Fic: Difficulties on Theory
Title: Difficulties on Theory
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: R
Pairings: Master/Ten, Master/Nine
Summary: There are a lot of flaws in the process of evolution; the Doctor learns, slowly, in the dark, that nothing ever really changes.
Written for: biroid, for the Master ficathon. Sorry it's so late!
Prompt: Master/Doctor. The Master is kept as a 'pet' on the Tardis, but he manages to gain control of the time machine. The Doctor's his plaything. Slash follows. I may have wandered off the point slightly.
Wordcount: 3,984
Thanks to aralias and salazire for quick beta work!
"Natural selection will not necessarily produce absolute perfection; nor, as far as we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found"
~Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
The Doctor shuts his eyes, lets his head fall back against the cold, hard, unforgiving wall. Sweating from his exertions, bleeding where the manacles cut into his flesh, he has, finally, come to admit defeat.
It’s dark in here. Not just dim, but black as space. There is no sense of how large the room is, no knowing if there’s anything or anyone nearby. The sheer darkness is oppressive, and, he has to admit, a little frightening. It isn’t the lack of light itself which troubles him; it’s the knowledge that when the Master comes for him - and he will come - it will be in silence, and the Doctor will not see him, not even when it’s too late.
His entire body is tense, waiting for the Master’s touch. He knows he could be waiting years, but, equally, it could be seconds. Locked in this bare, forgotten room in the depths of the TARDIS, time is practically irrelevant. Seconds, minutes, hours are all concepts without meaning, now, and the only proof that time is passing at all is the steady sound of his own two hearts, and the panting of his breath.
His legs and arms ache from the effort of trying to wrench himself free. His eyes sting, his stomach is a slash of empty agony, and in his head thumps a steady, rhythmic beat of pain.
But worse than that, he is alone. There’s no one who can help him, no one who knows where he is. No one, not anyone, at all.
The Doctor sags, exhausted. His feet slip on the invisible floor, his shoulders scrape a little against the wall. He lets out a long, low, frustrated moan.
In the darkness, a foot away, the Master grins a vicious, feline grin.
***
Six thousand, one hundred, and eighty-seven heartsbeats later, there is a sound. The Doctor stops breathing. He stops counting, too. Every muscle he possesses is tensed, painful but alert.
It is only a tiny sound, indistinct, the soft susurrus of clothes on flesh. It’s close by, very close, maybe inches, maybe less. The Doctor doesn’t dare move. He knows, for the first time in his life, how it really feels to be preyed upon. Time Lord he is, but millions upon millions of years of evolution slide away in the space of one sound, and suddenly he is nothing more than a defenceless, quivering animal, waiting for a predator to strike. His sympathies now are with tiny, soft little creatures at the bottom of the food chain, hiding in the dark from the hunters; he can barely remember how it felt to walk, unthreatened, in the sunlight.
The darkness is unyielding. There is no hint of movement. No other sound. Nothing to suggest the noise was a noise at all, and not just the psychological product of his fear, a hallucination. After all, it is darkness of one sort or another that leads from sense to insanity.
He shakes his head, dismisses the thought. The Master will not - cannot - leave him alone down here forever. All he has to do is keep a tight grip on his senses until then; until he either has someone to talk to, or finds a way to reason with the dark.
***
Two thousand and six heartsbeats after that, the Doctor laughs, spontaneously, because if the only way to know something is to sense it, and the only way to sense things is through interaction, and if one is truly starved of light and sound and materials to touch, then surely one doesn’t exist?
He rather likes the sound of that.
***
He has to give the Master credit. The man has certainly learned a few lessons about patience.
It must have been days. Perhaps weeks. It’s certainly long enough that he has forgotten what hunger feels like and has been reintroduced to the concept of head-to-toe, inside-and-out agony. Pain is an old friend of his, but it’s the boredom that is really killing him. He has tried re-playing old chess games, or mentally-writing a TARDIS maintenance textbook, or listing the names of all the stars in the universe. He is always forced to give up by the sensation of an infinitesimal breeze, or a sub-sonic sound that grabs his attention, and forces him into a now familiar state of absolute awareness. Every nerve tingling, every hair on end. His eyes wide and staring into the void.
But for all the Doctor’s alertness, when the Master kisses him it is entirely without warning.
His whole body jolts with electricity, and his head jerks back, away from the unexpected warmth. Something in his mind clicks into place, and he is entirely aware of the Master’s presence, and in awe of his stealth, and alarmed by the tight grip in his hair and the knee between his thighs. The Master tugs his head forward again, bites down on the Doctor’s lip, and for the first time in an age there is a true sound in the darkness as the Doctor yells out.
The Master kisses him greedily, and the Doctor can guess it has not been easy for him to wait for this. He tries to wrench himself away, but his head is trapped between the Master’s hands, and his entire body is pressed back against the wall. He cannot move his hands much, but he finds thin cotton and warm flesh. He can reach the Master’s neck, perhaps his face. His fingers scrabble, uselessly, against skin.
