Fic: The Judas Kiss (1/1)
Jun. 9th, 2018 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99Title: The Judas Kiss
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, the BBC do. No money is being made from this.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: The Ninth Doctor and the Simm Master.
Ratings/Warnings: 15, more for what's suggested than what actually happens.
Notes: This was written for the DW/TW Porn Battle 2009 for the prompt "The Master/Nine-Anger". The fic is set somewhere post-Utopia and pre-becoming Harold Saxon for the Master, and after regeneration but pre-Rose for the Doctor. No spoilers for anything after “Last of the Time Lords”. Summary borrowed and badly paraphrased from Oscar Wilde.
Summary: All men kill the thing they love, the brave ones with a sword, the cowards with a kiss.
~~~~
He knows he shouldn’t. It would be crossing back across his own time line. Crossing over … his. But when had something being wrong ever stopped him? It thrilled him, made his pulse race hard enough to drown out the drums. Just for now. It would do.
~~~~
He’d not met this one yet. Not in his timeline. In so far as that word applied to either of them (it applies to them more than most). He never meets this one, if the Doctor’s TARDIS is correct. Not before now, apparently. Because he’s going to meet him. In his now, which is his then, which is his now and his then. The timeline screams at him about the wrongness of what he is doing, and that drowns out the drums too.
~~~~
The Doctor recognises him. He normally did, when the Master wasn’t hidden away in someone else’s pocket watch.
He shakes the Master, as though he’s furious with him. That was different. The shaking, not the fury. It wasn’t like the Doctor to be so physical. “You ran!” It’s not like the Doctor to embrace him either, but he does, holding him closely and tightly, like he was infinitely precious. He might even have cried.
The Doctor loosened his grip only slightly. “You ran!” He’s not sure how the Doctor expects him to answer when he’s still got him clutched so tightly, so he says nothing. “You ran!” Now, the Doctor is crying for sure, great tears rolling down his face, and onto his.
That’s when the anger sweeps through him. Of course he ran. What else was he supposed to do? It was obvious that it wouldn’t end well, whoever won, and that a victory for the Time Lords would not be all that much better than a Dalek victory. He tore himself away from this Doctor, his sanctimonious sadness, his grieving and his guilt.
“You didn’t run,” he shouted. “For the only time in your stupid life, you didn’t run.” Because, just that once, it would have been the sensible thing, but when did the Doctor ever do the sensible thing. The Master would have waited for him, maybe he did, maybe he’d risked five seconds where the Nowhen Men could have caught him, but the Doctor never came.
This isn’t them. They don’t shout at each other. Well, the Doctor lectures him and he occasionally tries to explain to the Doctor why he is wrong, but they don’t stand in the middle of the street screaming at each other. Everyone who walks past them is rather pointedly ignoring them, but no one has called the police, so seeing two men alternatively shouting and crying at each other isn’t that odd, whenever and wherever they are. The Master still isn’t exactly sure when he is. He knows he’s on Earth, because he’s run into the Doctor and he seemed to spend an excessive amount of time on that particular backwater planet. When he escaped from Utopia he set the TARDIS to travel back to when the Doctor had come from, and then sent a few years earlier than that so that he had time to carry out his plan. But the old thing is falling apart (had always been falling apart, even when they were young), and he suspects he’s off by a few extra years. Years he will use.
The Doctor wanted to talk to him, but they’ve got nowhere private. And they will need privacy. If you start raving about supernovas in public, that’s when they tend to bring out the men in white coats. The Master can’t take the Doctor to his TARDIS because he’s stolen the Doctor’s and the Doctor won’t take him to his in case he steals it. The Master made sure to complain about that, to hide the fact that the Doctor knows him too well.
They decide a hotel room is the only sensible option.
The receptionist didn’t believe them one bit when the Doctor said they were travelling salesmen. The Master couldn’t blame her, not with him in Yana’s ridiculous waistcoat and stupid cravat. The Master knows who he looks like and hates it. The Doctor is no better, he’s dressed like the villain’s sidekick in a third rate action film (the Master’s time in Earth prisons had not been wasted). Travelling salesmen with no luggage and …
“What’s your registration number?” The receptionist got two blank looks. “Of your car. For the car park.”
Before the Master had time to improvise, the Doctor blurted out, “we’ve not got a car.” So that’s two travelling salesmen with no luggage and no car. The receptionist gave them the room anyway.
It wasn’t as though they were going to do what the receptionist thinks two travelling salesmen with neither luggage nor transport are up to. The Master ordered some truly extravagant port, while the Doctor nursed a tomato juice. Despite all the things they needed to tell each other, they’d not said anything for forty-five minutes. The Doctor was looking up at the sky, staring at nothing particular, a sense of quiet reflection rolling off him. Maybe that’s what the Master had lost somewhere along the line, the ability to wonder. He knows what’s coming. It’s death and darkness and drums.
