The Master rolls out from under the Console, where he’s been performing long hours of system maintenance. His arms are smeared in engine grease up to the elbow, and he wears an apron over his black jumper and trousers. He sits up, pleased that one of the Doctor’s new collectible humans has decided to do more than squint and gawk at him.
“On again, off again, but usually on and hiding it, for the better part of our lives. We were eight. Eight, when we met. Both boys, then. Then I was a girl, and the Doctor was a boy. Then, both boys, I think … ? I dunno, the Doctor might’ve been a girl once or twice when I wasn’t ‘round. Now here we are, boy, girl. I’m due to be a girl again next. We’ll see. Fingers crossed.”
He stands and luxuriously stretches, with a satisfied grunt at work well done. He lopes to the custard dispenser, dispatches one, and a second one, which he hands to Graham. He takes a fierce bite.
“Mm. Mm-HMM. Anyhow, we’ve been … all sorts of different people, far beyond the vicissitudes of gender. Somehow we remain as compatible as magnetic poles. Even though she left me, and I held a grudge for centuries, and we wasted … . appalling amounts of time fighting.”
“Seriously, that long?” he says, taking the biscuit and eating it. He doesn’t say it, but he kinda wants to knock their heads together for, as Koschei put it, wasting all that time. He can’t even imagine knowing someone for centuries, let alone spending most of it arguing.
He just knows that even centuries with Grace wouldn’t have been enough.
“Well, at least you figured it out in the end. Think it’ll stick this time?”
A dull patina of melancholy and regret descends over the Master. He catches his own transparent expression of despair. He smiles grayly at Graham.
He knows what the old mortal is thinking. It sears him with shame, and with anger, with the urge to flare you don’t understand, but weariness wins today.
“There are many reasons, but none of them would formulate an excuse you’d accept. We are friends before we are enemies or even lovers. I would adore her, in any face, any gender, any age, and I would follow her over the impossible edge of the ever-expanding universe. I would wish to consume, to demolish, anything between us, for eternity. But occasionally all that ardor gets converted into toxic energy, and we fight. And she certainly gets in her punches.”
His smile grows a little more wan.
“I just realized. You don’t know. You’ve never seen her really lose herself to her temper, have you? Never seen people disregard her sermonizing and her interfering, and seen her,” his teeth grate on edge with the word, “sna-p.”
A hushed laugh escapes. Hushed, or breathless, with a knowing pain.
“Oh, my friend. None of you lot had better leave her when you see it. Or I will be the one to come for you.”
Icarus 