“Oh, Doctor.” The Master’s voice is breathy, tinged with excitement. “The things I have to tell you! The things I’ve done while you’ve been down here…”
The Doctor tries to speak, but his throat is dry and the effort to form syllables is incredible. He coughs, dryly, and then finds something held against his lips. Water trickles over his chin. He opens his mouth, lapping desperately, but all too quickly the source of the moisture is gone again.
“Let me go,” he croaks.
There’s a disembodied chuckle in the gloom. “Oh, okay then. Why not? I’ll just give up this lovely ship and the wonderful, liberated lifestyle I’ve been getting used to so that you can get back to lording it over the universe from the top of your ivory tower. Yes, that sounds exactly like something I would do.”
“Please.”
“Oh, well, since you remembered your manners…”
The Doctor half-expects his freedom for a moment, but the Master laughs again, and gives him a little push.
“Oh, this is fun. I like this. It’s almost as interesting as the little adventure I had a few days ago. Shall I tell you about that? About how I tricked an entire planet full of primitives into thinking I was their god, and then convinced them to sacrifice themselves? And shall I tell you why I did it? Shall I confess that I had no good reason other than that I could?”
The Doctor can’t find the energy for a snappy retort. He lets the silence prevail, and tries to ignore the Master’s hands on him, tries to ignore the only other real thing in the universe.
“Oh!” the Master continues. “I know what I wanted to tell you! Almost forgot it in the sheer pleasure of-” he runs his hands eagerly down the Doctor’s chest - “feeling you again.”
“Again,” the Doctor repeats. “We’ve never-”
“Oh, yes we have. You see, just a couple of days ago I went back to Earth. Twenty-first century. About two days before a particular department store in London went baboom! What was that, your eighth regeneration? Or was that the pretty one with the silly hair? I lose track of these things. No, don’t tell me… Onetwothreefour… Ninth? Anyway, poor baby, you were so wrapped up in your own guilt and grief that I walked right past you and you didn’t notice. You looked at me and everything. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“It was dark. I don’t blame you for not kicking yourself now, but at the time… Well, I couldn’t resist. I went back, tapped you on the shoulder, asked for the time, and you looked me right in the eye. There we were, the two of us, last of the Time Lords exchanging small talk in the middle of London, and you had no idea! That’s the funny thing about you, Doctor. You do like your melodrama. It almost overwhelmed me, the self-loathing in your eyes, the all-oppressing remorse, the desire to go back, try again. Almost overwhelmed me. But it had completely smothered you, because you were so convinced there was no one else that you couldn’t see your oldest enemy standing right in front of you. Made me want to give you a cuddle and tell you it’d all be alright in the end. But I didn’t. Instead we-”
He doesn’t need the Master to explain any more. He remembers. A man stepping out of the fog, the hint of a connection somewhere in his mind, a connection that reminded him, strangely, of home and he pushed it away, fought against it, out of sorrow, of a longing to forget. A connection he managed to convince himself was all to do with the stranger’s half-shadowed smile, the hang of his coat around his hips, the grey hollow of his throat. And he remembers the alleyway, how he kept his coat on, how he let the stranger push him against the wall and take him. He remembers willing his freshly regenerated body to feel something. Pleasure. Pain. Anything. He remembers the graze of the rough brickwork under his hands. He remembers the stranger’s teeth on the back of his neck, and the noises he made as he hit his climax, and how he left without a word, leaving the Doctor half-hard and unfulfilled.
Just as he had always done before.
***
After the Master leaves him, he is all alone again in the dark. The Master’s words swim around in his head, round and round and round. Self-loathing. Melodrama. The story did not surprise him when the Master told it to him, and it holds no mystery for him now because it’s all true. The thing he had most desired had screwed him up against a wall, then left him wanting, and he was too wrapped up in himself to realise.
There was no way he could have known. So soon after the Time War, he could not have handled the Master. He must have known that, deep down, and denied himself the revelation - his own mind, deceiving him.
That thought is more frightening than anything he has fought before. The worst darkness of all, he has come to learn, is not the darkness that descends upon the world at night. It’s the sort you cannot fight. It’s the darkness behind the eyes.
***
He stops counting his own heartsbeats when he runs out of figures, because even a Time Lord can only invent so many pseudo-numbers to come after a gazillion. And he stops trying to connect his mind with the TARDIS when she knocks him back for the five millionth time. He knows why, but it took him this long to stop himself.
If the TARDIS lets him in, the Master will hurt her. She must remain strong and undamaged. That’s the only hope the Doctor has.
He hangs in the cell, blind and alone, not yet desperate enough to talk to himself for the company. But getting close. Definitely close.
