“You are the Doctor, comprised of morning sunlight and babies’ laughter, and yes, despite this, I know that you could knee me in the nuts, drop me hard, and snap my neck if you still had the inclination. It is a fact, and I impenitently confess that i find it desperately sexy.”
There was something about the way he was speaking to her. The mere look on his face. Something about that told her that he was being serious and that her own words had surprised him. However, the fact remained that this wasn’t what she was accustomed to. Something had changed about him.
“Well I don’t mind, really, you’ve just managed to catch me off guard.” The Doctor said before chuckling a little, “Something seems different about you? What is it?”
The Doctor moved closer to him, at first reading his face. Maybe Missy had rubbed off on him? The malice wasn’t there, at least not to the extent it always before. Instead it look like he cared. The look of the friend she had always cared for, maybe even more than that..
Yes, Missy’s rubbed off on him, but in an unanticipated way.
To be so undesired that even your own descendant self would hasten your regeneration … it jettisoned him into a place of dark melancholy, and self-loathing. And it sent him–ever the dogged survivor–on a frantic quest to find a Doctor, any Doctor, who had not yet given up hope, and consigned him to a place firmly in the past.
Koschei hopes to have found her, but her tepid reception, her skepticism, give him pause. His cheeks flare red, with sudden mortification.
“Maybe this was always a part of me, Thete. But I needed some time at your side, without the conditions of feigned imprisonment, to learn another … . venue, another way … . to govern myself.”
He swallows, audibly.
“I thought I might give that a go now, with you. Was this a mistake?”
After the adventure with… the thing, Graham needs to decompress. It affected them all, this one, but no one more than him. And rather than find the Doc or Ryan or Yasmin, he seeks probably the least likely person: the Master.
He doesn’t say anything right away, doesn’t even know what to say, he just sits down next to him, silently looking at his hands.
The Master says nothing, and has at least the social acuity to know not to stare. So the mercurial scientific prodigy imitates the quiet, no-nonsense bus driver’s exact stance, and waits.
At length, he smiles, and the bitterness is actually not nearly so pronounced as the grief. So perhaps, despite being an intergalactic criminal genius versus an everyman, they are exactly the same person in this moment.
“You think we’re alike … . because we both have a ‘her’ in our lives whose light is indescribable. Yes? But, hhhhah. Graham, I AM the Solitract, to the Doctor’s Universe. The time will come, if it hasn’t already … when she finally sheds me completely, and I’ll have to tell her, too, ‘I will dream of you out there without me.’”
He does regard Graham, now, with muted suffering.
“Your Grace might not be here in tangible form, but she would never have had to willingly leave you. You’re not corrosive and clinging. You’re good. Take refuge in that.”
The Doctor is buried in his work, a pile of cables and wires at his feet. For that reason, he doesn’t even address the Master when he arrives. Not until, that is, he steps in front of him and disrupts his work.
“Somethin’ I can help you with?” he asks a bit stiffly. He hadn’t felt much like sleeping lately. There wasn’t much point when the other side of the bed was so often empty.
“Oh, dar-ling.”
The Master sighs indulgently, and apologetically, awakening more fully, now, from his slumber.
He steps out of the path of the Doctor’s labors, stands on his tiptoes and pecks the side of his neck. He knows: he knows all the potential ways that timelines can unfurl from any given moment, and he knows that his husband can do the same, and he knows that the Doctor has seen other futures, in which they are not together, and the Master has found an earlier or later Doctor with which to nest. He could, at this moment, tell his Theta that he has seen the same disturbing things transpire, and not always even with other versions of Koschei. But that will not ease the gloom and irritability that have descended on his best and oldest friend.
“Here. Let me bring you the reason why I’ve been away so mooch.”
He pads back out of the Console Room.
He returns less than five minutes later, aided by a TARDIS that wishes to see Her thief in better spirits. What he holds is a very young coral from another TARDIS entirely, and it’s mounted onto a strange chrome-like piece of unmistakably Gallifreyan tech. Any child of the Great Houses would recognize that material: a piece of the Untempered Schism.
“Alright, Oscar the bloody Grouch: yes I’ve seen Sesame Street, you think I’d only watch Teletubbies? Bad for the brand to admit it, but there you go. Now listen here: I’ve been to Gallifrey behind your back, which was exceedingly hard to do when you were always on board with me, and don’t ask how, but I’ve stolen two things: a piece of the place where you married me, and a baby TARDIS to mark our new lives together. Because we’ve got a kid under our wing now, albeit an adult, and she’s having a kid, and well, maybe one of these days you an’ me’ll have a kid too, you never know. Or maybe it’ll have nothing to do with children. But it’s gonna grow oop and maybe it’ll merge with your Old Girl, or maybe it’ll carry a member of our budding family to someplace else entirely. But it’s an investment I’ve made in us. Us as we are now, two children of war who are healing from its scars, you big-earedidiot.”
The Doctor only grunts in response as the Master leaves, halfway not expecting him to come back. He’s irritable and irrational for reasons that have very little to do with his husband, but as often he does, he takes his misguided emotions out on the person nearest to him. He goes back to his work for a few minutes more, almost grateful for the quiet until Koschei returns with something in his arms.
Even the TARDIS gives him a less-than-subtle mental nudge and forces him to look up. What he sees makes him take pause. He knows what it is immediately, and he’s awed into silence.
“You…”
He stammers and sets his work down on the console, turning properly to face his best friend.
