He smiles, then rolls over to face the Master. They’ve been laying here quietly for a while now, and he’s not sure what prompted him to say this. It’s nice to hear all the same, though. He does all he can for the universe and all the living beings within it, and it’s so wonderful to know that somebody would go to extreme lengths for him. Not because he’s the Doctor and he’s needed to save the universe; because he’s the Doctor and he’s loved.
“I’ll have to remember that one next time I want a favour or something fetching from another room. For now, though…”
The Doctor takes one of the Master’s hands in his own.
“You don’t need to. You don’t need to do a single thing for me. It won’t make me love you more, because I already love you as much as one living creature can love another.”
He moves his hand up his arm, shoulder, neck, and finally strokes his cheek, hand gentle. Adoring. He adores him.
“You already do so much, and I don’t think you even realise. Things you do without thinking. You’ve been so patient with me and my stupidity. You’ve helped me. You’ve listened to me even when I’m being a complete idiot. You did all of that, and you didn’t have to. You do everything for me, Koschei. You are everything to me.”
The Doctor moves closer, wrapping an arm around him.
“I’m sorry if I’ve ever made you feel that what you do isn’t enough. It is. It’s more than enough. I love you.”
The arm draws him closer, and now he smiles slyly and kisses his head.
“By all means, though, if you’d like to cater to every want I have, I suppose you could rub my back. You did say anything.”
Koschei laughs huskily and slinks upright. He kisses his Theta on the forehead and the corner of an eye, growls playfully and rolls him back over.
“You’re horrid, turning my mawkish moment into a chance for pampering.”
Strong firm hands, callused from years of mechanical and technological tinkering, rest on the Doctor’s shoulders.
“Of course, I would’ve done exactly the same thing.”
He barks a laugh, ever so pleased with his own wit. And he begins to knead the tight muscles of the Doctor’s skinny back like a cat plying for attention. Which is precisely what he is.
At the Doctor’s apology, he stiffens. His features tighten with the effort to retain composure. Then he leans over him again, draped across him lazily, one leg slung across his side, one hand in his wooly-sheep hair, lovingly rummaging.
Koschei draws his hands up over his face, and drags them down his cheeks, all the way past his stubbled jaw, and down his long slender neck.
“I hate. Leaving something unfinished,” he retorts crossly: crossly mostly because he knows his husband is right.
He drags himself to his feet and shoves his face into Jack’s chest.
“ … fine.”
Jack chuckles and wraps his arms around his husband, kissing the top of his head. “I know, but you’re not leaving it unfinished, you’re taking a strategic break in order to finish it with more style tomorrow.”
He bends down then and swoops him up into his arms. “Besides, it can’t be anything too important, my birthday isn’t for another 6 months.”
Koschei snorts, a long low sound of indulgent amusement. He tucks in his legs and burrows against his husband’s chest still closer, enjoying the steadfast thrum of his heartbeat. His eyes are closed, and he is, faintly, smiling.
Once placed down on the bed, he clings tighter, and hoards all the blankets around himself in an impenetrable nest.
“I know you,” she says, panting as she runs up to the man. “I know you…. don’t I?”
The moment she’s kn his arms the harmonic frequencies of their grudgingly bonded minds sing. The moment she speaks to him, he’s already heard her true voice, the voice in which Time Lords most intimately converse: telepathically.
And he knows who she is.
The Master seizes the Doctor savagely. He shakes her by the arms, once, teeth clenched, still bleeding from his lumbar, rapidly losing sensation in his left hip and leg, ashen and clammy. He’s on the brink of regeneration, but he’ll stave it off even if it means dying. He just wants to see her one last time. He just wants to say a thousand words that clog in his throat and choke him.
“YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL who I am! You KNOW! The one you LEFT FOR DEAD! The one you ABANDONED! Just give it a minute, Doctor … I’m sure your legs will serve you to run away from me in no time!”