Normally, this was where he crowed and revealed his plan and generally tried to get one over on the Doctor. This time he doesn’t. He wasn’t sure how much of that is those parts of Yana he hasn’t fully managed to shake off, yet, restraining him, and how much was the terrible feeling he had that this time, the Doctor has done something terrible. The idea frightened him as much as it thrilled him, because the natural order of things is that *he* does the terrible things and the Doctor tries to stop him. He’s always known the Doctor was capable of deeds more horrifying than even himself, but the Doctor never does them, for whatever incomprehensible moral scruple.
He needed to know what the Doctor had done.
The Doctor won’t tell him, of course, not straight away. He swoops round the subject like a particularly irregular comet. Slowly, he approached perihelion.
The Doctor began with some talk of old friends, the few that they both shared; old enemies, of who there were more; and other people who they’d known at the Academy. They were dead, of course. Mostly.
“The Monk came back, you know. Said there was no point in being right if he couldn’t tell us he was right and we were wrong.”
“That sounds like him.” It did.
“I underestimated him, I think. He was better than I thought he was.” With the distinct undertone that the Master wasn’t, that the Master was exactly as unreliable as the Doctor had thought he was. Which was true. The Doctor didn’t understand, the Master had spent so long on the edge of death, fighting it step by step, inch by horrifying inch, that when the Time Lords gave him more life, he wasn’t going to waste it on them.
“The Rani didn’t come back,” which was good for her. The Master smiled, which made the Doctor pause in his litany of the dead. “I thought she wanted to kill you.”
“Oh she does.” The last time the Master had heard from her, she’d sent him a message spelling out exactly how she was going to remove his limbs. Anaesthetic hadn’t featured in her plans. “I just enjoy the idea of her finding out I’m still alive too.” It was, it must be said, probably a sign that the Council had given so much so he could return but hadn’t done the same for her. He was a megalomaniac by their standards, but she was something worse.
“I don’t know where she was, I don’t know if it was far enough away. I don’t know how you survived, I didn’t think any of us would.” The Doctor included himself in that.
There was this flash, a sudden understanding of what the Doctor had to have done, if he thought he’d wiped out all the Time Lords in all of time and all of space in a single act. It shocked the Master enough that he didn’t think to worry about the Doctor working out where he must have been, because there were very few places far enough away or when enough away to have missed it. “What did you do to the Eye of Harmony?”
Destroying it was the only way of killing so many Time Lords at once.
“Positron strike, direct to its heart.” That would do it. There were locks and shields to prevent it, but a suitably determined person could break those. “It was the only way. Rather the Time Lords dead than the Daleks control the Time Vortex.”
Which was why the Time Lords wanted both of them, the Doctor to come up with a way of stopping the Daleks and the Master to stop him. There were no limits to what the Doctor would do to stop the Daleks, but the Master, if he’d stayed, would have stopped him from damaging the Eye. He’d never have let so much power be wasted.
The Doctor’s method of killing the Daleks explained why so many Time Lords had died, and how the Master had survived. He must already have hidden himself away in the pocket watch when it happened, and the weakening of the connection between him and his TARDIS and it and the Eye was what had saved him. If he’d been any closer in time … he could see why the Doctor presumed that everyone else was dead. Everyone else should have been dead.
The Master had escaped because he’d run so far that time barely touched where he stopped.
He had no idea how the Doctor survived, “you should have been blasted.” Destroyed beyond the molecular level. Nothing could survive a direct blast at that distance.
“I know.” The Doctor always was impossible. “I think I might have been. I’m not sure how I’m around to think that.” He sounded upset about it. That was the Doctor all over, a stupid plan that destroyed him and so much power with him, and then sad, not about all the wasted power of the Eye of Harmony, but that he survived it all despite himself.
The Master sat there, blank, as the enormity of it sank in. The remnants of Gallifrey, sat together in a bland, mid-price chain hotel room. Night closed in around them as they sat, but as Time Lords time didn’t touch them in quite the same way.
Not just Time Lords, but the last of them, the only two left.
But what a pair! If only two of them survived the Master could happily say, what was left was the best of the Time Lords.
He shouldn’t have kissed the Doctor. But all the reasons why he shouldn’t were all the reasons he should; because it was tasteless and utterly the wrong thing to do, and because the Doctor might guess what he was up to. And if he did, then that was it. This thing he was going to do, the Doctor would never forgive him for doing it.
The man the Doctor had been might have forgiven him for what he was about to do, for all he said he never would, but the Master didn’t know about the man in front of him now, all edges and ears and barely stoppered fizzing rage.
So he had to kiss him, take this last chance.
The Doctor kissed him back, searching and yearning. There’s the faintest hint of regeneration energy, his own or the Doctor’s, because they are both brand new again.
It had been several hundreds of thousands of years since they’d done this, in direct and chronological time. It had been close to a thousand years in the Master’s own timeline and well, he’d stopped trying to follow the Doctor’s meandering life, wound tightly around itself as it was, strangling him with every turn.
He stopped to take in the detail, the shaven head, the eyes, the entirely ridiculous ears, oh he would have enjoyed getting to know them, but the Master knew he wouldn’t get the chance.
