“Well, there’s no need to point it out so obviously.” He’s sulking, the way he always does when anyone points out something he thinks he’s been keeping well hidden. “Shut up, Roundface. I love you. Stop being so good at reading me.”
“I’d tell you to be the bigger person and not retaliate against me, but that must be a bit difficult for you, given your height.” He pats the Master gently on the shoulder, as if he feels genuinely sorry, but the smirk on his face says otherwise.
The Master’s gaze is steel-trap-sharp. Not a syllable his beloved speaks goes unheard. He witnesses the Doctor’s suffering firsthand.
When he speaks, it’s with matching precision.
“Wake me up. No. Really. When it happens, the hour-mark. Wake me up with you.”
He reaches out, tidies the Doctor’s rumpled white buttonup and his black vest, tidies his hair, with all the doting diligence of a longtime spouse. Which is, all calamity and strife aside, exactly what he has always been.
“Doesn’t have to be a long conversation or anything. Grab onto me. Touch me. Say ‘hi.’ I’ll show you you’re here. Really here. Neither of us is there anymore. Or will ever be again.”
“That’s my vow to you.”
“I can’t do that to you.”
His words are infused with self-blame; a product of his slightly distorted view of himself. It’s as if he’s something to be inflicted upon others. What he means is ‘you don’t need to do that’, but in his head the problem has already been categorised as a burden to anyone he shares it with. Something that’s his own fault.
If he thinks about it reasonably, his view of this is all wrong. The Master is asking him to do this.
The Doctor steps closer, hands raising, then hovering in the air between them, and finally coming to rest on the Master’s shoulders. He shifts his fingers once. Again. He’s thinking.
“I don’t want you to suffer because of me. I don’t want you to lose sleep because of my maladaptive sleep pattern. It’s not fair. You’ve suffered enough.”
He tilts his head forwards, touching their foreheads together, and gazes into his eyes.
“You don’t have to do anything for me. You do enough just by sleeping in the same room as me. You’d really want waking up every single hour, without fail, just so you can make sure I know we’re safe?”
At first the Doctor’s fussy concern pleasantly flusters him, and the Master is very nearly bashful.
But then he chuckles, and it’s rich and genuinely amused, without a touch of the habitual snideness. He reaches down and pinches the Doctor’s sides, even as they’re still touching foreheads, even as his beloved gazes furtively, ashamedly, into his eyes. It’s a tacit reminder that their lives need not be marked by grave ceremony all the time; they know each other way too well for that.
“You really are a silly sausage. I would do anything for you, genius. Willingly. But it seems we’re at an impasse, as you’re wired to do the same for me.”
He kisses first the Doctor’s chin and then his lips.
“You should know I will be there every time you awaken. Again, my vow to you. And you should further know that the shame you’re feeling, that I can practically taste between our minds, is misplaced, my love. Take it from someone who’s always suffered self-imposed claims of invincibility, just to cope with what was done to me by the same bastard that shoved you in that Confession Dial.”
He’s so close to responding to that command with exactly what he’s just been told not to say. He shuts his mouth instead and looks away, trying to form the sentence before he lets it leave his mouth.
This is so stupid. How many times has he sat in silent anguish over these nightmares? And now, when he’s given a judgement-free space to talk about them, the pain they cause recedes into the depths of his mind, hiding. He could tell the Master it doesn’t matter. He could say they aren’t bad enough to warrant this conversation, or lie outright and say he doesn’t remember them.
It would be pointless, though. They’d achieve nothing. No. He needs to be brave and for once in his life, not apologise or feel guilty for admitting his pain.
“The confession dial,” he says finally, forcing himself to make eye contact. “I made myself a little strategy while I was in the castle slash personal torture chamber, and now it’s causing considerable problems for me.”
The Doctor very rarely speaks of this time. No matter how much time passes, heavy footsteps behind him will never again be separate from the idea of being constantly followed by a being that must only touch him in order to kill him.
“If I lured the creature to one end of the castle, then ran to the other, I could earn myself a maximum of eighty-two minutes. That’s how long it took it to catch up to me. So, with that time, I could sleep for one hour. One hour was a safe amount of time. I had to use my sonic sunglasses at first, to wake myself up, but after a certain amount of time it just became natural. Or — well, as natural as being woken up by the sudden terrifying realisation that it might be there outside the door can be. Because that’s what it feels like, when I start to get close to the one hour mark. It’s there, in the corners of my dreams. Always following me. Always so close that if I don’t wake up, it might get me.”
