She’s massaging his shoulders as he shrugs out of his maroon Council robes, having just taken the full lambasting of a dozen “concerned citizens” as to his crucial role in the reformation of the Prydonian Chapter’s testing procedures.
Isn’t your husband reputed to have failed his test before the Untempered Schism? and about eleven varieties of that (accurate) accusation still ring in his ears as he groans, and leans back into his wife, and takes his oldest friend’s legs, and wraps them around his waist.
The Master turns his head and presses his face into the Doctor’s neck, lazily kissing her jaw.
“Help me forget a while.”
she’s eager to help; he can read the tension not just in his face but his entire frame. the entire line of questioning had felt like a firing squad in her opinion. she had kept her tongue, however, unwilling to make it seem like koschei couldn’t speak for himself. but she will not waver on his role, or the complete overhaul of the testing procedures. it’s another step in gallifrey’s reformation. for the better, as far as she’s concerned.
her fingers dig deep into his shoulders, dragging the fabric of his robes to the floor somewhere on her left. her motions dip across his shoulder blades to his spine and back again, massaging anywhere she can. she mind is calm, warm, enveloping as she embraces him physically and emotionally at his request. yes, she can do that.
one hand breaks off the massage to drag through his hair, nails against his scalp. she tilts her head to press a series of kisses against his temple, trailing until she can kiss him properly. her other hand digs into the muscles down his spine, and she hums softly in agreement.
“of course.” she murmurs against his skin. “here, or shall i run you a bath?”
Koschei falls forward onto his face and stomach. He groans a long, quasi-obscene sound as the lady president’s fingers knead into and render pliant dough of his battle-taut muscles.
When his best friend encircles him mind and body he exhales just as slowly, and closes his eyes.
“Couldn’t move if I wanted to,” comes his voice from a smushed, muffled place somewhere in the sheets.
And when her hands employ their secretmost weapon and comb tension from his scalp, his mindscape is a bath of batik ink, swirling outward from a throbbing red place into gradations of violet and blue, indigo to cerulean to the hue of earth’s skies.
“Whoooooohhh,” comes the Master’s inarticulately blissful warbling.
“ … I dunno, but I’m already formulating a murder scheme for the person who spiked it,” the Master counters, catching the Doctor in his arms securely.
He pulls an all-purpose anti-toxin injection from his belt and injects the Doctor in the arm.
“OI! SEAL OFF THE EXITS!” he roars at the nearest guard, who scrambles to comply. “NO one leaves until they’re questioned!”
Doors to the Citadel audience hall slam closed. The Master lies down the Doctor on the floor and crouches over her. He pulls his laser screwdriver and shakes it once, hard, expanding it to a vallidium baton with a detachable floating laser nozzle that can decimate every living creature in the room within seconds.
“I do believe this is the part where one of your earth apes would say, ‘coom at me, scrublords, I’m ripped,’” he jests through his teeth, eyes ablaze. “How you feeling, Thete?”
the room is spinning. the glass in her hand shatters somewhere on the floor to her left, her fingers too numb to keep hold of it. she’s aware of her husband speaking, threatening, and she can only nod blindly because aloud his words are suffocated, as if she’s hearing underwater. thankfully, her mental capacity isn’t so quickly affected by whatever had been in her drink and she is capable of understand well enough. so far.
“oi, that hurts!” she hisses at the injection to her arm, her words only slightly slurred. her movements are even slower though, a delayed reaction well after he’s already injected her. something with her nervous system then, she can deduce. she doesn’t even recognize she’s on the floor until she recognizes the pattern on the ceiling ( which, is still spinning ).
and suddenly – she bursts out giggling. it’s uncontrollable, triggered by his statement, and she can’t stop it. her expression is everything but amused – instead it’s alarm as she tries to clap a hand over her mouth to try and stop the giggling – in her sluggish movements, she nearly hits herself in the face instead.
“oh my goood.” she squeaks out between fits, breathing hard. “i’m fine – it’s fine.” she’s routine; she drinks tea while she presides in the audience chamber; it’s not a secret. it helps her keep calm in the face of idiocy that reigns in the council. she can’t fathom how someone slipped it in there. “honey – i’m fine. i think your thing – the stabby thing – the one in my arm-” she breaks off because her ribs hurt from laughing and it feels as if someone has suddenly dumped ice water in her veins. she inhales sharply at the sensation, fingers digging in to try and find purchase on the marbled floor.
