Send “I’ve got you” to help my muse wash off blood from their body.
The Doctor doesn’t remember coming home. She doesn’t remember Koschei slowly peeling her layers off, grimacing at the stickiness of dried blood coagulating on her skin. She doesn’t remember his expression of remorse, of all consuming guilt.
All she remembers are the screams.
Even now, she’s not entirely sure what happened. Was it her mistake, or his? Which one of them missed it? A hidden trigger on a timer they’d already disarmed. One moment, the captives were there, breathing a sigh of relief and thanking their rescuers, then the next…
She remembers the smell of smoke, of singed flesh and hair. She remembers the sharp pain of debris cutting at her skin.
What she doesn’t remember is her husband helping her into the bath, or the water trickling down her back. She is hardly cognizant even now of him gently sponging her down and whispering soft reassurances.
It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. You did your best.
But your best wasn’t good enough. They’re all dead because of you. You might as well have set it off yourself.
You should have been in their place.
Hell, you should have died eons ago.
“I dunno how.”
“I dunno how, my sweet girl, I dunno. I just know when it’s you, I can. When it’s you, I rage and rampage till I chafe myself raw, for hundreds of years, trying to hate you, and it’s always just! Pointless. I can’t. Because when I see you I see the flaws and the blessings. I see the whole gamut. And the good bits are always bigger and brighter.”
He looks down and he sees the bathwater too, and it hardly fazes him, and he fears that as much as he fears her despairing forever.
Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with him, what’s always been wrong with him, and can he outrun it forever, and make her proud?
“C’mere, let’s get in the shower, okay? No leftover carnage, just. C’mon.”
He takes her upper arms and guides her to her feet; he was always the one better at surviving.
“Let’s go, here, I’ll help you. I don’t have the answers, Thete. I’m not a moral philosopher, I never could be. But I’ll always help you.”
She allows her husband to lift her up and drain the bath, the luke-warm shower water rinsing the last vestiges of their miserably failed adventure down the drain. The Doctor can’t do much more than stand there as he rinses her off and gentle runs a washcloth over her skin. She feels raw, from the inside out, blistered and bloody, dirty and the exact opposite of what Koschei describes. It’s the Time War all over, a decision, a failure, and the blood of so many people left staining her hands.
“You always could see past the worst of me… I never was certain that was a good thing. Certainly a flaw in your survival instinct, I think… Or perhaps a benefit. You always have seen yourself as worse than me, more dangerous, more steeped in blood and death and destruction. But that’s not really true, is it?”
The Doctor is spiraling, and she can feel it, her mind sinking into the darkness even as he tries to hold her head above those murky waters. She looks up at him, and her hazel eyes are sharp and focused, though lacking the usual warmth that fills them.
“I missed the wire. I was hasty and vain. Already celebrating my victory because I always win… I’m the Doctor, so I always win. But this time it went to my head. I’m supposed to HELP people, Koschei! They needed my help and now they’re dead and it was my fault. Don’t you see that? I’m not always the glorious hero, I’m stupid and selfish and I make mistakes and I HURT people just like I hurt you! Does it make up for it when I tell you I’m proud of you and you’re good and beautiful? Because I can’t imagine it does… I thought I’d learned my lesson, but I’m still the most dangerous thing this universe has to offer…”
She steps away from his touch and exits the shower, grabbing her ruined clothes and leaving the room. She’ll burn the bloodstained evidence, dress in clean clothes and disappear for a while. That’s all she can do.
He knows what she’s seeing and feeling. He was there, too. He was mired in the corpses of their fallen, too. Only instead of a savior, impossible and unfathomable, a god to end it all, Koschei was just a cockroach in the woodworks, just the “perfect warrior,” resurrected for the purpose of glorified, slaughter, just a weapon, making “practical use” of his long-marked degeneracy, and nothing, nothing, more.
He knows. Long before the Time War, they stood on opposite sides of that needless, fruitless, artificial divide, called “good” and “bad.”
It’s only been since coming to travel, and weep, and laugh, and eat, and sleep, and fuck, and live, with her once more, that he’s learned things are far more complicated, and far simpler, than “good” and “bad.”
One does one’s best, voluntarily, for the sake of doing one’s best, and no other motive, and that is the only thing that can be asked of anything living.
She’s taught him that. She’s the one, of all faces of the Doctor, who finally unlearned for him centuries of clusterfucked mental abuse.
And, he realizes, gathering about him all the vestiges of his indomitable will, that refusal to surrender that marks him apart from all Time Lords before or since: it’s payback time.
