They spent the whole of a week conversing quietly about painful truths. The whole of a week, while the Master chose to sit by the Doctor’s side, and honor the bond of their childhood, and tend to him without glory, or even hope of a happy ending.
So it’s with these thoughts in his hearts that he reaches his oldest and dearest friend–the one person he might place before himself–and rushes to his side.
He kneels. And then he lies down. And takes his hand.
“Come with me and I’ll show you a different perspective.”
A pause, and he turns to look at the Doctor’s profile. He beholds age and weariness and regret. These will simply not do.
“I’m sorry, Hearts,” he breathes, and means it, and hopes that the strength of that voluntary contrition will empower the Doctor to stand and follow him to safety.
The Doctor’s eyes are closed now, but he’s conscious. His fingers curl slowly around the Master’s.
“I don’t think I can stand yet,” he murmurs. There’s a crucial word there. Yet.
He needs to move a little bit, keep his body going. He bends his free arm, lifting his forearm up off he ground and repositioning it, hand resting on his middle. There’s a pain there, where the Cyberman shot him. It was an old one, not quite strong enough to kill him. The pain sears through him very suddenly, rising in intensity. He takes a shuddering breath, tensing his whole body and gripping the fabric of his clothes tightly with cold fingers. His other hand squeezes the Master’s.
It passes after a moment or two of agony. It’s his body trying to heal itself. It’s working, sort of. He needs a zero room really, if he’s to recover from this. It’s possible. He just needs to get there.
“It hurts,” he says quietly, opening his eyes once more. A second surge of pain forces him to close them again just as he tries to push himself onto his side, and he cries out this time. The first one, he’d been expecting the whole time he’d been lying here. The second has come sooner than he thought, and it catches him off guard.
He clutches the Master’s hand with both of his own now, trying again to force his injured body to move the way it’s supposed to. “Zero room,” he tells him. He can do this, for him. For his best friend. He’ll keep living, for him. Or trying to, at the very least.
“If we don’t make it there, I just- I just want you to know-” he coughs as he tries to sit. “-That I love you. Without hope, without witness, without reward. I still love you.”
The Master sits up with some strain, but succeeds. He turns and rests his hands beneath the Doctor, as though his old friend were floating on the surface of water, and he standing, and supporting him afloat.
Yet, yet. Good, progress. A sacrifice, an allowance, for once not in vain.
“I’ve got you,” he responds, without even being conscious of his words, the moment the Doctor voices his pain. “Zero room, a martini, a soft pillow, one of my life cycles, you name it, you old fool.”
If Bill bloody Potts can carry the person Koschei has known and loved longest, the person about whom he could write an anthology of novels, or to whom he could dedicate a newly discovered galaxy, then the Master certainly can do the same.
He steels himself, and presses his forehead to the Doctor’s. Eyes close, and for once there is something like humility, and something like a great deal of vulnerability.
“Surely you know. Surely. That I never stopped either.”
And I never will.
He’s kissing the Doctor’s eyelids without thought, as though by instinct.
“You know, you know. Come on. Here we go.” And again, “I’ve got you.”
He stands and lifts the Doctor into his arms, and begins to carry him across the smoking fields of Mondas, to safety.
A few steps in, and he scoffs, and speaks with characteristic indelicacy:
“Golly, Thete, you’re a stick, how can you be this heavy?”
“Oh? Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but eating people’s body parts won’t make you grow any taller. Must be true, what they say about short people being the angriest.”
He inches closer, daring, and quickly kisses the end of the Master’s nose. The speed of his movement is a tell; he wouldn’t move so fast unless he knew he was playing with fire. This isn’t the same, though. He almost wants to be caught. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
This feisty verbal bandying is a new development of their maturing, strengthening reconciliation. It invigorates Koschei, and he grows louder and more boisterous by the minute.
“Oh, very well, you pedantic bastard! See if I let you spoon me again for the next fortnight! No, no, don’t coom a drop closer, you can’t seduce me into compliance again!”
The Doctor is only just awake, but conscious enough to register the movement. Before, there were no arms around him, and he was cold, but now he’s being held. It’s a huge improvement, according to his tired mind.
