DW - Triple Hearted
Title: Triple Hearted
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairings: Doctor/AU Master; Rose/AU Master
Description: "Before you met him, you never really believed that the Doctor could ever be gone." Set in Pete's World, featuring alternate universe Simm!Master
Rating: S is for sad.
Before you met him, you never really believed that the Doctor could ever be gone. Even though you knew you would almost definitely never see him again, you also knew that he wasn’t gone. He was just somewhere else, off in the world that you left behind and probably in the world you were in now, living and adventuring and managing to get by on his own, just like he did before he met you.
Then, you met him.
He was a small and unassuming man, with short brown hair and sad eyes that were at once softened with grief and sharp enough to cut yourself on. He dressed in sleek, simple suits with thin ties, and called himself the Master. The definite article.
When the Master told you that he was a Time Lord, you laughed out loud, mostly out of disbelief. You said that he couldn’t be - all the Time Lords were dead and gone. They’d been trapped in the Time War.
Hadn’t they?
To this, the Master had given you a quizzical look. “Is that what happened where you came from?” he had asked, a heady mesmer in the bottom of his soothing voice. Before you knew it you were telling him everything, every single thing that you had heard of the Time Lords and the Time War from the Doctor. You found the Master’s reaction interesting. Up to that point, whenever you had met him, he had exuded a quiet but firm air of complete and utter ownership; but when he heard those two words come from your lips his presence had condensed inwards like a collapsing star, and you couldn’t help thinking - as his dark eyes bored holes into you - that he seemed so much smaller like this.
You learned a lot from the Master, just as you had from the Doctor. Almost more, in fact - where the Doctor gave tangents, the Master gave lessons. He subtly taught you about the High Council of Gallifrey, and the history of Time Lord society, and the Eye of Harmony, and of Rassilon and Omega. He taught you about himself, and his time at the Academy, and about his Doctor.
You were surprised to learn so much about the Doctor, from a man that the Doctor had never mentioned in all the time you knew him. You learned his Academy nickname (Theta Sigma), his favorite place (the red-grass fields of Gallifrey at sunset), and his favorite way to be woken up in the morning (soft but persistent nudges to his ribcage, parallel to the line of his hearts).
You learned of his friendship with the Master, and how the friendship had grown into something too big and beautiful to be defined in human terms. The Master had referred to it with a lyrical alien word, which he later translated as becoming four-hearted - to share your life completely with another, fitting together with such perfection that each pair of hearts would beat for both partners’ sakes, unable to continue without their twins from that point onward.
In particular, the Master seemed to be inexhaustible on the subject of their travels. With the Doctor, he’d seen the most far-flung reaches of space and time, from the year 300 trillion to the very genesis of the star system where their home planet shone proudly. They had also visited more imaginable locales, closer to home: Earth at all points in its history, righting wrongs and doing good wherever they managed to touch down. He recounted, with no small amount of laughter from both of you, their honeymoon visit to Earth in 1963 - at which point, the chameleon circuit of their dinky old Type 40 TARDIS (shouldn’t have even been flying at that point, but the Doctor always had a special affection for antiques) shorted out and got stuck permanently as a police box. They had never gotten it fixed because of the Doctor’s ridiculous fondness for the error, and the Master’s secret glee.
Later, after you two had progressed to the point where the Master ceased mesmerizing you out of a sense of respect, you asked him where the Doctor was, why he wasn’t with the Master, what he was doing. The Master had become silent for a long time at that. Then, he’d told you to meet him outside of Torchwood Tower the next morning, and get ready for a long drive.
Indeed, there had been a long drive - which you were now at the end of, shaking. You had driven for hours, through France and Germany and going north until you hit a huge, elderly forest. You and the Master had left your cars and travelled on foot, then, him leading you through the trees and looking older than you had ever realized he was. Finally, as you two had crested one last rolling half-hill, he’d looked over his shoulder and said, “We’re here.”
