The Doctor didn’t shift her eyes away from The Master for a second. She was concerned. Very concerned. She had only ever seen the other like this a couple of times in the past.
“Hey. It’s only me.”
With tremulous hesitation, the Master lifts his mournful eyes. He swallows audibly. He musters a grim smile.
“Yes, darling, but the trouble is, remembering a nightmare makes it all the more potent. And this was more than a nightmare. It happened.”
He leans toward her, and it isn’t pleasant. He stinks of sweat and bad breath from sick, sick from nausea, nausea from the pain in his back. Where Missy, dear, wild, beautiful, vicious Missy, left her scar. And Koschei, hunkered into an upright fetal ball, knees drawn to his chest, whispers conspiratorially to his Doctor.
“They stabilized my resurrection, in the Timelock, at a price. They did things to me, they … . rid me of the ability to tell them no, and then they punished me. Rassilon punished me. With intermittent … . sensory overload, and deprivation. With neurochemical substances. With seventy years alone. No one to talk to. The constant fear of the Drums returning, to mock me for being … once again forgettable. With you. With a hundred thousand nuanced scenarios of you bursting in to rescue me. You never came. And I have dreams. And sometimes I feel I might slice my scalp and pull it down over my face and … hide in nothingness, just to make it all stop.”
He draws a shuddering breath.
“You. You make it all stop. It’s only ever been you. That’s what I was afraid to say. The little boy who made me Death’s Dog is the woman who can save me.”
“This is Twirly. He lives with us now. Might need to do something about his upselling protocols.”
“Theta, oh my God.”
“Wha’?! He’s BRILLIANT, you’re gonna love him. And he helped save the day, so I couldn’t just leave him there in that stuffy old factory. He’s too great to be put on the shelf, plenty of life left in him.”
The Master rolls his eyes and richly laughs. His head lulls back as he broadcasts how tickled he is.
“Oh, darling. VERY well! As long as he doesn’t wheel along after me like a demented Roomba at all hours, following me into the lavatory and offering me prices on shaving gel or … or hemorrhoid cream, or something.”
He scoffs, forehead wrinkled at the extremely unpleasant mental image. He squats in front of the perpetually spinning robotic head. He tries not to shiver, with a flicker of a memory of uncontrollable Dalek high generals behaving similarly. A distant, stomach-curdling memory.
“Ey oop, Twirly. I’m probably gonna be the one performing regular maintenance on your circuitry, so. Put ‘er there, chum. With your metaphorical hand, as it were.”
He smiles his politician smile.
“Get cozy with me, because mum here is full of rousing speeches about your autonomy, sure, but can she remember to grease your joints every month?”
He catches her by surprise, and that is the only way he would get the best of her. The Master’s hand grips her jaw, pushes her back against the wall and pins her there by the throat. It is only because it’s him and no one else that he’s not unconscious on the floor with the help of her Venusian aikido skills.
The Doctor trusts her husband implicitly never to hurt her, but that doesn’t stop a brief flash of fear from running through her before she catches the look in his eye. Her own hazel gaze grows dark and she lets her hands run down his chest instead of gripping his arm.
“Interesting… can’t say I’ve ever seen you get quite like this… Can’t say I don’t like it, though.”
His mouth hangs slightly ajar with his arousal. Oh, there it is. That flicker of terror which might otherwise send him shrinking to a corner with shame at a relapsed evil. But now? With carefully staged, moderated “force”? He’s deeply satisfied. The Oncoming Storm, a tiny bit afraid, because of him; the Doctor, horny and playful and possessive and smug, because of him.
Nobody but nobody can do that to her.
Except him.
“I thought,” he explains, throaty, husky, “I’d surprise you with something I know you really. Really. Like.”
A knee presses up between her legs. He self-indulgently shivers at the nails scraping his chest.
“There’s a whole book written about you,” he breathes, ghosting his lips, his teeth, over her mouth, pinching her jaw hard. “But am I in it? Do they know what I can do to you? Do they know how I can make you go incandescent with pleasure? Do they know how I can undo you and leave you unfurled like ripe flower? Hm?”
“Okay, I’m not saying we pretend to be American, or proceed to believe that colonist brutally murdered natives, but what I am saying is that I would be partial to a very large meal where afterwards I take a nap on the couch.”
“Prerequisites: turkey is involved, and afterward I get to ‘nap’ with you.”
“You say ‘nap’ like I’m totally not going to pass out on the couch after eating food consisting of extremely large amounts of tryptophan.”
The Master sighs with feigned patience.
“Yes, love, but I. Get to nap. WITH. You. Emphasis on the collaborative nature of snuggling with, as the plebs put it, ‘full tummies.’”
Icarus 