The Master looks up from his cocktail with a set expression of fond exasperation. His expectations are not disappointed.
“Darling … .”
“No.”
Theta raises a brow at this.
“What?” She is genuinely confused over this. “It’s good…. Norwegian.”
“Love, I’m not arguing about the Scandinavian flavor, but there’ve been dirty human-feet all over it, and what’s more, earth-soil’s got Clostridium spores. D’you want your limbs to lock up and … to puke until you see colors beyond the electromagnetic spectrum? I’ll abstain, thanks.”
“You are the Doctor, comprised of morning sunlight and babies’ laughter, and yes, despite this, I know that you could knee me in the nuts, drop me hard, and snap my neck if you still had the inclination. It is a fact, and I impenitently confess that i find it desperately sexy.”
There was something about the way he was speaking to her. The mere look on his face. Something about that told her that he was being serious and that her own words had surprised him. However, the fact remained that this wasn’t what she was accustomed to. Something had changed about him.
“Well I don’t mind, really, you’ve just managed to catch me off guard.” The Doctor said before chuckling a little, “Something seems different about you? What is it?”
The Doctor moved closer to him, at first reading his face. Maybe Missy had rubbed off on him? The malice wasn’t there, at least not to the extent it always before. Instead it look like he cared. The look of the friend she had always cared for, maybe even more than that..
Yes, Missy’s rubbed off on him, but in an unanticipated way.
To be so undesired that even your own descendant self would hasten your regeneration … it jettisoned him into a place of dark melancholy, and self-loathing. And it sent him–ever the dogged survivor–on a frantic quest to find a Doctor, any Doctor, who had not yet given up hope, and consigned him to a place firmly in the past.
Koschei hopes to have found her, but her tepid reception, her skepticism, give him pause. His cheeks flare red, with sudden mortification.
“Maybe this was always a part of me, Thete. But I needed some time at your side, without the conditions of feigned imprisonment, to learn another … . venue, another way … . to govern myself.”
He swallows, audibly.
“I thought I might give that a go now, with you. Was this a mistake?”
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.”
(continued from ask) drapetxmaniia: (10th) the doctor wraps his arms around the masters waist, hoping to surprise him as he pushed his cold nose into his neck, a grin on his lips, before he kissed it.
Koschei’s entire form tenses, the way a cat arches its back; his features contort into an expression of shock that quickly evolves into haughty outrage.
“COLD,” he protests explosively.
He wriggles like a mongoose with the intent to turn, when instead far warmer lips suckle on his neck. His deeply sensitive, long, handsome neck.
And instead he’s writhing with a host of entirely other urges.
“M-mmmm,” he groans, and flashes a lazy smile.
–//–
The Doctor Laughed softly in amusement, and takes pity on him, (If you can call it pity, or just plain teasing) before pulling away so that he can kiss his cheek.
“I seem to have captured some kind of beautiful cat-like creature,” He grinned, laughter still in his voice. “I think ill keep him all for myself~” he comments jokingly, before returning to why he suddenly decided to capture him in a hug.
“You’re not cold are you? I think The ol’ Girl’s suddenly turned the heating down, but everything is fine on screen, but i keep getting the shivers.” and as if to prove a point another uncomfortable cold spell flashed though his body, making him grimace and hug Koschei a little tighter.
“Beautiful? You flatter me.”
You could be beautiful, that face with the cockatoo hair and the pinstripes had pontificated, that long-ago Christmas.
You are beautiful, that same face states now, imparting a hope long forgotten.
“But I don’t believe you’re being a drop insincere. What a miracle.”
Deep within the Master’s telepathic channels, there’s a steady thrumming, very like purring indeed.
“I’m hardly ever cold, Hearts,” he drawls. “Which I gather is why you’re using me as a space heater.”
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.”
His surprise registers both physically and mentally at the Master’s playful touch. He jumps visibly, and there’s a quick flash of a grin on his face, before he replaces it with a glare and something that might resemble a pout, if he’d admit to such a thing. The telepathically transmitted shock, however, is much more difficult to mask. It’s exactly the same kind of surprise he always projects when he’s given unexpected affection, and he has no ability to suppress it.
The forced glare disappears after a moment. He doesn’t mind really, even if he does expect his reaction to be the source of a new wave of amusement from Koschei.
“Yes, well, it might take me a while to get used to that. To you, being there. Knowing. I’ve been very good at pretending it’s not a problem for a long time, so — be patient.” Be patient, the way I’m not patient with myself.
The Doctor releases the Master’s shoulders, and wraps his arms slowly around his waist instead. His movements are carefully measured and thought out.
