“ … Hearts, we. Need. To discuss your nightmares. And their source.”
“That really isn’t necessary. Discussing them won’t make them disappear. And why should their source matter?”
He’s lucky he’s been able to avoid this discussion for so long, really, given how well the Master can pick up on things that are bothering him. It’s purely by chance that his regular pattern of sudden waking after just an hour of sleep hasn’t coincided with a moment the Master has been watching over him, until now.
As he always has, the Master summons the courage to look directly at the Doctor when the Doctor chooses to reprimand or avoid him.
“I believed that sort of thing for a very long time, but if you hadn’t convinced me otherwise, I would still be festering with rage and bitterness. And pain. And I would not be here to comfort you. I know you think you only want things, and never need them, but … . Doctor. Let me return you the favor.”
Send “Sleep already!” for a starter where my muse is very clearly sleep-deprived, but refuses to sleep.
“I REFUSE to be the cause of hurt, or injury, or death, for you even ONCE more!” the Master roars, his youthful round face contorted into an impossible snarl.
Their reunion in the wake of Tsuranga has been tumultuous: ironically, not because of quarreling, so much as the fact that the Doctor’s TARDIS wandered into an asteroid belt while her spleen continued to unevenly settle. She has been in excruciating pain in her left side, leaving him in charge of piloting the vessel and her three minty-fresh companions in a perpetual state of panic.
Well, not exactly true, he muses, through the simultaneous cotton and electricity of his sleepless, overstimulated brain. The police woman reflects dogged urgency, but is cool and self-controlled; he likes her. It’s more the men who are frantic: the young Dyspraxian (the Master has never heard of that province, but the lad is remarkably defensive, so he’s let it be) is grouchy and the old bloke continually whines. Still, he’s loathe to admit, he likes even them, and the Doctor has already taken them under her wing.
But the latest minefield on the asteroid belt has materialized. And so the Master aims all his vitriol at dodging the rocks. So far very few have struck the TARDIS.
“And you called me a rubbish pilot,” he mutters. “Oi! You. I won’t say it twice: stay lying down. I still have to examine your spleen. I don’t like you in pain!”
Send “Sleep already!” for a starter where my muse is very clearly sleep-deprived, but refuses to sleep.
“Are you MAD? You expect your opposition to ease oop on their counter-position to this school reform proposal if I sleep it off?”
It’s entirely possible that the Master takes his role as the Lady President’s Chief Counsel a bit too seriously.
A pile of ruthlessly marked-up paperwork sits on either side of his desk, like twin pillars of doom announcing his presence, as he continues to jot vicious notes in the margins of his own education reform documents.
“I mean honestly, which of us has been a successful politician before? You ought to be milking my skills for all they’re worth!”
As he says this, the tip of his fountain pen flies off like a deadly projectile, and sprays red ink all over his robes.
Koschei sighs and purses his lips down at himself.
“This looks a little more like what I’m in the mood for.”
Send “Sleep already!” for a starter where my muse is very clearly sleep-deprived, but refuses to sleep.
The Master has been at the same damned glitch in the Console computer for well over 48 sleepless hours. He is the perfect portrait of barely-contained madness: silver-blond hair a crow’s nest of raked fingers; facial hair ill-kempt; eye makeup smudged, and replaced by a pair of ominous dark circles.
When the Doctor greets him with this gentle command, he only grunts a nonresponse, holding up an index finger, and assaults the keyboard with a new system of input commands.
“I do that and every time we need to jump somewhere else, the navigation system will be compromised. You wanna be spit out into a meteor shower or the mouth of a volcano? Didn’t think so.”
He continues to type even as he speaks, at a rapid-fire machine-gun cadence.
“Take off that magician’s tux straightaway. And open the parcel on the bed.”
Never has the Master looked so benevolently smug. Never.
He’s standing in the doorway, wearing an implausible shirt indeed, a simple white with red print, in a blunt Century Gothic sans font, which reads,
I am Koschei.
Within the parcel is another white tee, which reads, in blue,
If lost, return to
and in red again
Koschei.
The Doctor, meanwhile, has never looked so confused.Take off his magician’s tux? For a start, there’s a complaint about the use of ‘magician’ on the tip of his tongue, and shortly after, a question about why Koschei would suddenly demand that he take off his beloved outfit. He doesn’t voice either, though, because his eyes fall on the parcel. A gift? He hasn’t done anything to deserve a gift, he’s quite sure, and he doesn’t think it’s his birthday. Not that he’d remember anyway.
