The Doctor stands on her tiptoes and hugs him tightly, shifting her arms ever so slightly until they find the perfect position. She smiles into his shoulder, where she’s at the perfect height to press her face in without even needing to lean down. One arm stays wound firmly around him, but the other moves every now and then, as her soft hand strokes his back. She might not know the reason for his request, but based on the chance that he might be in need of comfort, she tries to soothe anyway.
“Everything okay? Y’don’t need a reason to ask for a hug, but you might have one.” She reaches her hand up to the back of his head, touching his hair gently. There are so many ways she can think to try and comfort him if that’s what he needs, but finds herself struggling to pick one without knowing what it is he’s looking for.
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.”
“One … eight hundred … . K I S S,” Koschei speaks, standing charismatically on the bed, wearing nothing but boxer briefs, short and small boned and somehow absolutely magnetic.
He knows. He chose this Peter Pan face and this Shakespearean stage actor voice together on purpose. Regenerations hardly a lottery for the Master.
“You heard me right. I rigged the door so that everyone who enters this room, marked by yours truly as the room for voting for the racist candidate, gets zapped by this temporal manipulator, and sent to an era on Karr-Charrat during which all humans were called ‘anti-hydros’ and subject to capital punishment.”
The Master flashes a dazzlingly malicious grin.
“HehHAH, you think my campaigning days are over? Think again!”
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.”
There he sits, in a state of unpardonable vulnerability and existential crisis.
Making a long protracted noise halfway between a whine and a groan.
On and on it goes, that guttural whimper.
The sound of several consecutive italicized exclamation points, but in a size eight font, and struck through.
While he stares into the middle distance.
Feeling vaguely mopey and deeply, inarticulably uncomfortable.
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.
“Yeah, Hearts, but one of these centuries you’ve gotta stop finding new phrases for essentially stuffing your multitude of feelings behind either angst or optimism.”
He’s doing what he does best: refining her madcap ingenious inventions into more streamlined, practical technology, with the fastidiousness she has always lacked. He’s hand-rewiring the plugs connecting to the microwave that she had used as an ad-hoc intergalactic-temporal traveling system, now that they’re back inside the TARDIS, in case there should ever be any future need for it.
“And by the way I STILL think the morphology of your sonic is impractical; does it really fit in your hand for multipurpose emergency situations? Looks so clunky you could DROP it. I mean, I get it, Sheffield steel, it’s an ode to your new friends, blah dee blah, but can’t I joost …tweak it?”
He cringes, cajoling.
That is how they work best together, her with the big picture, him with the refining. Sure, both can do either and have proven so on many occasions, but it’s when they work together that the best is brought out in both.
So while he refines her crude creation, she’s already off making her next gadget out of a toaster, a lamp, and a brass deer statue she found. She’s very much enjoying this new method of creation.
“No, you can’t tooch it, it’s perfect!” she protests, all but stamping her foot as she turns to him.
After a moment, though, she casually asks: “Hypothetically speaking, what would you do to it?”
“Serious question?”
The Master lifts his hands high in apparent surrender; they both know better. His eyebrows loft amusedly.
“Like I said, the morphology. You’ve added every single useful scanning, diagnostic, and unlocking component you’ve ever had, and I wouldn’t dream of tooching that. But all of that’s utterly pointless if the shaft is shaped like some sort of…banana or … . vibrator that while it gives me wonderfully naughty thoughts, it’ll slip right out of your hand mid-crisis … . then that’s not of much use, now is it?”
He saunters over to her side, and produces his laser.
“Simple rod shape. Retractable shaft. Easy. Because when monsters are chasing you, my love, I’d like to think you had a fighting chance of unlocking that crucial door to safe escape.”
A rueful smile.
“Take it from someone with an insider’s perspective on monsters.”
Icarus 