“Darling, you should know given my brazen narcissism, I genuinely have never inhabited a face I didn’t adore. Tiny svengali me was definitely a highlight against your stuffy ponce, yes.”
“Stop feigning disdain and disinterest. You love the universe like it’s your child. Go on, Doctor. Let go.”
The slightest pressure on his hand and the Master knows he’s driven the point home. He inclines his head in the smallest, yet most deferent, salute. He waits for his oldest friend, waits and stands watch for the fixed mark of his every pursuit.
The Doctor stands and wavers around the TARDIS floor like a fawn taking its first steps; the Master supposes that’s apropos.
“I remember,” he confirms, quietly, simply, with a rarest reverence.
His smile is bittersweet; to see this face off is both to mourn and to rejoice. It seems to galvanize his best friend into throes of poesy, self-aimed directives about life and living it.
Hate is always foolish, and love is always wise.
“I would love you even if it were folly,” he whispers, and he knows the Doctor cannot hear, but that’s not the point anyway.
He’ll make sure he knows in the next life to come.
And he’ll begin by aiding his Theta back onto his feet, squeezing his arms, bracing them tight.
Courage, Hearts. I still know your name.
He steps back when the golden light crests, and he knows the moment has arrived.
Then it comes, the clumsy beautiful chaos, and the Master cannot help but raucously laugh.
And when the smoke clears, and the TARDIS complains, jettisoning in a nauseated spin cycle, the Master advances on the Doctor, and squats beside her.
“Oh, you bloody copycat,” he snorts, seizes the console screen and holds it up to her seraphic face.
Confusion. Everything was pure confusion, chaos and a kind of cognitive numbness that left her with the curious feeling of operating her body and mind by remote. It would all sort itself out in time, but the Doctor had this feeling that things had gone very, very differently this time. While trying to work out precisely what, someone nearby turned a monitor so the change could be seen.
Ooooo.
“Oh, brilliant..” she breathed as the neural fog receded a step further. Northern again, was it? Still, there was the slight matter of just who had moved that monitor. She turned and saw a bearded gent whose name escaped her for the moment. Ah, that was it!
“Missy!” she cried happily! “No, wait, ‘ang on. That’s not right either. Tegan! No, wait, wrong again. You’re not a gobby Australian, for a start. no, no, don’t tell me. I’m keen to guess.”
But instead, the dizziness and a slight nausea and she spun backwards into the jump seat again. “Y’know, I really miss when regeneration was a quiet business. Who the bloody ‘ell decided to turn it into a Pink Floyd laser light show? Sorry. Five minutes ago I was a grumpy Scotsman. It’s all a bit confusin’.”
“Happy Birthday, then, bestie.”
He’s staring into her eyes, marveling at the thick dark eyelashes, at the nova-like brightness of golden-hazel irises. There’s an infinity of stars within her, and he doubts for not a second that this is his beloved.
The hammy open-mouthed grin rather gives her away, too.
But for a moment, the reverence is broken, as he softly cackles.
“You’re a dye job. Like I was, that one time, that Christmas. Look! You’re blond with brown roots, hehHAH!”
But she cuts across his declaration with her own exclamation of joy. It tickles him to the core, and he practically stands at attention when she cries “Missy!”
“WHAT! YES! Ehr, not yet. ALMOST!” He’s smacking his chest, over both hearts, with an energy to match her own, to match the Doctor she was several faces ago, though when the Doctor has ever lacked madcap enthusiasm, none can say. It’s intoxicating and it’s contagious, and here he is, leaping up and down.
But when she falls back into the jumpseat, he squats in front of her, hands on her knees.
“Well I suppose I would agree, save for the fact that this is a rather momentous transformation: the Doctor, not giving up after all.”
The Master watches the Doctor agonizing, with a familiar sad affection. He ducks his head and scoots slightly closer.
“While you are a berk and more,” he murmurs, strangely soft-spoken for such an avowed tyrant, “you are mine. Even if we are out of synchrony, a harmony that’s a cacophony for only being a few beats off track. You will not believe me, but I would rather be dissonant with you than that your music stop forever.”
He catches the cantankerous old owl’s eyes, and the lines beneath his deepen with a smile that illumines his whole face.
“Stay. As an old Scotsman or a young ginger whatever, or a … .a kumquat. I don’t care. Just stay. So I can keep giving you hell, and you can keep lecturing me for all my shortcomings.”
He takes the hand that glows.
The Doctor could scarcely believe this was his old foe speaking to him. But then, he remembered, Koschei Oakdown had been his very best friend, even when so few of the rest in the Academy would be. He lazily waved toward the scanner. “Oh, there it is. The silly old universe. The more I save it, the more it needs saving. It’s a treadmill.”
