“You’ve got another gray hair? You’ve stolen me another painting? Some crown jewels? A rare love powder for extra pleasure from an intergalactic market? A new grand piano? The kids drew me a picture? Did I get any of them right?”
Oh, the smirk that spreads across his face, at that declaration; the expression of triumph. Oh, this conquest. He takes the hands around his waist, forces them down and slides his fingers into the Doctor’s. He lifts both joined hands to his lips and kisses, with particular fervor, the left.
“I think you belong to me already.”
He turns his head enough that he can look up, and back, at his oldest friend’s face.
“But I will marry you anywhere and anywhen. So let’s go.”
The Master flings open his TARDIS door, laser screwdriver blazing at the ready, only to find the foyer occupied by a young woman who seems entirely unfazed that there is a sleek black monolith standing in the middle of a cow pasture in Scotland.
He licks his lips, drops his weapon and cocks his head.
“Right, so I’m gonna take a wild guess and say you’re acquainted both with time travel and Time Lords, owing to the fact that you’re treating my TARDIS like a common petrol station at which to check your Google Maps directions.”
His voice is, for his small framed form, unexpectedly deep and charismatic, every consonant enunciated with the flawlessness of a West-End London Shakespearean. It’s clear he’s donned airs, and yet there’s something oddly charming about his affectation.
“There’s a grand total of TWO of us in this vicinity of the universe. So since you’ve already met the Doctor, process of elimination dictates you already know my name.”
Opehlia had a bit of free time as her father was busy tinkering in the console, so the girl decided to finally explore the bigger on the inside box. It was much bigger than she anticipated, and not expecting for her to get turned around as easily as she did.
She sighed, trying to remember exactly where she took the wrong turn and how to at least get back to somewhere that looked familiar. Problem was, the hallways started to all look familiar.
Hearing something nearby, the young Gallifreyan ventured cautiously towards it before opening the door timidly. Poking her head inside, she was surprised to see another person. She didn’t realize anyone else would be on board but her and her father.
“Hello?” She asked, poking her head inside. “Sorry, I got lost and… you are?”
The Master is hard at work on deep-space armor fittings that can be donned at the molecular level. It’s legitimate nanotech, but the “large” parts require work using surgical instruments of immense precision.
So when Ophelia comes blithely bumbling into his sanctum sanctorum, he holds up one, free hand, with one index finger, sharply, while speaking in an ill-matched tone of supreme calm,
“Juuuuuuuust a moment, please. And then I’ll decide whether to study, welcome, or murder you.”
The laser tool he’s using bevels the accurate dimensions into the salt-grain sized component, and Koschei sits back from the mirrors, LED strobes, and laser nodule, lifting his goggles as the instruments power down.
He tidies his short-shorn pale hair into order, and focuses his sharp black eyes on his guest.
“ … AHHHH, it’s the prodigal daughter! Welcome to my workshop slash think tank slash laboratory, Miss Ophelia. I’m the Master, but family refers to me as Koschei. Or dad. Dad’d work. I’m your dad’s lifelong best mate, and we’re definitely, you know, involved, so you can think of me as your stepdad. Drink? Cocktail? Wait, bloody hell, are you of age?”
He’s loud, charming, warm and expansive, a touch intimidating, but his claws are fully retracted for this particular person.
“Superior Time Lord biology, wouldn’t you have to eat a lot for those to even affect you? How many brownies did you have?”
“You mean t’tell me the Doct’r nev’r told you …” The Master clears his throat, and reaches out to grasp the side of the table firmly, against an undignified wave of dizziness. He squints, and focuses ferociously on enunciation. “ … abou-t. The highly compromising. Effects. Of ginger?”
He sinks down where he’s mistaken a chair to be; it’s about four inches back from where his ass lands, and he sits, decisively, on the linoleum.
“ … I meant to do that.”
Oh dear. I’m embarrassing myself in front of the Bad Wolf, who consumed the Heart of a TARDIS. How terribly unfortunate.
She looks good in pink. A blond in pink.
Huh.
Well that’s unexpected. Maybe I should add some pink to my wardrobe. Rather inspired, that.
Was it rude to laugh at an intoxicated person if they didn’t mean to be intoxicated? Probably, but Rose couldn’t stifle the giggle that burst past her lips. The Master was absolutely sloshed and on her floor. “He didn’t, but we never even drank together. Didn’t know ginger affected you this much. Ginger brownies are my mum’s specialty.”
For a man who talked about how almighty he was, seeing him in a state like this was quite amusing. It made her wonder what would happen if the Doctor got his hands on a few of these brownies. “Y’ need help over there? Wanna try sittin’ again?” She walked over and reached out a hand to help him up. The poor bloke.
“Why, my DEAR girl, I do believe I already AM. Sitting, I mean.”
A marked giddiness permeates the moment; Koschei snickers and it becomes a full-bodied cackle which is remarkably infectious.
“Ya MOOM, huh?”
He squints up at Rose thickly, but eventually accepts her hand, a miracle in and of itself, and further evidence both of his respect for this particular Companion, and his intoxication. He wobbles his ass into the nearest chair, leans back and blinks rapidly.
“Mm-HM. Maybe I’ll date her, and you can date the Doctor, and we’ll go on weird double-dates, and become the soobject of the next trashy … daytime … talk-show … Jerry … what’s that bloke’s name? Season … SPRINGER. We could go on Jerry Springer. How about that, Miss Rose Tyler?”
He snorts another laugh.