“You’re being far too nice to me, given how stupid I’ve been about this.”
“Oh, do shut up. Never call me ‘too nice’ again. Remember the hell I’ve given you over the millennia. I don’t want to hear that I’ve gone soft in the will as well as the tummy.”
The Master pinches the Doctor’s arm suddenly, without ceremony.
“I’ll acclimate you to my magnificence faster if I continue to do naughty, mean things like that, on a mundane everyday basis,” he cheerily explains. “Anyway!” He sinks back into the embrace that his beloved has so carefully executed. “You know … given what you’ve survived, my love, I’m proud.”
He chuckles straight from the gut, and rubs circles in the Doctor’s spindly back.
“And if you’re asking me to be patient–me–then you’ve forgotten that patience has been the one virtue I’ve always exhibited in spades. Don’t worry.”
The Doctor is immediately silenced as her eyes find the Master, and oh how she blushes besides. Not at being caught out having a row with an appliance, no, but rather because of the easy way he winks at her, the casual manner in which he strolls in and presumes to know more of the infernal device than she.
The sonic lowers just a bit but she keeps it well in hand, fingers twitching against the home-made exterior shell with her thumb poised to switch it on at a moment’s notice just in case the toaster decides to do combat with the love of her lives. One can’t be too careful with dodgy kitchen appliances.
She blinks once, twice, three times- a blink for every hard slap of Koschei’s hand against the toasty [pun very much intended] and rebellious metal -before eyebrows raise and the hand holding the sonic falls to her side. She lets out a huff of air, a combination of disbelief and appreciation. The toast isn’t even burned! Now more than ever she believes the toaster to have a personal vendetta against her, all because she chose to take it apart and put it back together again once-upon-a-pinstriped-time.
“Wha-… How did-… Oh tha’s joost not fair. I tried everythin’! Bangin’ on it, zappin’ it, tossin’ it down a fli’a stairs, givin’ it a good kick, even the sonic wasn’t workin’. Then ‘ere you coom, three slaps an’ it gives in?”
She narrows her eyes at the toaster, then turns her gaze toward her husband.
“You couldn’t’ve done tha’ two regenerationsago? Been cravin’ toast for centuries, me.”
She’s amused and impressed by his ability to intimidate the infernal appliance. Theta’s smile falters, however, the moment she steps over to the toaster to grab the perfectly toasted bread. Hand poised to grasp her long-awaited snack, fingers clasp only air as the toast vanishes down into the toaster once more, out of reach. Mouth open, Theta scoffs and looks back at Koschei with wide eyes, pointing her finger toward the menacing metal machine in an accusatory manner.
“There! Ri’ there, SEE?! Tha’s jus’ not normal!”
Koschei clicks his tongue; he’s a touch disappointed that Theta didn’t just swoon over his comedic problem-solving, but then, if she were a swooner, and not a meddlesome adventurous little gremlin, she wouldn’t be Theta.
“Well, I mean. It might joost be that after ALL YOU DID, it only needed one more bit of forceful persuading to obey,” he placates. “Anyway, I was saving the trick to have an ace oop my sleeve, keep spice in the relationship.”
He grins diabolically and it’s clear he’s trolling her.
The grin vanishes immediately as the toast retreats into the mechanism.
“OI!” he shouts, betraying every ounce the Mancunian dialect concealed behind his attempts to sound like a posh Londoner. “OI, I’ll av ya, you … . saucy piece of … of … economy-grade TIN!”
He produces his laser screwdriver, entirely too hastily.
“Believe me, it wasn’t exactly on my list of weekend plans.”
Always the ferocity, always the bravado. Ever keeping the love of his life at arm’s length because to surrender to the Doctor’s vantage point is to surrender what autonomy he has bled and hidden and rotted and suppressed and slaughtered for.
But the Master, self-proclaimed lord over death–little more than a child screaming ‘LOOK AT ME’ in order to combat the terrifying insignificance of living–finds it difficult to maintain his dignity when his oldest friend hovers over him, once again, holding him in his arms, once again, pleading for him to live, once again. The culprit, this time, is not his wife’s bullet, but a gash down his left arm with a blade laced in poison.
“This is some sort of shitty joke,” he rasps, and laughs a husky tired version of his big brave angry cackle. “Maybe this time you wanna give me true love’s kiss, as our exciting follow-up to the whole business on the Valiant.”
He holds up a trembling hand, covered in blood.
“I’m joking. Just. Whistling in the dark. Fairly sure I can beat this, if you can ah, find me some … . salt … hm, appears my cognition’s getting impaired now …”
His vision blurs, but the strangest expression of delirious affection crosses his features.