His hands move blindly to rest over Koschei’s, but he gets distracted from his intention to just leave them there and relax. He ends up tracing the shape of his hands, touching every finger as though he’ll never be able to see them again, and must commit the shape to memory. He measures his own hand against Koschei’s, testing out whether he’s able to cover the whole hand with his own. He can, as it turns out, if he positions his hand just right.
He’s already been lying here, in this half-awake state, for quite some time. But it’s suddenly become much more interesting, now that Koschei has moved so close to him. He considers their position, and what he likes most about it. He very much likes their closeness, and the fact that he’s being cuddled but not restricted. He can move if he wants to, which from time to time is something that’s absolutely necessary for him to be comfortable. He’s okay now, though. He wouldn’t mind more touching.
When he’s been lying in silence for the amount of time it takes him to go through each and every thing he likes about this, he begins fidgeting. Not a lot, but enough to give himself something else to think about. If he moves his left foot three inches backwards, he’ll reach the Master’s foot. He calculates the approximate number of degrees he can tilt his head backwards before his hair will brush the Master’s, then converts it to radians, then loses concentration and thinks about something else entirely.
He needs to move. He doesn’t want to wake the Master, though. Or does he? He wants attention, that’s for sure, but Koschei is sleeping… No, he needs to let him sleep.
He carefully turns himself over, so that he’s facing him instead. That’s much better; now he can study his face. That’ll give him something to think about for ages. He smiles for a moment, adoring. If he wasn’t so concerned about waking him, he might have kissed him. On the cheeks, on the nose, on the lips. Everywhere.
I love you, he thinks. He doesn’t even realise he’s projecting. I love you so much. He’s happy just to lie here and observe, in wait.
SEND FLUFF
Koschei doesn’t awaken fully at first. He took to hearts the Doctor’s demand that he not disrupt his own sleep schedule.
But feeling his Bondmate’s eyes rapturously upon his features has a way of rousing him even from the deepest stupor.
“Mnnnn, what?”
“Hmmmhmhm, Thete. You’re such a closet romantic.”
He speaks as though he hasn’t just described himself. Regardless he burrows closer still, greedily hoarding every gangly inch of his oldest friend. Lazily, he kisses his jaw, and then his mouth, and closes his eyes again.
They spent the whole of a week conversing quietly about painful truths. The whole of a week, while the Master chose to sit by the Doctor’s side, and honor the bond of their childhood, and tend to him without glory, or even hope of a happy ending.
So it’s with these thoughts in his hearts that he reaches his oldest and dearest friend–the one person he might place before himself–and rushes to his side.
He kneels. And then he lies down. And takes his hand.
“Come with me and I’ll show you a different perspective.”
A pause, and he turns to look at the Doctor’s profile. He beholds age and weariness and regret. These will simply not do.
“I’m sorry, Hearts,” he breathes, and means it, and hopes that the strength of that voluntary contrition will empower the Doctor to stand and follow him to safety.
“You’re wet, and fierce, and beautiful, and I have never loved you more.”
The Doctor is panting softly, which says a lot for someone of a species that’s built to avoid running out of breath. Her eyes are a perfect synthesis between annoyance and adoration, part of her wishing to throttle him for enjoying the uncomfortable happenings of wet cloth against skin without knowing specifics and part of her wishing to laugh until her respiratory bypass kicks in.
“I’ll ‘ave you know wot I jus’ went through was… it was… They called me Satan’s acolyte! I didn’t joost- I didn’t joost fall into the water accidentally, they- they… An’ all cos I’m a- a… Oh I tell ya wot, the human race needs t’sort out this whole gender inferiority business cos it’s gonna end up bloody killin’ me.”
She stops speaking with a grunt.
Three seconds pass, her fingers twitch at her sides. She needs a nap, warm, dry clothing, an entire sleeve of biscuits and, if the Master knows what’s good for him, a fair helping of plaudits and adulation. Shoulders slumping, she gives in to that gorgeous look on her beloved’s face and the first hint of a smile appears. Rays of sunlight breaking through the dark.
The misadventure isn’t over yet, but her Koschei gives her hope.
She moves closer, her arms lift to circle his shoulders and before any protestation can be had she’s hugging him tightly to her soaking-wet-self. Forehead pressing against his pulses-point just beneath his earlobe there’s no hiding it- this adventure’s taken it out of her, for many reasons, and she isn’t even done sorting it yet.