He thinks of all the people who could help him, if only they knew he was in trouble. All the people throughout space and time who owe him favours he would never dream of calling in, and all the friends who would leap to his aid without a second thought. The people he would urge to stay away, let the Master have his fun so long as they remain safe. The people he secretly wished would risk their lives to come looking for him now.
He can’t reach anyone from here, telepathically, even if he could break through the walls of their minds, but that doesn’t stop him from reaching out. The Master’s fractured mind is sometimes clear and livid, easy to find in the TARDIS, and other times it is a blur, indistinct and almost intangible to the Doctor’s questing thoughts.
Those times, when his mind is a fuzzy miasma impossible to pin-point to one location, are almost always the times when the Master emerges from the dark, reaching out to touch.
***
The Doctor always protests when the Master kisses him - every single time. He wriggles and fights and spits insults. He tries to burrow backwards through the wall with his shoulder blades. Anything to avoid the terrible softness of the Master’s lips.
So it surprises even the Doctor himself that he does not object when the Master appears from nowhere and begins, without warning or preamble, to relieve the Doctor of his trousers. There is something definite to his movements this time, something that is always missing when the Master kisses him. He wonders where the Master has been, what has driven him, now, to the depths of the TARDIS and to the Doctor’s startled acceptance.
The Master strips him, pushes him against the wall, and the first thing the Doctor feels is teeth scraping his collar bone. He throws his head back, strains against his chains. He wants to touch, to see, to give as good as he gets, but the Master is uninterested in the Doctor’s needs.
Hands along his spine, over his arse, gripping his thighs tight, and then the Doctor finds himself hoisted up, his weight supported by the chains as much as by the Master’s arms until he wraps his legs around the other Time Lord’s waist. There’s a moment of frantic confusion, since neither can see the other, and then there’s the unmistakable sensation of lubricant, haphazardly applied.
At first, there is no pleasure in it for the Doctor. He clenches his thighs tight around the Master only to relieve some of the tension from his arms. His head rests on the wall, his neck at an awkward angle, and he listens, intently, to the small sounds the Master makes. He’s in a world of his own, the Doctor realises, barely interested in who he’s fucking or why, his mind tightly locked away, even his surface thoughts closely guarded. He’s still dressed, in a suit if the Doctor is any judge. He can feel shirt buttons grinding against his bare skin, and it isn’t pleasant at all.
The Master slams into him, almost as if he is trying to break the Doctor, but it isn’t long before he seems to wear himself out. His movements become erratic, and then, the Doctor realises, he starts talking. Very quietly at first, almost to himself, but eventually he can make out some of the words.
“…can remember a time you wanted this, Doctor. Wanted me so badly, would have begged if I’d have listened, do you remember?”
It isn’t true. He would never have begged. But he can still remember, millennia ago, lying awake at night, unable to sleep because someone had to listen to the breathing of the boy in the bed opposite. It wasn’t a sane love, or a healthy love, and the reason he listened wasn’t fondness. He listened out of a terror of not hearing another breath, and more nights than not, he would climb out of bed, tiptoe across the room, and put a hand on the narrow chest, to feel the heartsbeat through the sheets.
There’s a laugh in the dark. The Master’s fingers stroke idly up and down the Doctor’s half-hard cock. His thigh-muscles tighten again, for a brand new reason.
“We all get what we want, Doctor. All of us, in the end. We get exactly what we want. But you and I… even we can do little about the timing.”
He kisses the Doctor again, and, this time, the Doctor doesn’t wrench himself away, he doesn’t groan in protest. His lips part, very slightly, and he lets the Master’s tongue flick across his teeth.
The thing about time, the thing every little Time Lord has to learn, is that it isn’t real. Time is a lie, there is no such thing, just like every other comforting story creatures tell about the universe. And that is, of course, the point of stories. Making sense of the insensible, comprehending the incomprehensible, hiding from the darkness and the cold, hard sanity of reality in cosy little home-spun nests of lies.
He knew, when they played together as children, exactly what could become of the Master, what potential evils lay dormant inside him. And he knows, now, that the man keeping him here, holding him captive, fucking him in the dark, is the best friend he’s ever had, the one who holds his hand when the bigger boys come, who fights with him or runs away with him. The Master has not transitioned from one to the other. He is both, man and boy and every age, every regeneration, every stolen shape in between. And the Doctor, who knows the universe’s biggest secret, cannot pick and choose which versions he loves, and which it suits him to despise.
***
They sit together, in the dark. The Doctor’s liberation came out of the blue, long after he stopped caring whether it happened or not, and ever since they have sat here, back-to-back, heads resting on each other’s shoulders. A while ago, the Doctor found the Master’s hand and gripped it.
“Where are we going?” he asks, eventually.
The Master’s head turns slightly, as though he is trying to look at him. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “Are we going somewhere? I hadn’t realised.”
