He whirls on his heel, a vortex of agonized reprisal.
“YES, I DO.”
I understand. I understand what it’s like to be left behind, to be forgotten so many times that you are weary, body and soul, and just want it all to end.
Because Y O U put me in that position. Over and over and over and over and over and OVER!
But then mydamned capacity to survive takes hold, and here I remain.
“Doctor, be STRONG.”
Be strong like me.
“I don’t want you to ‘keep your mouth shut.’ I want to know WHY. Why is it me? You couldn’t have looked more repulsed when you saw me if you’d tried. ‘Eugh, there’s the dirty beast that saved my life from Rassilon! Hope I don’t catch anything from it!’ You didn’t even know what I’d done to your human yet! How’m I supposed to believe you spoke to me out of TRUST, then? I’m not the one you groomed to perfection in your little Vault of Rehab, now, AM I? So just tell me why. Did you tell me because I was just in the room when you felt like talking? Or are you punishing me, because I took Missy away from you?”
He stalks right back to the Doctor’s side; it’s his blessing and his curse, that he will never ever escape the gravitational pull of his other self. He kneels, and cocks his head, and narrows his eyes.
“Because this? This feels like punishment. Or is it really so unfathomable to you that your death would… .?”
He grinds his teeth, and rolls his head on his neck, in one wide self-soothing animal circle.
“ …would r u i n me?”
A pause as the weight of the confession absorbs.
And then the Master removes his coat a second time and hands it to the Doctor. This time he is the one who cannot look.
I would stay with you while it happened. Either way. I would stay with you.
Surely you know.
Surely.
He doesn’t uncurl from his position for a good few minutes while he collects his thoughts. The ones that make sense, anyway. There’s a fair few that don’t make any sense at all. (I love you, I’m scared, I want you to lie with me, I’m not strong.).
“That look was not repulsion. That was shock. Horror, maybe. But not repulsion. You don’t repulse me, you terrify me. Probably not for the reasons you think, though.”
The Doctor sits up a little bit against his pillow, pauses to take a few ragged breaths because even the slightest movement requires effort from muscles that are begging him to just stay still. He takes the coat and holds it to his chest like it gives him vital life force, lacking the energy to support his own weight and actually put it on.
“I’m not punishing you. Do you really think I’m capable of thinking up a plan to ‘punish you’ in this state? You were in the room, and I did talk to you because you were here — but it wasn’t just luck that you were here, was it? You chose to stay. You told me so. You stayed to look after me. I trusted you, because yes, you were here at the right time, but because you chose to be here. You didn’t have to be. I wouldn’t have told Nardole, had he just been in the room for a few minutes.”
Your death would ruin me. The confession sounds like one torn straight from the hearts, and he struggles to really let himself believe that it’s genuine. If he lets himself believe that, he might open himself up to the possibility of false hope. False hope that he is more loved than he feels. As yours ruined me, he thinks but doesn’t say.
“Unfathomable — perhaps. Less so with Missy, because the time she spent with me in the Vault — well, she could’ve left any time she liked. She and I both knew that. She was there because at hearts, she does want to be a good person and do the right thing.”
He sighs and looks down the bed for something else to focus on. The two of them, who see each other for all they are, and they can’t look at each other. It’s so stupid. He moves his feet, watching the covers lift slightly, and regrets it instantly. He hates not being able to fidget very much for the pain it causes.
“I suppose it seems unfathomable that my death would bother you so much because you seem to detest the idea of your future self reaching this point with me. The two of you did beat me up and then tie me to a wheelchair. What was I supposed to think?”
I want my friend back. But I’m not sure you want me.
"I’m sorry. For everything.“
You chose.
You chose.
The Master’s mind is capable of conquering tangled knots of physics, metaphysics and technology, and yet when it comes to relationships, at least those not rehearsed and performed for the sake of a scheme, he is a bull in a china shop: all emotion, no nuance. Clumsy, a peculiar mixture of manipulative and childishly ardent. Scared of losing things, so he smashes them, and self-thwarts.
He has no idea what he’s doing.
So he must compress and simplify what the Doctor is saying, and he hovers there over the Doctor’s form as he does so.
His mind reaches a solution in time. The Doctor’s essential message:
{ I chose you because you chose me first. You showed me you care about me, so I chose you. }
Ah. That he can process. And his hearts twinge with the return of that softness.
But the remarks in defense of imprisoning Missy raise a few recurrent hackles.
“Missy wants to be good in Missy’s way. If you’re not looking for that, then you’ll miss her efforts entirely. Your version of good is not absolute. It’s vain, arrogant, and sentimental.”
Chilling, perhaps, to hear Missy’s own words echoed by her previous self.
“But more important to this conversation: I AM Missy. If you had shown me an ounce of the interest you show her, maybe I might be in your little accelerated ethics workshop. Maybe I’d be making you proud. But I was stuck on Gallifrey for YEARS after I saved you. And you never came for me.”
