He catches her by surprise, and that is the only way he would get the best of her. The Master’s hand grips her jaw, pushes her back against the wall and pins her there by the throat. It is only because it’s him and no one else that he’s not unconscious on the floor with the help of her Venusian aikido skills.
The Doctor trusts her husband implicitly never to hurt her, but that doesn’t stop a brief flash of fear from running through her before she catches the look in his eye. Her own hazel gaze grows dark and she lets her hands run down his chest instead of gripping his arm.
“Interesting… can’t say I’ve ever seen you get quite like this… Can’t say I don’t like it, though.”
His mouth hangs slightly ajar with his arousal. Oh, there it is. That flicker of terror which might otherwise send him shrinking to a corner with shame at a relapsed evil. But now? With carefully staged, moderated “force”? He’s deeply satisfied. The Oncoming Storm, a tiny bit afraid, because of him; the Doctor, horny and playful and possessive and smug, because of him.
Nobody but nobody can do that to her.
Except him.
“I thought,” he explains, throaty, husky, “I’d surprise you with something I know you really. Really. Like.”
A knee presses up between her legs. He self-indulgently shivers at the nails scraping his chest.
“There’s a whole book written about you,” he breathes, ghosting his lips, his teeth, over her mouth, pinching her jaw hard. “But am I in it? Do they know what I can do to you? Do they know how I can make you go incandescent with pleasure? Do they know how I can undo you and leave you unfurled like ripe flower? Hm?”
send “DON’T GO!” and an emoji to see my muse’s reaction to yours: 🌧️ saying it while crying.
The moment his Theta charges into the room openly weeping, the Master spins with an expression of affectionate alarm. Hers is a sanguine disposition. And maybe there are days she suffers deep gray melancholies, and he must wrap his form around hers and shield her as best he can from herself. But great tearful displays are an exceptional rarity.
So it’s with concern and a readiness to slaughter whatever wounded her that he exclaims,
“Hearts, what is it?”
“Darling. C’mere. Breathe with me?”
I’m not going anywhere. Not for our whole lives. Tell me what’s wrong.
The words come out like ripping off a scab, even though the Master strives with every fiber of his independence-loving, ire-filled soul to appear intimidating.
“After all,” and even less successfully, to look smug and dark, “it’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
“What?”
The Doctor turns, her goggles perched on the top of her head. Her expression is filled with confusion and something like hurt that has not entirely processed.
She isn’t sure what brought it up, what brought him to this conclusion, but… whatever it is, her hearts ache at the very thought of it.
“Koschei, I–” She licks her lips and clears her throat as she tries to force her mind to work, to understand what he’s saying and why.
“I love Yaz, ‘course I do. But… don’t you understand? Love… it comes in many forms. It’s… it’s the one thing I believe it, the only thing that I am absolutely certain in.”
There aren’t many certainties in our lives, but what we have… I have certainty in us. Love. In all its forms. Love is a form of hope. And like hope, love abides. In the face of everything. We’ve found love in each other. We believed in it, we fought for it, waited for it…
“Oh, love… Yasmin is wonderful, and I do love her, but to say that I should be with her and give you up is saying I should die of thirst if I’m to breathe air to live.”
She sets her work aside and approaches him, her hands held out, palms up.
“I love you. I belong to you. I don’t want anything but you.”
He doesn’t have the reservoirs of hope, faith, or natural compassion that she has.
Koschei of House Oakdown has only ever known how to loathe or adore, with every ounce of his being, and stay the course until ever last atom he can commit to a cause or person has disintegrated. He only knows how to commit himself fully, how to overpower, how to eclipse.
All that he has going for him is his devotion.
I cannot bring you what a human can. I cannot give you their folly or their innocence. I cannot be good for you, the way they can. I cannot be a novelty to you, a new stimulation. I can only endure, and wait, and love you.
That I can do, with every broken piece of my two hearts.
I belong to you, too.
He takes her hands–little hands, housing such a powerful being. She’s an angel. She’s achild. She’s acomet.
Hope-Bringer. Life-Bearer.