“You’re flying the ship.”
“No, I’m not.”
The Doctor sighs. “All right, so we’re in the vortex.”
“Are we?”
“Or maybe we’re somewhere. On some planet. Are we on a planet?”
“I can’t remember.”
“We should go somewhere,” the Doctor says. “And do something.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Anything.”
Silence falls again, and they sit there, on the floor of the cell, touching, always touching. The Doctor knows it doesn’t matter where they go or what they do. The details aren’t important. It doesn’t matter what the lies are, so long as they are told. So long as they are believed.
“We could go to Earth,” he says.
The Master shakes his head. “No, we couldn’t.”
“Why not? It’s as good a planet as any other.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a few bits of rubble floating in space. I destroyed it ages ago. Sorry.”
The Doctor’s eyebrows knit together. “You didn’t,” he says, his voice tinged with desperation.
The Master laughs. “No, I didn’t. But we can’t go to Earth. Because I say so,” he adds, as the Doctor starts to question him.
It’s cold in here. Not very cold, just a little bit. The Doctor noticed it only once his chains were cut, and he was free to move around, and now it’s starting to nag at him. He wants to get away, far away, taking the Master with him, but something keeps them both here, hiding away from the universe.
He thinks about evolution. About the tiny animal feeling he experienced in the dark, the feeling that remains at the core of every creature, no matter how highly advanced, no matter how many mutations it has undergone to get from primordial ooze to space flight. How easy it is to step down from the command deck of your ship and crawl back under your rock, closing your eyes and praying the bigger animals pass you by.
They each thought they were invincible. That the other was the only match for them. And they each were right, in a way.
“Nothing changes,” says the Master. His voice is very quiet, and his pulse is very slow. “Not really. You get nothing out of nothing, and you can’t change one thing into something else without some of the old thing staying behind. There. I’ve learned a lesson. Happy now?”
“Not as such, no.”
“We can’t travel together. We can’t live together. The only reason we can sit together is because you can’t see me.”
The Doctor opens his mouth to protest. He closes it again without a sound.
“What happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to forgive me again?”
The Doctor smiles to himself. “I did that ages ago. Are you going to forgive me?”
“For what?”
“Letting you think you’d won. Although I have to admit, you got along without me for a lot longer than I expected.”
There’s silence for a while. “No. I don’t think I am.”
The Doctor nods. Then he lets his head fall back again. He turns a little, and feels the Master’s hair on his face.
“We can’t stay down here, you know. This isn’t how it ends. Not for us. This isn’t how the Time Lords die, withering away in a battered old TARDIS that can’t even make a left-turn without malfunctioning. We have to get back out there, remind the universe who we are. We have to… we have to live, and fight, and survive. You have to underestimate me again. I have to misunderstand you some more. We aren’t finished yet. We can’t raise another Time Lord civilisation, and we can’t move on from here. But if we stop, if we just give up, what’s the point of anything we’ve ever done?”
The Master is still, and he says nothing. Around them, the TARDIS hums. She keeps herself busy, and her nose out of their conversation, but she’s a comforting presence. The Doctor puts his hand flat on the floor, feeling the TARDIS’s workings beneath. His ship, his living ship, which evolved from ancestors far stranger than even he can imagine.
He thought he wanted to die, after the war ended. He never understood the feeling, couldn’t logically explain why being the last of his kind made him wish for death himself, but he knows, now, why that feeling has faded away.
He isn’t the last. He never will be the last. Species and race mean nothing at all. There is life, and there is void, and so long as there is life he won’t stop living.
“Where will we go?” asks the Master.
“I’ll go my way,” says the Doctor, “and you will go yours.”
The Master shifts uncomfortably. He snatches his hand away from the Doctor, sits up, moves away from him. “And that’s it?”
“Yes,” says the Doctor. “That’s it.”
***
She’s running, running for her life, tearing through the passageways, fleeing from something she doesn’t understand. It’s not right, not normal. Must be… alien. A monster from under the bed, a freak of nature spat out by evolution and left to prowl the night alone. And it’s after her, chasing her down like a fox with a hare.
She’s past frightened now. Scared came and went around the time she found the bodies and the weird alien bugs, and now she’s running on instinct, dredging up automatic responses from somewhere deep down in her genes. Her head feels clear, uncluttered. This is easy.
All she has to do is run.
Someone steps out beside her, grabs her hand, drags her down a side-corridor. They run together, through the dark, gradually losing the monstrous thing in the maze of the building. She finds ordinary fear creeping back up her spine, into her brain.
She turns to look at him, as they run. Up ahead is a dead-end occupied by a strange, blue wooden box. The man pulls a key out of his pocket as they sprint towards it.
“Who are you?” she demands.
He grins, broad and trustworthy. “I’m the Doctor,” he says. “Now shut up and run!”
