He draws his laser screwdriver and dislodges the switchblade component. Fancy fingerwork boasted, he twirls it in his fingers and reaches up to shear off a strand of silver-blond hair, of moderate length.
He knots it into a small circle and slips it around the Doctor’s left ring finger.
“You said you wanted to marry him. Here he is. Marry me today.”
Each insult is more ridiculous than the last and the Doctor is absolutely gleeful to hear each one. His smile only grows wider and wider as the Master pulls back and litters his face with loud, wet kisses. What was blissful happiness is now boisterous joy, and he grabs Koschei’s hands, nearly hopping in place with excitement.
“I’ve got the perfect place! Ha! I know exactly where we should go, a blissfully married couple as we are. As best friends and husbands and lovers and–!”
He stops, stares down at the Master with wide eyes, as if he’s just realized something of vital importance.
“We did it! Can you believe it!? Look out there, where it all started, is it just me or does it not seem quite so frightening now? Because you’re here and you’re MINE and… HA! Alright, hearts. Alright, you mad silly bastard. I’ve got the perfect place for us. Hang on to your hat!”
The Doctor closed the doors behind them and dragged Koschei to the console. He flew around it with wild abandon, grinning ear to ear as he types in coordinates and pulls levers and presses buttons.
“Think edge of the universe. A time before our people became known across creation. Quite literally a pleasure planet. A bit touristy, maybe, but before it gets really popular. But let me tell you… when the third sun goes down over the horizon, there is nothing like that starscape. You can see things for lightyears. Artificial atmosphere magnifies and enhances the view. You’re gonna love it, Kosch. It’s gorgeous.”
The Master leans in the TARDIS doorway, watching his husband animated with more joyous energy than he has seen since their reconciliation. Ordinarily Theta Sigma’s enthusiasm infects him within milliseconds, but right now, Koschei savors the sight of GOOD that he has done simply by being in the presence of his most beloved person.
“I’M the ‘mad silly bastard,’ am I?” he chuckles.
He unwraps himself from where he stands, saunters over and places both hands on the Doctor’s cheeks, drawing him away from the knobs and levers long enough to stare into eyes as clear and bright as the day they met.
“I’m with you. Don’t you understand? I know. We’ve always gone nutters trying to impress each other. But you’re happy, and I did that. I’ll go to the edge of the universe with you. But you’ve already given me everything, idiot.”
▨ : rubbing their back to calm them down when they’re upset
He feels the Master’s hand on his back before he’d even realized his husband was in the room with him. He flinched a little, but then allowed it, his expression pulled into a tight line.
“There’s nothin’ you can do, so you might as well jus’ leave me alone.”
“Rather not, thanks.”
Koschei ceases to rub his Theta’s back and instead descends to sit behind him on his jumpseat, straddling him and slowly, gradually, leaving room for his beloved to decline, wrapping his arms around his waist. When he succeeds at this much, he rests his cheek on the back of his shoulder.
“I enjoy you too much.”
He closes his eyes and waits out the storm.
The oddest things, the strangest habits and dynamics, are constant and forever.
The Master’s pupils dilate, hot-blooded carnivorous desire moving him eagerly against the Doctor. His mouth hangs ajar, breath beating down against his oldest friend and soul’s lips.
“I wanted you to get angry,” he gasps, with a heavy-lidded gaze, simultaneously needy and predatory, up at his beloved.
Fingers rake greedily through short shorn hair, nails irrigating trails across buzzed temples.
“I l o v e it when you’re angry … . !”
The Doctor grinds his teeth, his jaw popping with the force of it. He’s angry, truly and properly angry, and it shows in the cold glint of his ice blue eyes.
“You do shit like that t’ piss me off, make me jealous… Well don’t be surprised when that’s exactly what happens.”
His voice is barely a snarl as he grabs the Master’s hands away from him and pins him roughly to the wall. The Doctor doesn’t care if he’s uncomfortable as he presses a knee to Koschei’s groin.
“I’m torn between fuckin’ you right into the ground or tyin’ you up and leavin’ you hard and wanting.”
He regards the Master for a moment, his eyes narrowing and a dark smirk playing at his lips.
“Tell me who you belong to, Koschei. Your answer might affect my decision.”
Koschei’s eyes go drunk, drowsy, with the domination he’s shown. His hands grapple downward to trace delicate circles up the inner thigh of the knee forced against his groin. He grinds there shamelessly, breaths heavy, with a giddy and quiet gasp. He makes no attempt to hide his intoxicated smile. Nothing, nothing in all the universe, so arouses him as his Oncoming Storm, the only creature as wild and dangerous, MORE wild, MORE dangerous, than he.
