The Master squawks with childish indignation-a characteristic that, incidentally, throughly unites this pair.
“You were WORK-ing!” he howls, hands flung out. “If I bothered you in the middle of your calibrating, to say, ‘Oi, DOC-tor, there’s a neon purple and chartreuse butterfly on the hood outside,’ you’d have told me I was being,” and he assumes a helium-high voice, complete with a Yorkshire warble, uncannily accurate, “ ‘rude and presumptuous wif mah valuable tahme!’”
She wrinkles her nose irritably at him – both because of the mocking and also because he’s right – and smacks his arm.
“You know what this means, right? You need to go find me a purple and chartreuse butterfly. Now.”
“Doctor, I can’t make indigenous insects appear out of thin air.”
A pause.
“Oh damn you. You know how mooch I hate the word ‘can’t.’ ”
And off he goes, stalking out of the TARDIS, nabbing appropriate bug-collecting equipment from the lab table on his way out.
The Doctor doesn’t react at first as the Master approaches him. The letter he’d written had been placed strategically in such a way as to hide its’ true nature at first glance but reveal the secrets laying therein upon inspection. He knew the Master would investigate it and once invested would see to it to read it in its’ entirety. The other’s presence here and now was evidence enough already that the letter had been discovered.
His eyes lifted as the Master stepped onto his feet, the act causing his hearts to swell with both familiarity and nostalgia and at once his hands meet the Master’s hips to keep him in place. The words that meet his ears set his flesh on edge, those fingers at the Master’s hips twitching just slightly in anticipation of what might come next. What comes is unexpected. His head bows at the other’s touch and his eyes flutter closed momentarily when forehead touches forehead.
The gesture is a comfort, as is the Master standing on his feet, but the words are what takes him by surprise. He is unsure for a plethora of unnamed seconds whether or not the Master is being serious, sarcastic, or simply testing the waters to see what the Doctor will respond with and thus, he is rendered temporarily speechless. His initial response is, of course, that this is impossible. There are too many risks, the first and not even the most complex being that of a paradox that would serve up a veritable feast for the Reapers. The automatic idealistic response causes his stomach to fill with shame and his insides to squirm.
He doesn’t voice them for this reason.
After a moment’s contemplation he chooses his words slowly, carefully. “I am whole, with you here, my hearts. You complete me, you always have.” The tone is genuine, and he continues. “It’s the centuries between that haunt me. Those ghosts refuse to settle and the more my mind is freed from the chains of the past the more memories there are, the more ghosts there are haunting the shadows. We may not be there physically, but the knowledge that I may never deserve your forgiveness, your love, your company, it-…” He lets out a ragged breath. “I spent so long in the dark, believing you were the one who needed saving, so much energy making you believe that as well, but it was me all along. I was the one who was lost.”
The hands at the Master’s hips squeeze tightly, needing to be anchored to the here and now lest he lose himself in the maelstrom of the past swirling through his mind. The normally bright cerulean is dark and pitched with navy. It has been a bad day. A bad few days, if he’s honest, and perhaps that’s what prompts the words that come next.
“I want to. Damn it all and damn the consequences, I want to go back. I want to go back and take your hand and never let it go. I want to prevent my younger self from ever venturing up that mountainside and instead go to you for comfort as I always should have done. I want to run with you, not from you. I want to risk a paradox so great it could swallow the Universe whole if it means I could prevent the fissure that came between us. If it means I could prevent hurting you and hearts, if you are serious, if that statement was genuine then I beg of you to take my hands and be quick before I change my mind. Take my hands and we’ll say sod the Universe, sod the timelines and together we’ll go back and get it right.”
The Doctor is still giddy and the fact that the Master is so delightfully flustered by his rapid-fire revelations that weren’t strictly revelations at all in combination with the hastened kiss and subsequent prodding to the side of his abdomen, well, that just makes it all the worse- or the better, as it were. The Doctor had lost the debate, but oh how he had just won in turn. The flush ever-present in the Master’s cheeks makes the Doctor feel something akin to vertiginous, soaring ever higher the more the Master fails to speak.
The feigned acrimony combined with legitimate near-perplexity of the Master’s demand causes another small bout of dare he admit, giggles, to escape his lips and all at once he is that dreamer, that boy standing on the mountainside with grass beneath his feet and his hearts right there in front of him. He can’t help himself- it’s always been this way and he finds, just as he always has, that he needs more. More of this, more of the happy, the banter, the moments that are far too few and far too far between.
“A demented- a demented cockatoo! Ha! Oh, oh yes, that settles it, you malevolent little koala bear, I shall never stop. Not now. Not once. Not for a moment, and do you know why? Because. You. Like. It.”
He says the last four words slowly, with a decidedly risqué tone and a waggle of his eyebrows. Unrelenting, the Doctor’s hands both immediately dive to prod the Master’s sides with deft fingers and as he does so he chuckles softly before those hands come to rest once more on the Master’s hips. He’s still smiling affectionately as he speaks again and his voice is soft, genuine, despite the mischief shimmering in his rich chocolate gaze.
“You are, you know. You’re breathtaking. Stunning. Clever. Venturesome. Powerful. Sovereign. Master of my hearts.”
The Doctor leans in and presses another brief kiss to the Master’s lips before pressing their foreheads together once more.
“But you know what else you are? Mine. Just as I’m yours, you are mine.”
“I am NOT! A KOALA BEAR!”
The Master is too comically indignant to come across as truly menacing. He squints at the Doctor as he approaches, lip curling with comedic irritation as his oldest friend attempts with his clownishness to seduce him.
The poke to his sides earns a grunt too deep and loud for his diminutive frame, as though the spirit within can scarcely be contained in this small and boyish body.
“Get off me with your philandering hands! AND YOUR POETRY, you cad! You obnoxious thing, you really do play a risky game, thinking you can probe at the tiger’s cage then compliment its stripes!”
It couldn’t be clearer that, for all his dirty talk and bombast, this particular Master is exceedingly Victorian: from his slang, to his vaguely steampunk-goth attire, to the laws of courtship by which he abides.
“Don’t touch me, you sly heathen, I!”
But once their foreheads touch he’s ceased his pompous thrashing. And he’s smiling like a fool.
Icarus 