The Master sits looking at the Doctor, who doesn’t want to be looked at, piercingly, knowing him mercilessly, loving him recklessly; this Master cannot be Missy, the clever cool lioness lying in wait, for he can conceal his claws to be a charming politician, but not when the person with whom he is most infatuated, the person whom he has adored since the day they met, is in the same vicinity. He’s a tuning fork picking up the Doctor’s vibrations, and they are loud, and they are violent, and never more so than when the Doctor is SILENT.
So it’s with a look of knowing, bleak exasperation that the Master smiles, the longer the Doctor faces away and strives to ignore him.
‘That’s not your choice to make.’
It’s in that moment that the Master realizes there is no honor, no privilege, in being the Doctor’s confidante. He was just HERE, when the Doctor was tired and discouraged enough to be candid. Just in the right place at the right time. Any show of steadfastness or loyalty or kindness rewarded with scoffing, yet again, with rebukes and cold shoulders. There is nothing special about him at all.
It was just a fluke.
“So you’ve told me that you plan to kill yourself, you’ve entrusted ME with that, and nobody else, and I’m the one who’ll have to watch it happen, because it’s ‘your choice to make.’”
He pauses, to gasp a laugh, and slowly shake his head.
“You’ve put me in that position, Doctor. Nobody but you.”
He leans in very close, lips a wounded sneer.
“I didn’t realize you were auditioning for MY part.”
{ You selfish prick. }
He stands, withdraws his jacket violently from the Doctor’s grasp. He dons it with brusque efficiency.
“Do excuse me.”
“NO.”
His hand shoots out to grab at the jacket. It’s partly an instinct to try and keep hold of something when it’s snatched from him, but he’s also saying no, you’re not excused.
It hurts, but he holds tight. Don’t go.
“I’m sorry I’ve burdened you with my trust. I thought you’d understand.”
He could rant and lecture for hours, but he doesn’t. For one, he hasn’t said he’s made his mind up. And he doesn’t intend to actually go out and cause his own death, he just wants the choice not to prevent it, should this body succumb to its injuries. Humans have that choice, sometimes. If they’re old and have lived a long time and don’t want to continue living. Why shouldn’t he have that option too? A life he is forced into continuing will hardly be worth living at all. If he hasn’t chosen to carry on, what will be the point?
The Doctor stares up at him, a plea for him to just understand forming in his mind – but he stays silent. Words get him into trouble. He’s in enough of that as it is. Besides, if he starts trying to explain why it is that he doesn’t feel able to continue, he might reveal too much emotion at once, accidentally. Every inch of his soul feels battered and bruised to match his physical body, aching and bleeding under his clothes.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t say I’d made my mind up, though. I just need time. I told you because I thought you’d want to know. I’ll keep my mouth shut next time.”
He lets go of the Master’s coat. Doctor, Doctor — let it go. Time enough. He can’t win them all, especially if they don’t want to be won.
He sinks back into the bed and turns away once more, closing his eyes. At a distance he’d give the impression of an attempt to sleep, but the way his fists clench around the sheets, the expression on his face with his eyes shut a bit too tightly to look calm — no. He’s not trying to sleep. He’s trying to forget.
He wants to forget the rushing of emotions going on in his mind, forget the pain spreading through his whole body, and forget the horrible argument he’s just had with the person he wants to just hold him. Isn’t that what anyone wants when they’re hurting — to be held by the person they love most in the universe? He could find Missy, but he doesn’t have the strength to leave his bed. All he has are his own thoughts and the face of the Master currently beside him — and he’s not even sure he has him anymore.
He whirls on his heel, a vortex of agonized reprisal.
“YES, I DO.”
I understand. I understand what it’s like to be left behind, to be forgotten so many times that you are weary, body and soul, and just want it all to end.
Because Y O U put me in that position. Over and over and over and over and over and OVER!
But then mydamned capacity to survive takes hold, and here I remain.
“Doctor, be STRONG.”
Be strong like me.
“I don’t want you to ‘keep your mouth shut.’ I want to know WHY. Why is it me? You couldn’t have looked more repulsed when you saw me if you’d tried. ‘Eugh, there’s the dirty beast that saved my life from Rassilon! Hope I don’t catch anything from it!’ You didn’t even know what I’d done to your human yet! How’m I supposed to believe you spoke to me out of TRUST, then? I’m not the one you groomed to perfection in your little Vault of Rehab, now, AM I? So just tell me why. Did you tell me because I was just in the room when you felt like talking? Or are you punishing me, because I took Missy away from you?”
He stalks right back to the Doctor’s side; it’s his blessing and his curse, that he will never ever escape the gravitational pull of his other self. He kneels, and cocks his head, and narrows his eyes.
“Because this? This feels like punishment. Or is it really so unfathomable to you that your death would… .?”
He grinds his teeth, and rolls his head on his neck, in one wide self-soothing animal circle.
“ …would r u i n me?”
A pause as the weight of the confession absorbs.
And then the Master removes his coat a second time and hands it to the Doctor. This time he is the one who cannot look.