He actually gave the proffered hand a gentle squeeze before swaying almost drunkenly to his feet, taking one last stroll around the console room, seeing it with these eyes the one last time. “This used to be your dad’s TARDIS, remember? If.. if Clara’s echo hadn’t pointed me to it that last awful night on Gallifrey, you and I might not be having this conversation and the old girl would be rotting away in some horrid temporal knacker’s yard. Even I didn’t recognize her until I was third me.”
Then he stopped, staring blearily at something no one else could see. “Doctor.. just you wait a moment. Let’s get this right.
I’ve got a few things to say to you. Basic stuff first. Never be cruel, never be cowardly, and never, ever eat pears! Remember, hate is always foolish. and love is always wise. Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind. Oh, and you mustn’t tell anyone your name. No one would understand it, anyway. Except, ah!” He collapsed at the console and only made it to his feet with The Master’s help. “Except children. Children can hear it sometimes. If their hearts are in the right place, and the stars are too, children can hear your name. But nobody else. Nobody else, ever. Laugh hard, run fast, be kind. Doctor, I let you go.”
And so he canted his head backward, arms spread wide as the primeval cataclysm took him, smashing his precious library to ruin and overloading the console with smoke, fire and sparking current.
His last conscious thought as number twelve was “.. oops.”
“Stop feigning disdain and disinterest. You love the universe like it’s your child. Go on, Doctor. Let go.”
The slightest pressure on his hand and the Master knows he’s driven the point home. He inclines his head in the smallest, yet most deferent, salute. He waits for his oldest friend, waits and stands watch for the fixed mark of his every pursuit.
The Doctor stands and wavers around the TARDIS floor like a fawn taking its first steps; the Master supposes that’s apropos.
“I remember,” he confirms, quietly, simply, with a rarest reverence.
His smile is bittersweet; to see this face off is both to mourn and to rejoice. It seems to galvanize his best friend into throes of poesy, self-aimed directives about life and living it.
Hate is always foolish, and love is always wise.
“I would love you even if it were folly,” he whispers, and he knows the Doctor cannot hear, but that’s not the point anyway.
He’ll make sure he knows in the next life to come.
And he’ll begin by aiding his Theta back onto his feet, squeezing his arms, bracing them tight.
Courage, Hearts. I still know your name.
He steps back when the golden light crests, and he knows the moment has arrived.
Then it comes, the clumsy beautiful chaos, and the Master cannot help but raucously laugh.
And when the smoke clears, and the TARDIS complains, jettisoning in a nauseated spin cycle, the Master advances on the Doctor, and squats beside her.
“Oh, you bloody copycat,” he snorts, seizes the console screen and holds it up to her seraphic face.
The Doctor groaned quietly at That Voice. “I shouldn’t bother asking what became of Missy, should I?” he sighed, absent-mindedly patting the pilot seat beside him. “I don’t understand you, I really don’t. I’m poison, Koschei, utter and complete poison. Everything I touch falls to ruin and with Bill’s death.. it’s time I faced what I am and do time one last service by making the same choice you did, once. It’s time I rang down the curtain, old friend. I’m so tired..” he murmured as a few puffs of regeneration played about his aged hands.
“Yeah, BILL,” the Master counters instantly, adopting his sonorous stage baritone, complete with the almost fastidious enunciation, “the one I spent a decade leading to that exact place in order to punish you, and you blame yourself instead of me?”
It’s not that he’s sacrificing himself to the argument, so much as that he’s challenging the Doctor’s distorted cognitions. An old habit derived straight from their Academy days, when Koschei of House Oakdown was a relentless logistician, and Theta Sigma of House Lungbarrow was a floppy-haired dreamer.
“You have never understood balance. I realize I’m no one to talk in that department either. But you have no survival instinct. Sometimes I think that’s my actual purpose, coming in and out of your life to jab you in the side with a life-threatening catastrophe so you’ll realize you need to save your own arse.”
He was right, of course. Blast his bearded soul, he was right.
“I’m just so bloody tired Tired of.. everything, tired of failing the ones who give up so much for a silly old berk and his odd little box.” Sighing, he closed his eyes for a moment. Still, at least they’d managed to set the Cybermen back a fair little bit. There was that, anyway, and the oddly pleasant feeling of having Koschei along. Perhaps he really should just it happen. “Well, enough of my self pity. I suppose..” The soft light was playing about his hand faster, now. “I suppose one more life won’t kill anyone..” Time Lord humor.
The Master watches the Doctor agonizing, with a familiar sad affection. He ducks his head and scoots slightly closer.
“While you are a berk and more,” he murmurs, strangely soft-spoken for such an avowed tyrant, “you are mine. Even if we are out of synchrony, a harmony that’s a cacophony for only being a few beats off track. You will not believe me, but I would rather be dissonant with you than that your music stop forever.”
He catches the cantankerous old owl’s eyes, and the lines beneath his deepen with a smile that illumines his whole face.
“Stay. As an old Scotsman or a young ginger whatever, or a … .a kumquat. I don’t care. Just stay. So I can keep giving you hell, and you can keep lecturing me for all my shortcomings.”
Icarus 