“HAL-lo, WIFE,” the Master booms, “and HAL-lo, BABY!”
He kisses each forehead, loudly and appreciatively. And then, in answer to the Doctor’s question, he holds up a forefinger, and lofts an eyebrow.
“Watch this.”
He lifts a small remote control, no bigger than one of the TARDIS’s custard creams. He punches the red and green striped button at the center.
The entire library illumines with a lights display of every Christmas hue, including the shapes of Santa, trees, snowmen, reindeer, stars and snowflakes, to Trans-Siberian Orchestra music.
Koschei puffs up with endearing pride.
“For you, my girls! Ho ho, and a third, very merry, ho.”
Her voice echoes for miles, the chatter of bystanders fading into a stunned silence. They may have not been part of it before, but all eyes were on the small blonde woman who shook with rage.
Her entire being bristles with power and commanding energy, far larger than life or even her current, unfortunately petite body.
Hazel eyes pin the offender with blazing fury.
“I said NO! You have no right! No right to harm these people! This planet is protected by the Doctor, and if you know what’s good for yourself, you’ll take a moment to think about EXACTLY what that means before you take another step.”
The Master’s whole body electrifies. Nipples harden, hair pricks, goosebumps surface. Fight or flight, the struggle between sane survivalism and the mad, abject, sublime desire to run toward the tornado, to pitch over the edge of the waterfall, to stand screaming and beating one’s chest in the hurricane. To be saturated wholly with the violence and the fury contained within the being he unthinkingly adores.
And he does. He runs toward the conflict, straight out of the TARDIS he’s strictly ordered not to leave, for fear of the disruption of TARDIS energy healing his back. He forgets himself when eclipsed in her shadow. He always has. Always will.
He catches her ‘round the waist and spins her out of the way of the people she’s antagonizing.
“Thete, STOP, they’re armed–!”
A musket fires, and grazes the Doctor’s bondmate in the side. A superficial wound, nowhere near the fatal shot inflicted by Chan-Tho, or Lucy, or by a random insignificant Mondasian gunman on Bill Potts. But Koschei goes down just the same, with a startled grunt, and cups his left side, and falters down onto the wound, trembling.
“Shit,” he snarls, trying in vain to stand.
In films, moments such as these are shown in slow motion, as if the heroes have ample time to recognize what is happening in the moment and be quietly horrified in convenient pacing for the plot. But that is not how it happens in reality.
The Master yanks her aside at the same moment a musket fires, and he collapses in the same instant. It’s over before she can even realize it happened, and her husband is struggling to stand. Red is soaking through her favorite soft cotton tee of his, the one that somehow has made it through spit up stains and grease spots and still always just smells like HIM.
It is here that the world slows down.
It slows down, because for just a fraction of a second, the timelines are splayed out in front of her, a Lord of Time, each a new path she can choose. Her husband is wounded, likely having saved her life in the process, and the people responsible will likely fire again if given the chance.
Her decision is made, and just as quickly, Time catches up.
They would have been luckier if Time had remained still.
There is a flash, and the Doctor spins, sonic screwdriver wielded as a weapon, not a tool. The gunpowder in the muskets ignites, a small explosion in the hands of each and every one of them threatening the Doctor and her family. Though it disarms every one of them, it is not enough to kill anyone, though a few cry out in pain from burns or mangled fingers. The Doctor looks on with cold disinterest.
“YAZ! Graham! Get Koschei back to the TARDIS.”
Her voice rings with authority and a cold, merciless determination as she stalks forward, her eyes blazing. Several innocent bystanders take a step back, not wanting to be caught in the crossfire of this fierce woman who reeks of fury.
“It’s people like you,” she spits, squaring her shoulders and addressing the leader, who clutches his hand with a pained grimace, “that make this world worse.”
“You claim what you do is for the greater good, but it’s not. It’s done out of hate and anger, and a selfish desire for power and glory. You’d do anything for it, right or wrong. But it ends here.”
The man stares at her… and whatever he sees staring back at him is more terrifying than whatever threat he imagined he would find in this place. The Doctor’s eyes hold billions of years of memory.
Death, destruction, pain, rage…
She’s seen things that would drive any one of these people mad, and it shows in the cold glare that she pins him with.
“Go. No second chances. I think it’s time to bring that rule back.”
Koschei’s never been cognizant of sluggish time; it’s more the sudden SILENCE of these horrific moments that he can feel. The relentless memory of Drums long purged, even that, violently ceases to be, in moments like this.
He continues to stagger, striving to stand, because he knows. He knows what is about to happen is the equivalent of barometric pressure plummeting. He knows these men will leave with their lives, because the Doctor claims to abhor murder, but there is not necessarily anything merciful about that choice.
And while the Master is enchanted, dazed, aroused, by the fury of his best friend, every time he sees her light eclipsed by her countless millennia of grief and loneliness and rage, he knows there is a chance that shadow will never pass.
So even as Graham stammers something about one two three up, and even as Yaz bodily shields Koschei, he reaches past their stricken forms for Her. Even as he is lifted off his feet and carried, even as the gunmen shriek and cower and run, he stretches his mind to breaking, to tickle, to brush, Hers.
