Chapter Text
It was years before the Doctor saw him again.
Three years, seven months, four days, nine hours, and fifty eight seconds, (Earth time, since she spent so much of her life working in Earth time) to be precise. Long enough that she had occasionally let herself think maybe, maybe it had actually happened. Maybe the Death Particle (was the one nonsensical thing in all of reality that could actually snuff out her sulking, smoky shadow) had actually done its job right. It would make sense, in a way, the symbolism of all that organic matter dissolving back into the ether and diffusing his fury right along with it. He had to be completely unmade for the universe to properly finish with him. Like a tumor, cut away and burnt up, returning to its base particles, scattered back into creation to begin anew as something else.
Later, it would occur to her that such a thought had been foolish. The idea that two of her greatest enemies would so beautifully cancel each other out, leaving her standing alone, the solitary victor? When had she ever been that lucky? When had her getaways ever come out so clean?
To be fair, she’d had lots of other things to worry about. First prison, then escaping prison. Then back to her fam, then Daleks again. Then losing some of the fam (saying goodbye to Ryan and Graham, letting them go back to the lives they never really left behind) and hitting the road with Yaz. Beautiful, brilliant Yaz… but of course she’d left too, in the end. Because that was how it worked. The Doctor got to take their hands, watch them run, help them soar, but eventually they still had to go their own way (or die trying). Sometimes, when the Doctor felt particularly calculating, she wrote it off as a biological issue. The human form could only take so much strain, after all.
But that wasn’t fair. The Doctor took breaks, too. Sometimes for decades.
(That’s what this was, she told herself. A break.)
She had found him again. Up to nothing very nice, as usual, but this time (she had nothing to lose) her reflexes were sharp and her mind was sharper. She’d beat him at his own game. Gone all in and taken the whole pot. Covered the field in one breakaway sprint and scored the goal for the championship. Executed that flawless double backflip and three twists for the gold medal.
Which is to say, she’d snuck up behind him and hit him over the head with something heavy, then dragged his dead weight onto the TARDIS. It had taken some time, and he’d kept waking up, necessitating additional blows to keep him less squirmy and more unconscious.
Good job his skull was particularly thick.
The TARDIS had provided her with a cell to keep him. Bit dramatic, but that was certainly what the converted space was meant to be—a large room with rugs and art on the walls, and one corner closed off with bars. The Doctor had dragged him in and shut the door and let him recover (and nurse the headache) on his own, while she took her best precautions. Biolocks on the TARDIS controls. Outer doors programmed to keep him shut in. Alarms set to trigger if he managed to touch anything he shouldn’t. She didn’t really have a plan, but letting him wander wasn’t an option. It just wasn’t.
Well, it probably wasn’t.
She’d left him in there longer than was kind, or even humane. Not to punish him (though he deserved it) or to teach him a lesson (he’d never learn one), but because she knew that once she confronted him, she would be subjected to his scrutiny, required to answer (at least some of) his questions. She would have to tell him he couldn’t leave, and couldn’t wander, and she didn’t have a good enough reason to make him accept things as he found them. This wasn’t their usual arrangement, after all, or even their unusual one. He hadn’t been surrendered to her care on this go-around, she’d just done it. Kidnapped him. It was unlikely that she’d be able to talk her way out of that.
Well, that wasn’t true. She could always talk her way out.
When the Doctor finally decided to check up on the Master, he was sitting on the only piece of furniture allotted to him in that little space behind the bars--a beat up old wingback chair that betrayed the TARDIS’s opinion of him (dramatic, but weathered and poorly kept). He showed no surprise at the Doctor’s entrance, or any reaction at all, in fact. He just sat, with his hands curved over the armrests like sets of claws and his heavy-lidded stare fixed on a dusty painting on the far wall.
The Doctor leaned back against the door jamb, feigning a casual attitude she did not, in that moment, possess. “Feeling alright? Sorry about the head, hope you didn’t wind up concussed.”
No reply.
She folded her arms across her chest, shook her head and unfolded them, tucked her hands into her trouser pockets. (Bodies were so pointless sometimes.) “You can’t blame me for this. We didn’t exactly part on good terms, and you’re supposed to be dead, don’t forget. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me how you wriggled out of it this time?”