“Thank you, Hearts… I love you, too,more than there are stars in the cosmos, I joost-… Thank you.”
Her mouth closes and remains closed, but her mind, interwoven with his own, crimson and cerulean now a perfect and deep violet, is speaking volumes. She’s nervous, and that almost never happens.
Can you help me?
He steps toward her without her ever having to audibly speak the request. Her sheepishness and her flush are expression enough, to the soul who’s known her since they were seven years old. Koschei guides his Theta by the small of her waterlogged back, straight into the bathroom. He strips her down and takes a warm dry fluffy towel and dries her, roughening up the dry volume of her hair. He pauses to kiss her on that ever-worrisome crease between her eyebrows, and to speak:
“Darling, that all depends upon how you define ‘Satan.’ Is it the fallen angel of Abrahamic lore? Or is it the scapegoat, the spectre of a backwards society too fearful of what it fails to understand? Oh my love. Don’t you know how easy it is to weaponize xenophobia?”
He tucks her hair behind her jeweled ear, and kisses the lobe, and tugs his teeth on the little silver chain.
“Don’t take it to hearts. You’re brilliant. Annoyingly so. Kick ‘em in the nuts. Even the royal nuts. It’s the bitch’s prerogative. Okay, maybe I’ll do it, in that case.”
He trots out and hastens back with a dry rainbow shirt–maroon this time, of course–and trousers.
“Coat didn’t get wet, did it? I’d imagine not. Just so you’re aware, I’m actually full of homicidal wrath, and if you’d like me to poison the water source into which you were flung, and the soil along with it, so that the extra-terrestrial parasites within all die, I know you’re into the ‘high road’ and all that golly fluff, but sometimes a moral shortcut is in order. Oh, what, you think I’ve not done research while stuck in this box? Even I in my unstable regenerative state can reach my hand across the TARDIS threshold and collect a soil sample. That pipette’s been banging like a bongo with the mud particulates I collected. Lemme guess, anything interred in that stuff isn’t exactly restive.”
“Master.” The Doctor replies, schooling his features to not give away any emotion. He studies the man in front of him, his eyes tracing over his face. He clenches his jaw. There’s a million questions wanting to burst from his lips, but he stays quiet, not even sure where to begin.
Koschei lingers in the doorway with a surprisingly gentle expression.
“Nice, isn’t it? To have the perfunctory greeting out of the way. Now, to the meat of it.”
He strides authoritatively toward his counterpart, and oldest friend, and dearest enemy.
“I’ve a simple question, really.”
The expression in dark sly almond eyes is halfway between wistful and predatory. One finger reaches up to trace the contour of that clenched jaw. He knows every compulsion the Doctor combats right now. They’re mirrors.
He whispers the question, inches from the face of his other self.
Koschei flops forward on his belly. He grins his unbridled cheshire grin at his baby girl, who looks almost comically like a tiny carbon copy of himself: his nose, his eye shape, her mother’s eye and hair color. A fey little wisp of baby, with fat pink cheeks.
He meets her every squeal and coo with a laugh from the gut and a clap of hands, wiggling his fingers with encouragement, until she clumsily collides with him.
“Hello, Beautiful! Have you been tiring mummy out?”
The Master, breathless and fatigued from running, spins with dread at the brassy female voice. Horrified alarm becomes amusement and something very implausible, coming from this particular Time Lord toward any human: admiration.
“Well I’ll be damned. You’re nothing if not persistent.”
He raises both palms in surrender.
“Honestly, Ms. Noble, I’m guessing from the fact that you know exactly who I am, and not in the standard ‘oh my God, you’re that nutter who got Prime Minister and disappeared’ fashion, it means that the Doctor spared your memories and you’re not feeling charitable toward the bloke who turned the whole planet into himself and scared the piss out of you. Long and short of it: self-preservation. Now I must warn you, if you’re armed, I shall have to do something drastic, like gnaw off your face with my bare teeth, because I’ve left my laser screwdriver in my TARDIS.
Is that dead seriousness or a truly perverse sense of humor? Rather impossible to say.
“Well, there’s no need to point it out so obviously.” He’s sulking, the way he always does when anyone points out something he thinks he’s been keeping well hidden. “Shut up, Roundface. I love you. Stop being so good at reading me.”
Icarus 