{ Don’t leave me. You promised: you said never. You promised. }
Beaches and babies and psychic ice cream; dolphins and Twirlies and mile long conveyers and dinner under the holo-stars by Our Tree; fencing matches and snuggles and good books and great tea and very long showers; come back to me, Goose.
But then Koschei blacks out.
When he’s conscious again, it’s hours later. Nobody’s in the room but his wife.
On dear, his wife.
His beautiful littleVengeful Pixie.
His Sunbeam of Doom.
Oh, look at her. Brilliant. Eccentric. Fearless. Effervescent. Breathtaking.
“Thete … Thete … Thete … I cann’feel my … .face. Hoo! Hooha! Hee. I can’t feel ANYthing. I didn’t die, though, that’s encouraging.”
Conversationally, idly, he glances at the bandage over his left side, and then, at the IV in his wrist.
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… .
I gave up on you a long time ago.
I gave up on a lot of things back then.
I gave up on my family, I gave up on my friends.
I gave up on myself.
When the Doctor left Gallifrey all those centuries ago, they’d had to give up on certain things. It was too painful to carry those burdens with them. But that meant giving up parts of themselves that they never imagined they would ever get back.
So… the fact that she has is infinitely precious.
“When I left. I gave up. I gave up on you, on us… and it’s been my single biggest regret. In all my lives, there’s not one thing I’ve ever regretted as much as making the decision to leave you behind.”
The Doctor steps towards her husband and takes his hands into her own. The gaze with which she stares up at him is impossibly full of love and unending, undying hope.
“You’ve come back and taught me that I should never give up… never lose hope, because that’s when you start to lose parts of yourself that you may never get back.
I was lucky enough to get you back…”
The Master takes great gulps of air. His relief is palpable, an unfurling sensation in his mind, and therefore in the entirety of the room that his mind so easily permeates.
“GOLLY, Thete.”
He all but collapses, making a great hammy show of buckling his knees and smacking his thighs and, slightly breathlessly, laughing.
“Thanks for scaring the PISS out of me. Maybe predicate your dramatic remarks with context next time!”
He captures her cheeks between his palms, squishing them until her elastic little fey face collapses like an accordion, and she is forced to speak with fish-lips. His expression is fiercely adoring.
“Your punishment for this grievous silliness is to recite Hamlet’s Soliloquy while I hold your face like this. I’m waiting.”
He forces this playful indignity on her for but a moment. Then he draws her tight against him with an affectionate growl, and crushes her in a hug. His chin rests neatly on the crown of her head.
“You always speak as if I had a choice. But following you is as natural to me as drawing blood from an enemy, or climbing any summit that challenges me, or breathing.”
This is how she finds him, a soft but somewhat familiar noise slipping from faintly parted lips. The sound itself concerning, but it the emotions she can feel emanating from him in tandem with the sound is what makes her hearts clench. The expression on his face is one she’s seen before in moments when he questions his place in the universe and (less frequently these days) in her life.
The Doctor slips into the room and walks up behind him, knowing that even if he doesn’t hear or see her, he will feel her presence.
Long arms slip around his shoulders and she kisses the top of his head before settling her cheek there with a contented sigh. Yet through the contact she is even more intimately aware of the discomfort and uncertainty he bears.
“Kookaburra,” she whispers in their minds, he telepathic tone full of adoration and affection to span eons.
“My boy in the red grasses. My best friend. Father of my child. Soulmate. Bondmate. Husband. It’s okay. You’re allowed to feel this way. But I’m here and I’ve got you and I love you. I’m just here to remind you when you forget, or when your own mind tries to tell you different.”
“I’m here to remind you that you are the best thing in my lives, the only thing I care about. My first choice, always, my Koschei. I will never leave you behind again, I will always be by your side. No, it’s okay… You don’t have to say anything. Just let me hold you. It’ll be alright.”
The Master’s short-shorn untidy head rests against the side of the fresh-painted TARDIS. His hand is in his old friend’s hair, his fingers transferring signals of almost incomprehensible bliss to his brain.
She is here. She is his. And she is happy, because of him.
“You’ve strategically pinioned me here, under a hundred or more pounds of domestic bliss, in order to point this out in such a way that I can’t even be irritated by you bringing it up,” he accuses, with a shamelessly doting smirk.
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!”
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.”
She turns to him, eyes widening in moment of surprise. But her expression immediately softens as the weight of his words settle in her hearts.
Her shoulders square, his words lifting her up, filling her with confidence and pride not only for what she’s become, but for what they have become.
“You are one of the reasons I am who I am today, Koschei. And I’m not just sayin’ that because I want to include you… but because I know it’s the truth. We were born for this.
Tonight he feels inert with the futility of his smallness.
Tonight he can’t shake off the ghosts.
Tonight he can’t stop the stomachache.
Tonight his faults are loud as klaxons.
Tonight he sits at the edge of his bed and stares at his hands and wonders why he bothers to do anything but smash things together and kill.