“working. working i think.” she’s vaguely aware the guards have sealed the room. good. her gaze flickers to his weapon, then back to his face. “consider my permission to, as they say, ‘give ‘em hell’.”
He clicks his tongue.
“Mkay. Close your eyes.”
And the Master dislodges the long-range nozzle.
With a gliding motion, like cracking a whip, he sends it searing through the nearest crowd of ten or twelve. They fall, missing limbs, heads, and bisected torsos, to the ground.
“Every last one of you in this room is a double-agent and a traitor, eh?” he snarls. “Someone start talking or I will randomly select just one of you to survive for interrogation.”
The Master knows he should be ashamed that killing still invigorates him.
And he will be, if the Doctor sees, if the Doctor looks at him and catches his unholy smile.
But only then.
And does that mean he hasn’t really become a better person at all?
“ … I dunno, but I’m already formulating a murder scheme for the person who spiked it,” the Master counters, catching the Doctor in his arms securely.
He pulls an all-purpose anti-toxin injection from his belt and injects the Doctor in the arm.
“OI! SEAL OFF THE EXITS!” he roars at the nearest guard, who scrambles to comply. “NO one leaves until they’re questioned!”
Doors to the Citadel audience hall slam closed. The Master lies down the Doctor on the floor and crouches over her. He pulls his laser screwdriver and shakes it once, hard, expanding it to a vallidium baton with a detachable floating laser nozzle that can decimate every living creature in the room within seconds.
“I do believe this is the part where one of your earth apes would say, ‘coom at me, scrublords, I’m ripped,’” he jests through his teeth, eyes ablaze. “How you feeling, Thete?”
“HehHAH, what’d I do? This is a most blessed visit.”
The Master follows wife and daughter out into that which is reminiscent of the red grassy fields made sacred by memory. He can’t help it: even when on another planet, his mind returns to the place of origin for every happiest state of his hearts. Still, the fireflies are bigger, fatter, and brighter on this planet, as he and Theta both aim to please their beloved babygirl.
“You know, I’m not sure I care, long as I’ve got my girls… . ! What IS it, my brilliant star? Oh golly, you’re joost piping with ideas!”
He bends carefully to hoist Celesia up onto his shoulders.
“Look, Lessie, look! See the lights? Those are bugs! They look like fallen stars, now don’t they? But you know those stars are all big …bigger than this whole field, bigger than ten of these whole fields? They’re joost very, very far away. Wave to them! Wave, loov! There’s a girl! Maybe you have a friend on one of those stars waving back, that you and mum and me’ll get to meet someday, hm? Like mum and I were friends!”
He realizes, of course, from his typically voracious study of child development, that Celesia can probably latch onto only a handful of the words he speaks, but Koschei hates the idea of ever speaking down to his daughter, and so it’s typical that they converse in this manner, her babbles to his full sentences, with mutually feeding enthusiasm.
She’s massaging his shoulders as he shrugs out of his maroon Council robes, having just taken the full lambasting of a dozen “concerned citizens” as to his crucial role in the reformation of the Prydonian Chapter’s testing procedures.
Isn’t your husband reputed to have failed his test before the Untempered Schism? and about eleven varieties of that (accurate) accusation still ring in his ears as he groans, and leans back into his wife, and takes his oldest friend’s legs, and wraps them around his waist.
The Master turns his head and presses his face into the Doctor’s neck, lazily kissing her jaw.
“Eugh, probably because you can’t see or hear any of the back-stabbing sycophants who swarm us during daylight hours.”
The Master laces his arm around the Doctor’s waist and draws her close, sipping a glass of brandy. A long pause ensues. Then he clears his throat, uncharacteristically self-conscious, and places the drink on the balcony ledge.
“ … reminds me of that city on the Mondasian ship that I … well, it’s what the humans call karma, isn’t it? The guilt over my own past shit spoiling a perfectly romantic moment.”
the doctor nearly snorts into her wine, resting her head against his shoulder as she admires the city and the way the night has truly cast it into a beautiful scene, a stark contrast from the daylight hours – sometimes the light hits the buildings just right at sunrise or sunset and casts the entire city into red, almost staining it with blood. in the night, the stars reflect against shining surfaces and all is calm. the world is quiet.
when he speaks, she listens. she sets her glass next to his and pulls away from his side so she can untuck her legs from beneath her and face him on the cushioned balcony bench. her fingers find his.
