, the picture of submissive shame. The mess of his lab is no longer testimony to his formidable ire, but rather, a mockery, a humiliating witness that he is raw and childish and stupid. Everything about Koschei Oakdown that makes him a bad habit to hide; a disgrace to the name of Lungbarrow; an unfortunate chapter in a life best closed and shelved and abandoned and forgotten.
None of this softens the Doctor, but then that’s one reason why he loves her so much. She is not soft. She is not nice. Not always.
She throttles him with words he never thought he’d hear. This, this, this is why he never fully relaxes, not months, not even years, into their reconciliation. She goes about the verbal beating with dazzlingly systematic, efficient litigation.
“That’s not what I meant… !” he tries, but her volume and ferocity swallow his words. He’s in tears and he hates himself for it. He hates himself, hates himself, his ugly fat baby face, his freak exuberance and enthusiasm and his weird tics and habits and his childish propensity to overwhelmed overstimulation; his idiot bouts of naivety; his egomaniacal overcompensation for being constantly scared shitless; god, can he really be such a disappointment? What is the point of him?
He treats her like a possession. { No! I meant I shouldn’t see you that way, and I was behaving accordingly! } He sees her desire to save and fix the wounded and disenfranchised as a “bad thing.” { No! I meant we’re at philosophical odds, yet I value your point of view, even if I don’t agree! } His efforts to do better are self-important. { No! I … } His efforts to do better are simplistic and childish. { I … } His efforts to do better are lazy. { … I …} He is pompous, tyrannical, and jealous. { … . I am pompous … tyrannical … and jealous.}
Oh Doctor. The POWER you wield.
“I’m not …sure . .. what more you can . . . s … say to hurt me, but. I don’t have what you have, I … don’t have … I don’t have the reference, or the skills, required to be desirable to many people. And … and I don’t say that to excuse my behavior. I DON’T say it to fish for pity or even for forgiveness, but there are simply people in this world, Doctor, in this universe, who are not well equipped to be sources of goodness. Or comfort. We are not built to deserve love. And some of us are cursed with knowing that. Knowing that to our marrow,day in and out, no matter what we do to fightit.”
He smacks a hand over his chest, and swallows audibly.
“But I fight it anyway. I fight what I’m best at: I fight being jealous. I fight being notorious for the one thing I do right.
I fight it for you. ”
{ There are two schools of thought in ethical discourse.
One school posits that those who are born good are superior beings. The other school posits that those who are born wicked, but try very, very hard, to be better, are, instead, superior. I don’t know if I’m superior at, or to, anything, Doctor. But I hope you’ll consider the latter school of thought. I hope you’ll stop looking at me like I repulse you. }
With a single sweep of his arm, and a roar from the gut, the contents of his workbench clash and shatter.
For the first time since Zinnia’s birth, Koschei is the Master, a fury brimming with explosive physical violence. Entirely, irony of ironies, because of the Doctor’s accusations.
“I don’t UNDERSTAND, Thete! Why this antagonism? I give you every minute of every day of my life, if it’s not for you it’s for our baby, I let you coom and go as you please, cavort with any friends you LIKE, go on ‘SAVING’ people, one project after anootha to outrun, to outrun … that black hole in your chest, and I love even THAT part of you! What else am I meant to DO? I, I anonymously donated my own medical inventions to Martha Jones’s hospital; I wired Donna Noble’s husband a raise; I talked to Nyssa in disguise to help her cope over her father; I apologized, cried, to Jo; I got Lucy in counseling; is it Bill? Because we haven’t found Bill yet.”
Frantically, he seizes her by the arms, and shakes her, once.
“ANSWER ME, is it BILL? Is that why you’re angry? Is that why you’re DISAPPOINTED? How am I NOT trying? TELL ME WHAT TO DO!”
I am a tiger, I am an inferno, and I don’t know what to do.
Were he to pluck the most hurtful phrase from a million trillion infinite possible combinations of sounds and syllables, this exact sentence would fit. Would be the sound of the neck snapping. Would be the sound of the glass shattering. The noose tightening. The gun firing.
This sentence would be the weapon.