He was pleased the Doctor still had blue eyes. They’re not the same eyes as when they were younger, but he’d miss them if they were gone. The Doctor’s eyes used to look like star-crushed diamonds, twinkling in the darkness, fire in their hearts.
Curious too, insatiably curious, which got them both into more trouble than was necessary. The Master remembered, back when they were schoolboys, it was those eyes that egged him on to break into the Academy’s records to see what their teachers had said about them. He remembered the comments clearly, for the Doctor they’d said, “definitely eccentric, possibly a genius,” while his own bore the legend, “this child, for good or ill, will be great.” He’d lived up to that and more.
He missed the Doctor’s hair, running his fingers through it as they kissed. There was something lacking in grace in the way they kissed now, desperate and greedy and fighting against what had happened and what was yet to come. The Master knew the Doctor knew that *something* was going to happen, that was the way time’s arrow flew, but as long as he didn’t know what would happen for a little longer it would be okay.
He wondered if the Doctor missed anything about him, because it wasn’t until now that he’d realised how different this body was, so much skinnier. And blond. He’d never been blond before. A whole new world of experience, another world to conquer.
No beard, either. Not at the moment. He’d not had time to grow one yet for a start. He thinks he won’t, it might give the game away later. Later is always coming.
He remembered the first time the Doctor saw the beard. They’d not spoken for far too long, or what seemed like that at the time. Twelve years to them now was a lot less than it had been then. The Doctor spent their entire conversation twitting him about it, saying how grave and distinguished it made him look, and who was this handsome man pretending to be his old friend.
Afterwards the Doctor begged him, pleaded with him to rub him with the beard everywhere. The Master was more than pleased to oblige, he remembers the Doctor’s hands curled in his hair, and blissful silence of the drums in the sounds coming from the Doctor’s mouth.
That was a first and a last time too, although neither of them knew it that time. The Master had already begun to retreat to his books and his estate, coming to the realisation that Gallifrey wasn’t big enough to hold his ideas and his plans.
This time there was no sound – no, that wasn’t true, there was sound but it was all animal noise. He didn’t know about the Doctor, but, this once, the Master didn’t trust himself to speak. Anything he said would be sentimental nonsense, and he wouldn’t risk asking stupid, maudlin questions, like “did you miss me?” (any “too” would be silent, and horribly true) because any answer the Doctor gave would hurt.
The silence protected them both. While they were together inside it they were safe, safe from their history and safe from each other.
They spoke again after, managing to have an argument even then. Their fights always had the edge of flirting, and this was no different. Or maybe this was just how they flirted, aggressively and with a determination to win.
This time, they were both utterly and equally determined that they would rest their heads their heads on the other’s chest. It was clearly impossible for them both to do it, unless you were long-necked Gzokai.
The Master let the Doctor win the argument, which should have tipped the Doctor off that something was up. But it didn’t. Then again, the Doctor liked to think the best of people.
They settled down, the Doctor resting his head against the Master’s chest, and the Master throwing his arm around the Doctor. The Master hadn’t let him win the argument out of sentiment. It played a part, he knows this is the last time and the Doctor doesn’t. It was also vital for his plan. He’s a much lighter sleeper than the Doctor, always has been, and will wake up long before him. Then he’ll put the next part of the plan into motion.
He wakes up, maybe an hour or so later, refreshed, despite everything. There’s a moment, which quickly passes, where he wonders if this is the right thing to do.
It has to be done.
This plan is partly why he looks so different now, to confuse the Doctor when they meet, as they inevitably will. They always do. The Doctor is the only person he’s ever known with so little control over his regenerations. If the Doctor expects the Master to look like himself, he’ll be surprised.
The idea was as much Yana’s as his, but it would solve both their problems. Yana had worried that Utopia wasn’t the solution, and the Master knew it wasn’t. This would save Yana’s people and give the Master the adoring populace he’d always wanted. But when he carried it out, the Doctor would never forgive him, because he was doing it to the Doctor’s precious humans.
He got up. The Doctor made a soft complaining noise, like he didn’t want the Master to leave, or that he didn’t want him to let the cold in. It was easy enough to gently ease his way out of the bed and head to the bathroom. With a little sleight of hand he picked his ridiculous frock coat up along the way.
The Master had no idea why the Doctor’s freakish friend had such a powerful drug in his possession and why he’d left pills of it in the TARDIS, but the Master couldn’t resist stealing the pills when he’d first picked the coat up in the TARDIS. At the time, he’d no idea what he would use them for, just that they might be useful. Now he’d found a use for them.
He placed one in his mouth and quickly walked back to the bed. While Gallifreyans were more resistant to the drug’s effects than humans, but even they would get their memory wiped if they took too much. But it was a risk he had to take. What was the worst that could happen, two of them sitting there with no idea what was going on?
