He puts down the bit of circuitry over which they’ve been arguing, voices and gestures absurdly escalating, when the Doctor’s infamous gob produces those words.
The Master’s smile is soft and betrays how susceptible he is to this particular verbal weapon.
Hands now freed, he traverses the small space between them, rises up on the Doctor’s feet—his usual proprietary body language–and kisses him firmly.
The Doctor has no concept of time, nor movement, light and dark, stardust and clover, color and sound- it all melted away the moment his eyes had fallen closed. Nor does he dream, at least not at first, not as he’s unknowingly cradled and hoisted into his hardly-used sleeping quarters, well, their sleeping quarters now. Not even as he is placed down onto the bed, covered, and joined by his beloved, his keeper, and a word he’s come to relate to the Master most recently though he will do all he can to avoid him finding out- his savior. He never wishes to know if he would outlive the inundation of the Master’s ego should he hear it spoken aloud.
So the Doctor merely lay peaceful, silent, still for once, aside from the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. He remains thus for a long time- perhaps three hours, perhaps a bit more -before there is any sign of distress, the first of which is a slight trembling of his fingers beneath the blanket. It lasts only a fraction of a second, less even than that, but it is a domino wavering in a room filled to the brim with objects poised to fall.
One breath draws in slightly deeper as color and sound and emotional reactions and responses permeate the inky black nothing deep in his subconscious mind, and the first domino plummets to the floor, taking out the next. His hearts begin to increase, to ascend slowly as his brow creases. The color and sound swirl together like matter circling the drain of a magnetic pull before touching, and when they touch they condense before immediately discharging, erupting in a chaotic whirlwind of imagery, vivid and terrifying and so absolutely powerful that his back arches slightly off of the mattress. Unknowingly, he is projecting telepathically, cerulean now just as inky black as the dreamlessness had been.
The red fields, he is a young boy terrified. The War, a soldier fighting for what he does not believe in out of guilt, obligation, fear always fear, and revenge. Revenge for the telepathic manipulation, physical medical experimentations, beaten, broken, weak and hopeless, nothing- Theta Sigma is nothing, nothing, the Doctor is all there is, all there was, all there ever can be because the Doctor is strong and together and he can fix this. Theta Sigma is weak and ignorant and foolish and contagious, run, run, you have to run before you hurt him again, like you hurt him before, like you killed your people, R U N Theta Sigma, block out the whispers, block out the heartsbeats, refuse the noise, you know you’re mad, let the Doctor fix you, let the Doctor fix him, the Master, Koschei, losing him, hurting him, your fault Theta Sigma, only the Doctor can make it better-
He feels the disturbance in his oldest friend’s mind far before there’s physical evidence.
The Master dodges around TARDIS equipment, through corridors and into their bedroom; he curses himself for having strayed from the room for even a few moments, to grab some water.
He drops to his knees in front of his beloved. He rests both palms on his wet, hot cheeks, and slips quietly, unobtrusively, inside his mind.
There he wades around, on the battlefield, full of corpses, and the ghost of four beats that so torments them both. A savant of telepathy since childhood, Koschei visualizes both his own form and Theta’s, and both materialize in their conjoined mindscape. Guided dreaming is a far more fragile, dangerous process than waking touch-telepathy, but he can’t bear to watch the Doctor thrashing in a private hell that he has every capacity to access.
In their minds, he takes the Doctor’s wrist, and points past the carnage.
“Look there, love. Look at the horizon.”
The air is black, the sky is black, everything is pitch, except that horizon, which the Master, determined, proverbial heels dug in, peels open, making a small crescent of golden light. That light grows.
“Look there for me, and wake up. This is a bad dream, a mere memory. I’m with you now. Wake up.”
I think the thing that makes you feel things about this face is the context paired with the expression, and the pretense of a very intimate moment (he leans down, asks him to “whisper in his ear” with that hand gesture in one of the above gifs).
He gazes into the eyes of his vulnerable, weakened equal and counterpart for a long, meaningful moment, before lofting his eyebrows, and the message there is “I know you already know who they are, I know you already suspect that they’re the self-cannibalized human race, and I don’t need to tell you,” and that weird sort of RESPECT for the Doctor’s intellect combined with the FACETIOUS “CONCERN” for the Doctor’s “hearts breaking” makes it a particularly potent form of cruelty. And the apex of arch-nemesis and former flame interaction: you respect but also loathe your arch-nemesis.
Pair with that, the Master is usingand therefore mocking the Doctor’s own most prized trait,COMPASSION, masquerading as someone showing “consideration” for the Doctor’s feelings, to deliver the awful killing blow to his hearts.
And what’s that killing blow? “The species with whom you replaced me after running away from our friendship and betraying my long-ago trust in you? They’re more evil than I, the disappointment you ran from, could ever be. They took advantage of each other’s weaknesses You DEFINE YOURSELF BY HOW YOU CAN SAVE OTHERS. WELL YOU CAN’T SAVE THEM. THIS IS THEIR INEVITABLE FUTURE.”
It’s the execution of his line “human race: greatest monsters of them all.”
Icarus 