The Master stares uncomprehending at the Doctor. His legendary capacity to maim is lost.
“ … what?”
He is falling she is leaving she is leaving he knew this day would come he knew it he knew it he knew ithe knew it he… .
Send “I’ve got you” to help my muse wash off blood from their body.
The Doctor doesn’t remember coming home. She doesn’t remember Koschei slowly peeling her layers off, grimacing at the stickiness of dried blood coagulating on her skin. She doesn’t remember his expression of remorse, of all consuming guilt.
All she remembers are the screams.
Even now, she’s not entirely sure what happened. Was it her mistake, or his? Which one of them missed it? A hidden trigger on a timer they’d already disarmed. One moment, the captives were there, breathing a sigh of relief and thanking their rescuers, then the next…
She remembers the smell of smoke, of singed flesh and hair. She remembers the sharp pain of debris cutting at her skin.
What she doesn’t remember is her husband helping her into the bath, or the water trickling down her back. She is hardly cognizant even now of him gently sponging her down and whispering soft reassurances.
It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. You did your best.
But your best wasn’t good enough. They’re all dead because of you. You might as well have set it off yourself.
You should have been in their place.
Hell, you should have died eons ago.
“I dunno how.”
“I dunno how, my sweet girl, I dunno. I just know when it’s you, I can. When it’s you, I rage and rampage till I chafe myself raw, for hundreds of years, trying to hate you, and it’s always just! Pointless. I can’t. Because when I see you I see the flaws and the blessings. I see the whole gamut. And the good bits are always bigger and brighter.”
He looks down and he sees the bathwater too, and it hardly fazes him, and he fears that as much as he fears her despairing forever.
Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with him, what’s always been wrong with him, and can he outrun it forever, and make her proud?
“C’mere, let’s get in the shower, okay? No leftover carnage, just. C’mon.”
He takes her upper arms and guides her to her feet; he was always the one better at surviving.
“Let’s go, here, I’ll help you. I don’t have the answers, Thete. I’m not a moral philosopher, I never could be. But I’ll always help you.”
She allows her husband to lift her up and drain the bath, the luke-warm shower water rinsing the last vestiges of their miserably failed adventure down the drain. The Doctor can’t do much more than stand there as he rinses her off and gentle runs a washcloth over her skin. She feels raw, from the inside out, blistered and bloody, dirty and the exact opposite of what Koschei describes. It’s the Time War all over, a decision, a failure, and the blood of so many people left staining her hands.
“You always could see past the worst of me… I never was certain that was a good thing. Certainly a flaw in your survival instinct, I think… Or perhaps a benefit. You always have seen yourself as worse than me, more dangerous, more steeped in blood and death and destruction. But that’s not really true, is it?”
The Doctor is spiraling, and she can feel it, her mind sinking into the darkness even as he tries to hold her head above those murky waters. She looks up at him, and her hazel eyes are sharp and focused, though lacking the usual warmth that fills them.
“I missed the wire. I was hasty and vain. Already celebrating my victory because I always win… I’m the Doctor, so I always win. But this time it went to my head. I’m supposed to HELP people, Koschei! They needed my help and now they’re dead and it was my fault. Don’t you see that? I’m not always the glorious hero, I’m stupid and selfish and I make mistakes and I HURT people just like I hurt you! Does it make up for it when I tell you I’m proud of you and you’re good and beautiful? Because I can’t imagine it does… I thought I’d learned my lesson, but I’m still the most dangerous thing this universe has to offer…”
She steps away from his touch and exits the shower, grabbing her ruined clothes and leaving the room. She’ll burn the bloodstained evidence, dress in clean clothes and disappear for a while. That’s all she can do.
He knows what she’s seeing and feeling. He was there, too. He was mired in the corpses of their fallen, too. Only instead of a savior, impossible and unfathomable, a god to end it all, Koschei was just a cockroach in the woodworks, just the “perfect warrior,” resurrected for the purpose of glorified, slaughter, just a weapon, making “practical use” of his long-marked degeneracy, and nothing, nothing, more.
