It’s amazing, those moments he’s caught utterly off guard, and millennia of monstrous evil and dogged survival reverse their course, and in an instant, a smattering of words from his Goose leave the Master a little boy.
Uncertain, soft of hearts, with a ticklish giddiness permeating every thought. and a little line forming between his eyebrows, one to match the line between hers.
“I would do anything to keep you alive. I can’t fathom ever wanting to destroy you now. I would rather be like a beekeeper to a … .a really ancient, really beautiful hive. And watch you spin honey.”
He chuckles at himself, at the quirky sentimentalism of the words, so unlike anything he might have said even a handful of years ago.
And he leans into her kiss, and hums, and it turns into a prolonged moan.
“HAL-lo, WIFE,” the Master booms, “and HAL-lo, BABY!”
He kisses each forehead, loudly and appreciatively. And then, in answer to the Doctor’s question, he holds up a forefinger, and lofts an eyebrow.
“Watch this.”
He lifts a small remote control, no bigger than one of the TARDIS’s custard creams. He punches the red and green striped button at the center.
The entire library illumines with a lights display of every Christmas hue, including the shapes of Santa, trees, snowmen, reindeer, stars and snowflakes, to Trans-Siberian Orchestra music.
Koschei puffs up with endearing pride.
“For you, my girls! Ho ho, and a third, very merry, ho.”
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.”
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?”
Her voice echoes for miles, the chatter of bystanders fading into a stunned silence. They may have not been part of it before, but all eyes were on the small blonde woman who shook with rage.
Her entire being bristles with power and commanding energy, far larger than life or even her current, unfortunately petite body.
Hazel eyes pin the offender with blazing fury.
“I said NO! You have no right! No right to harm these people! This planet is protected by the Doctor, and if you know what’s good for yourself, you’ll take a moment to think about EXACTLY what that means before you take another step.”
The Master’s whole body electrifies. Nipples harden, hair pricks, goosebumps surface. Fight or flight, the struggle between sane survivalism and the mad, abject, sublime desire to run toward the tornado, to pitch over the edge of the waterfall, to stand screaming and beating one’s chest in the hurricane. To be saturated wholly with the violence and the fury contained within the being he unthinkingly adores.
And he does. He runs toward the conflict, straight out of the TARDIS he’s strictly ordered not to leave, for fear of the disruption of TARDIS energy healing his back. He forgets himself when eclipsed in her shadow. He always has. Always will.
He catches her ‘round the waist and spins her out of the way of the people she’s antagonizing.
“Thete, STOP, they’re armed–!”
A musket fires, and grazes the Doctor’s bondmate in the side. A superficial wound, nowhere near the fatal shot inflicted by Chan-Tho, or Lucy, or by a random insignificant Mondasian gunman on Bill Potts. But Koschei goes down just the same, with a startled grunt, and cups his left side, and falters down onto the wound, trembling.
“Shit,” he snarls, trying in vain to stand.
In films, moments such as these are shown in slow motion, as if the heroes have ample time to recognize what is happening in the moment and be quietly horrified in convenient pacing for the plot. But that is not how it happens in reality.
The Master yanks her aside at the same moment a musket fires, and he collapses in the same instant. It’s over before she can even realize it happened, and her husband is struggling to stand. Red is soaking through her favorite soft cotton tee of his, the one that somehow has made it through spit up stains and grease spots and still always just smells like HIM.
It is here that the world slows down.
It slows down, because for just a fraction of a second, the timelines are splayed out in front of her, a Lord of Time, each a new path she can choose. Her husband is wounded, likely having saved her life in the process, and the people responsible will likely fire again if given the chance.
Her decision is made, and just as quickly, Time catches up.
They would have been luckier if Time had remained still.
There is a flash, and the Doctor spins, sonic screwdriver wielded as a weapon, not a tool. The gunpowder in the muskets ignites, a small explosion in the hands of each and every one of them threatening the Doctor and her family. Though it disarms every one of them, it is not enough to kill anyone, though a few cry out in pain from burns or mangled fingers. The Doctor looks on with cold disinterest.
“YAZ! Graham! Get Koschei back to the TARDIS.”
Her voice rings with authority and a cold, merciless determination as she stalks forward, her eyes blazing. Several innocent bystanders take a step back, not wanting to be caught in the crossfire of this fierce woman who reeks of fury.
“It’s people like you,” she spits, squaring her shoulders and addressing the leader, who clutches his hand with a pained grimace, “that make this world worse.”
“You claim what you do is for the greater good, but it’s not. It’s done out of hate and anger, and a selfish desire for power and glory. You’d do anything for it, right or wrong. But it ends here.”
The man stares at her… and whatever he sees staring back at him is more terrifying than whatever threat he imagined he would find in this place. The Doctor’s eyes hold billions of years of memory.
Death, destruction, pain, rage…
She’s seen things that would drive any one of these people mad, and it shows in the cold glare that she pins him with.
“Go. No second chances. I think it’s time to bring that rule back.”
Koschei’s never been cognizant of sluggish time; it’s more the sudden SILENCE of these horrific moments that he can feel. The relentless memory of Drums long purged, even that, violently ceases to be, in moments like this.
He continues to stagger, striving to stand, because he knows. He knows what is about to happen is the equivalent of barometric pressure plummeting. He knows these men will leave with their lives, because the Doctor claims to abhor murder, but there is not necessarily anything merciful about that choice.
And while the Master is enchanted, dazed, aroused, by the fury of his best friend, every time he sees her light eclipsed by her countless millennia of grief and loneliness and rage, he knows there is a chance that shadow will never pass.
So even as Graham stammers something about one two three up, and even as Yaz bodily shields Koschei, he reaches past their stricken forms for Her. Even as he is lifted off his feet and carried, even as the gunmen shriek and cower and run, he stretches his mind to breaking, to tickle, to brush, Hers.
{ Don’t leave me. You promised: you said never. You promised. }
Beaches and babies and psychic ice cream; dolphins and Twirlies and mile long conveyers and dinner under the holo-stars by Our Tree; fencing matches and snuggles and good books and great tea and very long showers; come back to me, Goose.
But then Koschei blacks out.
When he’s conscious again, it’s hours later. Nobody’s in the room but his wife.
On dear, his wife.
His beautiful littleVengeful Pixie.
His Sunbeam of Doom.
Oh, look at her. Brilliant. Eccentric. Fearless. Effervescent. Breathtaking.
“Thete … Thete … Thete … I cann’feel my … .face. Hoo! Hooha! Hee. I can’t feel ANYthing. I didn’t die, though, that’s encouraging.”
Conversationally, idly, he glances at the bandage over his left side, and then, at the IV in his wrist.
Icarus 