itsjustkind:

｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ sclfmastery:

The Master’s gaze is steel-trap-sharp.  Not a syllable his beloved speaks goes unheard. He witnesses the Doctor’s suffering firsthand.  

When he speaks, it’s with matching precision.

   “Wake me up. No. Really. When it happens, the hour-mark.  Wake me up with you.”

He reaches out, tidies the Doctor’s rumpled white buttonup and his black vest, tidies his hair, with all the doting diligence of a longtime spouse. Which is, all calamity and strife aside, exactly what he has always been.  

  “Doesn’t have to be a long conversation or anything. Grab onto me.  Touch me.  Say ‘hi.’  I’ll show you you’re here. Really here. Neither of us is there anymore. Or will ever be again.”  

   “That’s my vow to you.”  

“I can’t do that to you.”

His words are infused with self-blame; a product of his slightly distorted view of himself. It’s as if he’s something to be inflicted upon others. What he means is ‘you don’t need to do that’, but in his head the problem has already been categorised as a burden to anyone he shares it with. Something that’s his own fault.

If he thinks about it reasonably, his view of this is all wrong. The Master is asking him to do this.

The Doctor steps closer, hands raising, then hovering in the air between them, and finally coming to rest on the Master’s shoulders. He shifts his fingers once. Again. He’s thinking.

“I don’t want you to suffer because of me. I don’t want you to lose sleep because of my maladaptive sleep pattern. It’s not fair. You’ve suffered enough.”

He tilts his head forwards, touching their foreheads together, and gazes into his eyes. 

“You don’t have to do anything for me. You do enough just by sleeping in the same room as me. You’d really want waking up every single hour, without fail, just so you can make sure I know we’re safe?”

At first the Doctor’s fussy concern pleasantly flusters him, and the Master is very nearly bashful.  

But then he chuckles, and it’s rich and genuinely amused, without a touch of the habitual snideness.  He reaches down and pinches the Doctor’s sides, even as they’re still touching foreheads, even as his beloved gazes furtively, ashamedly, into his eyes. It’s a tacit reminder that their lives need not be marked by grave ceremony all the time; they know each other way too well for that.  

       “You really are a silly sausage.  I would do anything for you, genius.  Willingly.  But it seems we’re at an impasse, as you’re wired to do the same for me.”  

He kisses first the Doctor’s chin and then his lips. 

     “You should know I will be there every time you awaken.  Again, my vow to you.  And you should further know that the shame you’re feeling, that I can practically taste between our minds, is misplaced, my love.  Take it from someone who’s always suffered self-imposed claims of invincibility, just to cope with what was done to me by the same bastard that shoved you in that Confession Dial.”