He shrugs, movement slow with the weight of it.
“I know it’s not there. I know that because you’re there, usually. I can touch you, and you’re real, so any thought I have of that creature can’t be real. If it was, I’d be completely alone. I can think about it rationally now, when I’m awake. I couldn’t at first. I had to get up and check that I was in the TARDIS and nobody else was on board. Stupid. I felt stupid.”
He runs both hands through his hair, a tiny distraction from the truth of what he’s saying. Honesty frightens him. He’s got nothing to hide behind here. The Master can see him.
“So, there you go. I physically can’t sleep for longer than one hour at a time. I can wake up very briefly and go back to sleep for another hour, which is why I’ve been able to hide it. It’s not obvious when it’s not a particularly vivid nightmare that wakes me. Sometimes it’s not even a dream, I just wake up, acknowledge that I’m safe, and go back to sleep. But now you know. I’ve told you the truth.”
The Master’s gaze is steel-trap-sharp. Not a syllable his beloved speaks goes unheard. He witnesses the Doctor’s suffering firsthand.
When he speaks, it’s with matching precision.
“Wake me up. No. Really. When it happens, the hour-mark. Wake me up with you.”
He reaches out, tidies the Doctor’s rumpled white buttonup and his black vest, tidies his hair, with all the doting diligence of a longtime spouse. Which is, all calamity and strife aside, exactly what he has always been.
“Doesn’t have to be a long conversation or anything. Grab onto me. Touch me. Say ‘hi.’ I’ll show you you’re here. Really here. Neither of us is there anymore. Or will ever be again.”
“You miss the point. I don’t want your apology: I want your faith.”
The Master draws so near the Doctor that his breath stirs his friend’s hair, like a thousand hot scarlet birds disturbing the drift of a cumulus cloud. He holds his bloodied hand jealously. It’s as though all he has left is his pain, all he has left to claim as his alone, and he won’t relinquish it just yet. It’s his sole bargaining chip.
“I want you to … to understand that it’s nothing unique to Missy or me that divides us as a person. It’s how we’ve been treated over time. Environment over innateness, and all that. She might’ve thrown Bill in a meat grinder to get at youifshe still had fresh wounds from seventy years of abuse and neglect! And maybe if I’d spent the same!!! Identical!! Amount of time!!”
He pounds his other fist insistently; redness spreads to his other palm.
“Then I might be the one knocking me out to untie you–oh yeah, you think I don’t know she’s on your side? I know–and weeping with remorse… hell, shit, I wish I had a companion to give you now, to show you I don’t want to always be the one hurting you.”
He has no idea Clara exists, beyond the vague outline described by Rassilon during his torments ( “the Doctor will come to Gallifrey to save that human, but not you!”); he has no idea he’s predicting his own would-be future, when Missy was new.
But he looks down at his hands, and he knows now that they’re both in agony. He knows that he’s becoming more and more disturbingly self-destructive lately.
Almost sheepishly, at last, he offers his hands to the Doctor’s, and to its sunset glow.
“I’m fine,” he growls. “Don’t overdo it.”
I love you. Please see me. Please.
“You say that as though you and I are two opposites, forcing her to choose between us — but that’s not…it’s not what I intended. I didn’t mean to make it like that. It’s not what I wanted. I never wanted to fight you. I don’t want to fight you now. You are her. Can’t you be on my side, too?”
He realises the prediction of the future, but knows that even if the Master might not retain his memories, he can’t say anything. Whatever he might think to say probably wouldn’t be of any use anyway; the neural block is still there, and attempting to think about the companion whose face he can’t remember has become really quite painful. There’s a flash of something in his eyes there; grief, or regret, or sorrow. It’s gone the moment he’s able to hide it.
The Doctor takes his hands and closes his eyes. The glow surrounds their joined hands, and his expression settles into one of absolute focus. He must be so careful now, to let out only what is required. One slip and he’ll stumble into regeneration before he’s given his body a chance to heal on its own. He knows he can heal, with time.
His plan works,mostly. It’s successful in that he’s able to mend the physical damage to the Master’s hands, which is his main goal. Healing the Master releases enough of the energy to relieve the pressure, and he no longer feels so restless. The pulsing of the energy under his skin has faded, for now. It’s not as painful to hold back.
The only problem now is that he feels very, very tired.