She can feel his sorrow, the knot in his stomach identical to the one in hers. She can hear the whispers of the ghosts in his mind, taunting him with past mistakes and blood on his hands. She understands the thoughts he is harboring, likely better than anyone else, yet it is her job to help him let them go.
The Doctor walks quietly into their bedroom, a place that has become a haven of comfort and love. A place of laughter and affection and memories that might just be loud enough to drown out the lies his own mind is fueling.
Crawling on all fours onto the bed, she settles behind him, wrapping her legs around his waist and hugging his back like a koala. She presses a kiss to the back of his neck and holds her hands over his hearts, nuzzling closer and letting her mind seep into his like a cool, calming breeze.
“I know, hearts. I know, my dearest friend. My Kookaburra, my husband. But listen to me, listen and take my words to heart. You are so much more than the destruction in your past. You are so much more than a weapon, so much more than what they made you to be. You are a MIRACLE, a creator, a force of nature like the most beautiful storm. You helped create our daughter, you create such joy in our lives, such happiness. You are kind and loving and protective. You are my strength. You are so much more than smashing things and killing. You’ve moved beyond that and I am so proud of you, Koschei.
“You’re allowed to hurt, you’re allowed to ache, but I pray you don’t lose sight of the truth we’ve created together. I love you, Koschei. Master of my hearts.
I love you and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do if it made you see yourself through my eyes.”
Thawing him takes very little time once she’s present. Koschei takes his Theta’s right hand, and places his palm on her left leg. He fondles her calf and kisses her knuckles. The distant look caught halfway between nauseated rage and grief ebbs.
He exhales and leans back into her. He turns his head and catches her eye with a knowing look, a look of affectionate reprimand, how dare you know me so well, how dare you ruin my mope so quickly and skillfully?
He manages a grunt of laughter even then.
“You make me feel it’s all worth it. So easily.”
And then he’s smiling.
“Saved the day again, Doctor.”
He uses her title with the fullest understanding of its literal and ironic connotations, loaded with respect for the crisis of identity she’s long undertaken.
Sometimes he thinks maybe her entire life has been a desperate attempt at recompense for leaving him. The thought both breaks and warms him; it makes such blissful sense that he would reassure her, soothe her, by dedicating himself to being better.
“Hhhhah. Are we really a separate person, she and I? Are you quite sure?”
The Master removes his outer coat, the black hole hued one lined in blood red. He removes it ritually, ceremonially. Beneath it is a charcoal gray button-up, which he loosens down to the collarbones. He rolls up his sleeves, and then, thusly vulnerable and free, he continues speaking.
“She is … my wife. Mother of my child. My best friend. My oldest friend. My first friend. My friend, more than anything else. That may not seem particularly important to someone with a plenitude of acquaintances. But you see, where I come from, nobody could stand me until the Doctor met me. I was shy, and frail, and too sensitive. I was too eager to cling to others, particularly in the physical sense. I was too dependent. Then I met someone who not only valued my opinion, but enjoyed my company. Someone who taught me that connections were not only encouraged, but also safe. I suppose that’s when it began. The bonding that’s … I think, a fusion at the molecular level, at this point. Deeper still, even.
“The Doctor’s Thirteenth Face has circled back to that point in time when we met. When we were boys, and happy. Happier than we ever were thereafter, save in fugitive, fleeting moments. I can’t explain it to you, only that something about what she has just been through, in her Twelfth face, and what I have foreseen of my next face, has placed us in the … the unique position, to compromise for each other. She is the boy I met, only with the advantage of hindsight, and experience, and wisdom. We are both contrite, and it has broken the constant loop of misunderstanding.
“I don’t think I can articulate to you, what it does to me, when she smiles, and I’m the cause. It’s exultant. I feel as if the immortality I’ve connived and killed for is mine without an ounce of effort. I want to take her and squeeze her and burrow her into my marrow, I hate ANY distance between us, though I tolerate it, if it means I can stand back and watch that joy unfold from a front-row seat. I am wrapped around her moods and humors. I … I orbit her. Always did, it’s just I don’t care to pretend I don’t anymore. We know each other better than we know ourselves. No one can make her happy like I can. I know it. She’s told me, and I believe her. I believe anything she says, she’s never given me reason to doubt her. And I’ve. I’ve never felt so free, to exist without …without posturing. Of any kind. You know, the other day I wore an old sloppy gray jumper the whole day and all I accomplished was giving our daughter a bath and I felt completely fulfilled. It’s so strange.
“I want our daughter to grow up free of the pressures that were exerted upon us on Gallifrey. I want her to know it’s not shameful to touch and hold the person you love. It’s not shameful to feel biases and emotions. It’s not shameful to have self-serving wishes and passions, to care about your own welfare, independent of your family line and your legacy. But I don’t want her to become me, someone who … . who overcompensated for centuries by being a … despot and a lunatic . . I … I want her to make her own decisions, but not forced, not to prove something to her enemies, and not … not bloody WORRY about being ‘good enough.’ My God, I. I’ve perverted my own mind and will so long toward the goal of being … unforgettable, cheating, conquering death and obscurity, and it’s made me miserable. I don’t want that for her. I think only Theta can help me secure that future for our girl.”
Icarus 