When the Master leaned over to reach him the Doctor made this noise, mostly “not now dear,” because he was still completely spent from before, but that he wouldn't mind if the Master kissed him anyway. In the expression of this backward planet, it was a Judas kiss. The Master passed the pill from his cheek into the Doctor’s mouth.
Then came the split second where the Doctor noticed, the look of confusion that changed into one of utter betrayal when the Master brought one hand up to hold the Doctor’s nose and the other one down to cover his mouth to make him swallow the pill. The Doctor fought, of course he did, bucking and shaking and trying to bite, but the need for oxygen was a weakness Time Lords shared with humans, so he couldn’t help but swallow. Once that happened, disorientation followed quickly, then something like sleep.
Except, the Doctor lay there with his eyes wide open. Not knowing who he was or what he’d seen and done, it took centuries off the Doctor. He looked more like he used to look, years ago, when they were both young.
It was ridiculous that this was when the Master baulked, and he knew it to be so. The Master has killed people, will kill people, and this simple act, which harms no one, not really, is when he had regrets.
He failed at pretending to himself that he felt regret because he was destroying his last link to the Time Lords. That’s not it. It’s the difference in how the Doctor looked after he’d swallowed the pill. Before, even post-coital and relaxed, he looked like the weight of the centuries was on his shoulders. Now, in this gap of not knowing who he was, the Doctor was free. The Master was jealous. Why did the Doctor, who had done things just as heinous as what the Master had done, get that moment of peace, something the Master never had? He wondered if maybe that was the answer, take one of the other pills, take enough to forget, what, the last forty-eight, ninety-six hours, and …
The “and” was always the problem. The pills can take away memories of a time, but it can’t take away history. And what are Time Lords without their history, a history long enough to be their personalities rather than merely a list of what had happened to them and when. What could he do, what could they do, being themselves? How long before the Master chafed against the rules, saw how much better things would be if only people let him lead? How long before the Doctor ran off on some crusade to save someone, when he’d have been better off staying at home?
No, this moment is the only peace he’ll get.
He kissed the Doctor on the forehead, closed the Doctor’s eyes, rested his head against the Doctor’s chest, and tried not to notice that their heartbeats make the drumbeats. He ignored the part of him that said stay, because he knew that staying would only delay the inevitable.
This new body of his is all energy, wiry and purposeful, so he doesn’t walk so much as he springs out of the room, into his past (or future), the Doctor’s future (or past) and the Earth’s present.
~~~~
The Doctor woke.
Slowly.
He felt disorientated.
And sad. Except sad was too strong a word for it, it was closer to wistful. Like he’d been dreaming a very pleasant dream and didn’t want to wake from it. He didn’t remember it, and maybe that was it. He hadn’t had dreams so much as nightmares recently, and maybe it was the absence of those. But it didn’t feel like that. The dream had left him with feelings of warmth and tenderness, of something long lost that had just come back.
And now it was gone again.
It probably didn’t mean anything, it was just a dream after all. He’s a Gallifreyan, he knows too much to believe in prophetic dreams. But he’s a Time Lord, so he’s seen too much to automatically disbelieve it.
He’d spent enough time with Freud in Vienna, and refereed enough arguments between Sigmund and Carl, to not place too much emphasis on the psychology of dreams. But he’s still convinced that this dream meant something, even if he didn’t know what.
He'd felt safe in it. It’s not the not knowing of where he is that makes him feel unsafe now, it’s not the first time a regeneration has left him confused. No, he doesn’t feel safe because he doesn’t know what he might do.
He had a time machine, somewhere, but nothing to do with it and nowhen to go. That was a problem he could solve, however temporarily. He’d find the TARDIS, set her going and she’d take him to somewhere he was needed, if not wanted.
He recognised that he was in a hotel from the decoration of the room, that not ever properly lived-in look that all hotels shared, even if he doesn’t remember how he got there, and made his way to the reception. Always pay your bills.
“No need, sir, the other gentleman has already paid.” He’s tempted to ask for more information but the woman seems busy and whoever it was hadn’t stayed. A one-night stand didn’t sound like him, but what did? He didn’t know who he was any more. The man he thought he was wouldn’t have done the things he had done.
But they had been done and here he was, the last of the Time Lords, whatever that meant. The Doctor had been so determined not to be like them, spent so long running away from Gallifrey, that he didn’t know what he was without it or the Time Lords. He’s a permanent loose end frayed from tapestry, waiting to be cut.
The Doctor was walking out of the hotel, going to locate the TARDIS, when he noticed something not *quite* right about the bin around the back of the restaurant next door. He was distracted enough that he might not have noticed the subtle feeling that something was wrong that the area gave him if the Sam'ynn hiding in the bin hadn’t scurried down into the rubbish at the first hint of attention. He’s not entirely sure he wants to know what a Sam’ynn is doing in a bin in England sometime in the early 2000s but he felt he ought to ask. He’ll find out if the little fella is lost or something, how he got that way, and get him to wherever it is that he needs to be that isn’t a bin in the middle of a busy human settlement. Then he’ll go and find the TARDIS. It’s not like she would go anywhere without him.
