The Doctor runs their hand through their hair as if to disguise how their fingers tremble with emotion.
“All these years, all these worlds and people and schemes… he’s all I’ve got. He’s all I’ve ever had, honestly, ever since we were kids.”
“I loved him. The universe is big and cold and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes but I still love him now, if in a different way than before.”
The Doctor paces, a manic sort of energy around them. But their eyes are clear and bright as if they’ve seen something that defines their whole existence and they finally understand.
“Where would I be without him? He’d certainly be better off without me. Genius like him, he’d probably have been President. Maybe he’d have been able to stop the Time War. Ah, but things change and people change… The only thing that hasn’t ever is that he’s my friend. I know him better than I know myself. And if we’re to keep playing this game until the end of Time…”
“Well, I can say for certain, it’s a far cry better than losing him altogether.”
“My Hearts and Other Self, you’re such a fool.”
I have feared Death since I was eight and transfixed, petrified, prey trapped, robes soaked in my own urine, in front of a hole in time and space, that called to me.
But you, you spoke my name a little louder than that four-beat call, and I remember the epiphany like it was yesterday: it was a summer morning in the fields of red and you were standing in the light of the twin suns, they were framing you from behind like a gold halo, and I realized you were so beautiful that Death was afraid of you. More than that: Death was irrelevant because of you.
You were the Master far before I was, but I caught and harnessed that moniker, in your honor.
“You’re stupid. So stupid. Stop hating yourself long enough to see that, pain or no pain, my life without you is purposeless.”
It’s not an endless cycle now. I hear you and you see me now.
The Doctor’s abyssal mood seems to have transferred to her husband. When she sits in his lap and plays the music, he doesn’t fight her; he’s sitting in the chair she tends to use for nursing, eyes locked emptily on the
He is bad at leaving things alone. He reached out for her many times in the past hours, only to be blocked, and feel something in his gut twist, and then turn into a black hole that, for its size and darkness, began consuming him with an astounding quietude.
How can the world fall apart so silently? When there was always a four-beat noise in his head, always, tormenting him, until now?
It takes time for him to recognize the music she’s playing. When she begins to speak inside their minds, the words don’t register, but he looks at her, at least.
Finally, he speaks, and the words he has to offer are perhaps not of the comfort she has come to expect:
“Is it always going to be this way?”
You retreating from my reach, at erratic intervals, lashing out, telling me to go.
I, whose every thought is saturated with you, feeling with each moody interval, that I am standing in the total blackness of the moon’s shadow, with no reflection, no ME, because I cannot grasp you?
Will I always be waiting from moment to moment for the next fallout?
Is this what I can expect from my “redemption”?
Doctor, is this my punishment? For everything to be sublime, perfect, and, whenever the whim strikes, just out of reach?
The Doctors fingers still on the guitar strings, an uncomfortable tingling in the tips of them. It’s shame, and guilt, and all sorts of bad feelings that culminates in a pit in her own stomach.
Yes, she knows that she upset him by keeping her distance, and yes she regrets it now, but Koschei has always been the one who understands the need for such things when the cloud gets too dark and the weight too heavy. Yet now he calls it a punishment.
The guitar slides from her grasp as she leans it against the wall beside them, turning bodily to face her husband. Is this what it feels like when your world falls apart? Is this how he feels? Because it’s horrible and heartbreaking…
“I thought… I thought you understood. That– that sometimes it gets bad. You said…”
She pauses and closes her eyes, that little frown line forming between them. No, she doesn’t want to come at this with blame. She doesn’t want to hurt him more.
“I was afraid I’d lash out and get upset if you stayed. I was afraid I’d say something I didn’t mean, that I’d hurt you worse. I chose the lesser of two evils and… And I’m sorry, Koschei.”
She will have to do better for him. She is a practiced liar, even better at hiding what plagues her. If it spares him this heartsache, then she will do better. The Doctor nuzzles into his neck, love flowing from her mind to his as if to strengthen the connection that was closed off for those few hours.
“I’m never out of your reach, hearts. I’m so sorry I made you feel like I was… We’re fine. I’m fine. Nothing will come between us, nothing is falling apart. I’m here, Koschei. My beautiful Kookaburra. I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m sorry.”
He watches her not with spite but with complete faith in the honesty and insight of her answer, weary and lost, but so very trusting.
“I do understand, Hearts. I do. It’s only that … . when you’re sad, you fall so deeply into it and so … suddenly. I know that I am not easy to live with, and that I am proud and obnoxious and arrogant, but I feel that my reasons for all these things are all but predictable. When you lose yourself to despair, even having known you all our lives, I can’t fathom what triggered it and I feel helpless. I feel … useless. Useless to you. To my world and my reason, and my Favorite Thing.”