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: R
Pairings: Master/Ten, Master/Nine
Summary: There are a lot of flaws in the process of evolution; the Doctor learns, slowly, in the dark, that nothing ever really changes.
Written for: biroid, for the Master ficathon. Sorry it's so late!
Prompt: Master/Doctor. The Master is kept as a 'pet' on the Tardis, but he manages to gain control of the time machine. The Doctor's his plaything. Slash follows. I may have wandered off the point slightly.
Wordcount: 3,984
Thanks to aralias and salazire for quick beta work!
"Natural selection will not necessarily produce absolute perfection; nor, as far as we can judge by our limited faculties, can absolute perfection be everywhere found"
~Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
The Doctor shuts his eyes, lets his head fall back against the cold, hard, unforgiving wall. Sweating from his exertions, bleeding where the manacles cut into his flesh, he has, finally, come to admit defeat.
It’s dark in here. Not just dim, but black as space. There is no sense of how large the room is, no knowing if there’s anything or anyone nearby. The sheer darkness is oppressive, and, he has to admit, a little frightening. It isn’t the lack of light itself which troubles him; it’s the knowledge that when the Master comes for him - and he will come - it will be in silence, and the Doctor will not see him, not even when it’s too late.
His entire body is tense, waiting for the Master’s touch. He knows he could be waiting years, but, equally, it could be seconds. Locked in this bare, forgotten room in the depths of the TARDIS, time is practically irrelevant. Seconds, minutes, hours are all concepts without meaning, now, and the only proof that time is passing at all is the steady sound of his own two hearts, and the panting of his breath.
His legs and arms ache from the effort of trying to wrench himself free. His eyes sting, his stomach is a slash of empty agony, and in his head thumps a steady, rhythmic beat of pain.
But worse than that, he is alone. There’s no one who can help him, no one who knows where he is. No one, not anyone, at all.
The Doctor sags, exhausted. His feet slip on the invisible floor, his shoulders scrape a little against the wall. He lets out a long, low, frustrated moan.
In the darkness, a foot away, the Master grins a vicious, feline grin.
***
Six thousand, one hundred, and eighty-seven heartsbeats later, there is a sound. The Doctor stops breathing. He stops counting, too. Every muscle he possesses is tensed, painful but alert.
It is only a tiny sound, indistinct, the soft susurrus of clothes on flesh. It’s close by, very close, maybe inches, maybe less. The Doctor doesn’t dare move. He knows, for the first time in his life, how it really feels to be preyed upon. Time Lord he is, but millions upon millions of years of evolution slide away in the space of one sound, and suddenly he is nothing more than a defenceless, quivering animal, waiting for a predator to strike. His sympathies now are with tiny, soft little creatures at the bottom of the food chain, hiding in the dark from the hunters; he can barely remember how it felt to walk, unthreatened, in the sunlight.
The darkness is unyielding. There is no hint of movement. No other sound. Nothing to suggest the noise was a noise at all, and not just the psychological product of his fear, a hallucination. After all, it is darkness of one sort or another that leads from sense to insanity.
He shakes his head, dismisses the thought. The Master will not - cannot - leave him alone down here forever. All he has to do is keep a tight grip on his senses until then; until he either has someone to talk to, or finds a way to reason with the dark.
***
Two thousand and six heartsbeats after that, the Doctor laughs, spontaneously, because if the only way to know something is to sense it, and the only way to sense things is through interaction, and if one is truly starved of light and sound and materials to touch, then surely one doesn’t exist?
He rather likes the sound of that.
***
He has to give the Master credit. The man has certainly learned a few lessons about patience.
It must have been days. Perhaps weeks. It’s certainly long enough that he has forgotten what hunger feels like and has been reintroduced to the concept of head-to-toe, inside-and-out agony. Pain is an old friend of his, but it’s the boredom that is really killing him. He has tried re-playing old chess games, or mentally-writing a TARDIS maintenance textbook, or listing the names of all the stars in the universe. He is always forced to give up by the sensation of an infinitesimal breeze, or a sub-sonic sound that grabs his attention, and forces him into a now familiar state of absolute awareness. Every nerve tingling, every hair on end. His eyes wide and staring into the void.
But for all the Doctor’s alertness, when the Master kisses him it is entirely without warning.
His whole body jolts with electricity, and his head jerks back, away from the unexpected warmth. Something in his mind clicks into place, and he is entirely aware of the Master’s presence, and in awe of his stealth, and alarmed by the tight grip in his hair and the knee between his thighs. The Master tugs his head forward again, bites down on the Doctor’s lip, and for the first time in an age there is a true sound in the darkness as the Doctor yells out.
The Master kisses him greedily, and the Doctor can guess it has not been easy for him to wait for this. He tries to wrench himself away, but his head is trapped between the Master’s hands, and his entire body is pressed back against the wall. He cannot move his hands much, but he finds thin cotton and warm flesh. He can reach the Master’s neck, perhaps his face. His fingers scrabble, uselessly, against skin.