Everything, his everything. His only everything.
She always will be.
“You’re my hero, Hearts.”
And he speaks the one remaining wish of his hearts, the one thing missing from their perfect life, that he knows he will never, ever achieve:
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.
“I know you’re cross with me. But I missed you and I wanted to hold you for a while.”
“Well, I’m busy at the moment. You’ll have to wait.” And depending on his mood, he might make the Master wait a long time indeed.
“Convenient of you, missing me now.”
“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 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.
“I know you’re cross with me. But I missed you and I wanted to hold you for a while.”
It is one single, insignificant moment in the grand scheme
of the universe. But that moment is enough to crack the very foundations of
what they have built here over these last years.
The Doctor doesn’t recognize it until after she’s done
speaking and he pulls away, staring at her with a horrified and heartsbroken
expression. That look on his face twists her insides worse than even the terror
of his nightmare had. That is the look of someone who has lost something, the
look of darkness taking root, the look of doubt blossoming into something more
than she can handle.
You’re never too much for me, Koschei. Never too loud, never
too enthusiastic, too wild, too… much. Please don’t run away.
But it’s too late. The damage is done, and he recoils from
her, the act itself causing her to flinch from the pain. His words are cuts
made in her very soul, in the part of her that has found her home with him.
Every apology, every muttering of regret. It hurts.
She is as paralyzed as she had been in bed, unable to do
much more than watch as he strips the bed and rushes past her almost without
seeing her, crying and apologizing to her, to himself, to the universe that has
always seen him as lesser. As wrong. Broken. Monstrous. Shameful.
The Doctor wants to get up, climb into the shower fully clothed or not, and wrap him up, to shield him, protect him from his own doubts
and fears… But how can she have any right to do so when it her own doubt that sparked
the blaze of his own imagined inferiority? Though she doesn’t know how long she’s been kneeling on the
tile floor, Theta’s knees are red when she stands on trembling legs. The Master
climbs out of the shower, skin red and steaming from the punishment he
inflicted in an effort to rid himself of whatever filth he sees in himself. His
eyes are wild as he turns on her, and she can’t help but flinch again.
She is not afraid of him, but of his own fear. It frightens her when he is so full of doubt
and uncertainty. It frightens her because one of these days she might not be
able to pull him out of it. But this will NOT be one of those days. It will
not.
She takes a halting step towards him, then nearly throws
herself against him, wrapping herself around him, her nails digging sharply
into the scorched raw skin of his back. The Doctor buries her face in his
chest, hearing his hearts beat, smelling the scent of her favorite soap on his
skin.
“No.”
He’s too far away. His mind, his hearts, even his body is
too separate from hers, too far and too guarded. She feels isolated and cold
and she screams for him, silently, a cry from her very soul that begs him to
come back to her.
I never tire of it. I would die for you. I would live for
you. And I will be here at your side for eternity, no matter what.
“I have never regretted you. NEVER.”
Never regretted loving you, never regretted having faith in
you. Never regretted our lives together, our family, our child. Never regretted any of it. Because you DID save me, Koschei. You saved me from myself, from my
own despair, from hopelessness. You saved me, taught me things about myself I
never knew and loved me anyway.
“I’m so sorry, Koschei.”
We all have our moments of doubt. But I NEED you to know it
changes nothing about us, about how I feel about you, about how much faith I
have in you.
Gods, I hope you believe me.
I hope you know.
I love you.
I’m sorry.
We all have our moments of doubt.
“But I never doubted you.”
Not since you gained this face. Not since you grew so wise and your compassion and hope came thrusting to the fore of all you are. You are my boy again!
Oh, but that’s unfair, it’s unfair, and apart from what she means, and the moment he speaks it he violently shakes his head: like the physical embodiment of her firm “NO.”
It’s the last death knell of his determined, self-punitive resistance, before he greedily gulps down her every word, and greedily clings on to her, naked, skin still radiating the heat from the shower. He feels her scream, even though she does not make it audibly, or even between their minds. He feels it and beyond any self-serving compulsion is the will to keep her safe. So he braces the back of her head and holds her near, and sloppily, unsteadily kisses what he can reach of her face.
