It was those words that were dangerous when matched with the suffering in his eyes. Whirling in his grief, in his anger he grabbed the nearest object. A chair. Heaving with mild effort he sent it colliding into the and watched as the impact shattered the fragile glass. It cracked and popped, spraying shards of glass across the ground at his feet. Breathing in harsh jagged drags through his lungs, his hands clenched. Still he was ready to attack, to fight, to lash out at anything or anyone that dared stray too close.
Enough loss. Enough pain. Enough life.
E N O U G H !
The telepathic bond connecting the Doctor to the Master sizzles with rage and remorse. Koschei knows what awaits him before he stalks into the observatory.
He stutters to a halt behind the Doctor. And he closes the distance between them, slowly lacing his arms around his waist. Steadfast resolve mutes the pain on his features.
“Not until I’ve said so,” he murmurs.
And does not let go.
The Doctor felt the Master before he heard him enter. The footsteps were familiar and brisk until they halted behind him. Trembling all over the Doctor dragged a slow breath into his lungs fighting the urge to whip around and face the man behind him.
The arms around his waist made him tense, he didn’t want to end up lashing out at the Master. Swallowing hard he throws his hands up over his face, his jaw clenched tight.
“Koschei…”
A miracle occurs: the Master respects the Doctor’s space.
Perhaps it’s because centuries of an inexplicable, terrifying, overstimulating, isolating noise inside his head, penetrative and invasive and cruel, at the hands of their society’s great patriarch, made him realize just what it is to have no space, ever, to oneself.
Instead of overcompensation with aggressions of his own, then, he releases his beloved and steps back.
“It’s okay. C’mere. Turn around and c’mere. You don’t have to sort it alone, you mopey, deranged cockatoo.”
“Everything’s too loud, too much, I know. But you’ve got me. I get it.”
It was those words that were dangerous when matched with the suffering in his eyes. Whirling in his grief, in his anger he grabbed the nearest object. A chair. Heaving with mild effort he sent it colliding into the and watched as the impact shattered the fragile glass. It cracked and popped, spraying shards of glass across the ground at his feet. Breathing in harsh jagged drags through his lungs, his hands clenched. Still he was ready to attack, to fight, to lash out at anything or anyone that dared stray too close.
Enough loss. Enough pain. Enough life.
E N O U G H !
The telepathic bond connecting the Doctor to the Master sizzles with rage and remorse. Koschei knows what awaits him before he stalks into the observatory.
He stutters to a halt behind the Doctor. And he closes the distance between them, slowly lacing his arms around his waist. Steadfast resolve mutes the pain on his features.
The Doctor knew very well how to rile Koschei up. After this long, he had become intimately familiar with the particular looks, touches, words that made his husband squirm. That part was easy. What he wasn’t used to was admitting how desperately he needed Koschei.
He continues his work at the console, glancing up at his husband lounging in the jump seat every few seconds, but the longer he stands there, the more his desire grows. The Doctor finally clears his throat. “Koschei…? Think I might get your help with somethin’?
Koschei knows what he’s doing.
Koschei knows EXACTLY what he’s doing.
He’s reclined in the jumpseat–which, on raunchy occasions like this, he’s amusedly coined the “humpseat”–booted legs crossed at the ankle, up on the console, arms crossed behind his head, with a lordly and proprietary gaze at the ceiling.
“Only if you tell me from over there what ‘something’ is,” he leers, ever so smugly.
Send “Mating Season” to catch my muse in a lustful state & needing release.
Koschei has been preoccupied with some new project in his workshop, so the Doctor is left to her own devices. Nevermind that she’s been aching all day, she hasn’t wanted to bother her husband.
So… she retires to their room. It can’t hurt to indulge her desires, so she relaxes, her hand trailing down her body. She can almost, almost pretend it’s him touching her. As her hand slips beneath the covers and between her legs, she exhales a soft, whimpering moan of the sort that Koschei absolutely adores. She’s so caught up that she doesn’t hear the footsteps outside.
Koschei peels off his t-shirt and rubs work-callused palms down his cheeks, scratching the dampness in his trim little beard, dampness that causes the silvery-blond hairs to gleam more on his head, his face, and his chest. He heaves a sigh and sheds his trousers, too, and then his boxer-briefs, padding toward the bedroom and the connected shower.
He hears that whimper, a noise his boisterous wife ordinarily only makes in the throes of their lovemaking. And he stops dead, and licks his lips, as his eyes darken.
He strides in with twice the confidence, but softly, climbs onto the bed and drapes himself across her, slipping his hand inside her trousers.
He says absolutely nothing, but smiles down at her, and presses his naked hips down on top of her, and kisses her with a hungry open mouth.
“Did you really think,” he half-gasps, through another kiss, “that I would have objected to you interrupting anything for this … ?”
The Master sits looking at the Doctor, who doesn’t want to be looked at, piercingly, knowing him mercilessly, loving him recklessly; this Master cannot be Missy, the clever cool lioness lying in wait, for he can conceal his claws to be a charming politician, but not when the person with whom he is most infatuated, the person whom he has adored since the day they met, is in the same vicinity. He’s a tuning fork picking up the Doctor’s vibrations, and they are loud, and they are violent, and never more so than when the Doctor is SILENT.
So it’s with a look of knowing, bleak exasperation that the Master smiles, the longer the Doctor faces away and strives to ignore him.
‘That’s not your choice to make.’
It’s in that moment that the Master realizes there is no honor, no privilege, in being the Doctor’s confidante. He was just HERE, when the Doctor was tired and discouraged enough to be candid. Just in the right place at the right time. Any show of steadfastness or loyalty or kindness rewarded with scoffing, yet again, with rebukes and cold shoulders. There is nothing special about him at all.
