“You would never dare!” The idea alone! Unheard of. The Doctor mutters a half-formed insult that is very much not even an actual word, under his breath. Promptly covers the bowtie he’s wearing with a protective hand, eyeing the Master.
“Don’t threaten me, sweetheart —- when has that ever ended well for—-” He pauses. “Hang on, hang on, rewind! Kiss you?!” Now he’s at a loss for words.
“AHHHHHH,” the Master emits this sound, presumably of triumph, in a high soft falsetto, protracted, rather like helium leaving a balloon. “Look how futile it is, his attempt to protect his quaint little centrepiece!”
When he produces the entire shelf drawer of all of the Doctor’s other bowties, and opens the TARDIS doors, and dangles the bit of hapless wood over the abyss of space, it becomes clear WHY he’s feeling so victorious.
“Threatening you is my highly erotic hobby, my dear. And if my, ha, ‘request,’ ” and he produces air quotes with his free hand, “shocks you, then you lost your memory of our entire adolescence about three faces back, and I’ll have to start going through your entire wardrobe with punitive intent.”
“In point of fact, NO, this bag of Jelly Babies is MINE.”
The Master shifts the plastic parcel decidedly out of the Doctor’s reach. Obnoxiously, by lifting it high overhead. And grinning, because exultation! BLISS! At long last Theta Sigma is the shortass.
“And no amount of self-aggrandized adventuring, nor civilizations saved, nor wars preemptively stopped, nor whales and dolphins and baby seals spared, is going to wrangle them back into your grasp. But I might share, if you told me at length how much you love me, and how indispensable I am to you.”
His Excellency the Unmitigable Attention Whore has spoken.
His whole soul and both his hearts are screaming at the sight of her: a delicate fey being, but thrumming with all the energy of the universe and its ineffable perpetually unfolding beauty. He’d count it a privilege to be seen even once through her eyes, and how he burns for that. How he burns like the sun with which he’d quarrel, for just one smile and one hello.
“It’s me, Doctor. It’s just me. You know who I am. I was your first.”
Your first friend. Your first affectionate physical touch. Your first telepathic bonding. Your first lover. Your first schoolmate. Your first enemy.
“That’s alright, come to it slowly, your memory. I’ve faith. You’re the brilliant one. Even if you’re a discombobulated, disorganized mess.”
Will she forget what passed between them, when she was a cantankerous old man? It can’t have been long ago, not for her. She still simmers with regeneration energy.
“With all the DEVICES and GIMMICKS that have been invented, you’d think there would be something to get SONGS out of your head.”
This complaint has nothing — nothing ! — to do with the fact that the Master has thus far failed to get ATC’s All Around The World off her mind. It likewise has nothing to do with her frustration at herself for actually rather enjoying the song in question, and almost being tempted to hum it as she works.
Nothing at all.
“Funny you should say that. I remember vividly when we would have killed to have a different noise entirely out of our head.”
The Master leers at his future self, with, he hopes she’ll recognize, mostly no barbs.
“Which song is it? Oh please. Please tell me it’s something gaudily cheerful.”
“Aaaa-aahhhh, see! SEE. You could have let me catch you. And you know I’m right about everything else, too.”
The Master brays this with a cackle. He saunters smugly over to his best friend and perches right on her back, effectively pinioning her.
“Now, were someone to ask me, ‘Master, what IS it like to live with the most brilliant, courageous, beautiful woman in the cosmos?’ I would just say, ‘well, George,–’ George is a good name for an interviewer, don’t you think?–anyway, I’d say, ‘George, she’s mad as a hatter, but if you let her run her course, and accept your inevitable role as her catcher, why then, it’s quite a lark.’”
All this, conversationally, while he uses her as a chair for his tight little rump.
She sees him coming, but her limbs have yet to discover how to work together rather than individually, so she remains rather helplessly on the ground. His weight is nothing she can’t handle, but that doesn’t mean she’s content to lay there and give him the satisfaction of using her as a chair.