Her nails in his back hurt but they ground him, too.
I’m sorry you saw it, Hearts. I’m sorry you saw my fear.
He holds fast to her words: { You DID save me. }
He gathers her face in his hands, as he so often does. He meets her eyes, as he is unafraid to do, because he does know this. He does know.
So he nods at her, quirks his eyebrows, as if to say, “Do you see me saying yes?”, and he nods again. A slight nod, that becomes firm.
I love being your favorite, and you’re mine. I’m sorry I got scared. The things I fear aren’t your fault.
He kisses her forehead, where that troubling little line forms, when she’s upset. He kisses the corners of her eyes, and her tear trails.
I believe you. I do.
Don’t be sad, Goose.
When he finally speaks aloud, it’s hoarse, and very meek:
“Could we … could you. Could you check on Zinny? Please, I’ll. Be okay for a minute. Please, Thete. I know it’s silly. But just make sure she’s alright. I’ll sit right here and wait for you. I’ll be here, I. I promise. I won’t go anywhere.”
Where would he go, physically, plausibly, when her half of their merged TARDIS wouldn’t allow it anyway? Nowhere, but he speaks of his mental and emotional state. He aims–with the pieces of his legendary resolve–to comfort her, that this life is sacred to him.
“I love you, too, my Darling and Star. Please, Doctor … the faith you have in me isn’t a mistake. You couldn’t make me stop loving you if you tried. No act in any universe could stop me loving you.”
Were he to pluck the most hurtful phrase from a million trillion infinite possible combinations of sounds and syllables, this exact sentence would fit. Would be the sound of the neck snapping. Would be the sound of the glass shattering. The noose tightening. The gun firing.
This sentence would be the weapon.
The Master stares uncomprehending at the Doctor. His legendary capacity to maim is lost.
“ … what?”
He is falling she is leaving she is leaving he knew this day would come he knew it he knew it he knew ithe knew it he… .
I gave up on you a long time ago.
I gave up on a lot of things back then.
I gave up on my family, I gave up on my friends.
I gave up on myself.
When the Doctor left Gallifrey all those centuries ago, they’d had to give up on certain things. It was too painful to carry those burdens with them. But that meant giving up parts of themselves that they never imagined they would ever get back.
So… the fact that she has is infinitely precious.
“When I left. I gave up. I gave up on you, on us… and it’s been my single biggest regret. In all my lives, there’s not one thing I’ve ever regretted as much as making the decision to leave you behind.”
The Doctor steps towards her husband and takes his hands into her own. The gaze with which she stares up at him is impossibly full of love and unending, undying hope.
“You’ve come back and taught me that I should never give up… never lose hope, because that’s when you start to lose parts of yourself that you may never get back.
I was lucky enough to get you back…”
The Master takes great gulps of air. His relief is palpable, an unfurling sensation in his mind, and therefore in the entirety of the room that his mind so easily permeates.
“GOLLY, Thete.”
He all but collapses, making a great hammy show of buckling his knees and smacking his thighs and, slightly breathlessly, laughing.
“Thanks for scaring the PISS out of me. Maybe predicate your dramatic remarks with context next time!”
He captures her cheeks between his palms, squishing them until her elastic little fey face collapses like an accordion, and she is forced to speak with fish-lips. His expression is fiercely adoring.
“Your punishment for this grievous silliness is to recite Hamlet’s Soliloquy while I hold your face like this. I’m waiting.”
He forces this playful indignity on her for but a moment. Then he draws her tight against him with an affectionate growl, and crushes her in a hug. His chin rests neatly on the crown of her head.
“You always speak as if I had a choice. But following you is as natural to me as drawing blood from an enemy, or climbing any summit that challenges me, or breathing.”
The universe is a delicate balance. Everything in it has an
equal and opposite to keep existence from spiraling out of control. It is much
the same for the Doctor and the Master as well. Never in all her lives has she
been so happy, so whole… but that is not to say there aren’t things on the
other end of the scale. The Master’s nightmare puts into sharp relief one of
these.
