He knows now, but he certainly didn’t know it all night. The Doctor pushes himself up in bed, just enough that it’s clear he’s decided he’s not going to try and go back to sleep.
The night has been a long one, full of nightmares for him. He doesn’t remember all of them. They were fever-fuelled, panicky and loud. Too loud. With the amount of shouting and probably crying he’s done, he suspects the Master might know more about his nightmares than he himself does at this moment in time.
“Were you stroking my hair? I couldn’t tell if it was real or just in my head.”
Real or not, it definitely helped. He remembers crying, then, about the dream. All about how it’s his fault his friends all die. How he can’t save them, ever, and anybody who travels with him is doomed to suffer. He has these kind of thoughts regularly, but usually they’re in his own voice, which he can ignore for the most part. It becomes a little harder when it’s them. Their faces, their voices, accusing. Hatred for himself projected into the faces of his lost friends, blaming him like he deserves to be blamed.
It occurs to him that this might be the first time this face has cried in front of this Master. He’s cried in front of Missy before. Or… well, cried on Missy might be a more accurate description. But he’s normally quite good at holding himself together. Teary eyes sometimes give Koschei a window to his emotion, but he’s quite sure he’s never actually sobbed. Apparently while stuck halfway between nightmare and reality, he’s not so strong. He can still feel the tears on his face. It can’t be long since he had that dream, then.
He notices that the covers are still over him. Given his tendency to physically struggle against them when dreaming, he wonders how many times they’ve been picked up and laid over him again.
The Doctor sits slowly, reaching out to Koschei. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. It’s so much gentler than the torrent of apologies that spilled from him during his nightmares. Those words were rushed and frantic. Painful. He presses his face against the Master’s shoulder when he’s close enough. “You didn’t have to stay. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t want to see.” See me, see my pain. Of course he didn’t have to stay. The Doctor can never ask that of anyone. He never will. It’s not fair, no matter how much it helps him to know that he’s not alone. “But thank you for staying anyway.”
The Master opens his mouth. Considers. Closes it. Opens it again.
“I have been the embodiment of your pain too many times. I don’t know … how I couldn’t have stayed, or seen it.”
That would be a kind of unforgivable that excels any and all of his present litany of crimes. Because it would be hypocrisy. The Doctor is the storm. And he who quarrels with the stormy sky cannot abide hypocrisy.
He’s still in his own nightclothes. He slides closer to his best and oldest friend.
“It’s not as if it’s anything I haven’t seen before, love.”
Many times; the change of faces does not erase all of the most poignant memories. Nothing ever could.
He takes the hand offered him and sits in silence.
“Yeah, the … hair-stroking was real,” he ventures, feebly.
And the blanket covering. And the humming, and the touch-telepathic guided meditation that wrecked Koschei because he is so telepathically permeable and naturally assumes the emotions to which he’s exposed. Especially from the one person he adores.
“You wanna … ah, try resting again? I’ve ways to block bad thoughts for you. If you. Want.”
Koschei deposits all his work on the long laboratory table and strides over to his husband. He straddles his lap and gazes at him with marmish incredulity.
“Yeah, luv, as soon as you can explain to me how you couldpossibly forget all the reasons. Shall I catalogue them alphabetically or by subject?”
“It’s not a reflection of you, I promise,” he says, taking his husband’s face in his hands and kissing his forehead before pressing their heads together. “Just a bad head day. You know how it goes.”
Koschei removes his reading glasses and settles himself more firmly on Jack’s lap.
“That I do, husband, but you miss my point. I am prepared to lavish you with reasons for your greatness. Gird your loins, or rather, don’t, for I’m about to charm off your knickers.”
He clears his throat, theatrically.
“The High Classical Greeks have striven in vain to sculpt your perfect face and body. But this barely touches upon the beauty of your mind, heart, and soul. You have the mind of a scientist, an artist, and an intellect. The heart of a poet and an adventurer. The soul of one who secretly, for all his playful transgressions, wishes to warm his feet by a hearth cozied up with a special someone.”
He wriggles a bit.
“Lucky for you, here I am, dearest friend, father of my children, hero of my hearts. You may now express your accolades in return.”
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.”
“Koschei,” she breathes, instantly overwhelmed by his words. She knows how difficult it is for him to, for lack of a better word, share, how much hoarding is simply his natural instinct and a means of self-preservation. She knows that her adventures with her new friends have caused him no end of insecurity, no matter what he might say.
