This time she’s properly well and done it, but she couldn’t be arsed to care about that in this moment. In this moment where her love’s eyes moisten and his face does just the same, the memory playing out and tugging at both of her hearts as though it were yesterday. Feels like yesterday, in this regeneration. Closest she’s ever gotten to yesterday, in fact, and she feels the colorful warmth of freedom pulsing through her veins.
She’s never been closer to forgiving herself than she is at present. Never been closer to deserving the happily ever after that she’s found with her Koschei in their little-but-not-little TARDIS. Oh and when he reaches out to touch the image she wishes she’d have thought to make it a hard-light hologram. Though perhaps not. Perhaps that would be a bit too much for either of them, and the past is better left where it belongs- in the past, as a memory.
Intangible but present all the same.
Theta can feel the other Time Lord’s wish to pull his younger self close because she feels much the same impulse each time the memory’s been played, which has been a lot in the course of the orb’s making. When his question comes the smile on her face widens, brightens, and the moisture in her own eyes reflects the reassurance that quickly follows.
“Yes. Course it is, love. It’s us then, it’s us now, it’s us always. That’ll always be us. Two idiots in love. Happy, finally, again.”
She pauses, and says the next three words with such reverence and certainty that he can tell there is no fear left inside them. Not an ounce of hesitation to speak of.
The Doctor grins from her place lounging about on the sofa in the media room as she feels the Master’s presence surround her, bright cerulean tingling and coiling outward automatically in response. Melted-toffee eyes follow the feeling and find him standing at the entryway to the room, a hand lifting to motion to her face. In the background, instead of the usual movie, haunting music can be heard.
“Look’it what I found. The brainy specs. Been in the pocket’a that trench all this time, can ya believe it? Thought I lost ‘em centuries back. You were ri’.”
Her hand falls back to her side and her expression melts into one of reflection and devotion, a look he’s seen more times than either of them could hope to count.
“Coom sit with me, Hearts.”
Halfway between cocky and proprietary, the Master lingers in the doorway taking in the sight of the Doctor. He tilts his head, smile spreading, as a web of red accepts the tendrils of blue and swallows them to violet.
“Can you even see in this face, with that prescription?” he points out saucily, with a quiet laugh from his gut.
But he won’t deny for a second that this sight has the power both to bewitch and to arouse him, and to make his chest ache with nostalgia. That face, from so long ago, will forever mean more to him than his own breathing: the first face to properly ask, join me.
And how appropriate it is, now, that she would say, come sit with me.
So he does, as a cat deigns to wander over to its mistress’s side, sauntering, yet the path is a beeline directly to her. He perches beside her long enough to lay flush across her, and plant a savory kiss to her mouth.
It takes every ounce of learned gentleness the Master has not to seize the Doctor by the face, shake him, scream–you KNOW me, I am you, I AM you!--force memories upon him by virtue of their telepathic link.
Instead he squats in front of his fallen friend and presses a hand, very, very gently, to his brow. Through his fingers he infuses a warm settling sensation, a benign version of his lifetimes-long command you will obey me. It’s a sensation of the mind, one like fuzz, like downy feathers.
“You’ve got amnesia. That means you can’t remember. I’m safe. We’re best friends. I’m …”
He swallows back the infamous moniker, and settles for his schoolday title.
“I’m Koschei.”
And then he lies: just a small lie, a lie that disregards an unfortunate and heartsbreaking past.
“I would never hurt you.”
He nods at the smoke rising from the control panel, inwardly, viciously, compartmentalizing his panic and dread with the task at hand.
“But I need to diagnose the mechanical malfunction that hurt you. Stay here, yeah? You know this room, you know me, we travel together, we’re practically married. You call yourself the Doctor. Stay here, darling.”
Lest we forget how many people world-wide instantly adored Tenn*nt, or Sm*th, or even B*ker, or D*vison before they’d even seen ONE SINGLE IOTA OF SCREEN TIME. I think the only complaint people had about Capaldi was his age, and that was mainly just those who weren’t exposed to the Classic series. There is absolutely no way to pretend it has nothing to do with the incorrect perceived notion of the Doctor’s ‘gender’ like that’s a thing.
The Master’s Cheshire grin is both salacious and completely adoring as he watches the Doctor make a seductive fool of herself.