It’s a new start, and he should try to make the most of it.
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, the BBC do. No money is being made from this.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: The Ninth Doctor and the Simm Master.
Ratings/Warnings: 15, more for what's suggested than what actually happens.
Notes: This was written for the DW/TW Porn Battle 2009 for the prompt "The Master/Nine-Anger". The fic is set somewhere post-Utopia and pre-becoming Harold Saxon for the Master, and after regeneration but pre-Rose for the Doctor. No spoilers for anything after “Last of the Time Lords”. Summary borrowed and badly paraphrased from Oscar Wilde.
Summary: All men kill the thing they love, the brave ones with a sword, the cowards with a kiss.
~~~~
He knows he shouldn’t. It would be crossing back across his own time line. Crossing over … his. But when had something being wrong ever stopped him? It thrilled him, made his pulse race hard enough to drown out the drums. Just for now. It would do.
~~~~
He’d not met this one yet. Not in his timeline. In so far as that word applied to either of them (it applies to them more than most). He never meets this one, if the Doctor’s TARDIS is correct. Not before now, apparently. Because he’s going to meet him. In his now, which is his then, which is his now and his then. The timeline screams at him about the wrongness of what he is doing, and that drowns out the drums too.
~~~~
The Doctor recognises him. He normally did, when the Master wasn’t hidden away in someone else’s pocket watch.
He shakes the Master, as though he’s furious with him. That was different. The shaking, not the fury. It wasn’t like the Doctor to be so physical. “You ran!” It’s not like the Doctor to embrace him either, but he does, holding him closely and tightly, like he was infinitely precious. He might even have cried.
The Doctor loosened his grip only slightly. “You ran!” He’s not sure how the Doctor expects him to answer when he’s still got him clutched so tightly, so he says nothing. “You ran!” Now, the Doctor is crying for sure, great tears rolling down his face, and onto his.
That’s when the anger sweeps through him. Of course he ran. What else was he supposed to do? It was obvious that it wouldn’t end well, whoever won, and that a victory for the Time Lords would not be all that much better than a Dalek victory. He tore himself away from this Doctor, his sanctimonious sadness, his grieving and his guilt.
“You didn’t run,” he shouted. “For the only time in your stupid life, you didn’t run.” Because, just that once, it would have been the sensible thing, but when did the Doctor ever do the sensible thing. The Master would have waited for him, maybe he did, maybe he’d risked five seconds where the Nowhen Men could have caught him, but the Doctor never came.
This isn’t them. They don’t shout at each other. Well, the Doctor lectures him and he occasionally tries to explain to the Doctor why he is wrong, but they don’t stand in the middle of the street screaming at each other. Everyone who walks past them is rather pointedly ignoring them, but no one has called the police, so seeing two men alternatively shouting and crying at each other isn’t that odd, whenever and wherever they are. The Master still isn’t exactly sure when he is. He knows he’s on Earth, because he’s run into the Doctor and he seemed to spend an excessive amount of time on that particular backwater planet. When he escaped from Utopia he set the TARDIS to travel back to when the Doctor had come from, and then sent a few years earlier than that so that he had time to carry out his plan. But the old thing is falling apart (had always been falling apart, even when they were young), and he suspects he’s off by a few extra years. Years he will use.
The Doctor wanted to talk to him, but they’ve got nowhere private. And they will need privacy. If you start raving about supernovas in public, that’s when they tend to bring out the men in white coats. The Master can’t take the Doctor to his TARDIS because he’s stolen the Doctor’s and the Doctor won’t take him to his in case he steals it. The Master made sure to complain about that, to hide the fact that the Doctor knows him too well.
They decide a hotel room is the only sensible option.
The receptionist didn’t believe them one bit when the Doctor said they were travelling salesmen. The Master couldn’t blame her, not with him in Yana’s ridiculous waistcoat and stupid cravat. The Master knows who he looks like and hates it. The Doctor is no better, he’s dressed like the villain’s sidekick in a third rate action film (the Master’s time in Earth prisons had not been wasted). Travelling salesmen with no luggage and …
“What’s your registration number?” The receptionist got two blank looks. “Of your car. For the car park.”
Before the Master had time to improvise, the Doctor blurted out, “we’ve not got a car.” So that’s two travelling salesmen with no luggage and no car. The receptionist gave them the room anyway.
It wasn’t as though they were going to do what the receptionist thinks two travelling salesmen with neither luggage nor transport are up to. The Master ordered some truly extravagant port, while the Doctor nursed a tomato juice. Despite all the things they needed to tell each other, they’d not said anything for forty-five minutes. The Doctor was looking up at the sky, staring at nothing particular, a sense of quiet reflection rolling off him. Maybe that’s what the Master had lost somewhere along the line, the ability to wonder. He knows what’s coming. It’s death and darkness and drums.