The Doctor has forgotten until this moment in time, though, that she no longer has the advantage of height on her side. She tries to push herself up using legs that don’t stretch out as far as they did before. Her arms aren’t nearly as long either. It doesn’t quite work.
“Oi! I’m not ‘mad as a hatter’!” She realises at this point, after futile efforts to squirm free, that she’s trapped. “Well then, catcher, y’gonna let me go? ‘Cause you still can’t have my sonic.”
“ ‘OI! OI!’ HehhahHAHHH, you’re such a pleb.”
Says the inexplicable Manc who tries even now to cover his own Northernness up with something posh and Londinian.
Grudgingly, the Master stands. He gently smooshes the Doctor’s face into the TARDIS grates, then ruffles her hair, and the ruffling predictably becomes affectionate petting. At last, he offers her a hand up.
“C’mon, Graceful Swan. You need a long nap. Make the sonic controls isomorphic–you know, like my laser, just saying–and it’ll be a moot point of me nabbing it, now won’t it?”
He kisses her nose, and then, her oft-fugitive lips, tenderly.
“It’s yours. I won’t touch it. Scout’s Honor, and all that.”
He exhales and it turns into a snarl of incomprehensibly frustrated affection. He snatches a few levers, wrenches and assorted power tools into his arms and gives chase.
“Look, at LEAST let me run a few tests! Doctor! DOCTOR! I know you can hear me … Hearts, you look like a drunken baby giraffe, slow DOWN … ! I SEE you smiling, damn it!”
Imperiousness swift becomes desperation.
“It’s fine! Bit burn-y, but it’ll be fine!”
She won’t let him test her screwdriver because she knows he’ll improve it. He always was the clever one. She doesn’t care if the screwdriver explodes in her hand later, as long as it gets the current job done.
Luck is not on the Doctor’s side. Coordination all over, she catches her foot on something she herself left lying around, and finds herself sprawled on the floor a second later. Stubborn even now, she clutches the screwdriver to her chest.
“See, it didn’t even explode when I fell on it!”
“Aaaa-aahhhh, see! SEE. You could have let me catch you. And you know I’m right about everything else, too.”
The Master brays this with a cackle. He saunters smugly over to his best friend and perches right on her back, effectively pinioning her.
“Now, were someone to ask me, ‘Master, what IS it like to live with the most brilliant, courageous, beautiful woman in the cosmos?’ I would just say, ‘well, George,–’ George is a good name for an interviewer, don’t you think?–anyway, I’d say, ‘George, she’s mad as a hatter, but if you let her run her course, and accept your inevitable role as her catcher, why then, it’s quite a lark.’”
All this, conversationally, while he uses her as a chair for his tight little rump.
She steps up to him, taking his hands and bringing their faces together, rocking up on her tiptoes to rub their noses together. That’s the closest he’ll get to his request before she looks up at him with those impish hazel eyes, glittering with mischief and daring.
“Catch me first.”
Then she whirls around and takes off running.
He snatches for her the moment her expression shifts to that of a mischievous changeling.
“Don’t you d–!”
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!”
The Master’s voice carries a heavily spousal wryness.
The screwdriver in her hand sparks once more.
“…It’ll be fine.”
She has the good sense to turn around and run away, stupid grin on her face and sparking hazard still in her hand. Unfortunately, she hasn’t yet gotten used to having shorter legs, and doesn’t manage to run nearly as fast or as gracefully as she thinks she can.
He exhales and it turns into a snarl of incomprehensibly frustrated affection. He snatches a few levers, wrenches and assorted power tools into his arms and gives chase.
“Look, at LEAST let me run a few tests! Doctor! DOCTOR! I know you can hear me … Hearts, you look like a drunken baby giraffe, slow DOWN … ! I SEE you smiling, damn it!”
Icarus 