You had approached the wreck in dumb, blind horror. Somehow, the whole area seemed to be wavering; the blue-painted wood was at once newly splintered and providing nourishment for the thick ivy wreathing its shards, pocked with black scars from laser fire, and the shattered windows still belched black teal-tinted smoke from some perspectives. The Master hung back as you walked forward, as you reached out and put a hand on the broken body of the wreck. Its doors, swinging inward, gave way to nothing but an empty box, no bigger on the inside than the outside.
Now you are standing in front of the corpse-TARDIS, shaking. The whole scene blurs in a way unlike the blurring of time in the area - it blurs with tears, which catch in your lashes and refract light like crystals.
“This is why the Time Lords won the War,” the Master says hoarsely, his voice thick. You didn’t notice him come up behind you, but he’s there, his hands absently rubbing your shoulders in an attempt to calm. Through his palms you can feel a distant tremor: an earthquake, barely suppressed.
The Master tells you about the Time War. The fall and reclamation of Arcadia, the destruction of the Citadel, the hectic and frenzied place that the Doctor and the Master occupied at its center are all described by the Master, black eyes boring into the corpse-TARDIS as he speaks. With the painstaking detail of a madman, he describes the blood and horror of battle, the fire and gore and terror, the unrecognizable rage that had overtaken both of them as they fought for their planet and the rest of the known universe through a mask of calm.
The Master grows quiet as he talks about the end - the Doctor, regenerating within 15 hours of an earlier one, screaming as his body broke itself down and didn’t build back up again. He talks of himself, letting the rage take him over as he burned an entire star system. His hands are balled into trembling fists.
You don’t know when you sat down, but you’re sitting on the pine needle forest floor now, the Master beside you as you listen to his story and watch the cold dead corpse-TARDIS, covered with weeds and sizzling with heat. The Master is dwindling now, talking about the refugee camps and the paranoid searches for stray Daleks that may have escaped, and he finally becomes silent.
His eyes are old and soft, sad and sharp, and it’s through seeing them that you finally realize: yes. The Doctor can be gone.
Between you two, three hearts begin to beat in time.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairings: Doctor/AU Master; Rose/AU Master
Description: "Before you met him, you never really believed that the Doctor could ever be gone." Set in Pete's World, featuring alternate universe Simm!Master
Rating: S is for sad.
Before you met him, you never really believed that the Doctor could ever be gone. Even though you knew you would almost definitely never see him again, you also knew that he wasn’t gone. He was just somewhere else, off in the world that you left behind and probably in the world you were in now, living and adventuring and managing to get by on his own, just like he did before he met you.
Then, you met him.
He was a small and unassuming man, with short brown hair and sad eyes that were at once softened with grief and sharp enough to cut yourself on. He dressed in sleek, simple suits with thin ties, and called himself the Master. The definite article.
When the Master told you that he was a Time Lord, you laughed out loud, mostly out of disbelief. You said that he couldn’t be - all the Time Lords were dead and gone. They’d been trapped in the Time War.
Hadn’t they?
To this, the Master had given you a quizzical look. “Is that what happened where you came from?” he had asked, a heady mesmer in the bottom of his soothing voice. Before you knew it you were telling him everything, every single thing that you had heard of the Time Lords and the Time War from the Doctor. You found the Master’s reaction interesting. Up to that point, whenever you had met him, he had exuded a quiet but firm air of complete and utter ownership; but when he heard those two words come from your lips his presence had condensed inwards like a collapsing star, and you couldn’t help thinking - as his dark eyes bored holes into you - that he seemed so much smaller like this.
You learned a lot from the Master, just as you had from the Doctor. Almost more, in fact - where the Doctor gave tangents, the Master gave lessons. He subtly taught you about the High Council of Gallifrey, and the history of Time Lord society, and the Eye of Harmony, and of Rassilon and Omega. He taught you about himself, and his time at the Academy, and about his Doctor.