Normally, this was where he crowed and revealed his plan and generally tried to get one over on the Doctor. This time he doesn’t. He wasn’t sure how much of that is those parts of Yana he hasn’t fully managed to shake off, yet, restraining him, and how much was the terrible feeling he had that this time, the Doctor has done something terrible. The idea frightened him as much as it thrilled him, because the natural order of things is that *he* does the terrible things and the Doctor tries to stop him. He’s always known the Doctor was capable of deeds more horrifying than even himself, but the Doctor never does them, for whatever incomprehensible moral scruple.
He needed to know what the Doctor had done.
The Doctor won’t tell him, of course, not straight away. He swoops round the subject like a particularly irregular comet. Slowly, he approached perihelion.
The Doctor began with some talk of old friends, the few that they both shared; old enemies, of who there were more; and other people who they’d known at the Academy. They were dead, of course. Mostly.
“The Monk came back, you know. Said there was no point in being right if he couldn’t tell us he was right and we were wrong.”
“That sounds like him.” It did.
“I underestimated him, I think. He was better than I thought he was.” With the distinct undertone that the Master wasn’t, that the Master was exactly as unreliable as the Doctor had thought he was. Which was true. The Doctor didn’t understand, the Master had spent so long on the edge of death, fighting it step by step, inch by horrifying inch, that when the Time Lords gave him more life, he wasn’t going to waste it on them.
“The Rani didn’t come back,” which was good for her. The Master smiled, which made the Doctor pause in his litany of the dead. “I thought she wanted to kill you.”
“Oh she does.” The last time the Master had heard from her, she’d sent him a message spelling out exactly how she was going to remove his limbs. Anaesthetic hadn’t featured in her plans. “I just enjoy the idea of her finding out I’m still alive too.” It was, it must be said, probably a sign that the Council had given so much so he could return but hadn’t done the same for her. He was a megalomaniac by their standards, but she was something worse.
“I don’t know where she was, I don’t know if it was far enough away. I don’t know how you survived, I didn’t think any of us would.” The Doctor included himself in that.
There was this flash, a sudden understanding of what the Doctor had to have done, if he thought he’d wiped out all the Time Lords in all of time and all of space in a single act. It shocked the Master enough that he didn’t think to worry about the Doctor working out where he must have been, because there were very few places far enough away or when enough away to have missed it. “What did you do to the Eye of Harmony?”
Destroying it was the only way of killing so many Time Lords at once.
“Positron strike, direct to its heart.” That would do it. There were locks and shields to prevent it, but a suitably determined person could break those. “It was the only way. Rather the Time Lords dead than the Daleks control the Time Vortex.”
Which was why the Time Lords wanted both of them, the Doctor to come up with a way of stopping the Daleks and the Master to stop him. There were no limits to what the Doctor would do to stop the Daleks, but the Master, if he’d stayed, would have stopped him from damaging the Eye. He’d never have let so much power be wasted.
The Doctor’s method of killing the Daleks explained why so many Time Lords had died, and how the Master had survived. He must already have hidden himself away in the pocket watch when it happened, and the weakening of the connection between him and his TARDIS and it and the Eye was what had saved him. If he’d been any closer in time … he could see why the Doctor presumed that everyone else was dead. Everyone else should have been dead.
The Master had escaped because he’d run so far that time barely touched where he stopped.
He had no idea how the Doctor survived, “you should have been blasted.” Destroyed beyond the molecular level. Nothing could survive a direct blast at that distance.
“I know.” The Doctor always was impossible. “I think I might have been. I’m not sure how I’m around to think that.” He sounded upset about it. That was the Doctor all over, a stupid plan that destroyed him and so much power with him, and then sad, not about all the wasted power of the Eye of Harmony, but that he survived it all despite himself.
The Master sat there, blank, as the enormity of it sank in. The remnants of Gallifrey, sat together in a bland, mid-price chain hotel room. Night closed in around them as they sat, but as Time Lords time didn’t touch them in quite the same way.
Not just Time Lords, but the last of them, the only two left.
But what a pair! If only two of them survived the Master could happily say, what was left was the best of the Time Lords.
He shouldn’t have kissed the Doctor. But all the reasons why he shouldn’t were all the reasons he should; because it was tasteless and utterly the wrong thing to do, and because the Doctor might guess what he was up to. And if he did, then that was it. This thing he was going to do, the Doctor would never forgive him for doing it.
The man the Doctor had been might have forgiven him for what he was about to do, for all he said he never would, but the Master didn’t know about the man in front of him now, all edges and ears and barely stoppered fizzing rage.
So he had to kiss him, take this last chance.
The Doctor kissed him back, searching and yearning. There’s the faintest hint of regeneration energy, his own or the Doctor’s, because they are both brand new again.
It had been several hundreds of thousands of years since they’d done this, in direct and chronological time. It had been close to a thousand years in the Master’s own timeline and well, he’d stopped trying to follow the Doctor’s meandering life, wound tightly around itself as it was, strangling him with every turn.
He stopped to take in the detail, the shaven head, the eyes, the entirely ridiculous ears, oh he would have enjoyed getting to know them, but the Master knew he wouldn’t get the chance.
