Work Text:
All the TARDIS needed was to be programmed.
Coding was something the Master could do, but from scratch, it was going to take a while. The ship had been outfitted with a virtual reality system, but it was a blank slate. Empty. Nothing had been programmed in it.
And so the Master started, and the Doctor said nothing as he worked. If it kept the Master busy, it would keep him from getting into any trouble, and that would be grand. He made sure the Master only had access to the virtual reality coding, though, and nothing pertaining to the TARDIS' inner workings. He really didn't need a second occurrence of what the Master had done before.
First, the environment. It would be nice, the Master thought, to have more than one to choose from, but one had to start somewhere. And when he closed his eyes, there was only one place he was certain of.
Gallifrey. The fields of dark-red grass, the trees with silver leaves, the beautiful mountains, the bright orange sky. The field outside of the city, with the breath-taking mountains, stretching high into the sky. But even the Master knew he couldn't program an entire planet, and so he needed to be a little more specific.
He thought of his home when he'd been there - his father's manor, the halls of cold grey marble and black granite, columns that separated the grand hall from the outside courtyard, where a fountain ran with gold water. So beautiful, before it had been destroyed. As children, he and the Doctor had played together in that courtyard...
With a fury, he began to code. The Master accounted for everything - the smell of the air, the feeling of the breeze, the sunrise and sunset. The Doctor watched him work with wonder, occasionally bringing him food and letting the Master scarf it down before returning to work. While the Master slept, however, and the TARDIS was quiet and dark, the Doctor would go to his workspace and look over the code so far. His stomach clenched at what he saw, as the individual elements painted a picture in his mind of a place he knew very well indeed. Standing from the chair, the Doctor moved with a purpose towards the back room - where he normally slept when he needed to. The Master was there, curled in the blankets, shivering. He never slept well. The Doctor watched him for a long time, leaned against the door frame.
"You can't go home," he said, softly. "You know that, don't you?" But really, if he thought about it, where else would the Master program a virtual world? His distaste for Earth was apparent enough, and if he had any attachments to other planets, the Doctor wasn't aware of them.
He didn't say anything, but when he returned to the workstation to pour over the code once more, he corrected a few small mistakes, saved the file, and joined the other man in sleep.
What the Doctor didn't know was that the Master wasn't planning on being there alone. He had bigger things in mind - a Doctor who would listen to him, who would smile when he looked at him, who was still the Doctor, through and through, but who would be the Master's, completely. The last time he'd been in the TARDIS, reconstructing it, he'd installed a few programs that would be very, very useful here.
The first was a monitor, to record all the things that happened inside the TARDIS. The Master had learned a lot from that, but not as much as he had from the second program he'd coded and installed. While the first recorded events that had transpired, the second recorded people - personalities, habits, speaking patterns, likes, dislikes, actions and reactions. And the person with the most data was, of course, the Doctor.
Using that, creating his own version of the man had been simple. The Master wanted some changes, certainly, but in the end, he wanted the Doctor to be the Doctor, completely. Thanks to those programs having run silently in the background of the TARDIS for so long, coding had been a breeze.
The Master let the finished product sit for a day. There was almost a sort of uncertainty or trepidation about actually running the program and stepping inside. He'd checked and double-checked and triple-checked the code, but he was worried that once he actually ran it, he would find a glaring error that would make his mood even more foul. But soon the anxiety was too much. He had to see the fruits of his labours, to know whether or not the program worked, and how.
The Doctor stepped out for something or another. He'd be gone for a while, confident that the failsafes he'd installed into the TARDIS would keep the Master out of trouble. Unfortunately, he was right about that - but it wouldn't keep him from running his pet program. The Master slipped into the virtual reality bed - technology he'd gotten and then perfected from a very advanced engineer - and attached the small sticky sensors to his temples. As soon as he lie down, he entered the command to execute the program, and a jolt put him under.
Gallifrey was beautiful. Everything was exactly as he'd coded it. The randomizing program kept the individual blades of grass blowing gently in the changing breeze. The sound of the water running through the fountain was absolutely perfect.
And then there was the Doctor. When the Master opened his eyes and had been standing in the garden courtyard, the Doctor had been there as well - sitting on the edge of the fountain, his back turned from the Master, elbow rested on his knee and head resting in the connecting hand. When he heard the sound of the Master's footsteps behind him, he suddenly rose, turning, surprise on his face.
"Master!" he said, looking happy and relieved and a million different expressions the Doctor had never really used on him before. "Oh, am I glad to see you!"
"Are you?" he asked, cocking an eyebrow in uncertainty. "Are you, really?"
"Well, of course!" The Doctor crossed his arms, looking around. "Just look where we are. It doesn't make any sense, does it? Here, of all places. How? And why? And I just thought… well, you had to have something to do with it. Don't you?"
"Has anyone ever told you, Doctor," the Master asked, stepping towards the other man, "that you ask too many questions?"
"Oh, sure," the Doctor said, nodding. "Loads of times! I think even you have before, come to think of it. Shall I slow down? I tend to talk sort of fast. Some people don't get it. 'That Doctor's mouth, always running a mile a minute', they say, but I just tell them, 'Oh, well, of course you'd think that, what with the--'"
Without even thinking about it, the Master raised a hand, sending it across the Doctor's face with so much force it knocked the other man's glasses (had he programmed those in? He didn't recall…) to the ground. The Doctor yelped in more shock than pain at the contact, his face jerking downwards.
There was a long silence before he slowly looked back up through the hair that had fallen into his eyes.
"They don't usually react like that, no," he said, quietly. "But you're not most people, are you, Master?"
The Doctor was looking at him with those eyes, those infuriatingly bright eyes that burned with a fire more brightly-coloured than Gallifrey's sky, and everything that had happened between them was flashing quickly through the Master's mind in a film montage that only served to fuel his anger. The Doctor, falling through the sky, landing, dying. The Doctor, watching as he was executed, calmly taking the remains for disposal. The Doctor, doing everything he could to keep the TARDIS out of his hands. The Doctor, watching Harold Saxon in fright, thinking he was hidden by his clever but stupid disguise. The Doctor, always one step ahead of the Master.
He hit him again, his hand curled into a fist this time - first the face, in the other direction, and while the Doctor was still reeling, in the stomach with the other hand. The Doctor doubled over, holding his stomach, coughing. His face was flushed and red, and the Master kept hitting.
It was vile, he thought, somewhere in the back of his mind. To fight hand-to-hand, to mercilessly beat the Doctor with his fists was prehistoric, primitive, and most of all, human. But once he started, he simply couldn't stop. Minutes passed. The Doctor sank to the grass, bloody, coughing, weak.
"Because that's what you are, Doctor," the Master growled, continuing from his own train of thought. "Weak. Weak. Compared to me, you're nothing. I am your Master."
"You are," the Doctor choked, trying to force himself back up in a sitting position. He slipped, falling onto his back again. "Please, Koschei. Stop this. You and I-- we're… the same…"
The Master slipped quickly onto his knees, straddling the Doctor's waist, grabbing the man's shirt collar in his hands.
"Oh, no, Doctor," he said. "We're not. We're not the same at all. But that's all right. Really." And with that, he leaned down, crushing a kiss over the Doctor's mouth. He tasted blood there, and he savoured it immensely.