“Oh, Doctor.” The Master’s voice is breathy, tinged with excitement. “The things I have to tell you! The things I’ve done while you’ve been down here…”
The Doctor tries to speak, but his throat is dry and the effort to form syllables is incredible. He coughs, dryly, and then finds something held against his lips. Water trickles over his chin. He opens his mouth, lapping desperately, but all too quickly the source of the moisture is gone again.
“Let me go,” he croaks.
There’s a disembodied chuckle in the gloom. “Oh, okay then. Why not? I’ll just give up this lovely ship and the wonderful, liberated lifestyle I’ve been getting used to so that you can get back to lording it over the universe from the top of your ivory tower. Yes, that sounds exactly like something I would do.”
“Please.”
“Oh, well, since you remembered your manners…”
The Doctor half-expects his freedom for a moment, but the Master laughs again, and gives him a little push.
“Oh, this is fun. I like this. It’s almost as interesting as the little adventure I had a few days ago. Shall I tell you about that? About how I tricked an entire planet full of primitives into thinking I was their god, and then convinced them to sacrifice themselves? And shall I tell you why I did it? Shall I confess that I had no good reason other than that I could?”
The Doctor can’t find the energy for a snappy retort. He lets the silence prevail, and tries to ignore the Master’s hands on him, tries to ignore the only other real thing in the universe.
“Oh!” the Master continues. “I know what I wanted to tell you! Almost forgot it in the sheer pleasure of-” he runs his hands eagerly down the Doctor’s chest - “feeling you again.”
“Again,” the Doctor repeats. “We’ve never-”
“Oh, yes we have. You see, just a couple of days ago I went back to Earth. Twenty-first century. About two days before a particular department store in London went baboom! What was that, your eighth regeneration? Or was that the pretty one with the silly hair? I lose track of these things. No, don’t tell me… Onetwothreefour… Ninth? Anyway, poor baby, you were so wrapped up in your own guilt and grief that I walked right past you and you didn’t notice. You looked at me and everything. Do you remember?”
“No.”
“It was dark. I don’t blame you for not kicking yourself now, but at the time… Well, I couldn’t resist. I went back, tapped you on the shoulder, asked for the time, and you looked me right in the eye. There we were, the two of us, last of the Time Lords exchanging small talk in the middle of London, and you had no idea! That’s the funny thing about you, Doctor. You do like your melodrama. It almost overwhelmed me, the self-loathing in your eyes, the all-oppressing remorse, the desire to go back, try again. Almost overwhelmed me. But it had completely smothered you, because you were so convinced there was no one else that you couldn’t see your oldest enemy standing right in front of you. Made me want to give you a cuddle and tell you it’d all be alright in the end. But I didn’t. Instead we-”
He doesn’t need the Master to explain any more. He remembers. A man stepping out of the fog, the hint of a connection somewhere in his mind, a connection that reminded him, strangely, of home and he pushed it away, fought against it, out of sorrow, of a longing to forget. A connection he managed to convince himself was all to do with the stranger’s half-shadowed smile, the hang of his coat around his hips, the grey hollow of his throat. And he remembers the alleyway, how he kept his coat on, how he let the stranger push him against the wall and take him. He remembers willing his freshly regenerated body to feel something. Pleasure. Pain. Anything. He remembers the graze of the rough brickwork under his hands. He remembers the stranger’s teeth on the back of his neck, and the noises he made as he hit his climax, and how he left without a word, leaving the Doctor half-hard and unfulfilled.
Just as he had always done before.
***
After the Master leaves him, he is all alone again in the dark. The Master’s words swim around in his head, round and round and round. Self-loathing. Melodrama. The story did not surprise him when the Master told it to him, and it holds no mystery for him now because it’s all true. The thing he had most desired had screwed him up against a wall, then left him wanting, and he was too wrapped up in himself to realise.
There was no way he could have known. So soon after the Time War, he could not have handled the Master. He must have known that, deep down, and denied himself the revelation - his own mind, deceiving him.
That thought is more frightening than anything he has fought before. The worst darkness of all, he has come to learn, is not the darkness that descends upon the world at night. It’s the sort you cannot fight. It’s the darkness behind the eyes.
***
He stops counting his own heartsbeats when he runs out of figures, because even a Time Lord can only invent so many pseudo-numbers to come after a gazillion. And he stops trying to connect his mind with the TARDIS when she knocks him back for the five millionth time. He knows why, but it took him this long to stop himself.
If the TARDIS lets him in, the Master will hurt her. She must remain strong and undamaged. That’s the only hope the Doctor has.
He hangs in the cell, blind and alone, not yet desperate enough to talk to himself for the company. But getting close. Definitely close.