“If you ever change,” he leers, “I’ll cry.”
He crawls up the length of the Doctor’s seated form, still grinning like a fiend, and begins to kiss her, starting at her navel, all the way up to her chin, and at last, her mouth.
Then, with a wiggle of eyebrows, he works his way back down, with no intent to stop at her belly button.
Her head bows at that look, that look that sends her blood rushing to her face and makes her skin wash with coral hues. She giggles and the word, “Never” escapes somewhere along the way.
After a few seconds she’s back to looking at him, a smile pulling both ends of her mouth until she’s unable to hide it despite trying to.
“F’you see me, then how is it m’over ‘ere all alone an’ you’re still there, not here, where I am? Coom’ on, love. M’bored an’ you’re far too focused on somethin’ that’s not me.”
Again she tosses another balled up bit of paper in his direction, aiming this time for his gorgeous hair.
He catches the next wad of paper, both precisely and nonchalantly. He uncurls himself and stands, hands in pockets, beautifully predatory. But the look on his face is far too soft to suggest any real danger.
“That is anexcellent point. You’re positively scrumptious this evening.”
The Doctor steps out of the corridor rather lively, her hands cupped together in front of her to conceal the surprise and an impish look on her face. For centuries now, longer than that, they’ve been attempting to suss out the perfect gift for one another and the Master’s always been one-up. In a previous life full of pinstripes and fearfully unmanageable hair, she’d gotten nearly close enough with a phial full of her own blood. But that wasn’t properly a gift for the Master more so than it was a gift for them both. Now, though, she thinks she’s got it at long last.
THE gift.
Practically skipping her way over to where the Master perches himself she’s nearly unable to remain still, the abundance of energy bubbling up inside of her causing her to shift her weight from foot to foot in a manner suggesting she might actually be dancing rather than presenting a gift. Without a word but with a rather brilliant grin on her face and a wrinkle in her nose, she opens her hands palms up to reveal the secret beneath.
It’s an orb, clear as crystal and perfectly round, near the size of a playing marble. The orb itself is attached to a silver chain, and as she presents it to him her thumb trails over the spot in which the two objects meet, pressing down gently until a click is heard. Immediately following the click the orb glows in shimmering gold before filling with sight and sound.
It’s a memory, projected in such a way that it seems almost like a cinematic frame encased inside. The memory is the pair of them as young boys, holding hands in the red fields and gazing up at the twinkling starlight above, heads tilted each to the side so that their temples rest against one another’s. She’s managed to procure the memory from the third party perspective, allowing the orb to show both of their young, boyish faces at once- the look of serenity and contentment the pair of them are wearing is unlike anything either has worn since those faraway times. Aside from, perhaps, recently.
The sounds that accompany are the sounds of Gallifrey itself.
Insects chirping, the wind through the silver leaves now dark and glittering in the absence of the suns, the blades of grass swaying this way and that, and of course the two round-faced lads speaking their native tongue. It appears to be not an argument but a debate of emotions.
The adolescent Koschei can be heard whispering the closest facsimile to the words ’I love you, you idiot’ in Gallifreyan, to which the adolescent Theta immediately responds in kind. They stare at each other for a moment, then begin to laugh with unfiltered joy and tumble backward into the grass. The memory ends then, and the orb swirls with a glowing golden light before returning to the clear glass it was when she first opened her palms.
She still doesn’t speak, but rather just stares at him with a hopeful look in her melted-toffee eyes.
The Master rolls out from underneath the TARDIS console at the sound of footfalls he would know at the opposite end of the universe. There’s already a wan expression of amusement on his face as he lifts the goggles up and strips off the rubber gloves that protect his perfect fingernails from six inches of engine grease.
His eyes fall first on her flitting feet. He sits up with a grunt, lumbar acting up, and cocks an eyebrow at her.
“Myyyyeeees?” he trills, feigning a silly expression of sternness.
She reveals the perfectly crafted sphere. And he whistles low.
“What excellent morphology, my darling and star. And what’s it meant to–?”
When he reaches to snatch it, she activates the control that plays back the memory. And Koschei blinks, tilts his head and watches the whole memory unfolding, enrapt.
His eyes are moist before he can consciously register his emotions. He’s smiling, with such tender familiarity, and awe.