The Doctor wakes before he does, hazel eyes wide and terrified.
But it is not her terror. It is secondhand, shared through their bonded minds
and made all the more powerful by the skin to skin contact of their ankles
entangled together beneath the bedsheets. She is paralyzed by his nightmare,
paralyzed by the same imagined blade that pins him to the ground in his dream.
She stares blindly at the ceiling, unable to see anything but what he is experiencing.
They say dreams happen in a matter of seconds before waking, a
flash of consciousness as the mind begins to stir, but this is different. This…
It feels real.
Somehow she knows what is coming before it does. Her gut churns
and she tastes bile in her throat. Still, it doesn’t lessen the shock when she
hears her daughter’s voice filtered through the robotic intonation of a Cyberman.
Thank God, she thinks briefly as her husband lurches, drags them
both out of the nightmare and stumbles into the bathroom, all but tripping on
the sheets. She hears him, smells the stench of urine soaking the mattress, but
she still can’t move. Her hearts are pounding, her ears are ringing, and it’s
all she can do not to vomit herself.
The Doctor takes a few steeling breaths and pushes herself up
into a sitting position, her entire body trembling as she gets out of bed and
follows her best friend, her husband, her Koschei, father of her children into
the bathroom where he’s curled around the basin of the toilet. One step, two,
and she lets herself fall to her knees, wrapping her arms around his sweat-soaked,
sobbing form. He stinks of fear and vomit and piss and sweat, but she clings to
him, trembling almost as hard as he is.
“I—” She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, for once at a
loss as to what she could say to help him.
The Doctor is a creature born of hope, and as such it is one of
her most defining traits. Yet… she struggles to find it now. Her hands shake as
she runs her fingers through his hair, wipes a tissue across his mouth and
tends to him in the little ways she can that don’t require words. Her faith in
him has been unwavering. Her pride in him, in his progress, in his commitment
to do good for goodness sake. Since the day he asked her to help him, never once
has she doubted him.
And perhaps that is her own failing.
The Master doubts. He has always doubted, and she has been
steadfast in the fact that she doesn’t. But… for the briefest of moments, she
is afraid. She is afraid not of him or what he is capable of, but of the fact
that perhaps she should not be so absolute in her conviction. She is afraid of
the idea that maybe, just maybe, she could be wrong about her unending faith in
him.
But even as that seed of doubt is dropped, the Doctor
consciously tries to grind it into nonexistence.
The Master doubts. He has always doubted, and she has been
steadfast in the fact that she doesn’t. Now, perhaps more than ever, he needs
her to continue that belief, that strength. She knows his fears as intimately
as her own, and knows what it would do to him if he felt that she imagined for
even a millisecond that he could be capable of that, of harming even a hair on
their baby girl’s head.
She takes that seed, now pulverized into a ghost of itself and
locks it away in a box in her mind, and then locks that box in a chest, hides
that chest in a locked room, and seals that room in a vault. Only then does she
speak, dabbing the sweat from his brow and rubbing his back.
“It was a nightmare, love. Just a horrible, terrible nightmare.
I’m here. Zinnia is safe and sound in the other room. You are safe. You are
loved. You are home.
It’s going to be all right, I swear to you.”
But it happens. The doubt she feels in her own faith. It happens. She cuts it off like the head of a snake and she shoves it in her dark corner and puts a deadbolt lock on it, but it already happened, and he already saw it. He saw it. It’s like when you’re a child watching a magic show and the magician’s hand slips and you see the trick coin, just a flash, a flicker, of it, and the illusion bursts into a thousand tiny shards, and you watch, you stare blankly, and a chain reaction of lost belief, in that particular charlatan, then in magic, then in Santa Claus, then in God, then in Heaven, sets off like a hundred thousand little explosions of broken glass in your mind, and your world has fallen apart, because of one flicker of one trick coin. It only takes a millisecond to lose your whole world.