“you can’t let the past define you still.” she says slowly, carefully, as if choosing her words with great care. “we both have things we regret, and the universe has made sure we remember.” there are nights she can’t sleep for the nightmares of her own misdeeds, the blood on her hands. “but you cannot let the guilt eat at you. it will destroy you, from the inside out. use it to shape your actions for the future instead. let it build for you.” a pause. “besides, everyone knows karma doesn’t exist. your life is what you make it, for the good or the bad.”
He’s particularly fond of those blood-red hours. They remind him that destructive power, chaos, have a place in the cosmos; that, indeed, they are agents of change and transition. Fire clears forests for new growth. So, too, can he.
As if reading his mind, his best friend takes his hands and pledges that he can see inroads to the future in his mistakes.
He catches her gaze and tilts his head to the left, a gesture that both implores and thanks.
“Yeah,” he supplies, and nothing more, raising her hands to his lips, to kiss them.
“Eugh, probably because you can’t see or hear any of the back-stabbing sycophants who swarm us during daylight hours.”
The Master laces his arm around the Doctor’s waist and draws her close, sipping a glass of brandy. A long pause ensues. Then he clears his throat, uncharacteristically self-conscious, and places the drink on the balcony ledge.
“ … reminds me of that city on the Mondasian ship that I … well, it’s what the humans call karma, isn’t it? The guilt over my own past shit spoiling a perfectly romantic moment.”
The Master laces fingers with the Doctor, and he swears he could feel the variations of the lines of her palms, could recite them like verse, by hearts.
The Master’s perched a mere ten feet from his wife, at his steadfastly ferocious spot: bodyguard, chief counselor, husband, father of her child, oldest and best friend. These are all accolades he cherishes over anything to do with his malicious intergalactic reputation for criminality.
“I’d like to think I could help, though.”
He lopes over to his wife, and squats in front of her, hands on her knees. The desolate landscape in her head eases around the edges, and turns the hues of dawn.
“Running is not so bad if we can run together.”
everything in her mind bleeds together into one colour, streaks of pink and yellow and orange and there is something poetic to be said about it, how starkly their roles are reversed. still, she smiles the soft, gentle smile she reserves only for him and takes his hands in her own because they are familiar, strong, and reminders of this life that they’ve built together. the hands that hold their daughter so tenderly, and protect her so fiercely.
“we’ll always run together.” she murmurs, leaning over to press her forehead to his. not so much as to share the telepathic bond ( they hardly need touch for that anymore ) but because the motion is familiar. grounding. “but there isn’t a need. i was just reflecting. loudly. apologies. sometimes i feel like i’ve woken to a very elaborate dream.” there is something to be said in the idea that the doctor had never fathomed this as her life. that she would not be so lucky to obtain this level of happiness ever again in her lifetimes, extended as they were. that home would be a ship, not a planet or a person or a child. sometimes she fears it must be a dream, that perhaps she’s trapped in some bastardized confession dial again and she’s doomed to live here forever. the doctor doesn’t mind that fate so much.
her hands squeeze his, gently, reminding herself this is reality and this is hers, and she will cling to it with every fiber of her being. she tilts her head just so to greet koschei with a kiss, and her expression softens and melts around the edges.
“hello, darling.”
“There she is.”
The man with the lungs that could make noise heard across the cosmos now elects to speak in the gentlest whisper.
He climbs his fingers up, one touch at a time, both her arms, until they’re on her shoulders, and he guides her close against him.
“Believe me, Thete: I’ll never take this life for granted, either. I feel certain I deserve it far less than you do. But it’s not a dream. I sometimes peek into the minuscule alterations that could send our timelines forking, but nothing says this is a lie: only that it is the best of all pathways.”
He combs her plait over one shoulder and kisses it.
He would hope that it isn’t so much a shock of a role reversal, so much as another step toward the symbiosis of their boyhood. Whoever needs the other, the gaps fill in naturally, and the caretaker confidently assumes their role.
Icarus 