You were surprised to learn so much about the Doctor, from a man that the Doctor had never mentioned in all the time you knew him. You learned his Academy nickname (Theta Sigma), his favorite place (the red-grass fields of Gallifrey at sunset), and his favorite way to be woken up in the morning (soft but persistent nudges to his ribcage, parallel to the line of his hearts).
You learned of his friendship with the Master, and how the friendship had grown into something too big and beautiful to be defined in human terms. The Master had referred to it with a lyrical alien word, which he later translated as becoming four-hearted - to share your life completely with another, fitting together with such perfection that each pair of hearts would beat for both partners’ sakes, unable to continue without their twins from that point onward.
In particular, the Master seemed to be inexhaustible on the subject of their travels. With the Doctor, he’d seen the most far-flung reaches of space and time, from the year 300 trillion to the very genesis of the star system where their home planet shone proudly. They had also visited more imaginable locales, closer to home: Earth at all points in its history, righting wrongs and doing good wherever they managed to touch down. He recounted, with no small amount of laughter from both of you, their honeymoon visit to Earth in 1963 - at which point, the chameleon circuit of their dinky old Type 40 TARDIS (shouldn’t have even been flying at that point, but the Doctor always had a special affection for antiques) shorted out and got stuck permanently as a police box. They had never gotten it fixed because of the Doctor’s ridiculous fondness for the error, and the Master’s secret glee.
Later, after you two had progressed to the point where the Master ceased mesmerizing you out of a sense of respect, you asked him where the Doctor was, why he wasn’t with the Master, what he was doing. The Master had become silent for a long time at that. Then, he’d told you to meet him outside of Torchwood Tower the next morning, and get ready for a long drive.
Indeed, there had been a long drive - which you were now at the end of, shaking. You had driven for hours, through France and Germany and going north until you hit a huge, elderly forest. You and the Master had left your cars and travelled on foot, then, him leading you through the trees and looking older than you had ever realized he was. Finally, as you two had crested one last rolling half-hill, he’d looked over his shoulder and said, “We’re here.”
You had approached the wreck in dumb, blind horror. Somehow, the whole area seemed to be wavering; the blue-painted wood was at once newly splintered and providing nourishment for the thick ivy wreathing its shards, pocked with black scars from laser fire, and the shattered windows still belched black teal-tinted smoke from some perspectives. The Master hung back as you walked forward, as you reached out and put a hand on the broken body of the wreck. Its doors, swinging inward, gave way to nothing but an empty box, no bigger on the inside than the outside.
Now you are standing in front of the corpse-TARDIS, shaking. The whole scene blurs in a way unlike the blurring of time in the area - it blurs with tears, which catch in your lashes and refract light like crystals.
“This is why the Time Lords won the War,” the Master says hoarsely, his voice thick. You didn’t notice him come up behind you, but he’s there, his hands absently rubbing your shoulders in an attempt to calm. Through his palms you can feel a distant tremor: an earthquake, barely suppressed.
The Master tells you about the Time War. The fall and reclamation of Arcadia, the destruction of the Citadel, the hectic and frenzied place that the Doctor and the Master occupied at its center are all described by the Master, black eyes boring into the corpse-TARDIS as he speaks. With the painstaking detail of a madman, he describes the blood and horror of battle, the fire and gore and terror, the unrecognizable rage that had overtaken both of them as they fought for their planet and the rest of the known universe through a mask of calm.
The Master grows quiet as he talks about the end - the Doctor, regenerating within 15 hours of an earlier one, screaming as his body broke itself down and didn’t build back up again. He talks of himself, letting the rage take him over as he burned an entire star system. His hands are balled into trembling fists.
You don’t know when you sat down, but you’re sitting on the pine needle forest floor now, the Master beside you as you listen to his story and watch the cold dead corpse-TARDIS, covered with weeds and sizzling with heat. The Master is dwindling now, talking about the refugee camps and the paranoid searches for stray Daleks that may have escaped, and he finally becomes silent.
His eyes are old and soft, sad and sharp, and it’s through seeing them that you finally realize: yes. The Doctor can be gone.
Between you two, three hearts begin to beat in time.