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 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:
It takes every ounce of learned gentleness the Master has not to seize the Doctor by the face, shake him, scream–you KNOW me, I am you, I AM you!--force memories upon him by virtue of their telepathic link.
Instead he squats in front of his fallen friend and presses a hand, very, very gently, to his brow. Through his fingers he infuses a warm settling sensation, a benign version of his lifetimes-long command you will obey me. It’s a sensation of the mind, one like fuzz, like downy feathers.
“You’ve got amnesia. That means you can’t remember. I’m safe. We’re best friends. I’m …”
He swallows back the infamous moniker, and settles for his schoolday title.
“I’m Koschei.”
And then he lies: just a small lie, a lie that disregards an unfortunate and heartsbreaking past.
“I would never hurt you.”
He nods at the smoke rising from the control panel, inwardly, viciously, compartmentalizing his panic and dread with the task at hand.
“But I need to diagnose the mechanical malfunction that hurt you. Stay here, yeah? You know this room, you know me, we travel together, we’re practically married. You call yourself the Doctor. Stay here, darling.”
“If I told you ‘nothing,’ honest as it may be, you wouldn’t believe me, so I think I shall enjoy sitting here on your jumpseat grinning at you, and letting you progressively spiral into a panic.”
“ … Congratulations,” the Master retorts, aiming for bitter, and landing somewhere on the terrain of feisty: with a perceptible quiver in his tone.
“It’s been too long old friend.” The Doctor said as he approached. His converse squeak on the floor as he did so. “You know I cant let you do this. Right?”
“Do WHAT?”
The word ‘friend’ chafes visibly. The Master strives to conceal it with crisp enunciation and expansive gestures; it’s really very primitive, the urge to make oneself larger at sight of a threat. And what threat the Doctor poses is far more obscure, far subtler, than a gun or a poison. It’s the threat of vulnerability.
“Oh, right. I suppose you’ve no notion of where I’ve been. You’re still a young face. The one who almost had me. The one I MISS.”
He thrusts that last word like a gauntlet, wondering if he’ll ever have the fortitude to tell this young, eager, simperingly apologetic martyr of a Doctor what happened after he stumbled into the Timelock with the intent to murder Rassilon. Does the Doctor even notice the silver in his hair now? The new wrinkles? The more bitterly fermented weariness?
“We are a long way from that Christmas when I made the entire earth into my image, my dear. In your future, I will be thwarted still more profoundly, but not by your hand. No. By my own: in another face.”
By the only person I EVER trusted, after you LEFT me. Oh, Missy.
“I scarcely have the strength to live, much less concoct a scheme to conquer the universe. I’ve lost my touch, darling. So you can relax, and go.”
Damn that porcupine hair; damn those soft dark eyes; damn those squeaky shoes. Damn him whom he loves.
“Okay” It would appear that he had encountered a much later incarnation of is old friend. He was not expecting this response. Come to mention it he did look older than he did before he took on Rassilon.
He missed him in away. Sure he was evil and mentally unstable but they had been through so much together over the ages. He loved him but he seemed to be a shell of his former self.
“Tell me everything”
“To what end?”
The Master balks, though his poisonous edge has dulled. Now his hesitation is borne of wounded vulnerability, more than it is rage. His nostrils flare as he draws temper-steadying breaths.
“Don’t mistake me. I only ask because at this stage of your … development … as … as you, the options you tend to offer me are open battle or surrender and imprisonment, and very little in between.”
He draws his laser, lifts it high, and activates the safety lock.
“Tell me how you hope to walk away from this conversation. What you hope to gain. And if I’m reassured, I’ll give you my weapon.”
“ … Congratulations,” the Master retorts, aiming for bitter, and landing somewhere on the terrain of feisty: with a perceptible quiver in his tone.
“It’s been too long old friend.” The Doctor said as he approached. His converse squeak on the floor as he did so. “You know I cant let you do this. Right?”
“Do WHAT?”
The word ‘friend’ chafes visibly. The Master strives to conceal it with crisp enunciation and expansive gestures; it’s really very primitive, the urge to make oneself larger at sight of a threat. And what threat the Doctor poses is far more obscure, far subtler, than a gun or a poison. It’s the threat of vulnerability.
“Oh, right. I suppose you’ve no notion of where I’ve been. You’re still a young face. The one who almost had me. The one I MISS.”
He thrusts that last word like a gauntlet, wondering if he’ll ever have the fortitude to tell this young, eager, simperingly apologetic martyr of a Doctor what happened after he stumbled into the Timelock with the intent to murder Rassilon. Does the Doctor even notice the silver in his hair now? The new wrinkles? The more bitterly fermented weariness?
“We are a long way from that Christmas when I made the entire earth into my image, my dear. In your future, I will be thwarted still more profoundly, but not by your hand. No. By my own: in another face.”
By the only person I EVER trusted, after you LEFT me. Oh, Missy.
“I scarcely have the strength to live, much less concoct a scheme to conquer the universe. I’ve lost my touch, darling. So you can relax, and go.”
Damn that porcupine hair; damn those soft dark eyes; damn those squeaky shoes. Damn him whom he loves.
Icarus 