He was pleased the Doctor still had blue eyes. They’re not the same eyes as when they were younger, but he’d miss them if they were gone. The Doctor’s eyes used to look like star-crushed diamonds, twinkling in the darkness, fire in their hearts.
Curious too, insatiably curious, which got them both into more trouble than was necessary. The Master remembered, back when they were schoolboys, it was those eyes that egged him on to break into the Academy’s records to see what their teachers had said about them. He remembered the comments clearly, for the Doctor they’d said, “definitely eccentric, possibly a genius,” while his own bore the legend, “this child, for good or ill, will be great.” He’d lived up to that and more.
He missed the Doctor’s hair, running his fingers through it as they kissed. There was something lacking in grace in the way they kissed now, desperate and greedy and fighting against what had happened and what was yet to come. The Master knew the Doctor knew that *something* was going to happen, that was the way time’s arrow flew, but as long as he didn’t know what would happen for a little longer it would be okay.
He wondered if the Doctor missed anything about him, because it wasn’t until now that he’d realised how different this body was, so much skinnier. And blond. He’d never been blond before. A whole new world of experience, another world to conquer.
No beard, either. Not at the moment. He’d not had time to grow one yet for a start. He thinks he won’t, it might give the game away later. Later is always coming.
He remembered the first time the Doctor saw the beard. They’d not spoken for far too long, or what seemed like that at the time. Twelve years to them now was a lot less than it had been then. The Doctor spent their entire conversation twitting him about it, saying how grave and distinguished it made him look, and who was this handsome man pretending to be his old friend.
Afterwards the Doctor begged him, pleaded with him to rub him with the beard everywhere. The Master was more than pleased to oblige, he remembers the Doctor’s hands curled in his hair, and blissful silence of the drums in the sounds coming from the Doctor’s mouth.
That was a first and a last time too, although neither of them knew it that time. The Master had already begun to retreat to his books and his estate, coming to the realisation that Gallifrey wasn’t big enough to hold his ideas and his plans.
This time there was no sound – no, that wasn’t true, there was sound but it was all animal noise. He didn’t know about the Doctor, but, this once, the Master didn’t trust himself to speak. Anything he said would be sentimental nonsense, and he wouldn’t risk asking stupid, maudlin questions, like “did you miss me?” (any “too” would be silent, and horribly true) because any answer the Doctor gave would hurt.
The silence protected them both. While they were together inside it they were safe, safe from their history and safe from each other.
They spoke again after, managing to have an argument even then. Their fights always had the edge of flirting, and this was no different. Or maybe this was just how they flirted, aggressively and with a determination to win.
This time, they were both utterly and equally determined that they would rest their heads their heads on the other’s chest. It was clearly impossible for them both to do it, unless you were long-necked Gzokai.
The Master let the Doctor win the argument, which should have tipped the Doctor off that something was up. But it didn’t. Then again, the Doctor liked to think the best of people.
They settled down, the Doctor resting his head against the Master’s chest, and the Master throwing his arm around the Doctor. The Master hadn’t let him win the argument out of sentiment. It played a part, he knows this is the last time and the Doctor doesn’t. It was also vital for his plan. He’s a much lighter sleeper than the Doctor, always has been, and will wake up long before him. Then he’ll put the next part of the plan into motion.
He wakes up, maybe an hour or so later, refreshed, despite everything. There’s a moment, which quickly passes, where he wonders if this is the right thing to do.
It has to be done.
This plan is partly why he looks so different now, to confuse the Doctor when they meet, as they inevitably will. They always do. The Doctor is the only person he’s ever known with so little control over his regenerations. If the Doctor expects the Master to look like himself, he’ll be surprised.
The idea was as much Yana’s as his, but it would solve both their problems. Yana had worried that Utopia wasn’t the solution, and the Master knew it wasn’t. This would save Yana’s people and give the Master the adoring populace he’d always wanted. But when he carried it out, the Doctor would never forgive him, because he was doing it to the Doctor’s precious humans.
He got up. The Doctor made a soft complaining noise, like he didn’t want the Master to leave, or that he didn’t want him to let the cold in. It was easy enough to gently ease his way out of the bed and head to the bathroom. With a little sleight of hand he picked his ridiculous frock coat up along the way.
The Master had no idea why the Doctor’s freakish friend had such a powerful drug in his possession and why he’d left pills of it in the TARDIS, but the Master couldn’t resist stealing the pills when he’d first picked the coat up in the TARDIS. At the time, he’d no idea what he would use them for, just that they might be useful. Now he’d found a use for them.
He placed one in his mouth and quickly walked back to the bed. While Gallifreyans were more resistant to the drug’s effects than humans, but even they would get their memory wiped if they took too much. But it was a risk he had to take. What was the worst that could happen, two of them sitting there with no idea what was going on?
When the Master leaned over to reach him the Doctor made this noise, mostly “not now dear,” because he was still completely spent from before, but that he wouldn't mind if the Master kissed him anyway. In the expression of this backward planet, it was a Judas kiss. The Master passed the pill from his cheek into the Doctor’s mouth.