He blinked, just once.
It took her a moment to find something else to say, and she was already getting punchy. Not a great sign for their first conversation. “Come on, it’s not that bad. We did it before, for decades. You in a vault, me as your keeper. Thought you’d be thrilled.”
“Thrilled,” he mimicked, eyes finally sliding over to her, like a predator that hadn’t yet decided whether or not it was hungry. “What would thrill me about this? Last time you brought me presents, there was takeaway, it was nice and roomy.” The Doctor tried to think how she would respond to that very fair complaint, but he beat her to it. “Did you keep my piano, by the way?”
She sniffed. “You expect me to believe you actually care?”
“I liked that piano.”
The Doctor thought about being withholding, but eventually relented. “Yeah, think it’s still lying about somewhere.”
The expression on his face indicated that he was about to say something scathing, but when he opened his mouth, what he said was, “Probably out of tune by now.”
"Possibly." She dragged over a wooden dining chair (wonder where the rest of the set ended up) and sat down in it, legs akimbo, just a few feet from him.
“Why am I here?”
"You're here for the same reason as always," the Doctor said. "It's the only way we ever talk."
He sneered at that. "You can't make me. I talked for ages the last time, and it did no good." He tilted his head back into the cushion of the chair, stretching his neck, appearing to get comfortable. She wasn’t sure whether it was a good or bad sign. (Whether he was faking, drawing her in.)
"I suppose I can't," she agreed. "But you had such a go at me when we saw each other last, I thought turnabout was only fair play."
"Did I?" He shook his head, feigning ignorance or maybe sheer innocence. "There was so much going on..."
The Doctor pursed her lips at him.
"What?" He pursed his lips right back. "Not the answer you're looking for? Tres désolé, ma chérie."
The Doctor sighed, though not too heavily, as she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. This wasn’t working. She needed to change tactics. "Why do you do that?"
His eyes (so expressive, so telling) darted away, just for a moment. “Do what?”
"I mean, I'm all about the bluster, me," the Doctor continued, blithely, tugging her coat off of her shoulders and letting it drape over the back of the chair. "But it's because I'm trying to work something out, or to buy time, or to make friends. You do it just... to do it. It's almost like you can't stop yourself. You were never like that before. You were always so... you know, so stoic."
A hint of a smile threatened his whole dour aura. "I must be very good if you never think I'm doing it to buy time.”
"You don't babble when you're buying time,” the Doctor said, waving a dismissive hand. “It's different." Still, she could see that he’d got some momentum now, and his thumbs were tracing the pads of his fingers, over and over. She couldn’t tell if the repetitive action was meant to soothe, or to fire himself up.
"I could feel it, you know, when you saw me again.” He bit his lower lip, sly and somehow coquettish. “The relief coming off you like waves at high tide. It's like a drug, your relief."
Something ran through the Doctor's veins at that, a warm sort of shiver. (Was it muggy in here? Couldn’t be. The TARDIS always kept the humidity down in rooms like this.) "You've never admitted as much before."
"Before I had nothing to gain from admitting it." He leaned forward suddenly, eyes fever-bright, round and bottomless. "Now I get you . Every micro reaction, every change in your posture, all the little things you're always trying to hide from the casual onlooker. You're so close."
His eyes began to dart to different points on her face, her neck, her shoulders, and it brought more heat to the Doctor’s skin, pooled warmth in her gut. Something was changing, there in that room, around them or between them or emanating from them--she couldn’t tell which. And… well, it could almost be fun, whatever game he was trying to play. There were no lives currently on the line, no apocalypse that he’d created and she had to give the majority of her attention to. "It's... nice, actually," the Doctor decided, after a moment. "Just us, the way I keep asking for."
"The way you keep asking for?" His brow furrowed, pretending to shock and confusion. "You, great progenitor of our species, keep asking for me , personally?”
"That's not fair," she said. Why was he going there already? She didn’t want to go there. She didn’t want to think about any of that right now. "That wasn't my choice, I was a child. And I don't even remember it."
He winced, almost as though he were embarrassed on her behalf. "That excuse is going to get old fast, Doctor."