It’s as orgiastic as standing in front of a black hole and denying oneself the ever-present urge to fall in. Delaying the release of that oblivion, over and over and over and over.
“I have been yours,” he moans, hard already, forcing himself to maintain eye contact even as every inch of his body screams with heat, “since the first day I saw you; since you first took my hand; since you first smiled at me. You had damned well better fuck me until I can’t walk.”
The Master’s pupils dilate, hot-blooded carnivorous desire moving him eagerly against the Doctor. His mouth hangs ajar, breath beating down against his oldest friend and soul’s lips.
“I wanted you to get angry,” he gasps, with a heavy-lidded gaze, simultaneously needy and predatory, up at his beloved.
Fingers rake greedily through short shorn hair, nails irrigating trails across buzzed temples.
“ … and do you think I never fear I’ll awaken one day to the smell of engine exhaust, and the sight of the TARDIS dematerializing, with you inside, afraid of yourself, me, us, what we are, were, or never will be, abandoning me again? We remain together not because we have no fear of what we could do to destroy each other, but despite that knowledge. Every day, love is a choice, that’s what you told me. Because what we are together is more than our fear of being annihilated by the person who knows us best in all the cosmos. Or am I wrong?”
He stands before his best friend, his husband, his hearts and other half, ashamed. The Doctor knows Koschei’s fear is just as valid as his own, and yet it still hurts to know that he’s the cause of such uncertainty and fear.
“You’re… you’re not wrong.”
It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation and it’s sure to not be the last. The Doctor feels small and timid as he takes a tentative step closer, pulling Koschei’s hands into his own. He is more Theta Sigma now that he has been in millennia, and he hopes the Master can see that.
“You’re right… Love is a choice, and it’s a choice I make gladly every single day. Despite the past, despite my fears, despite the odds. I won’t make the same mistakes again. I simply won’t.”
He pulls his husband into a tight embrace and buries his face in his neck, kissing the underside of his jaw and letting his mind and hearts fill the other with the depth of that promise.
I choose you. I choose you.
“You had damned well better,” he addresses the Doctor’s vow aloud.
He resolves to stand up against, and beside, his husband.
“The ‘odds’ are in our favor. Look how many times we’ve openly tried to destroy each other, yet found ourselves drawn back into each other’s orbit. It’s more undeniable than magnetism.”
He cups the Doctor’s jaw indelicately, feeling rough hot skin against his palm, fixing amber eyes hard against blue.
“You look at me. You look at me when I tell you nothing in the universe can move me from where I stand at your side. When I tell you that anything and anyone that wants to hurt you has to get through me.”
He draws his laser screwdriver and dislodges the switchblade component. Fancy fingerwork boasted, he twirls it in his fingers and reaches up to shear off a strand of silver-blond hair, of moderate length.
He knots it into a small circle and slips it around the Doctor’s left ring finger.
“You said you wanted to marry him. Here he is. Marry me today.”
“We can go somewhere else if you like.”
His voice is gentle and without judgement, offering Koschei a way out should he find this place too much to bear a second time. But even as his best friend presses against him, hides and buries his face in his chest, he knows that the Master will not be content with running again. And that’s enough.
The Doctor’s arms wrap tightly around his lover’s body and he holds him very close, protecting him and offering him his own strength.
He’ll go first. He’ll help him.
“It’s alright to be afraid. I am, too. All the infinite possibilities, what we could be, what we will be… what we’ve been.”
He realizes as he speaks that these are his vows, and the boy who is the Doctor takes his best friend’s hands and holds them tight.
“I’m afraid… But I know that as long as you and I are together, there’s nothing we can’t take on together. Here, at the place that set us off on our long journey home… Here is where I make marriage vows to you, Koschei, and promise you this:
From today onward, you are not a failure. You are not a monster. You are not a mistake or irrelevant. You are the Universe. Every possibility creation can contain, all bundled up in you, in those beautiful hearts that you have gifted to me. You are my best friend, my savior, the only person in the universe who could have taught me that I’m worth something. You’re my husband. You’re mine. For the rest of Time.”
The Doctor lifts the Master’s chin up so he’ll meet his gaze, and Koschei will find his other half smiling, confident in this.
“I’m afraid, but I’d much rather be afraid while holding you than to do it on my own.”
For the interval that his Most Beloved speaks, the Master is without fear.