“I’m joost shitten’ ye, I’ll probably get jealous and try to kill you! Oho WOW. My internal monologue is GONE, Rose. What do I DO?! Heh-HAH!”
“doesn’t it just ruin your day when the person you fail to kill is actually alive?” she drawls, tilted back in a chair with her feet thrown up on the desk as she eyes her past self with a morbid sense of curiosity. “well, certainly good to know we can MAIM prey but honestly, we’re so much better than that. i’m almost disappointed and yet – here we are.” her voice is singsong, high and sharp as the edge of a knife.
“hello, junior. say something nice for mummy, won’t you? i think it’s time we came to an agreement, you and i.”
The Master stops altogether in his advance. This isn’t the first time he’s encountered his future face since their disastrous parting, but it is the closest they have come to physical contact.
“You,” he ventures, mouth dry, words deep but husky with conflicting emotions, “are more disappointed than I, I’m sure. At the time I only wished to stop you from forfeiting yourself to the shared love of our life. I really, really didn’t want to commit suicide.”
He loathes himself in the moment, a sensation with which he’s still unfamiliar, for being the hotter-blooded of the pair. The volcanic magma to the softly lethal snake bite. No finesse, no quiet viper grins, no surgical precision, at least, not anymore: just a thundering lionsinged by the force of his own fury, just Icarus falling from the sun with his melted wings, just a tired old man with gray in his beard and a bad back care of the woman sprawled before him.
“All that aside: It cannot have escaped you that I admire you tremendously.I want you to be happy, Missy. I always did. I want us to be happy.”
How is that for nice?
So Junior joins Sis, offering her the added gift of his deference by taking a seat on a chair lower than hers.
He rests the olive branch in the silence between them.
“Only one thing?” He rolls his eyes and sighs dramatically. “Ah, I rather thought I was useful for reaching high shelves for you. I suppose I’ll have to hide more of your things up there, and then you’ll be sure to appreciate my height.”
The Doctor is privately glad he seems to like the hugs, though. It must mean that even though he’s not a natural hugger, his height gives him an advantage when it comes to hugging people to comfort them.
“Your height — or lack thereof — makes you easy to hug, I suppose, little spoon.” He does enjoy calling him that. It shows on his face.
“HAH! Hehahah! Oho! You were worried. I can feel it.”
The Master dances the fingers of both hands up the Doctor’s chest, straight into his unruly cumulonimbus cloud of curls.
“You were worried your hugs didn’t stand up to some nonexistent test of merit! You numpty, try to remember when we were boys, and pounced each other in red fields and rolled down hills of grass in a tangle of limbs. Were we worried for even a moment, that we might not be good pouncers? No, of course not.”
He stands right upon the Doctor’s feet to obtain the height to kiss his chin.
“We were only overflowing with joy and affection, and expressing those things in the comfortable tactility of three dimensions. That’s all such things are, in the end.”
He then bites his hooked nose.
“I even forgive you for that damned nickname, in light of that fact.”
The Master observes his young, parallel self with rarest pity. Compassion is something he’s not wont to offer, not even toward himself; more than he realizes, he speaks in the voice of his loomers, of his House and his whole heartsless caste, when he castigates himself for any failing great or small. Self-loathing, from the avowed narcissist: it’s not so implausible, actually.
He squeezes the fobwatched doppleganger’s upper arms.
“I dunno what name you go by, but I do know you. You’ve surely not missed that we look exactly alike. But the things you don’t know yet, you don’t know for a reason, and I’m not eager to upset that delicate amnesia. Might do you damage. How you ended oop here could be by one of many routes, including a TARDIS and a Vortex Manipulator. Either term ring a bell?”
He lifts one hand off, and gestures emphatically for focus.
“You know what, before any of that, what DO you call yourself? And please, please, don’t say ‘Harold.’”
“No, um. It’s Sam. Sam Tyler,” he says, and this is such a weird conversation for him. He’s confused as hell and barely comforted by the man in front of him.
The drumming noise inside his head is loud and quiet all at once, as if they recognise the other man, despite the fact that this is the first time Sam’s met him.
“Sorry, but who are you? You say you know me but all I am is confused,” he informs. “And no, the words ‘TARDIS’ or ‘vortex manipulator’ don’t happen to ring any bells.”
Bang some drums, though, maybe.
“Sam Tyler.”
He speaks the name the way a professor pronounces a key term on an examination, every syllable crisp and clear, every vowel trembling with an almost comical power.
And then he snorts.
“Well OKAY. Not the answer I was expecting. But it’ll do.”
It’ll do: the entire identity of a human being will pass as satisfactory, for this lofty Time Lord. He sniffs.
“You need only know my title: Master. Why don’t I take you someplace off the damned street, at least? And before I do, indulge me with one further question.”
Black eyes shrewdly narrow.
“Do you hear anything? I don’t mean right now. I mean constantly. Something deafening, yet nobody else hears it, and if you tell them, they accuse you of madness. ‘Auditory hallucinations,’ the psychiatrist proclaims. Right? I know it’s an odd question. But if it’s true, you’ll know immediately what I mean.”
It’s an unusually crass declaration from the salty Victorian, but out it spills, with great panache, great enunciative crispness, on the t.
“I KNOW I didn’t say that aloud. I KNOW I didn’t. What’d you do, eavesdrop? We weren’t even touch-telepathing, how’d you DO that? God, is it that earnest a need? Not that I’m ADMITTING to it … !”
Icarus 