Then came the split second where the Doctor noticed, the look of confusion that changed into one of utter betrayal when the Master brought one hand up to hold the Doctor’s nose and the other one down to cover his mouth to make him swallow the pill. The Doctor fought, of course he did, bucking and shaking and trying to bite, but the need for oxygen was a weakness Time Lords shared with humans, so he couldn’t help but swallow. Once that happened, disorientation followed quickly, then something like sleep.
Except, the Doctor lay there with his eyes wide open. Not knowing who he was or what he’d seen and done, it took centuries off the Doctor. He looked more like he used to look, years ago, when they were both young.
It was ridiculous that this was when the Master baulked, and he knew it to be so. The Master has killed people, will kill people, and this simple act, which harms no one, not really, is when he had regrets.
He failed at pretending to himself that he felt regret because he was destroying his last link to the Time Lords. That’s not it. It’s the difference in how the Doctor looked after he’d swallowed the pill. Before, even post-coital and relaxed, he looked like the weight of the centuries was on his shoulders. Now, in this gap of not knowing who he was, the Doctor was free. The Master was jealous. Why did the Doctor, who had done things just as heinous as what the Master had done, get that moment of peace, something the Master never had? He wondered if maybe that was the answer, take one of the other pills, take enough to forget, what, the last forty-eight, ninety-six hours, and …
The “and” was always the problem. The pills can take away memories of a time, but it can’t take away history. And what are Time Lords without their history, a history long enough to be their personalities rather than merely a list of what had happened to them and when. What could he do, what could they do, being themselves? How long before the Master chafed against the rules, saw how much better things would be if only people let him lead? How long before the Doctor ran off on some crusade to save someone, when he’d have been better off staying at home?
No, this moment is the only peace he’ll get.
He kissed the Doctor on the forehead, closed the Doctor’s eyes, rested his head against the Doctor’s chest, and tried not to notice that their heartbeats make the drumbeats. He ignored the part of him that said stay, because he knew that staying would only delay the inevitable.
This new body of his is all energy, wiry and purposeful, so he doesn’t walk so much as he springs out of the room, into his past (or future), the Doctor’s future (or past) and the Earth’s present.
~~~~
The Doctor woke.
Slowly.
He felt disorientated.
And sad. Except sad was too strong a word for it, it was closer to wistful. Like he’d been dreaming a very pleasant dream and didn’t want to wake from it. He didn’t remember it, and maybe that was it. He hadn’t had dreams so much as nightmares recently, and maybe it was the absence of those. But it didn’t feel like that. The dream had left him with feelings of warmth and tenderness, of something long lost that had just come back.
And now it was gone again.
It probably didn’t mean anything, it was just a dream after all. He’s a Gallifreyan, he knows too much to believe in prophetic dreams. But he’s a Time Lord, so he’s seen too much to automatically disbelieve it.
He’d spent enough time with Freud in Vienna, and refereed enough arguments between Sigmund and Carl, to not place too much emphasis on the psychology of dreams. But he’s still convinced that this dream meant something, even if he didn’t know what.
He'd felt safe in it. It’s not the not knowing of where he is that makes him feel unsafe now, it’s not the first time a regeneration has left him confused. No, he doesn’t feel safe because he doesn’t know what he might do.
He had a time machine, somewhere, but nothing to do with it and nowhen to go. That was a problem he could solve, however temporarily. He’d find the TARDIS, set her going and she’d take him to somewhere he was needed, if not wanted.
He recognised that he was in a hotel from the decoration of the room, that not ever properly lived-in look that all hotels shared, even if he doesn’t remember how he got there, and made his way to the reception. Always pay your bills.
“No need, sir, the other gentleman has already paid.” He’s tempted to ask for more information but the woman seems busy and whoever it was hadn’t stayed. A one-night stand didn’t sound like him, but what did? He didn’t know who he was any more. The man he thought he was wouldn’t have done the things he had done.
But they had been done and here he was, the last of the Time Lords, whatever that meant. The Doctor had been so determined not to be like them, spent so long running away from Gallifrey, that he didn’t know what he was without it or the Time Lords. He’s a permanent loose end frayed from tapestry, waiting to be cut.
The Doctor was walking out of the hotel, going to locate the TARDIS, when he noticed something not *quite* right about the bin around the back of the restaurant next door. He was distracted enough that he might not have noticed the subtle feeling that something was wrong that the area gave him if the Sam'ynn hiding in the bin hadn’t scurried down into the rubbish at the first hint of attention. He’s not entirely sure he wants to know what a Sam’ynn is doing in a bin in England sometime in the early 2000s but he felt he ought to ask. He’ll find out if the little fella is lost or something, how he got that way, and get him to wherever it is that he needs to be that isn’t a bin in the middle of a busy human settlement. Then he’ll go and find the TARDIS. It’s not like she would go anywhere without him.
It’s a new start, and he should try to make the most of it.