But the fact that he’s acknowledging them, agreeing with them, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s placing her happiness over his own, it staggers her.
She wraps her arms around his neck, pressing their foreheads together. “I love you. So much. You deserve that too. Are you happy?”
Are you happy?
What a simple question, yet how unsure the answer.
Some measure of the Master is ashamed of the fact that he cannot proffer a perfectly desirable, positive answer. Some part of him that is deeply his youngest and first self, a boy wracked with scars of perceived insufficiency that will last a lifetime.
He can’t avoid her when she’s so near, so he closes his eyes.
“Trying,” he settles to confess, with a feeble smile. “At the risk of sounding … . corny, I’m with you. That’s enough.”
“My best friend,” she smiles, feeling the truth and pain of that statement. “My other half. Trying is all we can do.” She kisses his forehead, his cheeks, his nose, and finally, his lips, brushing her fingers against the back of his neck.
“But Koschei, you deserve a lot more too. If there’s anything I can do, anything that will make you happier, tell me. I don’t care what it is, how silly or grand it is, I want you to be as happy as possible.”
I deserve the mound of waste I stood on, railing about my imagined import to the universe, that Christmas many years ago.
He doesn’t voice this: as a matter of pride, and to free her from his guilt.
“I don’t know,” he admits, and when he does speak, the despair in his voice is not withheld.
What can I ask of you, really? The things I want and need from you are so unwholesome, so selfish, so cruel. I want and need you to abandon everyone and everything else, wrap yourself around me and become the same being as me. I want and need you to dull the ache of existing, the constant pulsing throbbing hurt, of being. I am so tired of being alive. I am so tired.
They’re back, all safe and sound. The fam are tucked up in their beds after another exhausting adventure and the Doctor is burning through the adrenaline that had carried her through the last trip.
Which is a very bad thing.
She makes it to their bedroom, each step getting more and more difficult, until she stops in the doorway, leaning against the frame to keep herself up.
“Koschei…” is all she gets out before she collapses on the ground.
The Master turns at the sound of his bondmate’s feeble cry. Already his features are feral with protective resolve. He rushes to her side, and scoops her into his arms without contemplation.
“Right, Zero Room.”
He carries her there. The sterilized blankness, the absolute zero of silence, like a bloodless womb, engulfs them both at once, and he must struggle with the cottony sensation inside his mind, the nigh irresistible lull of R E S T, to place her on the table and run the diagnostic equipment.
“Tell me what happened or the first person I see gets the brunt of my wrath.”
Where – Where had he come from? What could he possibly mean by that? Wide eyed, Stormy stared after the man. Was he trying to say that he had literally made all the whole of the universe vanish? No, that wasn’t possible. Earth would cease to exist without the moon, and the sun at the very least!
“W-why would you do that?” the ginger questioned a bit timidly as she looked back up to search the blanket of darkness above. No, surely the city lights played a role in it. Or clouds? Were there any clouds?
Somehow, in such a youthful, round face, the Master’s diabolical smile is still more disturbing; it’s like a dagger gouged a red slash down to the white of bone out of a baby’s cheeks.
“You have an unusually high concentration of Time Vortex energy, which is ordinarily limited to my kind, and to so-called ‘celestial’ beings. I’m surprised that you absolutely must belong to one of those categories, yet you find that the order of the universe is impregnable by malice.”
He taps on a small control panel in his left hand.
“But this time, it’s just a mild case of charlatanism.”
One honeycombed cell at a time, the “sky” above the pair dissolves, to reveal the continued presence of celestial bodies. A very well-executed holograph dissipates.
The universe is a delicate balance. Everything in it has an
equal and opposite to keep existence from spiraling out of control. It is much
the same for the Doctor and the Master as well. Never in all her lives has she
been so happy, so whole… but that is not to say there aren’t things on the
other end of the scale. The Master’s nightmare puts into sharp relief one of
these.
The Doctor wakes before he does, hazel eyes wide and terrified.
But it is not her terror. It is secondhand, shared through their bonded minds
and made all the more powerful by the skin to skin contact of their ankles
entangled together beneath the bedsheets. She is paralyzed by his nightmare,
paralyzed by the same imagined blade that pins him to the ground in his dream.
She stares blindly at the ceiling, unable to see anything but what he is experiencing.