"I haven't even used it yet!" she shouted, throwing up her hands. They were only talking. It shouldn’t be this easy for him to get under her skin. (She was allowing it. Maybe she did feel guilty about kidnapping him. Or maybe it was that strange buzz under her skin when his eyes glanced along the line of her collar bone.) "I didn't make you a Time Lord. They did that. I never said I was special, you're the one saying that. All I ever knew was that I didn’t belong.”
He gave a whistle that sounded like a bomb falling toward its intended target. "Even you're not this obtuse. A lack of belonging denotes specialness. It makes one unique, it sets one above, apart, beyond--any of this ringing bells? Rattling some percussion instruments?"
The Doctor was unprepared for the anger that rose up in her, but tackled it in her customary fashion—by standing and putting some distance between them. (Running away, always running.) "A lack of belonging makes you lonely," she told him bitterly, staring at the picture that had been holding his interest when she’d entered; an old book engraving from Alice Through the Looking Glass in which the young heroine was being scolded by the Red Queen. "Being set apart means being denied connection, love, understanding. It means being prized for what you are, not who you are. If everything you're saying is true, that just shows that I was nothing more than a tool to them. That's not special. That's sad."
There was a moment's pause, and when the answer came, it wasn’t his voice that she heard in reply. Instead, she received a soft hum in her peripheral senses, then a small press of consciousness. The edge of his mind was creeping along hers, scraping haphazardly at all the niches she never bothered to guard as carefully as she should. The Doctor shook her head a little, reflexively, but it didn't dislodge him. (Focus, Doctor.) "I didn't realize," she said, raising her voice a little, "that you still defined yourself by what they thought."
Those tendrils dug in sharply then, viciously, a mark of his surprise—did he think he was the only one who could play the manipulation game? "What are you on about?"
The Doctor was stopping herself from flinching. She should push him off, really. Push him out. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t. "Who cares what they thought about us?" she said instead, whirling back to look at him (still sitting there fixed to his chair like nothing was happening at all). "Who was treated well or badly, who was special or a freak or both? Those days are gone, they're literally dead. The Time War took them from us, and then you took them a second time. We grew up. We changed. We made choices; some good, some bad, some just different. When are you going to let go of their definitions of you?"
"Oh, so that's easy for you, is it?" His grip was tightening around her in the absence of fight, the way someone would suffocate a kitten. "Why? Because you know who you are? Even with everything they erased?"
"I never said that."
"Then you'll have to help me, dear—not sure how you’ve broken free of them either."
It all sounded so benign when set against what was really happening. He was clutching her in a fierce embrace, one that would be fatal in the physical realm, and clearly had no intention of releasing her. The Doctor caught the edge of a thought, one of his, and it sang through her: It feels too good .
And the Doctor was strong, stronger than most, stronger maybe than even she knew. She could take it. She wanted to take it. "Now who's being obtuse?" she asked, but she wasn’t angry anymore. (Well, maybe a little, but it was a fun sort of anger that stirred the blood and urged action.) And so their minds intertwined, as she closed the physical distance between them.
He had always been better at this than her. It was only in her last few regenerations that she had begun to feel like she understood--and could control--her mind and how she interfaced with others. There was a brief memory of fear, fear she’d had as a little boy called Theta, and she wasn’t quite sure if it was his memory or hers. "You want to hurt me," she murmured, leaning against the bars that separated them. Curling her fingers around the cool metal.
The Master slid from the cell's chair to his knees before her, one hand slipping around the bar near her shin. "Yes."
And the Doctor wanted to let him. (Should she let him?) She didn’t know why she wanted to let him, unless the reason was as simple as that undeniable curl of desire that arose under his intense, perfect focus. He was always such a force, such a heat in her life. (And she was still afraid of him.) Of course, there was some risk, given his skill in mental contact, but the Doctor still had the upper hand, and she was safe enough, even with the inroads he was making into her mind. And wasn't this what she'd been begging him for, over several generations now? (You can have me, just me, but let them go.)
With Missy it had been all verbal fencing and carefully offered gifts, like debating a rival philosopher and trying to befriend an abused animal at the same time. The Doctor had given companionship, understanding, even comfort… but she hadn’t offered herself (himself) to Missy in quite this way. What they were doing now felt more like those moments that always came whenever the Master unleashed one of his deadly schemes. He would declare himself in some grand way, revealing to her his terrible plan--some horror that would enslave worlds or wipe out countless lives--and he would laugh and cavort in his glee that he’d finally, finally beaten her. And the Doctor would look at all that potential destruction and know that those lives and those worlds were only laid on the line because of her, because of the Master’s unending quest to cut her down to his size.