He takes her hands, so small, in his own, and brings them to his mouth, and kisses them.
“ … don’t run. You needn’t be ‘fine.’ Or sorry. Juststay. I love you.”
The Doctor’s abyssal mood seems to have transferred to her husband. When she sits in his lap and plays the music, he doesn’t fight her; he’s sitting in the chair she tends to use for nursing, eyes locked emptily on the
He is bad at leaving things alone. He reached out for her many times in the past hours, only to be blocked, and feel something in his gut twist, and then turn into a black hole that, for its size and darkness, began consuming him with an astounding quietude.
How can the world fall apart so silently? When there was always a four-beat noise in his head, always, tormenting him, until now?
It takes time for him to recognize the music she’s playing. When she begins to speak inside their minds, the words don’t register, but he looks at her, at least.
Finally, he speaks, and the words he has to offer are perhaps not of the comfort she has come to expect:
“Is it always going to be this way?”
You retreating from my reach, at erratic intervals, lashing out, telling me to go.
I, whose every thought is saturated with you, feeling with each moody interval, that I am standing in the total blackness of the moon’s shadow, with no reflection, no ME, because I cannot grasp you?
Will I always be waiting from moment to moment for the next fallout?
Is this what I can expect from my “redemption”?
Doctor, is this my punishment? For everything to be sublime, perfect, and, whenever the whim strikes, just out of reach?
He pinches the bridge of his nose at her ludicrous prancing, trying not to laugh, but the richest cackle eventually escapes him.
Okay, so she totally knew he’d be watching.
She cackles madly and turns on him, looking utterly ridiculous as she runs and leaps into his arms.
“Oooh, kiss me goose! I’m ever so mad for youuuu! You’re the most b-e-a-oooootiful thing I’ve ever seen!”
And then she kisses him, hard enough to smear eyeliner onto his mouth.
“D’you know what I wanna know?” he declares in the middle of all this. “I wanna know why Earth apes …sorry, HUMANS … call TWO different types of fruit ‘grape.’ I mean one is enormous, the other is tiny and makes wine! Why not joost think of another name for the BIG one? ‘Grapefruit.’ Like, what a redundant name!”
He’s stalling on her intentionally, trying to ignore her as she hangs off of him doing a hilariously accurate impression of him. Considering he has eyeliner on his mouth and looks like he just sucked off an inkwell, it’s impressive.
Finally,
“Goose, did you get into the ginger?”
The Doctor wipes her mouth with the back of her sleeve, managing to get most of her ‘beard’ off in one go. Then she licks her thumb and wipes the smudges from her husband’s face, too.
“That’s a really interesting point! Grapefruit aren’t even in the same family as real grapes! It makes no sense! One’s a berry, one’s citrus! It’s madness!”
She wraps her legs around his waist, his hands under her bum to hold her up. But she’s grinning ear to ear, gleefully happy and mad and…
“NO! I’m not DRUNK! Or… inebriated in any way! I’m just REALLY excited! I found a new type of candy and it’s GOOD!”
Were Koschei to examine the half-empty bag of alien sweeties the Doctor had left on the floor, he’d realize that the main ingredient was indeed a derivative of the ginger root. Cultivated and evolved over a few million years, but certainly still ginger. And maybe even a bit stronger than usual, for all the time and effort put into it.
“I completely buy that.”
The Master’s words drip sarcasm. He braces his wife securely with one hand, as she continues to plaster herself to his person. With his other hand, he bends to pick up the candies and narrow his eyes–bereft of his reading glasses, this is a small challenge–and read the ingredients.
“Theta, dear, there’s loads of ginger-like compounds in this. You are absolutely, as your earthies put it, ‘lit.’”
He cackles openly, and drops a loud kiss on her cheek.
“Let’s get you into a nice dark cool room, give you a lie-down, and contemplate grapefruit while we sober you oop. Be thankful I’m not subjecting you to a cold shower, because I’m too great a fool for you.”
Koschei drops his entire elaborate circuitboarding project–seventy solid hours of work so far–on the TARDIS floor. It shatters into a million pieces. Agony! His hands claw in his hair.
But there she is, his baby girl, tugging on his trouser leg and weeping about a boo-boo.
And how comically ready is the terror of the cosmos to kneel, how heartsbroken his face, at his daughter’s tears.
“Oh, Zinny. My love, however did you fall? Were you being an adventurer, my music note?”
He guides her to sit on his thigh, while examining her wound. He pulls ointment and a pink unicorn bandaid–now standard contents–from the pocket of his pants and tends to the burn.
“That is a very nasty scrape. But I think you will survive, if! I give it the Special Kiss.”
And so he does, the softest little peck on top of the bandaid.