He thinks of all the people who could help him, if only they knew he was in trouble. All the people throughout space and time who owe him favours he would never dream of calling in, and all the friends who would leap to his aid without a second thought. The people he would urge to stay away, let the Master have his fun so long as they remain safe. The people he secretly wished would risk their lives to come looking for him now.
He can’t reach anyone from here, telepathically, even if he could break through the walls of their minds, but that doesn’t stop him from reaching out. The Master’s fractured mind is sometimes clear and livid, easy to find in the TARDIS, and other times it is a blur, indistinct and almost intangible to the Doctor’s questing thoughts.
Those times, when his mind is a fuzzy miasma impossible to pin-point to one location, are almost always the times when the Master emerges from the dark, reaching out to touch.
***
The Doctor always protests when the Master kisses him - every single time. He wriggles and fights and spits insults. He tries to burrow backwards through the wall with his shoulder blades. Anything to avoid the terrible softness of the Master’s lips.
So it surprises even the Doctor himself that he does not object when the Master appears from nowhere and begins, without warning or preamble, to relieve the Doctor of his trousers. There is something definite to his movements this time, something that is always missing when the Master kisses him. He wonders where the Master has been, what has driven him, now, to the depths of the TARDIS and to the Doctor’s startled acceptance.
The Master strips him, pushes him against the wall, and the first thing the Doctor feels is teeth scraping his collar bone. He throws his head back, strains against his chains. He wants to touch, to see, to give as good as he gets, but the Master is uninterested in the Doctor’s needs.
Hands along his spine, over his arse, gripping his thighs tight, and then the Doctor finds himself hoisted up, his weight supported by the chains as much as by the Master’s arms until he wraps his legs around the other Time Lord’s waist. There’s a moment of frantic confusion, since neither can see the other, and then there’s the unmistakable sensation of lubricant, haphazardly applied.
At first, there is no pleasure in it for the Doctor. He clenches his thighs tight around the Master only to relieve some of the tension from his arms. His head rests on the wall, his neck at an awkward angle, and he listens, intently, to the small sounds the Master makes. He’s in a world of his own, the Doctor realises, barely interested in who he’s fucking or why, his mind tightly locked away, even his surface thoughts closely guarded. He’s still dressed, in a suit if the Doctor is any judge. He can feel shirt buttons grinding against his bare skin, and it isn’t pleasant at all.
The Master slams into him, almost as if he is trying to break the Doctor, but it isn’t long before he seems to wear himself out. His movements become erratic, and then, the Doctor realises, he starts talking. Very quietly at first, almost to himself, but eventually he can make out some of the words.
“…can remember a time you wanted this, Doctor. Wanted me so badly, would have begged if I’d have listened, do you remember?”
It isn’t true. He would never have begged. But he can still remember, millennia ago, lying awake at night, unable to sleep because someone had to listen to the breathing of the boy in the bed opposite. It wasn’t a sane love, or a healthy love, and the reason he listened wasn’t fondness. He listened out of a terror of not hearing another breath, and more nights than not, he would climb out of bed, tiptoe across the room, and put a hand on the narrow chest, to feel the heartsbeat through the sheets.
There’s a laugh in the dark. The Master’s fingers stroke idly up and down the Doctor’s half-hard cock. His thigh-muscles tighten again, for a brand new reason.
“We all get what we want, Doctor. All of us, in the end. We get exactly what we want. But you and I… even we can do little about the timing.”
He kisses the Doctor again, and, this time, the Doctor doesn’t wrench himself away, he doesn’t groan in protest. His lips part, very slightly, and he lets the Master’s tongue flick across his teeth.
The thing about time, the thing every little Time Lord has to learn, is that it isn’t real. Time is a lie, there is no such thing, just like every other comforting story creatures tell about the universe. And that is, of course, the point of stories. Making sense of the insensible, comprehending the incomprehensible, hiding from the darkness and the cold, hard sanity of reality in cosy little home-spun nests of lies.
He knew, when they played together as children, exactly what could become of the Master, what potential evils lay dormant inside him. And he knows, now, that the man keeping him here, holding him captive, fucking him in the dark, is the best friend he’s ever had, the one who holds his hand when the bigger boys come, who fights with him or runs away with him. The Master has not transitioned from one to the other. He is both, man and boy and every age, every regeneration, every stolen shape in between. And the Doctor, who knows the universe’s biggest secret, cannot pick and choose which versions he loves, and which it suits him to despise.
***
They sit together, in the dark. The Doctor’s liberation came out of the blue, long after he stopped caring whether it happened or not, and ever since they have sat here, back-to-back, heads resting on each other’s shoulders. A while ago, the Doctor found the Master’s hand and gripped it.
“Where are we going?” he asks, eventually.
The Master’s head turns slightly, as though he is trying to look at him. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “Are we going somewhere? I hadn’t realised.”
