It’s an unusually crass declaration from the salty Victorian, but out it spills, with great panache, great enunciative crispness, on the t.
“I KNOW I didn’t say that aloud. I KNOW I didn’t. What’d you do, eavesdrop? We weren’t even touch-telepathing, how’d you DO that? God, is it that earnest a need? Not that I’m ADMITTING to it … !”
The Master glances with his best effort at imperiousness at his beloved buffoon. He rounds on the Doctor as he has the TEMERITY to RUN AWAY from the feisty foreplay he himself instigated!
“Oi, OHO. Cat and mouse time, you little SHIT!”
He draws the nanotech tracker he had been engrossed with, a pinhead-sized bug that hovers after the Doctor and adheres to the skin of his neck. Then the Master spins round, grinning maniacally, and returns to his testing screen. Excellent. The tracker is activated, and the Doctor is now a bright blinking blue dot on the digital grid.
“The sun isn’t bright just because I say it is. It just is. It was bright before I even knew the word for bright. I didn’t decide what it is, I just acknowledged what it is.”
She ducks her head, but glances up a moment later, a smile on her lips.
“You aren’t worth something just because I say you are. You just are. You were worth something before I even said anything. I didn’t decide that you are, I simply acknowledged that you are.
This is what I mean when I say you are worth it.”
“ … . are you really so selfless?”
The Master shifts weight where he stands, trying to convert restless emotional energy into kinesis. He rocks weight from one hip to the other, even bounces. Ultimately the attempt fails, and he growls, and then laughs, throwing his hands overhead, lacing his fingers at the nape of his neck.
“You would free me from all emotional obligation to you, just to ensure that I know my intrinsic value? KNOWING how long I’ve railed against you and every other damned Time Lord, railed against what the Untempered Schism showed me, against my own smallness, and EVERYONE’S?”
“Are you really so PERFECT for me …as I’d always believed? Yes, Doctor. My Theta, I know I could, theoretically, live without you. I know I could, theoretically, have merit, be worth something, worthy of love even, without you there to guide me. I need depend on no one. Theoretically. So thank you, Hearts.
But I’d rather see myself through your eyes anyway.”
The Master catches the barb on his tongue before it rolls off: well, it wouldn’t be you and me if we didn’t habitually break each other’s heart.
He stops himself only because the joyful abandon on the Doctor’s face is too hard-won to sacrifice to his own visceral, latent anger.
He stops himself because he loves him.
Because he always will. Hopeless, hopeless. There will never be an end to it.
He turns his head before his reluctant eyes will even relinquish the sight of his lover. But his hand remains in sweat-dampened hair, stroking it reassuringly. As was once, long ago, their way, it is Theta who can find the way to articulate deep-seated emotions, not Koschei, who is weary at the same time as he rejoices.
Finally, he speaks, but of practical matters, and not feelings; that was ever his way of showing affection, after all.
“You haven’t slept long enough to replenish yourself. If your mind wanders back to that place, I can guide it home again. Rest.”
Theta can sense the barb behind the Master’s lips, and though he expects it he’s also thankful it doesn’t escape.
He isn’t sure at this point if he could withstand it, at least in the sense that it would render his apology entirely meaningless the moment he retaliated with his own barb of equal or greater value. Even before the Academy, it was simply how they operated- trading one sharp twist of the proverbial knife-made-of-syllables for the other until they were both left laughing hysterically at one another’s abilities- or inabilities -to engage in verbal warfare, or left so filled with passionate rage that it instigated, well… some other form of communication entirely.
Right now though, Theta doesn’t think it would do either of them any good to trade insults, especially when Theta knows he deserves them and therefore his own would be far more stinging than usual. Once more in the space of moments, his Koschei has saved him an unsavory fate- first within his nightmares and now here, within their conversation and briefly Theta wonders how in the Multiverse he plans to make up for what he’s done. Perhaps his hearts had it right in that argument that had changed both of their lives. Perhaps all he need do is stay, and prove it, through every wave crash and every vessel torn asunder along the rocks and jagged coral. Perhaps escaping the wreckage of their collective past isn’t the point.
Perhaps surviving it together is. Navigating the storm together, not avoiding it. Embracing it as it is and growing from it, not instigating it as present-tense and running in circles around it. Koschei is right, he is thick. But he’s learning and that’s what counts. He’s one step closer to shedding the past as he gazes at the keeper of his hearts, his expression subconsciously moving into a resting state, a contemplative state. His hands move from below the sheets and seek out the hemline of the Master’s shirt, curling into the fabric as he brings himself closer, closer, until his head is resting in the other Time Lord’s lap with one eye glancing upward.
“I’ll do better, Kos.”
Unburdened by the past though he may currently be, he still knows what he’s like most of the time. It doesn’t escape him that he’s difficult. Cerulean tendrils shimmer on the outskirts and those four words hold a clear message: he’ll do better to open up, to trust, to let go of what he’s done in favor of what he can do. He’ll do better to shed the person he once was in favor of the person he could become. The light. The hope. Someone who smiles and means it every time. Someone worthy of the Master’s forgiveness, his love, his time and adoration because the man Theta is now isn’t quite there yet.
Yet.
Koschei feels the head in his lap, and it inspires an immediate sigh. He rolls his eyes up and then down at Theta’s face, and gnaws on his upper lip.
“Yeah, you will,” he sasses, but the effect is lost in the quiver of his voice. He winces and juts his jaw. He shakes his head.
“You have power over me. Like no one else has. I dunno if that … satisfies, even pleases, you, or frightens you. Probably both. But just bear it in mind. You are everything.”
Those damned words are contraband to the Master, but Koschei? Koschei feels more deeply and with more self-abandon than his calculating, pragmatic exoskeleton will ever show. And all that feeling is aimed with a laser’s singularity, a laser’s precision, at one person.
Always has been.
Always will be.
“I have a child’s simplicity when it comes to my schema of the universe. There is you, at the center. You are the sun. You say I am bad, and I become as bad as I can be. You say I am good, and I rejoice. I want to be the most powerful creature because I don’t want to need you. That’s what it all boils down to. But I DO. I DO need you. I would have to rewrite my personality not to need you. More than that, I would have to die and be reborn a new being, with an idea of existence ascribed anew on my brain.”
He smacks his forehead, for emphasis, suddenly animated, vehement.
“I’m not trying to … to achieve anything in confessing all this, but to say, yes, you must do better. You must be my boy again, as I am yours. Come back to the start with me, won’t you?”
And then he voices words which even he cannot know rest upon the Doctor’s mind:
Icarus 