He steps forward and tears open the parcel, hesitantly at first, and then with the eagerness of a child at Christmas, once he’s forgotten he’s being watched. The shirt he takes out warms his hearts like nothing else. ‘If lost’ can be said to have always applied to him, and now applies whenever he is alone. The idea of being lost, literally or metaphorically, does not affect him greatly any more. ‘Return to Koschei’ is the part that touches him, warmth seeping through the cracks in any mask of emotional detachment.
Now he follows the initial instructions, throwing off his jacket and the several unnecessary layers underneath that. He pulls on the shirt, wearing it with pride. He is wanted. Needed. The other half of something that isn’t ashamed to claim him as its own.
There’s a specific part of his mind that hurts sometimes, when he feels the sting of rejection or abandonment. In all the time he’s been in this body, the only thing that can soothe it is being made to feel wanted, or irreplaceable. Doing what he does, being the Doctor, doesn’t help. Wherever he goes he is an abstract concept, a mystery. He’s simply a being with a title, who arrives with a purpose and disappears from a person’s world when he has done what he needs to do. All the kindness in the world won’t make him important to someone who needs him only to save their life. He is temporary, most of the time.
This touches that part of him more than anything else has ever done. He doesn’t speak, because he hasn’t found the words to express any of this, but he does wordlessly make his way across the room to the doorway where Koschei stands. His arms hug tightly, pulling close the only being who has ever made him feel so complete. He’d never dream of asking for validation or reassurance that Koschei is pleased to have him. Him specifically, not just a being who has something to offer. The wonderful thing about this is that he hasn’t had to ask.
“I love you,” he says. “I’m never going to take this off. Do you understand what you’ve just done for me?”
He’s still holding him, but he pulls back just enough to let Koschei see his face. This is no time for using hugs to hide his face. His eyes shine, and there’s no hint of coldness anywhere in them. No mask. The Doctor kisses him on the face, just in case the hug and the tears in his eyes aren’t enough to demonstrate his feelings about this.
“I do understand, as a matter of fact.”
I love you.
Every time the Doctor says those words–the Doctor that the Master thought had finally given up on him, relegated him to a “hopeless case”–his hearts are buoyant, and his head experiences brief but intense vertigo. He gets giddy.
“When you’re accustomed to being thought undesirable, or problematic, or simply ‘too much’ … . being claimed by a loved one is an act of salvation.”
There’s no more eloquent way of putting it. She’s just excruciatingly kind; she always has been, it’s always been the honey with which she’s entrapped him, since they were boys and he was frightened of his own shadow and intoxicated by the Pied Piper’s charm of a sunkissed blond boy who smelled like windburn and christened him “my friend” before they’d even exchanged names.
No matter how much righteously infuriated armor he dons, here they are, here he is, smitten.
Shit. Fuck.
The Master releases the Doctor. He shakes his head, angrily, swiftly wipes his eyes, and struggles to sit.
“I was stabbed. In the back. Literally. Call it an … identity crisis. You know me, you … . look, I’m the person living who’s known you longest. Call me …”
Suddenly his own moniker feels filthy on his tongue.
“Call me Koschei. And you, you’re.” Not that little boy anymore. Too many of your friends and enemies have passed under the bridge between us like so many rushing rapids. “You’re the Doctor.”
Her worried eyes don’t leave for a second as she
“Koschei,” she breathes, as if it’s a holy word that she can barely stand to utter, she’s so unworthy. “Yes, I remember you.” She reaches out and gently touches his face, remembering their shared childhood memories. It only goes so far, though, stopping before the burning pyre and crisis at the water and only letting her remember the good times before it all went wrong.
“No, I’m not the Doctor, I’m.. I’m….” She lets out another frustrated noise. “It’s gone again! No matter, get over here, Koschei, I’ll be the best damned doctor you’ve ever known!”
She moves her hands to his back and concentrates, sending some of her regeneration energy to him to heal the worst of it.
Oh, for the first about fifteen seconds of that healing act, the Master loses himself to the sublime relief.
Then his mind rings, like the most feverish tinnitus, with the realization that alchemy is a law of the universe and there is after all something called Equivalent Exchange.…
“SSSTOP IT!”
He shoves her back, brutally, but only because he fears for her; he is awful, he is unpracticed and stupid at kindness, he has coarse beast paws for hands and he mauls anything he touches, but he LOVES her and–!
“If you do that then you shave years off your OWN life, and I won’t let you.”
He stumbles to sitting; the agony in his back is significantly dulled, but his hearts thunder deafeningly.
“You are the Doctor, you’re my Doctor, you always were and you always shall be. Because of things like that. Because you do it without even thinking, you fool.”
Icarus 