itsjustkind:

｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ sclfmastery:

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?”