“You stole this? Right from under their noses?”
The Doctor looks amused, and he approaches the Master with wide blue eyes, drinking in the sight of the infant Time Ship. It is beautiful, really, and made even more so by the thought behind it.
His lips quirk into a half smile and he reaches out to touch the thing, his work roughened fingertips gentle.
“You did this for us?”
Theta’s expression falters a bit, but then he wraps his arms around both Koschei and their growing TARDIS, embracing them both and nuzzling into the Master’s neck.
“You bloody old fool,” he chuckles. “You sentimental, beautiful old madman. I love you. I’ve MISSED you. But I love you. Thank you for this. It’s beautiful. You are beautiful… My Koschei. My beloved.”
No, dummy, I did it for the Easter Bunny. Of COURSE for us.
“M-hmmm,” Koschei hums aloud, practically incandescent with smugness. “So the next time you decide to get all mopey and bitter about my absence, coom looking for your, what was it?”
He places the infant corals gently aside, steps up onto the Doctor’s feet with brazen entitlement, and kisses his lips between each word: “Sentimental. Beautiful. Old. Madman.”
(continued from ask) drapetxmaniia: (10th) the doctor wraps his arms around the masters waist, hoping to surprise him as he pushed his cold nose into his neck, a grin on his lips, before he kissed it.
Koschei’s entire form tenses, the way a cat arches its back; his features contort into an expression of shock that quickly evolves into haughty outrage.
“COLD,” he protests explosively.
He wriggles like a mongoose with the intent to turn, when instead far warmer lips suckle on his neck. His deeply sensitive, long, handsome neck.
And instead he’s writhing with a host of entirely other urges.
“M-mmmm,” he groans, and flashes a lazy smile.
–//–
The Doctor Laughed softly in amusement, and takes pity on him, (If you can call it pity, or just plain teasing) before pulling away so that he can kiss his cheek.
“I seem to have captured some kind of beautiful cat-like creature,” He grinned, laughter still in his voice. “I think ill keep him all for myself~” he comments jokingly, before returning to why he suddenly decided to capture him in a hug.
“You’re not cold are you? I think The ol’ Girl’s suddenly turned the heating down, but everything is fine on screen, but i keep getting the shivers.” and as if to prove a point another uncomfortable cold spell flashed though his body, making him grimace and hug Koschei a little tighter.
“Beautiful? You flatter me.”
You could be beautiful, that face with the cockatoo hair and the pinstripes had pontificated, that long-ago Christmas.
You are beautiful, that same face states now, imparting a hope long forgotten.
“But I don’t believe you’re being a drop insincere. What a miracle.”
Deep within the Master’s telepathic channels, there’s a steady thrumming, very like purring indeed.
“I’m hardly ever cold, Hearts,” he drawls. “Which I gather is why you’re using me as a space heater.”
At first the Doctor’s fussy concern pleasantly flusters him, and the Master is very nearly bashful.
But then he chuckles, and it’s rich and genuinely amused, without a touch of the habitual snideness. He reaches down and pinches the Doctor’s sides, even as they’re still touching foreheads, even as his beloved gazes furtively, ashamedly, into his eyes. It’s a tacit reminder that their lives need not be marked by grave ceremony all the time; they know each other way too well for that.
“You really are a silly sausage. I would do anything for you, genius. Willingly. But it seems we’re at an impasse, as you’re wired to do the same for me.”
He kisses first the Doctor’s chin and then his lips.
“You should know I will be there every time you awaken. Again, my vow to you. And you should further know that the shame you’re feeling, that I can practically taste between our minds, is misplaced, my love. Take it from someone who’s always suffered self-imposed claims of invincibility, just to cope with what was done to me by the same bastard that shoved you in that Confession Dial.”
His surprise registers both physically and mentally at the Master’s playful touch. He jumps visibly, and there’s a quick flash of a grin on his face, before he replaces it with a glare and something that might resemble a pout, if he’d admit to such a thing. The telepathically transmitted shock, however, is much more difficult to mask. It’s exactly the same kind of surprise he always projects when he’s given unexpected affection, and he has no ability to suppress it.
The forced glare disappears after a moment. He doesn’t mind really, even if he does expect his reaction to be the source of a new wave of amusement from Koschei.
“Yes, well, it might take me a while to get used to that. To you, being there. Knowing. I’ve been very good at pretending it’s not a problem for a long time, so — be patient.” Be patient, the way I’m not patient with myself.
The Doctor releases the Master’s shoulders, and wraps his arms slowly around his waist instead. His movements are carefully measured and thought out.
“You’re being far too nice to me, given how stupid I’ve been about this.”
“Oh, do shut up. Never call me ‘too nice’ again. Remember the hell I’ve given you over the millennia. I don’t want to hear that I’ve gone soft in the will as well as the tummy.”
The Master pinches the Doctor’s arm suddenly, without ceremony.
“I’ll acclimate you to my magnificence faster if I continue to do naughty, mean things like that, on a mundane everyday basis,” he cheerily explains. “Anyway!” He sinks back into the embrace that his beloved has so carefully executed. “You know … given what you’ve survived, my love, I’m proud.”
He chuckles straight from the gut, and rubs circles in the Doctor’s spindly back.
“And if you’re asking me to be patient–me–then you’ve forgotten that patience has been the one virtue I’ve always exhibited in spades. Don’t worry.”
Icarus 