The Doctor isn’t the Master’s greatest enemy. The Doctor’s self-loathing is.
“ … That’s not true. No wait. Really.”
The Master lets the Doctor pass him by, but only when her words first sting him with the weight of his uselessness. It’s only when he’s past caring about his own worth, his own value or lack thereof, and only blindly desperate to help her, that he regains his voice.
It is soft and it shakes, but he speaks again, and it’s firmer.
He gets directly in her way, and juts his jaw.
“That’s all horse shit. You taught me that. It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you’re trying to do now. It’s what you try very hard never to do again. It’s being sorry, it’s being really, properly sorry, by changing your behavior forever. How many times did you tell me that? How many times d’you STILL tell me that? And who says you’re exempt? Ey? You don’t have the right to exempt yourself. Not when I love you. Not when WE love you. You don’t GET to do that, Thete. It’s just another way to run and you don’t GET to be CRUEL to yourself!”
He seizes her hands, and places each cold limp lifeless thing on each of his hearts.
“Here’s your proof! Feel? I’m ALIVE because of YOU. Me. Proud, scary Master, ME, I’d be DEAD without YOU. Maybe that’s NOT MUCH in the grand scheme of things, but it’s SOMEthing. Yes, yes, you’re stupid and selfish, you’re proud and brash and disorganized and impulsive and pedantic and vain! And yes, YES. Guess WHAT. When you tell me I’m beautiful, it IS worth it! When you coom and sit with me when I’m past despair, and hold my hand and say nothing at all, it IS worth it. When you make love to me and I feel connected to all of space and time and the universe, it IS worth it. When you laugh like an idiot and gasp like a child and show me all the new things that excite and please you, it IS worth it. I never called you a ‘hero’! Did I ever ONCE call you a ‘hero’? NEVER! I’d NEVER call you something so REDUCTIVE! You’re my WIFE. You’re my BEST FRIEND. You’re the only person I’ve ever known who’s like ME. You are the good, you are the bad, you are all the mundanities in between, you are EVERYTHING. I don’t know if you’re ‘worth it’ to anyone else, and I don’t care! You’re MINE, and you’re worth it to ME, and this life? With you? Mistakes and all? It is ALL I will EVER need. Do NOT leave me. Do NOT listen to the voice in your head that HATES you!”
She sounds both certain and uncertain at the same time. She’s certain she knows him, but she’s not certain of what she actually wants to say. She’ll later put that down to the dizziness and the headache coming on. She has just regenerated, after all – it’s understandable. Happens almost every time, one way or another.
“Oh! You’re the one.” With that, the Doctor promptly staggers forward and catches herself just before she actually falls over. She’s awake, just about.
His hand extends. His finger, just his index finger, brushes the Doctor’s lips.
The sensation of fresh regeneration energy electrifies. The hairs of his arm stand on end; he may has well have stuck his finger straight in a socket. Yet the jolt is far from unpleasant. It sends, through the charged link from one bondmate to the other, a myriad of images, scents and sounds: their shared memories. At times an inferno, at times a placid sea. Inimitably, them.
“It’s just me, Doctor. You’re correct.”
He braces her by the shoulders; the electricity grows still more intense.
The Master’s mind is capable of conquering tangled knots of physics, metaphysics and technology, and yet when it comes to relationships, at least those not rehearsed and performed for the sake of a scheme, he is a bull in a china shop: all emotion, no nuance. Clumsy, a peculiar mixture of manipulative and childishly ardent. Scared of losing things, so he smashes them, and self-thwarts.
He has no idea what he’s doing.
So he must compress and simplify what the Doctor is saying, and he hovers there over the Doctor’s form as he does so.
His mind reaches a solution in time. The Doctor’s essential message:
{ I chose you because you chose me first. You showed me you care about me, so I chose you. }
Ah. That he can process. And his hearts twinge with the return of that softness.
But the remarks in defense of imprisoning Missy raise a few recurrent hackles.
“Missy wants to be good in Missy’s way. If you’re not looking for that, then you’ll miss her efforts entirely. Your version of good is not absolute. It’s vain, arrogant, and sentimental.”
Chilling, perhaps, to hear Missy’s own words echoed by her previous self.
“But more important to this conversation: I AM Missy. If you had shown me an ounce of the interest you show her, maybe I might be in your little accelerated ethics workshop. Maybe I’d be making you proud. But I was stuck on Gallifrey for YEARS after I saved you. And you never came for me.”