Despite the rage and anger and violent coursing through the man in front of her, a man she only vaguely recognises but that clearly knows her intimately, she reaches up and rests a hand on his cheek. Her brows furrow as she cocks her head to the side, trying desperately to understand what she could have done to make him so angry.
“I’m…” she starts, but then she drops her gaze. As she does, she notices the stiffness of his stance, the clear and total pain starting to eek into her own mind, and she looks back up at him. “Don’t matter who I am, you’re hurt! And I’m gonna help. What ‘appened?”
Aw, shit.
There’s no more eloquent way of putting it. She’s just excruciatingly kind; she always has been, it’s always been the honey with which she’s entrapped him, since they were boys and he was frightened of his own shadow and intoxicated by the Pied Piper’s charm of a sunkissed blond boy who smelled like windburn and christened him “my friend” before they’d even exchanged names.
No matter how much righteously infuriated armor he dons, here they are, here he is, smitten.
Shit. Fuck.
The Master releases the Doctor. He shakes his head, angrily, swiftly wipes his eyes, and struggles to sit.
“I was stabbed. In the back. Literally. Call it an … identity crisis. You know me, you … . look, I’m the person living who’s known you longest. Call me …”
Suddenly his own moniker feels filthy on his tongue.
“Call me Koschei. And you, you’re.” Not that little boy anymore. Too many of your friends and enemies have passed under the bridge between us like so many rushing rapids. “You’re the Doctor.”
Despite his “annoyance,” he wastes no time in hurrying over to his husband’s open arms, sprawling over him with his head in Koschei’s lap, braiding their fingers together.
“Mmmm is all of that an option?” he says, smiling up at him adoringly. “I don’t know, I kinda want another girl. But Sammy might pitch a fit if someone tries to steal her throne. Then again, she might be absolutely enamoured with a little mini-me. Definitely going to need to expand the nursery. And yes, new clothes for me. Probably my favourite part, they’ll get their own section in my closet you made me.”
Koschei leans down and squishes his husband’s face between his palms, with a an enthusiastic growl.
“Whyever would anything not be an option? YOU’RE the one doing the difficult work here.”
He sits back upright, petting Jack’s hair in even rhythms.
“Our daughter will adapt as soon as she realizes her little brother or sister is a minion she can send on errands and quests on her behest. Remember, she IS the one who takes after ME.”
Jack laughs out loud, suddenly imagining Sammy ordering around her younger sibling whilst she lounges on a small stuffed chair, every bit the princess she already acts. “Alright, good point. That’s the only reason you want kids, huh? Someone to do your bidding and aid you in all your schemes?”
He’s TEASING, Koschei.
Despite the humor in the words, the Master has long doubted his prowess as a parent, and the jibe hits home. He tightens in Jack’s arms, with an airily surly look.
“Why, because my reputation speaks for itself?”
It’s rare, so very rare, that their frequent mutual jostling taps a real nerve, because both are ever so certain of the other’s benign intentions; trust makes real hurt difficult to achieve. The trouble with this occasion, however, is that Koschei believes Jack isn’t trying to wound him: he’s just speaking from the heart.
“I don’t …really scheme anymore, you know that …”
Oh, it’s a weak riposte. And he knows it. And the embarrassment makes him angrier still. He worms his way loose. But even now he’s grown enough not to make some infinitely cruel and desperate lash-out about Jack’s grandson.
“Tremendously true, but to whom do I credit this compliment? Show yourself.”
Koschei growls appreciatively. He smacks the Doctor on the chest, and then the arm, and writhes in his arms.
“Stop.”
It’s a command, cheeks aflame, and always the indicator that his affection for his oldest friend is real: the shyness of his boyhood, buried under so many layers of narcissistic tyranny, comes out full force.
“Hra-HAH, STOP … !”
Theta chuckled and ceased nipping at his neck, his arms still wrapped around the man’s waist.
“Your wish..is my command..”