I would stay with you while it happened. Either way. I would stay with you.
Easy? Hardly, that was excruciating. And yet he can’t but feel softly. Softly, for the angry, weary, befuddled old man (old, like he is) fumbling for his dignity. And that is all he’s ever wanted to see from the Doctor, in the end: some semblance of vulnerability, or neediness. Some sort of aching empty spot where Koschei used to be. Rather like the facade of an old house, whose shutters have been ripped off, and the remaining rectangular stains haven’t weathered like the rest of the house. Something fresh and vibrant and yet devoid, beneath, within.
At his core, the Master wants to feel … . mandatory. Necessary. Needed.
By this specific person: or who this specific person was.
Softly, yes. He feels softly. Like he never feels.
How terribly, sentimentally ordinary of him.
“You’re welcome,” the words escape before he’s able to stop himself, because they are the truth.
But when the Doctor lets slip his true condition, up flies a protective emotional exoskeleton around the Master’s hearts. Up like the carapaceof an armadillo, circling itself. His eyes blaze and flash.
“Like hell you’re fine,” he snarls, face viciously animated, even while his voice remains discreetly low. Because this is his, this is HIS to hoard, the Doctor told HIM first how badly off he really is, and no one, not a cyberman named Bill, and not even his own future self, can take that away. “If your body is trying to regenerate that’s the very definition of not fine.”
He leans across the bed, feigning an effort to adjust the curtains and shutters, glances around, and continues, in the Doctor’s ear, so close that his scent of cloves and engine grease is overpowering.
“It’s mindfulness. That’s literally ninety-nine percent of it. You have to will yourself not to regenerate. You have to recite it like a mantra, and keep your mind from wandering off the subj … look, Doctor, I’m not giving you advice on how I stopped my own regeneration. You may recall that ended with me dying.”
He grinds his teeth.
“I’m rather not keen on you copycatting me.”
He rolls his eyes and puts his water down. ‘Like hell you’re fine’. Yeah, he’s very much aware of that; he just didn’t expect to be called out on it so directly. He supposes he shouldn’t have expected anything else. This is his oldest friend, and he does know him better than anyone else.
“Alright, well, if not-fine is what you want to call it, go ahead. But as far as anyone else is concerned, especially Bill Potts, and including your future self, I’m FINE. One person’s concern is quite enough for me.” And yours is the one I’ve chosen.
The Doctor watches him as he moves closer, but ignores the strange mix of instincts he has to both push him away and pull him closer all at once. The closer someone is, the more easily they can hurt him. Physically and emotionally. He would do well to remember that. But the urge he has to grasp him by the shoulders and hold him right where he is or closer — that’s one he’s not sure how to handle. It comes with the voice that whispers ‘please don’t ever leave me alone, I’m hurting and you’re the only person in this universe who understands’; the same voice he chooses never to speak aloud because it would reveal too much. He’s unable to make a decision between his two instincts, so grips the sheets either side of him instead, and lies still.
“That’s not your choice to make.” He speaks seriously but calmly. His death is, and has always been, something that isn’t finality or closure for him. Because he dies, and he is reborn into a new body, and he must work himself out all over again. Just for once, he wants that concept to mean the same as it does to those without the gift or curse of regeneration. “It has to be my choice. I can’t do this again. Why is it never my turn to rest?”
He doesn’t expect an answer. Doesn’t want one, really. He turns on his side, facing the other way. Hiding, again. Don’t look at me.
The Master sits looking at the Doctor, who doesn’t want to be looked at, piercingly, knowing him mercilessly, loving him recklessly; this Master cannot be Missy, the clever cool lioness lying in wait, for he can conceal his claws to be a charming politician, but not when the person with whom he is most infatuated, the person whom he has adored since the day they met, is in the same vicinity. He’s a tuning fork picking up the Doctor’s vibrations, and they are loud, and they are violent, and never more so than when the Doctor is SILENT.
So it’s with a look of knowing, bleak exasperation that the Master smiles, the longer the Doctor faces away and strives to ignore him.
‘That’s not your choice to make.’
It’s in that moment that the Master realizes there is no honor, no privilege, in being the Doctor’s confidante. He was just HERE, when the Doctor was tired and discouraged enough to be candid. Just in the right place at the right time. Any show of steadfastness or loyalty or kindness rewarded with scoffing, yet again, with rebukes and cold shoulders. There is nothing special about him at all.
It was just a fluke.
“So you’ve told me that you plan to kill yourself, you’ve entrusted ME with that, and nobody else, and I’m the one who’ll have to watch it happen, because it’s ‘your choice to make.’”
He pauses, to gasp a laugh, and slowly shake his head.
“You’ve put me in that position, Doctor. Nobody but you.”
He leans in very close, lips a wounded sneer.
“I didn’t realize you were auditioning for MY part.”
{ You selfish prick. }
He stands, withdraws his jacket violently from the Doctor’s grasp. He dons it with brusque efficiency.
Icarus 