And she’d make the offer. (You can have me if you let them go.)
That kind of capitulation, that compromise, had never been enough. The Master wanted more pain, more suffering—he wanted her to lose everything that he wished she did not want. (He wanted to win, not tie.) In all their lives, he had never accepted the offer… was he truly considering it now?
(Was she?)
Her voice was low, a little rough, when she asked her next question. "Do you think you can?"
"Ah," he sighed, an unmistakable rumble of pleasure in his voice as he pressed his forehead to the bars and stared up at her. "I know I can."
She felt him reach inside her and find (the blossom of her consciousness, buzz of her thoughts, the flow of information) the shape of her mind. And then he squeezed .
The Doctor's back arched as he sank into her—thrusting into, and past, the surface of her thoughts like the thick roots of a banyan tree, crowding out all other life but its own. He pressed between an equation she'd been running for days, through the sounds of the room, through the distant annoyance of an itch on her ankle. She wondered (a little wildly) how he would like being compared in her mind to Earth's flora, and laughed, a sharp, pained sound he probably couldn't have misunderstood even if he wasn't curling in through the thought.
She got a sense of him moving through her tastes and her metaphors, could feel how he yearned to destroy them, to overwrite them (or maybe to drown in them). He reached for the familiar places, and she twisted a little in his grip, not resisting, exactly, but not quite submitting either. The tendrils of him scraped along a shallow memory of working on the TARDIS in her last body, his mind preoccupied by Missy. What a strange sensation.
"Oh Missy, you're so fine..." he echoed, pushing in on the memory, leaning on it with all his psychic weight, seemingly for fun.
The thought reverberated with pain, with annoyance, with need. The Doctor hadn't known that body to be interested in lust, but Missy had awakened something. A desire for the Master, both physical and emotional, and deep, fierce curiosity. The Master was a woman. Why? How? Why had the Doctor never been a woman, not once in all this time? He wanted it, craved it in a way he couldn't fully understand. To have Missy, yes, but also to be her.
The Master gasped, delighted. "Were we a little jealous? Did my fashion sense finally outstrip yours? Or just my wit?"
“You're the one who dressed to match me," the Doctor answered.
Missy had always seemed like she was having so much fun. The Doctor had wanted that, wanted to be lively and vivid again. Her memory echoed with the Master's laugh, brightening the spaces between the spines of him. But he didn’t much care for that—his reflexive reply was to tear into her further, claw down into places that might not heal.
"You'd miss me," she whispered, as one side of her mind lit up under his attack. He was digging deep, and she could feel that his intent was to break her down., but on her side it felt more like a tunneling, an attempt to reach the fathomless parts of her. (Journey to the Center of the Doctor.) Her thoughts twisted around the Master within, forced to accommodate the new presence. Such an invasion. And yet so good . She threw her head back again, body shivering in horror and delight.
"I wouldn't," he told her, voice quivering with exertion.
It was such a bald-faced lie that the Doctor actually felt sorry for him, a well of sympathy blooming within her, mingling into suspension with her desire for him. A bit alarmed, she shoved the feeling down at once, trying to keep it from anywhere he touched, knowing he wouldn’t thank her for it. It might even drive him away, and she didn't want him to go. She needed him inside her, filling her. Clutched close in ways he couldn’t even recognize. Wrapped up and held, when he believed he was attacking.
She needed to finish.
Searching for a distraction, for a lure, the Doctor offered a more tempting gift instead, proffering it up like a jewel: "I would."
Outside of her mind, she heard a sound, and it took the space between seconds to recognize it as his breath shuddering in his chest. Inside, she could feel how struck he was, how suddenly and utterly consumed--she could have done anything in that moment and he wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to stop her. Greedily, he wriggled deeper, reaching for that shining, indigo-glory admission.