“That’s us,” he gasps.
A hand ventures into the holograph, even as the Master knows there is nothing material to touch, thousands of years lost. He first caresses the air where Theta Sigma’s head glints in the setting suns, and then fades with the appearance of stars. Then his fingers travel to the back of his own dark head, and that is when the tears fall, and fall again, harder.
He swallows, trying to bury the absurd urge to cradle that little boy close and promise him the happy ending he’s found. Mightn’t he have gotten here sooner had he known?
“It’s us now, as well, isn’t it?”
He turns to her, vulnerable with the poignant memory, seeking reassurance.
“Doctor, I don’t suppose you could have just let me do the grocering while you recovered your memory AND your sense of balance.”
The way the Master speaks these words, he might as well be reciting Chaucer to a crowded theater; his voice thunders through the supermarket with thespian incredulity. People turn their heads and stare. To them, it’s a highly typical old married couple, except the woman is rather batty and the man is rather melodramatic.
Just another day in London.
“Come on, then, the most most logical way to do this is to sample sundry foodstuffs, while I distract any clerks who happen upon us. Just pinch off a bite of everything not boxed or canned or raw. Unless it’s sushi, which you very well may enjoy. We’ve yet to know.”
He sniffs, laces an arm about her waist and guides her toward the bakery.
“I confess, it’s rather exciting. Will she like cupcakes? Croissants? Shall we go hogwild, and even try a muffin?”
The way his voice thunders through the supermarket doesn’t have half the effect it would have on the Doctor’s previous incarnations- in fact it has less than that, to be sure. Instead of blushing, cursing, or even frowning a bit, she merely smiles wider and lets out delighted snort of laughter at the way he dramatically phrases each word. Every syllable drips with headlining disbelief and if she’s not mistaken, a bit of enervated affection.
He’s done in, and she’s loving every ticking moment. The people staring make her hearts swell and she hopes she can get him to raise his voice a few more times. He’s just so bewitching that way, when he’s lost his head.
“An’ let you ‘ave all the fun? Look’it this place! S’like another planet entirely, f’it were made’a produce, confections an’ tin cans full’a questionable foodstuff. ‘Sides, only way I’m gonna learn is if I try first hand.”
Her eyebrows both lift at once, but she doesn’t comment on his suggestion of partial thievery. She’s done enough for the planet in her collective lives, and besides, it’s not like children don’t do the same thing on a near daily basis in London to begin with. At least if her memory serves, which… well, for this purpose it serves, anyway. Along the way to the bakery, she covertly snatches a bit of this and that, randomly popping things into her mouth and either happily swallowing and adding the full item to the trolley or scrunching her nose with distaste and shoving the half-chewed remnants in her inter-dimensional pocket. She’ll clean that later.
“A muffin? What a scandal! S’like they’ve tried to be cupcakes an’ failed! Not even a scrap’o icing to ‘elp it along. For shame.”
Her voice holds a charming playfulness to it and despite having found more less-than-savory items than ones she likes along the way, she’s still smiling. She does that a lot now, it seems. Once at the bakery, she reluctantly parts from the Master’s side and wanders through the many tiered tables of confectionery wonderment, and breads of course, careful to only try bits of this and that when no one is looking.
No, she’s not embarrassed; his impishness only encourages her. That’s because more than any other face of the Doctor since their boyhood, this Doctor is the most like his Theta Sigma, his co-conspirator and fellow rapscallion. Each would bend into a veritable pretzel to impress and support the other. Each would come out of a day’s mischief exhausted and fulfilled. And walking through this grocery store, he’s never had a more vivid memory of those days in red grasses.
“Lost his head,” hardly. He’s playing her every bit as much as she is him.
“You sound like a damned street peddler, my love,” he ventures to call her by so familiar a title. “Someone auditioning for a Northern version of My Fair bloody Lady. HehHAH. Right, okay, but consider this: you may or may not recall, but in past lives, you adored bananas, and well, there is no such thing as a banana cupcake, but banana nutbread muffins? Those exist in veritable armies.”
The space criminal picks up a plastic container of the aforementioned confection: with a bright orange sticker declaring “SALE!” He wiggles it around in front of his compatriot.
Icarus 