They say dreams happen in a matter of seconds before waking, a
flash of consciousness as the mind begins to stir, but this is different. This…
It feels real.
Somehow she knows what is coming before it does. Her gut churns
and she tastes bile in her throat. Still, it doesn’t lessen the shock when she
hears her daughter’s voice filtered through the robotic intonation of a Cyberman.
Thank God, she thinks briefly as her husband lurches, drags them
both out of the nightmare and stumbles into the bathroom, all but tripping on
the sheets. She hears him, smells the stench of urine soaking the mattress, but
she still can’t move. Her hearts are pounding, her ears are ringing, and it’s
all she can do not to vomit herself.
The Doctor takes a few steeling breaths and pushes herself up
into a sitting position, her entire body trembling as she gets out of bed and
follows her best friend, her husband, her Koschei, father of her children into
the bathroom where he’s curled around the basin of the toilet. One step, two,
and she lets herself fall to her knees, wrapping her arms around his sweat-soaked,
sobbing form. He stinks of fear and vomit and piss and sweat, but she clings to
him, trembling almost as hard as he is.
“I—” She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, for once at a
loss as to what she could say to help him.
The Doctor is a creature born of hope, and as such it is one of
her most defining traits. Yet… she struggles to find it now. Her hands shake as
she runs her fingers through his hair, wipes a tissue across his mouth and
tends to him in the little ways she can that don’t require words. Her faith in
him has been unwavering. Her pride in him, in his progress, in his commitment
to do good for goodness sake. Since the day he asked her to help him, never once
has she doubted him.
And perhaps that is her own failing.
The Master doubts. He has always doubted, and she has been
steadfast in the fact that she doesn’t. But… for the briefest of moments, she
is afraid. She is afraid not of him or what he is capable of, but of the fact
that perhaps she should not be so absolute in her conviction. She is afraid of
the idea that maybe, just maybe, she could be wrong about her unending faith in
him.
But even as that seed of doubt is dropped, the Doctor
consciously tries to grind it into nonexistence.
The Master doubts. He has always doubted, and she has been
steadfast in the fact that she doesn’t. Now, perhaps more than ever, he needs
her to continue that belief, that strength. She knows his fears as intimately
as her own, and knows what it would do to him if he felt that she imagined for
even a millisecond that he could be capable of that, of harming even a hair on
their baby girl’s head.
She takes that seed, now pulverized into a ghost of itself and
locks it away in a box in her mind, and then locks that box in a chest, hides
that chest in a locked room, and seals that room in a vault. Only then does she
speak, dabbing the sweat from his brow and rubbing his back.
“It was a nightmare, love. Just a horrible, terrible nightmare.
I’m here. Zinnia is safe and sound in the other room. You are safe. You are
loved. You are home.
It’s going to be all right, I swear to you.”
But it happens. The doubt she feels in her own faith. It happens. She cuts it off like the head of a snake and she shoves it in her dark corner and puts a deadbolt lock on it, but it already happened, and he already saw it. He saw it. It’s like when you’re a child watching a magic show and the magician’s hand slips and you see the trick coin, just a flash, a flicker, of it, and the illusion bursts into a thousand tiny shards, and you watch, you stare blankly, and a chain reaction of lost belief, in that particular charlatan, then in magic, then in Santa Claus, then in God, then in Heaven, sets off like a hundred thousand little explosions of broken glass in your mind, and your world has fallen apart, because of one flicker of one trick coin. It only takes a millisecond to lose your whole world.
Koschei doesn’t realize the pure betrayal on his face. Doesn’t realize he’s lifted his face from the toilet bowl and he’s staring with horror and fear and loss into his Theta’s eyes. He’s clambering to seize onto the magician’s crafty hands, to hear the “it’s going to be alright,” to feel her pride and her joy in his efforts, to know that she trusts he would never harm their child, and not see the trick coin of her self-doubt. But, fuck, fuck, it’s there. For one fleeting instant, the Doctor wondered if she was right to place her faith in the Master.
Suddenly he is so keenly aware of his own stink, of the entire lifelong litany of his crimes and mistakes, of embarrassing foolish awkward mistakes he made, wrong answers he blurted out in class at the Prydonian nearly a thousand years ago; putting Zinnia’s–oh Christ, Zinnia’s–first diaper on backwards; talking too much and too loudly; dancing badly; failing his initiation before the Untempered Schism; all the times the Doctor foiled his stupid convoluted schemes and made him look like a coward and an imbecile.