There are tears in his eyes.
The Doctor stares up at him now while he talks, all fidgeting paused. That final point hurts because it’s true. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to get across how truly sorry he is for any pain he has ever caused the Master.
He holds himself together, still and quiet, until he sees the tears in the Master’s eyes. Then he finds that he can’t stop his own from brimming.
His cold hand reaches up and grips the front of the Master’s shirt. He tugs. It’s weak but insistent. He remembers reaching out for Koschei, whether he was there or not, when they were young and restricted. Nightmares have plagued the Doctor always but never more so than as a child. He remembers leaving his bed, or sometimes just looking up to find him already there, reaching out and tugging at his friend’s shirt; forbidden and secret, as all their touches were at that point. Come here, the action said. Come here and stay with me, please. I need you here. I want you to stay.
“I want you to stay,” he says, because their words and their touches aren’t forbidden anymore. He’s allowed to say whatever he wants. No – not just allowed – FREE. He’s free to do that.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Every instinct he has is telling him to look away and hide his face, or even try to leave the room, because there are tears in his eyes and his voice makes that obvious enough. No.Doctor, be STRONG. That’s what the Master has said to him, so that’s what he needs to do. He needs to let him see him the way he’s learned to let Missy see him over these years. But it’s so much easier to develop openness and willingness to share his emotions over seventy years than just a few minutes, here and now.
The Doctor shifts an inch to the side, leaving the Master at least enough room to sit down. That’s all he asks, just some hint that he’s not in such a hurry to leave as before.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t-” he stops and starts again. “I’m not going to make an excuse because nothing can excuse that. I left you there and I’m sorry. I would do anything to take it back. But I can’t. All I can do is make it up to you. Please let me try.”
Oh God, that tug at his shirt might as well be a scythe blade embedded in both his hearts, dragging him down. He remembers it too. That’s the problem, the Master’s memory as as far-ranging as his foresight. He remembers being sought and he remembers the long gentle frightened face of the boy seeking him and he remembers the smell of them together in bed, two innocent children smelling of honey and damp earth and long hours of running in sunshine, holding hands in one of their school beds, because Theta Sigma’s nightmares were dogged and relentless and Koschei felt for once like a source of something wholesome and good.
And every instinct the Master has is telling him to lunge, to punch, to assault, to hurt. Hurt him before he sees he hurt you, hurt him before he sees he hurt you, hurt him before he sees he hurt you.
[ I would rather d i e than beg YOU! } Stupid, stupid words, so unfortunate and true. SHIT!
All the fury festering beneath rushes forward with violence, in a single wordless strangled agonized ROAR, as he strikes the wall over the Doctor’s head. He strikes it so hard that it bloodies his knuckles. He cradles his fist to his chest, and grinds his teeth at the whitewater sound in his ears.
It’s the death throes of resisting every magnetic, gravitational pull of every pore and tissue and muscle and firing synapse and feeling in his being, to just. Sit down. And BE. With his best friend.
So that’s when he sits down, in that space the Doctor provides, and drops his head between his knees.
A long silence ensues.
Then,
“I’m sorry, too,” he surrenders. “For the girl. The girl out there. Your girl, Bill. There’s a thousand and one reasons why you care for her, I know. I took … . considerable time getting to know her, after all.”
He sits upright, and wipes his eyes.
“Did I ever tell you how long I was trapped on Gallifrey, after that day you spared me, and I you?”
He smiles at the Doctor, and it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Okay, I’m asleep,” Koschei mumbles slyly, grinning palpably against the Doctor’s neck. His chuckle comes from a deep rich smoky place, and thrums against the Doctor’s chest.
He lurches upright, eyes closed, with a foolishly trusting smile that is a once in many millennia rarity, and kisses his way up to the Doctor’s nose, from chin to lips to the final destination. Then he nips the nose tip, wrinkling the bridge of his own nose in delight, and sinks back down.
“It’s the same for me, y’know.”
“You know, I was under the impression that people who are asleep tend not to respond to conversations.”
He smiles against the kisses, his own eyes closed in delight at the attention.
“Or kiss people. But then, you always were extraordinary, weren’t you?”
The Doctor’s arms encircle him, squeezing gently. You are the most precious thing I’ve ever held. His hands move very slowly up and down Koschei’s sides, like he’s trying to memorise him, the shape of him, how it feels to hold him. You’re real, this is real. He hardly even realises he’s doing it.
Icarus 