The Master rolls out from under the Console, where he’s been performing long hours of system maintenance. His arms are smeared in engine grease up to the elbow, and he wears an apron over his black jumper and trousers. He sits up, pleased that one of the Doctor’s new collectible humans has decided to do more than squint and gawk at him.
“On again, off again, but usually on and hiding it, for the better part of our lives. We were eight. Eight, when we met. Both boys, then. Then I was a girl, and the Doctor was a boy. Then, both boys, I think … ? I dunno, the Doctor might’ve been a girl once or twice when I wasn’t ‘round. Now here we are, boy, girl. I’m due to be a girl again next. We’ll see. Fingers crossed.”
He stands and luxuriously stretches, with a satisfied grunt at work well done. He lopes to the custard dispenser, dispatches one, and a second one, which he hands to Graham. He takes a fierce bite.
“Mm. Mm-HMM. Anyhow, we’ve been … all sorts of different people, far beyond the vicissitudes of gender. Somehow we remain as compatible as magnetic poles. Even though she left me, and I held a grudge for centuries, and we wasted … . appalling amounts of time fighting.”
“Seriously, that long?” he says, taking the biscuit and eating it. He doesn’t say it, but he kinda wants to knock their heads together for, as Koschei put it, wasting all that time. He can’t even imagine knowing someone for centuries, let alone spending most of it arguing.
He just knows that even centuries with Grace wouldn’t have been enough.
“Well, at least you figured it out in the end. Think it’ll stick this time?”
A dull patina of melancholy and regret descends over the Master. He catches his own transparent expression of despair. He smiles grayly at Graham.
He knows what the old mortal is thinking. It sears him with shame, and with anger, with the urge to flare you don’t understand, but weariness wins today.
“There are many reasons, but none of them would formulate an excuse you’d accept. We are friends before we are enemies or even lovers. I would adore her, in any face, any gender, any age, and I would follow her over the impossible edge of the ever-expanding universe. I would wish to consume, to demolish, anything between us, for eternity. But occasionally all that ardor gets converted into toxic energy, and we fight. And she certainly gets in her punches.”
His smile grows a little more wan.
“I just realized. You don’t know. You’ve never seen her really lose herself to her temper, have you? Never seen people disregard her sermonizing and her interfering, and seen her,” his teeth grate on edge with the word, “sna-p.”
A hushed laugh escapes. Hushed, or breathless, with a knowing pain.
“Oh, my friend. None of you lot had better leave her when you see it. Or I will be the one to come for you.”
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.”
“This is Twirly. He lives with us now. Might need to do something about his upselling protocols.”
“Theta, oh my God.”
“Wha’?! He’s BRILLIANT, you’re gonna love him. And he helped save the day, so I couldn’t just leave him there in that stuffy old factory. He’s too great to be put on the shelf, plenty of life left in him.”
The Master rolls his eyes and richly laughs. His head lulls back as he broadcasts how tickled he is.
“Oh, darling. VERY well! As long as he doesn’t wheel along after me like a demented Roomba at all hours, following me into the lavatory and offering me prices on shaving gel or … or hemorrhoid cream, or something.”
He scoffs, forehead wrinkled at the extremely unpleasant mental image. He squats in front of the perpetually spinning robotic head. He tries not to shiver, with a flicker of a memory of uncontrollable Dalek high generals behaving similarly. A distant, stomach-curdling memory.
“Ey oop, Twirly. I’m probably gonna be the one performing regular maintenance on your circuitry, so. Put ‘er there, chum. With your metaphorical hand, as it were.”
He smiles his politician smile.
“Get cozy with me, because mum here is full of rousing speeches about your autonomy, sure, but can she remember to grease your joints every month?”
Koschei’s After-Episode Summary
“You’re wet, and fierce, and beautiful, and I have never loved you more.”
He catches her by surprise, and that is the only way he would get the best of her. The Master’s hand grips her jaw, pushes her back against the wall and pins her there by the throat. It is only because it’s him and no one else that he’s not unconscious on the floor with the help of her Venusian aikido skills.
The Doctor trusts her husband implicitly never to hurt her, but that doesn’t stop a brief flash of fear from running through her before she catches the look in his eye. Her own hazel gaze grows dark and she lets her hands run down his chest instead of gripping his arm.
“Interesting… can’t say I’ve ever seen you get quite like this… Can’t say I don’t like it, though.”
His mouth hangs slightly ajar with his arousal. Oh, there it is. That flicker of terror which might otherwise send him shrinking to a corner with shame at a relapsed evil. But now? With carefully staged, moderated “force”? He’s deeply satisfied. The Oncoming Storm, a tiny bit afraid, because of him; the Doctor, horny and playful and possessive and smug, because of him.
Nobody but nobody can do that to her.
Except him.
“I thought,” he explains, throaty, husky, “I’d surprise you with something I know you really. Really. Like.”
A knee presses up between her legs. He self-indulgently shivers at the nails scraping his chest.
“There’s a whole book written about you,” he breathes, ghosting his lips, his teeth, over her mouth, pinching her jaw hard. “But am I in it? Do they know what I can do to you? Do they know how I can make you go incandescent with pleasure? Do they know how I can undo you and leave you unfurled like ripe flower? Hm?”
“Good afternoon! Kerblam hopes that you are having a great day – how can I help you today?”
“Yes, how’s it gelling, and all that, Twirlie,” the Master greets the remains of the delivery bot with typical cheerful tyranny. “I’m trying to reroute your circuitry into the TARDIS mainframe, so you can feel a bit less isolated, and! Perhaps even serve as a GPS. How would you feel about a protocol update?”
Through all this smooth conversing, the puckish yet infamous Time Lord’s hands deftly work. He’s wiring, tacking, drilling, beveling, and computing beneath the spinning headstalk.
Fortunately for Kerblam’s last survivor, Gallifrey’s wickedest displaced child isn’t in a mood for villainy today. Or in general, lately.
“Okay, I’m not saying we pretend to be American, or proceed to believe that colonist brutally murdered natives, but what I am saying is that I would be partial to a very large meal where afterwards I take a nap on the couch.”
“Prerequisites: turkey is involved, and afterward I get to ‘nap’ with you.”
“You say ‘nap’ like I’m totally not going to pass out on the couch after eating food consisting of extremely large amounts of tryptophan.”
The Master sighs with feigned patience.
“Yes, love, but I. Get to nap. WITH. You. Emphasis on the collaborative nature of snuggling with, as the plebs put it, ‘full tummies.’”
Send an accusation and the muse can only answer with “guilty” or “not guilty.”
An accusation thoroughly reciprocated. The Master sits up in their shared bed, skin bare and sleep-warmed, body softer than it might have been in loud and reckless youth, back still sore from Missy’s stab wound. But still alive, and still unquestioningly adoring, even through generations of senseless malice.
Icarus 