Every way in which he has ever fallen short now litigates itself against him.
FIX IT!!!!!!
The self-inflicted command ricochets like bullets inside his skull.
“I’m sorry.”
The words aren’t a Shakespearean tragedy; they’re terrifyingly robotic and banal. He cannot even place to which shortcoming, flaw, or sin he refers. Maybe all of them. Who cares? Who even cares.
He stands, flushes the toilet, rushes out to the bed and grinds his teeth while stripping it of all the evidence of his mess. He lashes off the covers and drags them all toward the trash chute, and stuffs them in. He doesn’t even realize he’s crying; he’s wild, lost, desperate to conceal the evidence of his own treasonous brain.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He storms past her and strips naked, and steps into the shower and runs the water scalding. He scrubs himself head to toe with excessive soap. He’s a ridiculous sudsy mess in the shower, cleaning, cleaning.
He steps out and seizes a towel and wraps it around his frame like armor, and it’s only then that he turns to her, and demands, desperately,
“Don’t you EVER get TIRED of it? DON’T YOU GET TIRED OF ME?! I wanna be more than the person you save! I wanna SAVE YOU TOO!
“Yes, well, have fun with that, darling. Meanwhile I’ll be situating myself at a suitable distance to laugh at the ensuing debacle.”
The Doctor puffed out his cheeks in childish annoyance. How dare he. Theta of course, pouts.
“It works most of the time!” He protested. “As if you could come up with something better.”
He knew far too well that he could come up with something better, and childishly hopped that he wouldn’t even try.
“I can’t tell if that’s an invitation to be schooled by someone who has long been your logistical superior, but either way, I’m calling your bluff. Move, bitch.”
Says the asshole who made the entire planet himself and then didn’t notice when one of his armed guards was several inches too tall.
*le gasp* “Language Koschie… dont- dontswear!”
He gave him such an outraged look before he moved into the room under the console… 2 minuets later panicked shouting was heard, a cat screeching and then he scrambled back up, scratches all over his hands…
“OKAY! that plan didn’t work…. time for plan B…” When he thought of a plan B…. shit… he wasnt going to admit that he didnt have one…
“ … right, okay. Is that like, the ghost of your dad under there? Your dad was sodding awful.”
The Master rubs throbbing temples, then lifts both hands high, palms forward, and smacks them together for his best friend’s ever-frail focus.
“Oi. OI! Look. You have to tell me what the bloody hell it is. I can’t diagnose and act properly until I know exactly what animal you’ve summoned from the jowls of hell.”
“ … hey. Hey, you’re the best person I’ve ever met, too.”
Granted, there’s the scrambling of jealous insecurity fueling his words, but also, far purer, the desire to reassure the Doctor that someone who’s known her longer than a handful of days agrees with Yasmin Khan’s evaluation.
“I know coming from me that’ll sound like a joke, given what I’ve put you through in the past. But I was … directionlessly angry. And frankly, that anger, it wasn’t wrong. But how I carried it. How I used it. That was.”
A shift of weight, a shuddering, dogged sigh.
“What I mean to say is you deserve happiness. You deserve … you know. To be admired. And treasured.”
God knows I did, do. God knows the sight of you puts me in secret raptures. God knows I’m infatuated and always will be.
“Koschei,” she breathes, instantly overwhelmed by his words. She knows how difficult it is for him to, for lack of a better word, share, how much hoarding is simply his natural instinct and a means of self-preservation. She knows that her adventures with her new friends have caused him no end of insecurity, no matter what he might say.
But the fact that he’s acknowledging them, agreeing with them, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s placing her happiness over his own, it staggers her.
She wraps her arms around his neck, pressing their foreheads together. “I love you. So much. You deserve that too. Are you happy?”
Are you happy?
What a simple question, yet how unsure the answer.
Some measure of the Master is ashamed of the fact that he cannot proffer a perfectly desirable, positive answer. Some part of him that is deeply his youngest and first self, a boy wracked with scars of perceived insufficiency that will last a lifetime.
He can’t avoid her when she’s so near, so he closes his eyes.
“Trying,” he settles to confess, with a feeble smile. “At the risk of sounding … . corny, I’m with you. That’s enough.”
Icarus 