😀

😀:  When does your muse smile the most?

When he has succeeded.  Whether that success is making a spouse sublimely happy, or getting away with an abysmally evil scheme, the Master delights in reaching extremely challenging goals with aplomb.  

“Kookaburra sittin’ in the old gum treeeeee, merry merry kind of the bush is heeee, laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra! Gay your life must be.” The Doctor sits in the jump seat, bouncing the baby on her knee as she sings.

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        “And ought he perform a demo of his laugh?” 

In saunters the titular crazy bird with the mad, territorial laugh-call, to ruffle his wife’s hair and smooth it back behind her ears, finding her earring and teething on it just the faintest teasing bit. 

He squats and makes a silly cloying big eyed face at their daughter, playing peekaboo around each of her mother’s shoulders. 

“Gbbbbpppfffff! Bah! Brrrrrpplllthhhh!” Zinnia is rather talkative it seems, as she giggles as madly as both her parents. Her little feet are gripped tight in her hands and pulled up over her head, a huge smile on her face.

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       “Is that a fact, little missy?  My sources dictate otherwise.” 

Koschei has sworn off baby-talk from the start; he’s convinced his daughter is a form of higher being, whose linguistic skills will transcend all  in current existence, but what’s more, he’s read that speaking any way but normally stunts intellectual growth.  

For that reason he speaks to Zinnia in an ordinary cadence, while, currently, he changes her diaper.  Dabbing powder on her bottom, to keep it from chafing.  Tossing the stinky dirty diaper in the wastebasket.

      “There we are, nice clean girls grow oop big and strong!” 

Entirely domesticated, wholly conquered, by his little baby girl.  

The cosmos can sleep more soundly without at least one incarnation of its greatest criminal mind.   

The Doctor thought she was alone in the wardrobe (or did she?). She had dug out his old coat, lined in red satin and threw a horrible grey wig on her head. An eyeliner pencil made a good enough drawn-on goatee. She pranced around in front of the mirror, giggling. “I’m the Master! Loooook at me and my brilliant plans! I’ll have the Doctor all tied oop! But not really because I looooove my goose!”

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       “Oh my God, GO away.” 

He pinches the bridge of his nose at her ludicrous prancing, trying not to laugh, but the richest cackle eventually escapes him. 

Today is a good day. Or at least, better than some more recent ones. The Doctor skips into the room with a giggling baby on her hip and all but drapes herself across her husband’s lap. “Zinny, tell Daddy how absolutely appalled we are that he hasn’t paid us any attention today. Tell him it’s just unacceptable and we demand our daily quota of kisses and snuggles!” The baby just burbled and smiled, a string of drool dangling from her chin, which the Doctor wiped away with her sleeve.

The Master flashes teeth jubilantly at wife and child.  A curious and wonderful sensation borne of this new life is that he finds he is genuinely joyful whenever the people he loves are.  Whether he is part of their joy, as he is privileged to be at the moment, or not: if they are happy, his universe is brighter. It’s an odd and magnificent sentiment.  

He juts out his bottom lip.

        “I am a monster, a positive monster, to have neglected my girls,” he 
         softly wails, and showers both their faces in kisses.  “Come, into the
         snuggle nest, of notorious Time Lords, Ladies, and Tots.  And let us 
         have a happy little three-signaled mind-meld. Hm?” 

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         “Hello, my Zinny.   My little comet.  I shall play you every song that
          I have ever found beautiful, my lamb.  But none shall be so lovely as
         my daughter, and her mum.
”