He wasn’t foolish enough to push further when the Master commanded him to stop. The Doctor respected him too much for that. Humming he instead rested his chin on the man’s shoulder, content to be so close.
Koschei ceases to gleefully ferret. His expression is hilariously petulant.
“Oh, but I didn’t mean it seriously,” he clarifies.
He produces his neck again, demanding, entitled, deeply comfortable in the grasp of his best friend.
“C’mon, go at me again.”
Hands rub possessively affectionate circles up and down the lean and wiry back of his lover.
Oh God, that tug at his shirt might as well be a scythe blade embedded in both his hearts, dragging him down. He remembers it too. That’s the problem, the Master’s memory as as far-ranging as his foresight. He remembers being sought and he remembers the long gentle frightened face of the boy seeking him and he remembers the smell of them together in bed, two innocent children smelling of honey and damp earth and long hours of running in sunshine, holding hands in one of their school beds, because Theta Sigma’s nightmares were dogged and relentless and Koschei felt for once like a source of something wholesome and good.
And every instinct the Master has is telling him to lunge, to punch, to assault, to hurt. Hurt him before he sees he hurt you, hurt him before he sees he hurt you, hurt him before he sees he hurt you.
[ I would rather d i e than beg YOU! } Stupid, stupid words, so unfortunate and true. SHIT!
All the fury festering beneath rushes forward with violence, in a single wordless strangled agonized ROAR, as he strikes the wall over the Doctor’s head. He strikes it so hard that it bloodies his knuckles. He cradles his fist to his chest, and grinds his teeth at the whitewater sound in his ears.
It’s the death throes of resisting every magnetic, gravitational pull of every pore and tissue and muscle and firing synapse and feeling in his being, to just. Sit down. And BE. With his best friend.
So that’s when he sits down, in that space the Doctor provides, and drops his head between his knees.
A long silence ensues.
Then,
“I’m sorry, too,” he surrenders. “For the girl. The girl out there. Your girl, Bill. There’s a thousand and one reasons why you care for her, I know. I took … . considerable time getting to know her, after all.”
He sits upright, and wipes his eyes.
“Did I ever tell you how long I was trapped on Gallifrey, after that day you spared me, and I you?”
He smiles at the Doctor, and it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Seventy years.”
The Doctor sees the sudden violence coming with just enough time to squeeze his eyes shut and tense his whole body in anticipation for a strike that might finish him off.
If that punch was delivered directly to his chest, he wouldn’t have blamed the Master for even a moment. A punch is the least he deserves.
His eyes open slowly at the slight dip of the mattress next to him. He glances over, wary now that the Master might be prone to another outburst of violence, and that this time he may not be so lucky as to avoid it being directed at him.
“I will forgive you. Not yet. I can’t yet. But one day, I will forgive you. As I always do and always will.”
He gives a minimal shake of his head at the question. They haven’t discussed it very much, he and Missy, apart from the occasional comment made. It hasn’t been something she’s wished to bring up, and he hasn’t pushed for information.
“Seventy years,” he repeats, raising his eyebrows. Longer than he spent with River, and roughly the same amount of time he’s spent on Earth with Missy. From living it himself, paying attention to the passing of time, he knows that despite their lifespans, seventy years is not a short time. It doesn’t feel it. He knows how the years can drag.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, because he doesn’t know how else he can respond. What is he to say? He is truly sorry, and though he is curious, he knows better than to ask questions when the Master isn’t necessarily in the best of moods.
He eyes the bloody fist. The sight of it makes the golden energy running so close to the surface burn in sympathy. He resists letting it take him over, because he knows he can heal from this if he’s only given time, but perhaps he can expel some of it — relieve the pressure slightly. Usually it would be dangerous to do so, but if he’s given something to actually focus it on, it might not be so bad.
The Doctor takes the Master’s hand gently in his own and concentrates.
“Let me do this,” he says quietly, waiting just a moment to give the Master chance to pull his hand away. Although he will be insistent on trying to heal him, he won’t do anything the Master actively doesn’t want him to do.