“The Special Kiss works as well as regeneration energy. Now, that scrape will go away. Because the tiny little workers in your skin, called cells, are gonna patch everything back together good as new.”
“Sweethearts, it’s alright. Shh, let us banish these tears as well.”
He kisses both her round little cheeks.
“I love you. I’m sorry you caught a nasty.”
“The railing in the Library! I was trying to reach a book!” she sniffles, enraptured by her father. Certainly he can see how serious this all is.
“A big book! Mummy told me I couldn’t climb on the railing but I did so I could reach the book and I got it! But I fell and banged my knee and I couldn’t find mummy and… and… !”
Zinnia looks like she’s ready to wail again, but then her daddy sits her on her knee, the most optimal of places to be examined, as any small child knows. Her tears quickly subside as she focuses on him tending to her battle wound.
“Hm. I think it’s working.” The power of the Special Kiss seems to have done it, and Zinnia hops off her father’s lap, testing out her leg to see if it’ll support her weight after such an injury. “Thanks, Daddy.”
The toddler, clever than her years, looks up at Koschei with bright eyes and grabs his face with two chubby hands, kissing the tip of his nose like she’s seen him do to her mum a thousand times.
“I love you too. Now come read me a story from my new big book.”
Koschei clicks his tongue, nods and pulls out a digital tablet. He types on it lightning-fast, inputting a memo.
“I’ll be fixing the railing, making it sturdier, easier to grip, straight away.”
He studies Zinnia’s features as she explains her harrowing experience. His lower lip juts, and he pets her hair, and pats her back in even gentle rhythms, every ounce attentive and sympathetic, unrecognizable to his many foes.
“My sweet brave love, you must still be careful. Mum is an adventurer, you know, so if she says you shouldn’t do something, that means it is really quite dangerous. Next time, if she’s busy, coom and get me, yeah? I can lift you up so you can grab the thing that’s out of reach.”
As Zinny stands, her father flashes his Cheshire grin, all warmth and ebullience.
“You know WHAT? You lot think I look like a koala, and that it makes me so impotently adorable, but have you ever heard about the Drop Bear, HM?”
The Doctor lofts a brow, amusement glittering in her eyes. She’s not entirely sure if he knows the truth or if he’s just being ridiculous. Either way, she drapes her arms around his neck and kisses his lips, cheeks, nose, brow, showering him in affection until he blushes.
“Ooohhh, my dearest hoosband. Don’t let them rile you. I’m the only one allowed to do that. But as for the Drop Bear…”
She indulges him, presses against him with a giggle, kissing the tip of his round koala-like nose.
“Well, I for one think you’re just far too adorable to be compared to such a vicious creature!”
“You’re making FOON me, I can tell, you’re using the Indulgent Voice–”
The pompously ruffled Time Lord gets no further. The Doctor is in his arms, filling his nostrils with her wondrous fugitive scent.
His lips thin to a line as she kisses every inch of his face; he scowls, and ferociously grumbles. All in vain, as the color rises in fat cheeks.
Her raucous laugh and the kiss to his nose finish him. The Master looks little more than deflated and hapless.
“Viiciousness and cuteness are most certainly NOT mutually exclusive.”
Never tell him that the Drop Bear is an urban legend; he genuinely doesn’t know. There’s that streak of peculiar naivety …
He draws his laser screwdriver and dislodges the switchblade component. Fancy fingerwork boasted, he twirls it in his fingers and reaches up to shear off a strand of silver-blond hair, of moderate length.
He knots it into a small circle and slips it around the Doctor’s left ring finger.
“You said you wanted to marry him. Here he is. Marry me today.”
“We can go somewhere else if you like.”
His voice is gentle and without judgement, offering Koschei a way out should he find this place too much to bear a second time. But even as his best friend presses against him, hides and buries his face in his chest, he knows that the Master will not be content with running again. And that’s enough.
The Doctor’s arms wrap tightly around his lover’s body and he holds him very close, protecting him and offering him his own strength.
He’ll go first. He’ll help him.
“It’s alright to be afraid. I am, too. All the infinite possibilities, what we could be, what we will be… what we’ve been.”
He realizes as he speaks that these are his vows, and the boy who is the Doctor takes his best friend’s hands and holds them tight.
“I’m afraid… But I know that as long as you and I are together, there’s nothing we can’t take on together. Here, at the place that set us off on our long journey home… Here is where I make marriage vows to you, Koschei, and promise you this:
From today onward, you are not a failure. You are not a monster. You are not a mistake or irrelevant. You are the Universe. Every possibility creation can contain, all bundled up in you, in those beautiful hearts that you have gifted to me. You are my best friend, my savior, the only person in the universe who could have taught me that I’m worth something. You’re my husband. You’re mine. For the rest of Time.”