“Hoh, you know … you’re really so beautiful. Even in this weird young face … I do love chasing you, Doctor.” He swallows back his own spit, which seems to be accumulating in the corners of his mouth at a rapid rate. “Really do love it more than anything. No. No, I love something else more than anything. Give you a hint: it’s you. Did I say that aloud? Oh, Doctor, yo-you’re … the picket fence … and the wind blowing, too … you’re all.”
If this is it, I guess at least I found my harbor, before the end.
“Mmmmguess you could kiss me ‘f you wanted …”
That pure desperation had crept back into his tone because once again he was faced with his worst nightmare. Of course he begged, begged to not go through this hell for the second time. That mantra in his head of, not again, not again, not again; is deafening. The situation was so painfully similar to last time but instead of a human’s bullet it’s something much more. Instead of a refusal to regenerate it’s a struggle to live.
The familiar joking nature of the Master is a partial comfort to the Doctor’s panic. “If this was someone’s idea of a joke it’s not funny. Not ever.” His lips twitched in an effort to smile but it just wouldn’t stick. No instead a creaky laugh escapes, amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes. “I’ll kiss you all you like if you pull through this.”
The word salt had struck a chord, throwing him back through the memories of his own detox. The highly unpleasant sensation he had endured after consuming cyanide. Scoffing he shook his head and smirked. “Salt is too salty. I need to get you into the TARDIS. I have everything there. I promise you’ll be safe, not a prisoner, not trapped.” The desperate pleading tone had returned. He didn’t want to make the Master think he’d trap him but he couldn’t do much without the supplies inside his TARDIS.
Staring at the wound he pressed his lips in a thin line. There was one other thing he could do. While the Master rambled a series of delirious affection, the Doctor was focusing. Moving one hand he hovered it over the wound, his skin gleaming with a soft gold hue. Regeneration energy, he could heal him, he could fix this.
Drawing in a ragged breath the Doctor let his dark eyes fix upon the Master’s face. “Don’t be cross with me for this..” Leaning his head down he pressed a lingering kiss upon his lips. His hand settled on the wound, sending soft gold light across the Master’s skin. He only hoped it would work, that it would be enough. Losing the Master simply wasn’t an option. He couldn’t, wouldn’t fail him again.
“L-listen. I don’t want to go before you know, it was such a good ride, such a good life. You an’ me, all we did. I wanted more but don’t I always.”
Blood drizzles down the Master’s right nostril; saliva down the corners of his mouth. Speaking becomes impossible. His body convulses at erratic intervals.
That is when the Doctor kisses him, spit and blood, poison and all, and the Master’s eyes, still grimaced in agony, peer open.
His face is still a mask of pain-wrinkles, but he’s watching the face upon which he’s fixated with equal parts hatred and adoration, watching it as one watches an unexpected beauty, an unexpected rapture of meteor showers under a crystal clear night sky. It’s that sudden and beautiful. And as it so often does, the affection and the nostalgia and the admiration and the raw adoration all eclipse the contempt and the rage.
And, exactly according to the Doctor’s plan, the Master falls perfectly still, in unwitting compliance.
The regeneration energy–robbing the Doctor of unknown years of his life–has seeped into Koschei’s pores before he can protest.
The fury is back, boosted perhaps by the fact that he is again in robust health. He sits up, a mess of sweat and blood and wrinkled suit, so rapidly that he looks like a vampire emerging from its coffin at midnight. Under other circumstances, it would be hilarious.
“How COULD you! You think I want YOU to die? Who’m I gonna hound to the brink of hell if YOU’RE gone?”
Who’m I gonna love?
No. Don’t utter any ‘ last words ‘ yet.
The convulsions caused ripples of panic to claw through him, digging deep into his flesh. His plan had to work, he couldn’t go through the pain of seeing him die again. Couldn’t handle another burial. Couldn’t face life utterly alone, with not a soul to understand all that he was so entirely as the Master does.
The regeneration energy leaving felt wrong, he fought the instinct to pull back. Tears slid down the Doctor’s face falling to the space between them, he didn’t care enough to brush them away.
When the Master sat up he felt like the air had been pulled from his lungs. The anger barely registering due to the sheer relief he felt in the moment. Safe. Safe. Safe. Safe. His mind thrumming with the knowledge the Master was well and truly alive.
A shaky smile dawned upon his lips, dark eyes a bit duller.
Sagging forward he leans into the Master, burying his face against the
crook of his neck. His arms curling around the other time lord, holding
him.
Icarus 