The Master’s bristly chin rests on the Doctor’s shoulder. Arms slide around his old friend’s waist like additional appendages, and he reaches for a fist full of marshmallows, which he places directly in his mouth.
The Master stops scanning the dashboard the moment his doted daughter enters. He squats and props her on a thigh, licking a finger and tidying her hair. Ferocious and formidable, he’s little more than a gentle giant with his tiny Zinnia.
“Well, sure,” he chimes, as if he’d say no to anything ranging from “I want a pony” to “I want a constellation.” “But! You’ve gotta promise me something: you’ll stay with mummy and me. And you won’t do anything we say it’s unsafe to do. Cause daddy loves you more than anything. Two hearts,” and he places her little hands over each heart, with a refrain that’s clearly familiar, “both of them yours.”
The Master puts up his welding goggles. He grins puckishly.
“Maybe, love. May.” He taps the child’s nose. “Be.”
He lifts the little one into one arm, and carries them to the workbench away from all hot, corrosive, and electrical substances. A peck on the forehead and he places them beside a maze of different colored wires.
“Can you twist the red around the blue? All of them, mind, like this.”
The Master blanches at the gravity of the request. The nape of his neck grows sticky and hot. He who is fearless is now stunned by his own anxiety.
“I’m. Uh. Oh lord. I’m rubbish at this. You’ll want to ask my best friend for this kind of thing, but I. Er.”
But she’s not here right now.
Ask him to calibrate an infinitely complex alien technology, he’s golden. Ask him to hack a global bank, he’ll do it in under sixty seconds. Ask him to run a successful political campaign to be legitimately elected chief seat of a major world power, give him a year and a half, tops. Ask him to build a gun from leaves, a cinch. A robot from toothpicks, sure.
For gentle words of sympathy, not geared at emotional or psychological manipulation? He’s screwed.
Still. Still . . . it’d be nice not to be the slave of one single definition of who he is, or could be. Wouldn’t it?
He sinks to sitting beside you. That’s the first step. Get on the level of the wounded. Right?
He takes your hand, cautiously, making sure he’s not exacting force.
“I don’t know you, and I didn’t know your dad. So I dunno what I can say that won’t sound like empty consolation. But. But to have a child who remembers him with such eloquence and love … both your innate faculties and the comportment you’ve learned to guide you … those speak well of him, and of what pride he’d have in you were he here now.”
He musters a smile that he hopes is comforting. His own face is young and innocent, no matter the wrinkles or silver hairs. There’s an odd sort of comfort in that alone, in the way this Master is changelessly a brash little boy.
“And if you want. I can try to barbecue on the roof of my TARDIS. And not give in to the urge to burn something down. Or fix something you broke. Or … tell terrible corny jokes. Swap blood with you so we can briefly share DNA? No, that’s … that’s rather macabre. Perhaps I’m past due to shut up now.”
He pats your hand.
“You can call me dad if you like. I’m also surprisingly good at hugs. Just don’t stab me in the back with a concealed blade … ! Or, you know. shoot me or. Generally do something to try and assassinate me. Bring it in … ! There we go.”
The Master’s in the process of hydrating when Sammy and Vicky rampage around the corner. His eyes go owlish.
He’s barely seized the stairway railing when they collide with his legs. He goes down hard, landing on his ass on a stair, offhandedly grateful that there’s more padding there than in younger years.
“Golly,” he comments, with an infectious thunderclap of laughter. “What a welcoming committee. Either you two want me to do something, or you’re hiding something else.”
The Master puckers his lips at his daughter from across the room. He stalks over, and snatches her up.
“Ohhhh, c’mere, you little MONSTER. Daddy’s shirt is yours for the sacrificing.”
He dangles her upside down and blows raspberries into her belly button. Then he hoists her upright and makes vaguely threatening fish-lips at her face, certain that he’s about to get peacock-hued war paint on his own cheeks.
The Master shakes his head. Fingers dance down the Doctor’s delicate back, sliding into the pockets of bright blue pants, to draw her flush against him. He’s smiling easily, lazily.
“Everything’s splendid. I’m proud of you’s all.”
He tucks her defiant slice of blond hair behind each ear, and he tidies her earring chain, and weathered little lines of affectionate amusement crease the skin beneath his eyes. It’s hard to feel his age around her.