“You’re flying the ship.”
“No, I’m not.”
The Doctor sighs. “All right, so we’re in the vortex.”
“Are we?”
“Or maybe we’re somewhere. On some planet. Are we on a planet?”
“I can’t remember.”
“We should go somewhere,” the Doctor says. “And do something.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Anything.”
Silence falls again, and they sit there, on the floor of the cell, touching, always touching. The Doctor knows it doesn’t matter where they go or what they do. The details aren’t important. It doesn’t matter what the lies are, so long as they are told. So long as they are believed.
“We could go to Earth,” he says.
The Master shakes his head. “No, we couldn’t.”
“Why not? It’s as good a planet as any other.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a few bits of rubble floating in space. I destroyed it ages ago. Sorry.”
The Doctor’s eyebrows knit together. “You didn’t,” he says, his voice tinged with desperation.
The Master laughs. “No, I didn’t. But we can’t go to Earth. Because I say so,” he adds, as the Doctor starts to question him.
It’s cold in here. Not very cold, just a little bit. The Doctor noticed it only once his chains were cut, and he was free to move around, and now it’s starting to nag at him. He wants to get away, far away, taking the Master with him, but something keeps them both here, hiding away from the universe.
He thinks about evolution. About the tiny animal feeling he experienced in the dark, the feeling that remains at the core of every creature, no matter how highly advanced, no matter how many mutations it has undergone to get from primordial ooze to space flight. How easy it is to step down from the command deck of your ship and crawl back under your rock, closing your eyes and praying the bigger animals pass you by.
They each thought they were invincible. That the other was the only match for them. And they each were right, in a way.
“Nothing changes,” says the Master. His voice is very quiet, and his pulse is very slow. “Not really. You get nothing out of nothing, and you can’t change one thing into something else without some of the old thing staying behind. There. I’ve learned a lesson. Happy now?”
“Not as such, no.”
“We can’t travel together. We can’t live together. The only reason we can sit together is because you can’t see me.”
The Doctor opens his mouth to protest. He closes it again without a sound.
“What happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going to forgive me again?”
The Doctor smiles to himself. “I did that ages ago. Are you going to forgive me?”
“For what?”
“Letting you think you’d won. Although I have to admit, you got along without me for a lot longer than I expected.”
There’s silence for a while. “No. I don’t think I am.”
The Doctor nods. Then he lets his head fall back again. He turns a little, and feels the Master’s hair on his face.
“We can’t stay down here, you know. This isn’t how it ends. Not for us. This isn’t how the Time Lords die, withering away in a battered old TARDIS that can’t even make a left-turn without malfunctioning. We have to get back out there, remind the universe who we are. We have to… we have to live, and fight, and survive. You have to underestimate me again. I have to misunderstand you some more. We aren’t finished yet. We can’t raise another Time Lord civilisation, and we can’t move on from here. But if we stop, if we just give up, what’s the point of anything we’ve ever done?”
The Master is still, and he says nothing. Around them, the TARDIS hums. She keeps herself busy, and her nose out of their conversation, but she’s a comforting presence. The Doctor puts his hand flat on the floor, feeling the TARDIS’s workings beneath. His ship, his living ship, which evolved from ancestors far stranger than even he can imagine.
He thought he wanted to die, after the war ended. He never understood the feeling, couldn’t logically explain why being the last of his kind made him wish for death himself, but he knows, now, why that feeling has faded away.
He isn’t the last. He never will be the last. Species and race mean nothing at all. There is life, and there is void, and so long as there is life he won’t stop living.
“Where will we go?” asks the Master.
“I’ll go my way,” says the Doctor, “and you will go yours.”
The Master shifts uncomfortably. He snatches his hand away from the Doctor, sits up, moves away from him. “And that’s it?”
“Yes,” says the Doctor. “That’s it.”
***
She’s running, running for her life, tearing through the passageways, fleeing from something she doesn’t understand. It’s not right, not normal. Must be… alien. A monster from under the bed, a freak of nature spat out by evolution and left to prowl the night alone. And it’s after her, chasing her down like a fox with a hare.
She’s past frightened now. Scared came and went around the time she found the bodies and the weird alien bugs, and now she’s running on instinct, dredging up automatic responses from somewhere deep down in her genes. Her head feels clear, uncluttered. This is easy.
All she has to do is run.
Someone steps out beside her, grabs her hand, drags her down a side-corridor. They run together, through the dark, gradually losing the monstrous thing in the maze of the building. She finds ordinary fear creeping back up her spine, into her brain.
She turns to look at him, as they run. Up ahead is a dead-end occupied by a strange, blue wooden box. The man pulls a key out of his pocket as they sprint towards it.
“Who are you?” she demands.
He grins, broad and trustworthy. “I’m the Doctor,” he says. “Now shut up and run!”