The Doctor held it out. Waited for him to take what she offered, to swallow it down. It was a bribe without consequence, bait without a hook, but even as he reached for it, suspicion began to weave its way in, snaking through the intertwined parts of them, obscuring purpose and dragging at him until he realized what he was doing. She felt annoyance from him, then disgust, and then suddenly he was abandoning her, kicking her emotions aside on his way out, overturning her thoughts like he was wrecking hotel furniture.
The Doctor stumbled backwards, feeling dizzy under the onslaught and, worse, empty without his presence. She should have known better. Self-sabotage was always his most indulgent vice, and of course he wouldn’t allow her to give him something so lovely, even if it was something desperately desired. ( Because he desperately desires it, Doctor you fool.)
She stopped when she bumped into the chair, and stood staring at him. Inside she ached, and her fingers twitched with the desire to draw him back, physically if necessary, to pull him down and in and back where he had been. Her mind and body screamed for completion… but he didn’t even look up. He just passed a few fingers idly through the air (if she’d still been close, he would have been brushing the cuff of her trousers) and rested his forehead against the bars. Closed his eyes, even, shutting her away completely.
“Get out,” he whispered.
The Doctor’s hands balled up into fists. This wasn’t his TARDIS, or even his room. He had no control here. (How had she ceded her control here?) She would stay if she wanted, would needle him some more, or shout at him until they fought, or shift gears and go off on some unrelated topic, filling the room with her incessant babbling. After all, unrelated babbling was her speciality, and it would deny him that solitude whose company he seemed to prefer so much more than hers.
How was he always so infuriating ? The Doctor wasn’t accustomed to being so easily played, especially in this regeneration (hadn’t realized that having him in her mind would make her so easy to play) and she certainly wasn’t going to let him see how well he had managed it. If she stayed, if she kept badgering him, it would at least result in a good fight.
But then… what would be the point? She had thought she had all the power here, and yet in a way she had none of it. She could control everything except whether or not he would connect with her, and as long as that was what she wanted most, her control meant next to nothing. For a moment she hesitated, not wanting to show any capitulation, then turned sharply on her heel, snatching up her coat as she stalked out. She was still his jailor. Let the condemned sit there for a while and contemplate his fate.
But she only made it three steps down the hall before she staggered, catching herself with one hand against the wall. He wouldn’t even look at her. He’d filled her mind with himself, with his pleasure and his rage, with his desire to hurt and his desire to understand (did he recognize that in himself? she had to wonder.) and then snatched it away in an instant, petulant and selfish, like always. He was so bloody selfish!
And so was she. Every bit as selfish, every bit as hungry for the things she couldn’t have. He would never come with her anymore than she would go with him. Missy had been close, so very deliciously close, but even then… even then when the moment had come, she couldn’t take that last step. All that time together had only been a game.
A break. (Just like this one.)
The Doctor fumbled one-handed with the fastenings of her trousers. Of course she’d noticed before now that she had a certain sexual attraction to the Master. But the intensity of this mental sharing, the heat that came despite (because? It could have been because, how could she tell?) of the pain he inflicted, had been more than she had bargained for. She ached for him, for the pressure of his mind, the taste of his mental touch, the feel of him taking up space inside her. The fabric of her knickers was damp against her knuckles as she pushed her hand down past the waistband, fingers questing. It was a different kind of ache there, a different kind of desire for fullness, but in this moment the two felt the same, or at least inexorably linked.
She took two fingers at once, easily—nothing but heat and slickness there—and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out, unsure if the door was thick enough to keep the Master from hearing it. She thrust urgently, rocked the heel of her hand to give herself that sweet, electric friction. It was the work of moments to reach the peak, sharper and hotter than in any of the times she tried this before. It left her gasping, wet-eyed and trembling for a moment against the wall.
When she came back to herself, she felt instantly foolish. Foolish and silly and vulnerable, standing in the hallway with her hand shoved down in her pants like a desperate human teenager seeking half-satisfaction in her own hand because she couldn’t have the one she really wanted. Awkwardly she pulled her hand free and pushed away from the wall, stumbling down the hall on wobbly legs, on her way to another room and the safety of a second locked door between the two of them.
Hexilionous. She would go to Hexilionous and see the carnival, and then maybe take a spin off to the Frash nebulae and go invent lugeing on one of the ice planets. Or maybe find a rebellion to support on Sherilni Three. Anything but stay here with him.
At least for a little while.