“No. Keep talking. You make me feel powerful.”
It has long been fear that’s motivated him: driven him like game outrunning hounds, to grotesque excesses. Fear of abandonment, of obsolescence, of death. Fear of ordinariness, of dullness, of insufficiency. Fear.
Fear has made him wicked, and bitter, and wrathful, and cruel. Always fear.
But that is the incantation, of their nearness: whenever he stands with the Doctor, he is recklessly unafraid, just as the Doctor forever seems reckless, and it intoxicates him, to see that legendary figure at the edge of every cliff, still shouting at the sky, shouting like they shouted as boys, that storm, rolling in, a thing that can never be fully tamed.
The only thing that the Master has ever done unmotivated by fear, was chase the Doctor.
Because the Doctor is Absence of Fear.
The instant his Theta stops speaking those words that Koschei, parched, laps up, his confidence wavers.
But Theta’s final words seep deep into some innermost recess of Koschei. And he cants his head back, and dons reading glasses that, more and more, have become necessary.
“Right, then.”
He’s not reading from any prompt but his own hearts, and yet, he wants to make it clear, he can see the Untempered Schism with every syllable that falls from his lips. A passing look of trepidation, a firm look straight into the swirling abyss of All Things, and then he turns and faces his best friend.
“I’m not afraid. I have you. I have us. We are a fixed point. Here, at the place that set us off on our long journey home… Here is where I make marriage vows to you, Theta Sigma, and promise you this:
… I promise… ah … ah, lord … Can you ever know … . is it fathomable … how important you are to me? Ah, my Sweethearts. From today onward, you are not a killer. You are not a monster. You are not a guilty survivor. There’s no blood under your nails. You needn’t outrun a hundred million ghosts; you needn’t save everyone. You are not your father’s son, you are not destined to either solitude or enslavement, and you are not burdened solely to be my keeper. You are the Universe. Every possibility creation can contain, starlight shooting out your fingertips and your hair follicles and your …nose and your eyes, hehah. You are the constellation that points me home to every purpose worth acknowledging. You are my best friend, my savior … the only person …”
He swallows loudly; a tear escapes down his cheek anyway.
“The ONLY …person … who could teach me what to do with all the awful mighty self-devouring love I’ve felt for you since we were boys. You are the only person who could teach me how to save myself. You’re …”
“You’re my husband, for the rest of time.”
The Doctor lifts a hand to Koschei’s cheek and smiles, his hearts full. As his best friend of ages finishes his vows, he pulls him up and into a sweet, tender kiss. It is their first as a married couple, and the first of many more to come.
He doesn’t pull away for a long time, letting his mind touch Koschei’s even as his hands urge him closer, their bodies pressed so tightly together that it’s hard to determine whether they’re two separate entities; and that’s how the Doctor likes it. There is no one in all of creation, the grand expanse of the universe that could make him feel this way. Only his best friend. The boy who defines his very existence. His husband.
He doesn’t realize he’s crying too until he pulls away and a fat tear rolls of the end of his nose.
“Heh. Look at us. Sobbing like babies in front of the whole universe.”
He chuckles and looks out at the Schism, at the terrifying possibility of EVERYTHING. But he holds Koschei’s hands, holds onto his husband, and the view is not so daunting.
But he turns back and smiles, more at peace with himself and the world around him that he has been… ever.
“I love you. My husband. I love you so much. Thank you. Thank you for all of this, for saving me and letting me save you in return.”
Another kiss lingers on their lips and he sighs, bunting his forehead against Koschei’s.
“Shall we go found a spot to honeymoon as a newly married couple, do you think?”
“Shut oop. I dunno what to do.”
Thank you for saving me and letting me save you in return.
Never has he heard concision, accuracy, FULFILLMENT in words, quite like in those. Naturally, he must cope with it by clinging on to his new spouse, and old, old friend, bodily, mouth pressed into the leather coat that smells of engine grease and windburn, aftershave and battlefields, home.
That way the Doctor can’t see his lips still trembling.
“I’m not a baby, YOU’RE a baby, and you joost got me swept oop in the moment, you cocksplat. You rotten egg. You black banana peel. I love you.”
He pulls back and if the Doctor thinks he can feign being a tough guy, that’s abolished, annihilated, in the Master loudly, ticklishly, vivaciously kissing every inch of his wet face.
“I” –kiss– “shall honey many a moons”–kiss– “with my mad idiot” –kiss– “who had the idea for this wedding” –kiss– “and therefore has dibs on our first destination!”
Icarus 