The Doctor lifts the Master’s chin up so he’ll meet his gaze, and Koschei will find his other half smiling, confident in this.
“I’m afraid, but I’d much rather be afraid while holding you than to do it on my own.”
For the interval that his Most Beloved speaks, the Master is without fear.
“No. Keep talking. You make me feel powerful.”
It has long been fear that’s motivated him: driven him like game outrunning hounds, to grotesque excesses. Fear of abandonment, of obsolescence, of death. Fear of ordinariness, of dullness, of insufficiency. Fear.
Fear has made him wicked, and bitter, and wrathful, and cruel. Always fear.
But that is the incantation, of their nearness: whenever he stands with the Doctor, he is recklessly unafraid, just as the Doctor forever seems reckless, and it intoxicates him, to see that legendary figure at the edge of every cliff, still shouting at the sky, shouting like they shouted as boys, that storm, rolling in, a thing that can never be fully tamed.
The only thing that the Master has ever done unmotivated by fear, was chase the Doctor.
Because the Doctor is Absence of Fear.
The instant his Theta stops speaking those words that Koschei, parched, laps up, his confidence wavers.
But Theta’s final words seep deep into some innermost recess of Koschei. And he cants his head back, and dons reading glasses that, more and more, have become necessary.
“Right, then.”
He’s not reading from any prompt but his own hearts, and yet, he wants to make it clear, he can see the Untempered Schism with every syllable that falls from his lips. A passing look of trepidation, a firm look straight into the swirling abyss of All Things, and then he turns and faces his best friend.
“I’m not afraid. I have you. I have us. We are a fixed point. Here, at the place that set us off on our long journey home… Here is where I make marriage vows to you, Theta Sigma, and promise you this:
… I promise… ah … ah, lord … Can you ever know … . is it fathomable … how important you are to me? Ah, my Sweethearts. From today onward, you are not a killer. You are not a monster. You are not a guilty survivor. There’s no blood under your nails. You needn’t outrun a hundred million ghosts; you needn’t save everyone. You are not your father’s son, you are not destined to either solitude or enslavement, and you are not burdened solely to be my keeper. You are the Universe. Every possibility creation can contain, starlight shooting out your fingertips and your hair follicles and your …nose and your eyes, hehah. You are the constellation that points me home to every purpose worth acknowledging. You are my best friend, my savior … the only person …”
He swallows loudly; a tear escapes down his cheek anyway.
“The ONLY …person … who could teach me what to do with all the awful mighty self-devouring love I’ve felt for you since we were boys. You are the only person who could teach me how to save myself. You’re …”
“You’re my husband, for the rest of time.”
The Doctor lifts a hand to Koschei’s cheek and smiles, his hearts full. As his best friend of ages finishes his vows, he pulls him up and into a sweet, tender kiss. It is their first as a married couple, and the first of many more to come.
He doesn’t pull away for a long time, letting his mind touch Koschei’s even as his hands urge him closer, their bodies pressed so tightly together that it’s hard to determine whether they’re two separate entities; and that’s how the Doctor likes it. There is no one in all of creation, the grand expanse of the universe that could make him feel this way. Only his best friend. The boy who defines his very existence. His husband.
He doesn’t realize he’s crying too until he pulls away and a fat tear rolls of the end of his nose.
“Heh. Look at us. Sobbing like babies in front of the whole universe.”
He chuckles and looks out at the Schism, at the terrifying possibility of EVERYTHING. But he holds Koschei’s hands, holds onto his husband, and the view is not so daunting.
But he turns back and smiles, more at peace with himself and the world around him that he has been… ever.
“I love you. My husband. I love you so much. Thank you. Thank you for all of this, for saving me and letting me save you in return.”
Another kiss lingers on their lips and he sighs, bunting his forehead against Koschei’s.
“Shall we go found a spot to honeymoon as a newly married couple, do you think?”
“Shut oop. I dunno what to do.”
Thank you for saving me and letting me save you in return.
Never has he heard concision, accuracy, FULFILLMENT in words, quite like in those. Naturally, he must cope with it by clinging on to his new spouse, and old, old friend, bodily, mouth pressed into the leather coat that smells of engine grease and windburn, aftershave and battlefields, home.
That way the Doctor can’t see his lips still trembling.
“I’m not a baby, YOU’RE a baby, and you joost got me swept oop in the moment, you cocksplat. You rotten egg. You black banana peel. I love you.”
He pulls back and if the Doctor thinks he can feign being a tough guy, that’s abolished, annihilated, in the Master loudly, ticklishly, vivaciously kissing every inch of his wet face.
“I” –kiss– “shall honey many a moons”–kiss– “with my mad idiot” –kiss– “who had the idea for this wedding” –kiss– “and therefore has dibs on our first destination!”
Icarus 