“I know you don’t want my apology, but I am sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t give you the time you deserve. As for faith… well, I’ll give you what’s left of my time but I can’t promise it’ll be long or what you hoped for. And I need you to answer a question for me first. It doesn’t have to be now. You can give it time.”
His eyes are half-closed already, but he fights to keep them open long enough for this.
“Why did you do it? She deserved so much better from the universe. And from me. She was my student. All she wanted to do was learn, and all I wanted to do was teach her. Help her. Show her the universe. Why did you take that away from her?”
The Master seethes a sigh through his teeth.
“That’s what I just said: I am her, and given the same circumstances as she experienced, I would react the same way as she did. Or at least in a comparable vein.”
They’re in agreement, then. What a strange sensation. Strange enough that he falls inert long enough for the Doctor to successfully mend him.
The words that follow pierce him through with a deep existential sorrow that he knows will never mend. Not so long as he lives. The Doctor, dying, even to live again: even when he was the one to fling this intergalactic legend from a high precipice, to force regeneration, there was that gaping maw of self-annihilation involved in seeing his best friend destroyed. Now is one such moment: like watching a monument crumble, or a star collapse.
It makes him willing to answer the crucial question immediately.
“Because I wanted there to be one case, just one, in all the universe, where you couldn’t save someone. And what better person than me? What better revenge for being left behind, than to leave you right back?”
His smile is filled with bitterness and rue.
“I wanted to be past saving, and I got what I wished for, now, didn’t I? So I guess it makes sense. Missy lobbing me on the back of the head. I guess I am self-destructive after all. Anything to end you. And it’s only recently become … . apparent to me, how mad that is. How …”
Stupid.
“It won’t bring you peace to know this, but I didn’t think of her. Of Bill. I judged it all … worth the loss that anyone in between us would suffer. I don’t value the lives of others the way that you do, Doctor. Perhaps you’ll be motivated to live a little longer if I express interest in learning.”
He places the same hand the Doctor healed on the forehead of his perennial savior.
“I’m not going to smile, so you can stop looking at me like that. With those eyes. I know you’re doing them.”
He’s determinedly not looking at the Master’s beautiful round face, at the eyes he know have the ability to see right through him. Having fixed himself firmly in a sulk because his project, a second hybrid guitar, isn’t going well, the Doctor is sat crossly in the middle of their bed. His frustration has already faded almost to its usual level again, and now he’s mostly just sulking for show. The second he looks at the Master, his facade will break. He can’t allow that.
Naturally this means that the Master must “do them,” that is, fix his impish sparkling dark eyes all the more determinedly on his oldest and best friend’s face.
Naturally this means he must insinuate himself like a warm soft Slinky between the failed guitar and the Doctor, and stretch out his neck, and squash his nose into that of his beloved.
Naturally this means he must diabolically chuckle while smooshing the Doctor’s face between his hands.
As he always has, the Master summons the courage to look directly at the Doctor when the Doctor chooses to reprimand or avoid him.
“I believed that sort of thing for a very long time, but if you hadn’t convinced me otherwise, I would still be festering with rage and bitterness. And pain. And I would not be here to comfort you. I know you think you only want things, and never need them, but … . Doctor. Let me return you the favor.”
He sighs. “You’re making it really hard for me to get out of this one, aren’t you? Fine. We can…discuss. I suppose. You win.”
It’s the thought of the Master not being here that’s gotten to him. The anticipated conversation is one the Doctor isn’t looking forward to, and it will be painful and shameful and embarrassing, and any number of negative emotions that he doesn’t know how to deal with, but it is infinitely preferable to being alone.
“I’m sorry,” he starts, “That I didn’t try to tell you about it on my own. You deserve to know. You’ve been patient and loving to me, especially when I’ve needed it. And you deserve better than me trying to avoid conversations.”
“Good of you to notice.”
The way the Master looks at the Doctor, his black eyes are inscrutable, but on features marked with more lines, more silver hairs, than during their days of volatile youth–when the Doctor was a brown-haired pinstriped zealot and the Master his particularly manic breed of monster–there’s an undeniable gentleness. A willingness to stop and listen, where one did not exist before.
Fear of abandonment can be reciprocal: he is afraid of losing the Doctor, too.
“For once in your life, my love, in all seriousness: don’t begin a sentence with an apology.”
Now his smile is tinged with sadness.
“I’m not so ready to lampoon you as you may believe. I am more than my violence. Go on, Hearts. Just talk.”
Icarus 