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.”
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.”
“Thete, luv. Breathe. She came to me first, scared shitless you’d despise her for leaping into this. I tried to assure her otherwise.”
Here I am, the Master muses wryly, back in the role of the sane pragmatist. It’s like I never left.
“How could she possibly think I’d hate her?! She’s my DAUGHTER for Rassilon’s sake! I can’t say the same for that stupid BOY, though, the one– Koschei, it’s the same delinquent that had her in tears barely a week ago! I might kill him, I haven’t decided yet. Ophelia might get angry, but– ARGHH! Koschei, why the HELL didn’t you tell me!??”
“Oh please don’t start fighting over this because of who I told first. I didn’t want to cause this. I just… I found Koschei first and I’m sorry Dad that you weren’t the first to know, but I… you can’t go and kill him either. Neither of you can. He’s still the father and I might need him… won’t I?”
“Oh don’t pull that horse shit, Mister! I was literally on my way down the hall with medical results we took in the infirmary to surprise you with!”
Koschei bristles like an affronted peacock.
“She told me first because your opinion of her is the center of her universe, particularly right NOW, when she’s fresh from the Lungbarrow Shitshow and striking out on her own! And maybe she told me because I’m not her dad, but I happen to know as well as you what it’s like to be thought of as the family freak. Maybe–!”
Ophelia cuts in, meaning to diffuse tension, but in the process, makes it clear that … well, unlike assumptions and placations made earlier, she told Koschei for no good reason except that he was … just … there.
The cold stone in the pit of his gut–you don’t matter; you are circumstantial–is heavy.
But he reminds himself how childish it is to recenter attention from their frightened kid when she’s in a state of immediate crisis.
“Look, Hearts. I wanna kill him too. For saddling her with a massive lifelong duty. For hurting her at all. But she’s right, in that a child deserves a father, if at all possible, and in that this is her choice, her body, her baby, heridiot piece of shit sexual partner. Er, sorry, Button. Perhaps we … er, you … ought to speak to this boy. And remind him, for a boy he is, what it means to be a father. Sorta like you and I forgot what that meant, in his shoes.”
The Doctor knew very well how to rile Koschei up. After this long, he had become intimately familiar with the particular looks, touches, words that made his husband squirm. That part was easy. What he wasn’t used to was admitting how desperately he needed Koschei.
He continues his work at the console, glancing up at his husband lounging in the jump seat every few seconds, but the longer he stands there, the more his desire grows. The Doctor finally clears his throat. “Koschei…? Think I might get your help with somethin’?
Koschei knows what he’s doing.
Koschei knows EXACTLY what he’s doing.
He’s reclined in the jumpseat–which, on raunchy occasions like this, he’s amusedly coined the “humpseat”–booted legs crossed at the ankle, up on the console, arms crossed behind his head, with a lordly and proprietary gaze at the ceiling.
“Only if you tell me from over there what ‘something’ is,” he leers, ever so smugly.
“I’ll tell you a secret: the Doctor isn’t interested in you unless you need them. And I don’t mean need them to carry your parcels or give you driving directions. I mean need them in a deep, aching, existential way. I mean you’re looking for a savior. They can’t resist. Not one. Single. Time.”
“Do you think that’s why he left for so long?” The young Gallifreyan asked softly. “That he was waiting to be idolized in stories and hoping I would grow up longing to be like him that he gained some superiority complex and that’s why he finally returned? While I was in need of someone to help me readjust to this life? He couldn’t just return as my father but as someone who was saving a damsel in distress?”
The Master turns round from where he’s been angrily recording his voice entry, and hastily stamps down his whole palm on the delete button.
He shakes his head, rapidly, and holds up both hands.
“No. No, I don’t. I don’t think any of that applies to his children.”
He’s not lying; he truly believes Ophelia is exempt. Perhaps he’s in error, but mortification and shame are loud inside his head, a clangor louder than drums, because he knows the chief reason why the Doctor ran from domestication.
And that reason is the Master.
‘It’s just. Your father’s marriage was. Arranged. His father, he … was not a good person, Ophelia, and that’s … rich, I know, coming from me, but he … your father won’t want you to know this, so please. Be discreet. But your grandfather beat your father, all through his childhood and adolescence. The House of Lungbarrow is … unforgiving, and. Your father and I were. Were. Involved. Romantically. And. Physically. And our relationship was a point of major contention within his family. He was married to silence all the overwhelming pressure. Your mum was a good person, too, a wonderful person, I’m sure, it wasn’t her fault, but he.”
He missed me. And he missed the lure of freedom I symbolized. The nonconformity. I didn’t seduce him back. Quite the contrary, I despised him for leaving me. But, just the same …
Icarus 