“You miss the point. I don’t want your apology: I want your faith.”
The Master draws so near the Doctor that his breath stirs his friend’s hair, like a thousand hot scarlet birds disturbing the drift of a cumulus cloud. He holds his bloodied hand jealously. It’s as though all he has left is his pain, all he has left to claim as his alone, and he won’t relinquish it just yet. It’s his sole bargaining chip.
“I want you to … to understand that it’s nothing unique to Missy or me that divides us as a person. It’s how we’ve been treated over time. Environment over innateness, and all that. She might’ve thrown Bill in a meat grinder to get at youifshe still had fresh wounds from seventy years of abuse and neglect! And maybe if I’d spent the same!!! Identical!! Amount of time!!”
He pounds his other fist insistently; redness spreads to his other palm.
“Then I might be the one knocking me out to untie you–oh yeah, you think I don’t know she’s on your side? I know–and weeping with remorse… hell, shit, I wish I had a companion to give you now, to show you I don’t want to always be the one hurting you.”
He has no idea Clara exists, beyond the vague outline described by Rassilon during his torments ( “the Doctor will come to Gallifrey to save that human, but not you!”); he has no idea he’s predicting his own would-be future, when Missy was new.
But he looks down at his hands, and he knows now that they’re both in agony. He knows that he’s becoming more and more disturbingly self-destructive lately.
Almost sheepishly, at last, he offers his hands to the Doctor’s, and to its sunset glow.
The Doctor asked, turning her head to look at him. Her usually nimble fingers were fumbling with the earrings she was trying to properly put on. Having never had to wear them before this was a new challenge. It was strange but she liked how they looked. Especially the ear cuff that dangled on a chain.
“Mm. Onnnnnne sec.”
The Master turns a minuscule needle over intricate multi-hued copper wiring, on a superior external monitoring system for the Doctor’s TARDIS. If she won’t allow him to furbish it with weaponry, at least surveillance can slake his anxiety on her behalf. He places the project down on the workbench and saunters over to his oldest friend.
“Oh, that’s rather whimsical.”
He examines the earring closely; he has his own pair of black studs these days: factual, blunt, punctuating each side of his animated round face like a pair of periods, and somehow, alongside his eyeliner appropriately androgynous. Her suit her as well: a pale sterling silver and gold, hands of the two hues joined as though in warm collaboration, and a small galaxy of silver stars.
“ … It’ll hurt a bit. You should’ve left in the studs they used when you got the piercing, Hearts.”
His eyes, dark, as lustful as they are apologetic, simmer as his fingers grasp her earlobe. They fix upon hers.
The slim silver rod slips through the soft skin of her ear, with the slightest catch. Then he cuffs the stars in place.
Koschei hisses, and winces, in sympathy. He pauses, to turn and kiss her cheek, softly and warmly.
“Well OB-viously, darling, we hold them over the top of each pumpkin while they pull out the goo, which is wonderfully disgusting, and then we sit them on workstools for the rest, and we finish what they can’t when they get too fatigued! We’re going for a festive high-point here!”
Oh, he does badly when he’s alone.
The doubts resurrect themselves. The self-loathing of his distant childhood thatches to his mind one aspersion at a time. Until it’s cluttered with disgust and fear and dread: a terrible sickly skin. And he’s surprised to look in the mirror, that he’s not rotting, the way he was many bodies ago.
Sometimes his skin hurts. Sometimes he wants to dig the hatred right out from where it lurks, with his bare nails. Sometimes the sound of water dripping thirteen rooms away is excruciating. Stop, stop. He’ll even say please. He’ll acquiesce.
He does badly when he’s alone, but he prides himself on needing no one. Never has there been such an Icarus.
The Master perks upright while pouring himself and his wife “monkey-picked” oolong tea from a Chinese monastery, suitable to her fanatical taste for the beverage, and continues to pour the tea long after it has filled her cup.
Icarus 