It was just a fluke.
“So you’ve told me that you plan to kill yourself, you’ve entrusted ME with that, and nobody else, and I’m the one who’ll have to watch it happen, because it’s ‘your choice to make.’”
He pauses, to gasp a laugh, and slowly shake his head.
“You’ve put me in that position, Doctor. Nobody but you.”
He leans in very close, lips a wounded sneer.
“I didn’t realize you were auditioning for MY part.”
{ You selfish prick. }
He stands, withdraws his jacket violently from the Doctor’s grasp. He dons it with brusque efficiency.
“Do excuse me.”
“NO.”
His hand shoots out to grab at the jacket. It’s partly an instinct to try and keep hold of something when it’s snatched from him, but he’s also saying no, you’re not excused.
It hurts, but he holds tight. Don’t go.
“I’m sorry I’ve burdened you with my trust. I thought you’d understand.”
He could rant and lecture for hours, but he doesn’t. For one, he hasn’t said he’s made his mind up. And he doesn’t intend to actually go out and cause his own death, he just wants the choice not to prevent it, should this body succumb to its injuries. Humans have that choice, sometimes. If they’re old and have lived a long time and don’t want to continue living. Why shouldn’t he have that option too? A life he is forced into continuing will hardly be worth living at all. If he hasn’t chosen to carry on, what will be the point?
The Doctor stares up at him, a plea for him to just understand forming in his mind – but he stays silent. Words get him into trouble. He’s in enough of that as it is. Besides, if he starts trying to explain why it is that he doesn’t feel able to continue, he might reveal too much emotion at once, accidentally. Every inch of his soul feels battered and bruised to match his physical body, aching and bleeding under his clothes.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t say I’d made my mind up, though. I just need time. I told you because I thought you’d want to know. I’ll keep my mouth shut next time.”
He lets go of the Master’s coat. Doctor, Doctor — let it go. Time enough. He can’t win them all, especially if they don’t want to be won.
He sinks back into the bed and turns away once more, closing his eyes. At a distance he’d give the impression of an attempt to sleep, but the way his fists clench around the sheets, the expression on his face with his eyes shut a bit too tightly to look calm — no. He’s not trying to sleep. He’s trying to forget.
He wants to forget the rushing of emotions going on in his mind, forget the pain spreading through his whole body, and forget the horrible argument he’s just had with the person he wants to just hold him. Isn’t that what anyone wants when they’re hurting — to be held by the person they love most in the universe? He could find Missy, but he doesn’t have the strength to leave his bed. All he has are his own thoughts and the face of the Master currently beside him — and he’s not even sure he has him anymore.
He whirls on his heel, a vortex of agonized reprisal.
“YES, I DO.”
I understand. I understand what it’s like to be left behind, to be forgotten so many times that you are weary, body and soul, and just want it all to end.
Because Y O U put me in that position. Over and over and over and over and over and OVER!
But then mydamned capacity to survive takes hold, and here I remain.
“Doctor, be STRONG.”
Be strong like me.
“I don’t want you to ‘keep your mouth shut.’ I want to know WHY. Why is it me? You couldn’t have looked more repulsed when you saw me if you’d tried. ‘Eugh, there’s the dirty beast that saved my life from Rassilon! Hope I don’t catch anything from it!’ You didn’t even know what I’d done to your human yet! How’m I supposed to believe you spoke to me out of TRUST, then? I’m not the one you groomed to perfection in your little Vault of Rehab, now, AM I? So just tell me why. Did you tell me because I was just in the room when you felt like talking? Or are you punishing me, because I took Missy away from you?”
He stalks right back to the Doctor’s side; it’s his blessing and his curse, that he will never ever escape the gravitational pull of his other self. He kneels, and cocks his head, and narrows his eyes.
“Because this? This feels like punishment. Or is it really so unfathomable to you that your death would… .?”
He grinds his teeth, and rolls his head on his neck, in one wide self-soothing animal circle.
“ …would r u i n me?”
A pause as the weight of the confession absorbs.
And then the Master removes his coat a second time and hands it to the Doctor. This time he is the one who cannot look.
I would stay with you while it happened. Either way. I would stay with you.
“and i’ll never doubt it. not for a moment. you were brilliant.” she is there to greet him after his speech, grinning broadly in her usual way. she kisses him then in greeting, in kindness and warmth because while she considers herself a decent speaker, there is something about his words that inspire emotions in ways she has yet to manage on her own.
looping her arm through his, she practically glows in his company after his speech, his impassioned words. she had been uneasy at first, but now sees what she might have missed had she not agreed to such a public display, such a broadcasted speech across the entire planet. but the emotion he puts behind his words still ring in her ears, relays over their mental connectivity and makes her heartbeats quicken still.
“i loved it. i love you. gods, that was amazing kosch!” another dazzling grin, another lingering kiss. “you were amazing. i’m so proud of you.”
“You really like it that much? I mean, I confess, I was beyond invigorated!”
The Master pulls the Doctor near by the waist, tidying some of the tailored details of her formal; he muses wryly how much more real and right it feels to play charismatic politician with his one great love on his arm, and not poor bereft Lucy Saxon.
“Take me away.”
Their faces are inches apart; she could count the hairs of silver fox stubble on his jaw and his sideburns, and she can smell the cinnamon gum he chewed before his speech, and the musky fresh aroma of his cologne.
“Now. Pull a publicity stunt. Call the TARDIS and let’s have a victory run.”
Icarus 