Koschei doesn’t realize the pure betrayal on his face. Doesn’t realize he’s lifted his face from the toilet bowl and he’s staring with horror and fear and loss into his Theta’s eyes. He’s clambering to seize onto the magician’s crafty hands, to hear the “it’s going to be alright,” to feel her pride and her joy in his efforts, to know that she trusts he would never harm their child, and not see the trick coin of her self-doubt. But, fuck, fuck, it’s there. For one fleeting instant, the Doctor wondered if she was right to place her faith in the Master.
Suddenly he is so keenly aware of his own stink, of the entire lifelong litany of his crimes and mistakes, of embarrassing foolish awkward mistakes he made, wrong answers he blurted out in class at the Prydonian nearly a thousand years ago; putting Zinnia’s–oh Christ, Zinnia’s–first diaper on backwards; talking too much and too loudly; dancing badly; failing his initiation before the Untempered Schism; all the times the Doctor foiled his stupid convoluted schemes and made him look like a coward and an imbecile.
Every way in which he has ever fallen short now litigates itself against him.
FIX IT!!!!!!
The self-inflicted command ricochets like bullets inside his skull.
“I’m sorry.”
The words aren’t a Shakespearean tragedy; they’re terrifyingly robotic and banal. He cannot even place to which shortcoming, flaw, or sin he refers. Maybe all of them. Who cares? Who even cares.
He stands, flushes the toilet, rushes out to the bed and grinds his teeth while stripping it of all the evidence of his mess. He lashes off the covers and drags them all toward the trash chute, and stuffs them in. He doesn’t even realize he’s crying; he’s wild, lost, desperate to conceal the evidence of his own treasonous brain.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He storms past her and strips naked, and steps into the shower and runs the water scalding. He scrubs himself head to toe with excessive soap. He’s a ridiculous sudsy mess in the shower, cleaning, cleaning.
He steps out and seizes a towel and wraps it around his frame like armor, and it’s only then that he turns to her, and demands, desperately,
“Don’t you EVER get TIRED of it? DON’T YOU GET TIRED OF ME?! I wanna be more than the person you save! I wanna SAVE YOU TOO!
The endless, monotonous, metallic refrain down the halls of that hellish platform on a ship from Mondas. The last few surviving threads of independence sentience, crying out for compassion, for aid, that never came. The remnants of a human body lost in a suit of vinyl, plastic, steel.
The dream of a few mad fanatics that he took like a political ticket and ran with, refined to a fine science, cultured like a cancer in a petri dish and infected, gorged with grandiosity and self-importance. Cybermen.
A whole hospital full of bits and pieces of the infirm, sent to be healed, fed through a meat grinder of eugenicist experimentation. Children, children, children like his child. Children like HIS child: brains and musculo-skeletal structures retained, sweet little hands and feet and toes and noses and hair in clips and ribbons discarded like waste in a butcher shop.
He didn’t do it, sure. But he allowed it. Even tacitly encouraged it. Just like with the Toclafane: scavenging on their innate proclivity to do wicked and cruel things, in order to ascend to power, and therefore, autonomy, and therefore, safety.
But that was nearly two years ago.
Why is he here now?
It’s dark. the kind of dark that yawns and swallows all form, and bids you, dangerously, sweetly, just sleep. Just sleep. Just surrender …
That’s when Koschei realizes he’s lying on his belly in cold, wet, dewy grass, staring down an empty lift shaft. It might as well be a grave dug straight to hell.
For an army of child-sized Cyberman crawls up the chute, chanting the endless refrain of pain, pain, PAIN.
He’s paralyzed, stabbed through the back by Missy’s blade, straight through the gut, straight through his belly button, and it’s pinioned him into the grass.
The Cybermen draw ever nearer.
The first one to scale the shaft seizes greedily onto his black and red coat.
“Dad-dyyyyy,” the Cyberman who is Zinnia intones, “dad-dyyyy, what. Have you. Doooone?”
The Master lurches awake, soaked in sweat and urine, and can barely stumble to the bathroom in time to vomit.
Icarus 