“You stepped in. And nudged history. And then stepped out of the spotlight. No longer sanctimonious, imperious, cruel in kindness. Just a facilitator. A traveler tinkering with things for the better. You are more the boy I met and adored than you have been in many, many lifetimes.”
“I love you madly. Let that warm you. Always.”
“I just got it right today,” she murmurs. “That’s all.”
The Doctor tucks her face against his neck. While she knows she’s done the right thing, and she’s tried her absolute hardest, that doesn’t mean she felt good doing it. To sit there and let it happen, to be witness to the arrest of someone she thinks is truly wonderful and be unable to step in and do anything about it because of what it means for the future and for humanity… She gives a minimal shake of her head.
“Come and lie with me? It’s been a long day. Need a rest.”
She steps back and gives him a smile. A tired, slightly saddened smile, but a smile nonetheless.
He studies her features a long while. There’s vigilance–long-established–and compassion–fresh and new–in his own.
“Yeah, maybe. But that’s still something.”
He knows enough about human history: he had to, in order to prey upon their divisive weaknesses in office. He read, and he studied, and he examined, and he became an expert at weaponizing micro-aggressions that he didn’t even believe in to his advantage ( “it’s girlie and the freak!” “Just stand there and look pretty.” “Got any old bras I can use?” “Is the future gonna be all girl?” ).
He knows how humans gouge out each other’s spirits with words (”Your kind.” “we don’t serve negroes or Mexicans.” “No blacks allowed.”) and once, he used these tools expertly himself, all the while laughing at the pathetic, xenophobic nature of humanity, all the while using their own vernacular to wound and control them.
He knows why the Doctor is weary, and this time he is standing on the right side of why.
So when she hides in him, he envelops her.
“You allowed Rosa to bear the burden that was hers to bear. And make the mark that was hers to make. Sometimes … erasing evidence of the bad things, making everything all better with a loud speech or a magical snap of you fingers … it isn’t what’s needed. It isn’t what galvanizes lasting, systemic change. The evidence needs to be visible. We need to be … uncomfortable. We need to bear witness, sometimes. And then thank these people for what they did with … I dunno. Action in our own lives.”
Rubbing her back, drawing “I love you” repeatedly in Circular Gallifreyan, he pauses, to chuckle.
“I almost sounded like a decent person just now, didn’t I? Crikey.”
He lifts her into his arms like a child, and carries her to bed. Perhaps he’s talking rubbish, but she wants to be held, and that he can do.
She eludes him anyway, fair hair tossing with her dash, and she’s sun skipping across water on a clear March morning, just as warm and just as terrifyingly intangible. That’s what he’s afraid of, but what can he do? Hoard her? What good will that do?
So he gives chase, and tries not to let it seem desperate, with his limp flaring up today, and his face that he knows is older than hers now, a brash male-presenting hasbeen. Seems such a short time ago he was Peter Pan, confidently cruel, clean-shaven and pleasantly sharp like a costly aftershave. But life happens, and despite the Doctor’s irrepressible outlook, life inevitably diminishes some people.
Still, catch him dead admitting a drop of this to her. When she’s this happy. When she’s this free.
He struggles out of his coat, taking advantage of her lack of coordination, and tosses it at her, grazing her retreated back.
“HA!” he pants. “It’s touch-tag! I GOT ya! I WIN!”
As the coat touches her, she stops due to some unwritten rule. Sure, she could just keep running, claim that isn’t part of the game, but then, the whole point is for him to catch her.
So she whirls on her heels, instead running towards him with just as much speed and force as she had been running away from him. Just as she reaches him, she hurls herself up and into him, sending them both careening to the ground where she lands on top of him.
“Guess you get that kiss now.”
Koschei knows the collision’s coming the moment his Theta whirls round. He’s already raucously laughing, flinging wide his arms.
They go down hard, and he grunts, hit on the bad part of his back, but he’s absorbed all visible evidence of pain almost before impact is complete.
His expressiveness is, after all, a form of self-indulgence. All Masters are crafty beings.
Irony that he uses that skill now to conceal what might cause her undue guilt.
“Now this is what I call premium koalaty entertainment!”
“With apologies to the Master for that particular pun.”
// @masterfulxrhythm – she’s punning again. I should never have let her get a hold of a pun meme… xD
“ … God is dead and you’ve killed her.”
He says nothing further, but limps off in the opposite direction, head cocked at an odd angle, as if the effort to restrain himself from strangling her is so great that it manifests in psychosomatic agony.
Icarus 