Missy quickly straightened up and got a hold of herself. She bit her bottom lip, holding back her tears with difficulty. She was turning her back to the Master. Of course he would make disobligent comments and pick on her if he saw her like that.
“I’m not crying, Junior. Get that thought out of your head will ya? Why even would I be crying anyway huh?” Her voice sounded normal but very faintly shaky. She was too proud to tell him the truth. To tell him that she was crying and especially why.
She remembered the names of the people she killed through her lives. Every single name and how she killed them. Begging for mercy. Screaming for help. Crying of fear. The ones that fought for their lives. The one that accepted their fate with dignity. She remembered them all one by one and it was tearing her apart.
The Master pads around behind Missy, hands folded behind his back, examining her posture, studying the tremor of her voice, knowing her as well as he knows himself, as well as kissing the reflection in the mirror, for they are one mind.
“Just like it’d be foolish to, say, confess that time spent in the Doctor’s company might’ve … unscrewed a few valves in my avowed hatred for all life, and my bad memories. Might’ve softened my resolve a bit. Might’ve made me just the smallest bit reluctant to maim.”
He rounds the front of her, with a steadfast stare.
“Might’ve made me start reconsidering what I’ve done, and to whom. Gotten me reacquainted with the idea of shame.”
He offers her a handkerchief, red, engraved with a simple black “M.”
“You’re not the only one. I promise. I just. Put on a show in front of him. Out of pride.”
Missy didn’t move an inch as the Master walked behind her. Every single word he said was true and felt like daggers in her hearts.
But for the last thing he said? She didn’t believe half of it. She didn’t look up at him until he handed her the handkerchief, but she didn’t take it.
“Of course you would put on a show. Of course out of pride. But I don’t believe that you could feel the same way.” She snickered softly but it sounded pitiful. “Do understand this though, Master.”
“Yes, it would be foolish to say that, dear.” She simply repliered as she stared at him, her icy blue eyes piercing through his.
“Nd do you know why? Simple. Because it would have happened anyway. The shame will creep up until you snap because you won’t be able to take it anymore.” Missy remained calm, doing a good work at not crying in front of him.
“It would be foolish to blame it on the time spent with the Doctor. Because he is actually trying to help and he is succeeding. Whether you like it or not.”
The Master blinks, reacquainting himself with his dignity, after baring himself to Missy and being returned … what feels like scorn.
He recalibrates his mind quickly. Perhaps she speaks out of embarrassment, which always raises her hackles, and his, and any Master’s.
“I think you mistake me, sis,” he begins, with uncommon courtesy- courtesy he’ll only show versions of himself. “I don’t regret what’s begun to happen to me. To you, us. I’m only telling you that you’re not running mad. That you’re not alone.”
Her haste to defend the Doctor, in particular, stings. Can she forget that long before she was born, long before he was born, the Time Lord that they are agonized with the ghost pains of a severed limb, and that limb is the Doctor?
The very definition of the Master is the struggle between self-service, and love of the Doctor.
“D’you really think my every pore doesn’t scream for him every moment? Remember, I am you. What you feel, I feel. How can you think we’re so different, Missy? It’s only a matter of how each of us expresses it. The feelings themselves remain.”
Missy quickly straightened up and got a hold of herself. She bit her bottom lip, holding back her tears with difficulty. She was turning her back to the Master. Of course he would make disobligent comments and pick on her if he saw her like that.
“I’m not crying, Junior. Get that thought out of your head will ya? Why even would I be crying anyway huh?” Her voice sounded normal but very faintly shaky. She was too proud to tell him the truth. To tell him that she was crying and especially why.
She remembered the names of the people she killed through her lives. Every single name and how she killed them. Begging for mercy. Screaming for help. Crying of fear. The ones that fought for their lives. The one that accepted their fate with dignity. She remembered them all one by one and it was tearing her apart.
The Master pads around behind Missy, hands folded behind his back, examining her posture, studying the tremor of her voice, knowing her as well as he knows himself, as well as kissing the reflection in the mirror, for they are one mind.
“Just like it’d be foolish to, say, confess that time spent in the Doctor’s company might’ve … unscrewed a few valves in my avowed hatred for all life, and my bad memories. Might’ve softened my resolve a bit. Might’ve made me just the smallest bit reluctant to maim.”
He rounds the front of her, with a steadfast stare.
“Might’ve made me start reconsidering what I’ve done, and to whom. Gotten me reacquainted with the idea of shame.”
He offers her a handkerchief, red, engraved with a simple black “M.”
“You’re not the only one. I promise. I just. Put on a show in front of him. Out of pride.”