He knows. Long before the Time War, they stood on opposite sides of that needless, fruitless, artificial divide, called “good” and “bad.”
It’s only been since coming to travel, and weep, and laugh, and eat, and sleep, and fuck, and live, with her once more, that he’s learned things are far more complicated, and far simpler, than “good” and “bad.”
One does one’s best, voluntarily, for the sake of doing one’s best, and no other motive, and that is the only thing that can be asked of anything living.
She’s taught him that. She’s the one, of all faces of the Doctor, who finally unlearned for him centuries of clusterfucked mental abuse.
And, he realizes, gathering about him all the vestiges of his indomitable will, that refusal to surrender that marks him apart from all Time Lords before or since: it’s payback time.
The Doctor isn’t the Master’s greatest enemy. The Doctor’s self-loathing is.
“ … That’s not true. No wait. Really.”
The Master lets the Doctor pass him by, but only when her words first sting him with the weight of his uselessness. It’s only when he’s past caring about his own worth, his own value or lack thereof, and only blindly desperate to help her, that he regains his voice.
It is soft and it shakes, but he speaks again, and it’s firmer.
He gets directly in her way, and juts his jaw.
“That’s all horse shit. You taught me that. It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you’re trying to do now. It’s what you try very hard never to do again. It’s being sorry, it’s being really, properly sorry, by changing your behavior forever. How many times did you tell me that? How many times d’you STILL tell me that? And who says you’re exempt? Ey? You don’t have the right to exempt yourself. Not when I love you. Not when WE love you. You don’t GET to do that, Thete. It’s just another way to run and you don’t GET to be CRUEL to yourself!”
He seizes her hands, and places each cold limp lifeless thing on each of his hearts.
“Here’s your proof! Feel? I’m ALIVE because of YOU. Me. Proud, scary Master, ME, I’d be DEAD without YOU. Maybe that’s NOT MUCH in the grand scheme of things, but it’s SOMEthing. Yes, yes, you’re stupid and selfish, you’re proud and brash and disorganized and impulsive and pedantic and vain! And yes, YES. Guess WHAT. When you tell me I’m beautiful, it IS worth it! When you coom and sit with me when I’m past despair, and hold my hand and say nothing at all, it IS worth it. When you make love to me and I feel connected to all of space and time and the universe, it IS worth it. When you laugh like an idiot and gasp like a child and show me all the new things that excite and please you, it IS worth it. I never called you a ‘hero’! Did I ever ONCE call you a ‘hero’? NEVER! I’d NEVER call you something so REDUCTIVE! You’re my WIFE. You’re my BEST FRIEND. You’re the only person I’ve ever known who’s like ME. You are the good, you are the bad, you are all the mundanities in between, you are EVERYTHING. I don’t know if you’re ‘worth it’ to anyone else, and I don’t care! You’re MINE, and you’re worth it to ME, and this life? With you? Mistakes and all? It is ALL I will EVER need. Do NOT leave me. Do NOT listen to the voice in your head that HATES you!”
The Doctor’s advantage here is that she’s caught her husband deeply engrossed in the technical procedure of merging their TARDISes: specifically, at the moment, finalizing the blueprints for the changed interior. When her finger finds his chest, he looks up, quasi-dazed by his own myopic tendencies during a project.
“What.”
He looks like a peturbed Basset Hound, all rounded edges and big brown eyes and forehead wrinkles: the farthest fling imaginable from the Terror of the Cosmos he is still fully capable of being.
And the more his wife talks, the more Koschei’s apple cheeks darken.
“I, er.”
Oh, worm?Where are your snazzy, self-aggrandizing comebacks now?
Oh dear she’s. Small yet omnipresent and it always gets him going … . how can there be so much longing in the sparest touch?
She commands that he say her name and he is undone like a fool.
“Hhhhhah, D o c t o r … !”
He lunges to kiss her.
“Goose, I’m. So proud of you.”
His voice is thick with withheld emotion, his features radiant as a hearth.
“You are rife with power. You’re incandescent with the power of moving forever forward and celebrating it. You are so beautiful that I’m. I’m … ecstatic . . . to share the light of you with the universe.”
Icarus 