//But imagine the only person in all the universe that you trust (your future self) stabs you in the back literally and metaphorically because even to her you’re that expendable ultimately in the service of the person you both love just a teensy bit more than yourself. “Hurry up, regenerate into the version of me that finally gave in and compromised with our best friend.”
Imagine the profoundness of that betrayal.
It’s BOTH growth AND betrayal, and it’s agony. And a part of me will always believe there was another way for Missy to stand with the Doctor, besides injure herself (and that the Master would never ever kill himself, especially not to prevent corroboration with the Doctor, which he’d already done a thousand times in Classic AND New Who).
I’m not saying he didn’t deserve it 100%, I’m just saying IMAGINE that.
Send “We’re married.” for my muse to wake up in a future or alternate reality where our muses are married.
This. This!
This actually wasn’t that surprising, at all. Missy opened her eyes, realized of her situation, groaned and proceeded to sank on her resting spot again. Of course, she was going to establish an economic and legal alliance with herself. Himself. Themselves.
“Since we are Mr. and Mrs. Paradox now, can we get our daughter back?”
The Master sheds his nightshirt and buttons up his charcoal top, with its flawlessly pressed collar, and then he slips into the throbbing red lined black overcoat, tucking up the collar, like donning a mantle of ill will.
He licks his lips and smiles.
“Oh, we’ll get back that which we love, that which we deserve, my darling. All of it. A l l . Of it. But first. Don’t you think it’d be fun if we reminded this universe why it fears us?”
The one he was proposing was a quite logical and sensible course of actions. Yes, the universe needed a reminder.
And yet.
“There’s always time for that, Junior. The universe will fear me, will fear you no matter what we do. Old men will piss themselves at the very sight of your face, you can count on that. But I’m tired. Of waiting. You can go out and play if you want to so bad, but I have a better idea.”
He cocks his head, quelled by her suggestion, and takes a seat at the foot of the bed, watching her closely.
“I confess myself confused, dearest. Do you speak of the same daughter we lost well before the Time War? The one we …ah, abandoned, in pursuit of the Doctor? I’ve been looking for her for years. No matter who I interrogate, torture or kill, the answer is always that she’s dead. That’ll not stop me, though. Not if you’ve ‘an idea’ … ?”
“D’you mean to say that by being in the same place despite our horse-shoed timeline, we’ve created a temporal paradox big enough to find her?”
Send “We’re married.” for my muse to wake up in a future or alternate reality where our muses are married.
This. This!
This actually wasn’t that surprising, at all. Missy opened her eyes, realized of her situation, groaned and proceeded to sank on her resting spot again. Of course, she was going to establish an economic and legal alliance with herself. Himself. Themselves.
“Since we are Mr. and Mrs. Paradox now, can we get our daughter back?”
The Master sheds his nightshirt and buttons up his charcoal top, with its flawlessly pressed collar, and then he slips into the throbbing red lined black overcoat, tucking up the collar, like donning a mantle of ill will.
He licks his lips and smiles.
“Oh, we’ll get back that which we love, that which we deserve, my darling. All of it. A l l . Of it. But first. Don’t you think it’d be fun if we reminded this universe why it fears us?”
“doesn’t it just ruin your day when the person you fail to kill is actually alive?” she drawls, tilted back in a chair with her feet thrown up on the desk as she eyes her past self with a morbid sense of curiosity. “well, certainly good to know we can MAIM prey but honestly, we’re so much better than that. i’m almost disappointed and yet – here we are.” her voice is singsong, high and sharp as the edge of a knife.
“hello, junior. say something nice for mummy, won’t you? i think it’s time we came to an agreement, you and i.”
The Master stops altogether in his advance. This isn’t the first time he’s encountered his future face since their disastrous parting, but it is the closest they have come to physical contact.
“You,” he ventures, mouth dry, words deep but husky with conflicting emotions, “are more disappointed than I, I’m sure. At the time I only wished to stop you from forfeiting yourself to the shared love of our life. I really, really didn’t want to commit suicide.”
He loathes himself in the moment, a sensation with which he’s still unfamiliar, for being the hotter-blooded of the pair. The volcanic magma to the softly lethal snake bite. No finesse, no quiet viper grins, no surgical precision, at least, not anymore: just a thundering lionsinged by the force of his own fury, just Icarus falling from the sun with his melted wings, just a tired old man with gray in his beard and a bad back care of the woman sprawled before him.
“All that aside: It cannot have escaped you that I admire you tremendously.I want you to be happy, Missy. I always did. I want us to be happy.”
How is that for nice?
So Junior joins Sis, offering her the added gift of his deference by taking a seat on a chair lower than hers.
He rests the olive branch in the silence between them.
Icarus 