The Moment Has Been Prepared For
Title: The Moment Has Been Prepared For
Author: x_los
Rating: NC-17
Pairing/Characters: Four/Ainley!Master
Summary: from the Best Enemies Kink Meme, "Four/Ainley - sex at Logopolis, in which they genuinely connect and the Doctor thinks the Master isn't so bad after all..." Now with more DOOM. Also a Prelude to Scarf Destruction.
Beta: aralias, who dealt with my whinging over tone and how I didn't know how it ended, waaah, and beta'd it.
For once in their lives the Doctor didn’t actually blame the Master for their current sticky situation. Well, he did, somewhat, but only because blaming the Master for things had become something of a habit with him. After all, he was usually perfectly right to do so.
The trouble with Logopolis was its opacity. Tying central causality to a specific point in order to suspend entropy was such a ludicrously bad idea it was no wonder the Master had thought it preposterous. A ridiculous scheme-the entire idea was fundamentally scientifically unsound. If the universe was a closed system, a ship in a bottle (and he had his doubts about that), all it needed was to be blown open-and he could have managed that with a K9 unit, a handy sun about to go nova, and a copy of Three Men In A Boat (not for the plan, just because he was bound to get bored and to want a bit of reading material. An apple wouldn’t go amiss, either).
Instead someone (and he’d be very surprised if the CIA hadn’t left their sticky fingerprints all over this catastrophe) had decided to spend their time and resources shoring up the bottle itself-lining the walls with thicker and thicker glass from the inside, putting ever-greater pressure on the system from within, forcing it to remain unnaturally static. If not the Master, someone else would’ve blundered into a similar mistake-that is if the machinery of it didn’t manage to overload and destroy itself first. The Doctor was only surprised that a people as clever as the Logopolitans had managed to get involved in such a ridiculous scheme.
All things considered, they’d come out of it rather better than he could have expected. The calcified skin of the universe had crunched inward, eradicating perhaps as much as a third of all available space in that first hard snap. Luckily the furthest regions of regular space were largely uninhabited-with the space between worlds growing vaster the further one traveled from galactic centre, naturally. It seemed callous to say, what with the Traken Union snuffed out of existence, but dangerous though the situation still was, this was almost the best possible scenario. Sheer serendipity was all that had prevented this from being a total, absolute destruction.
The Doctor knew that very soon he himself wouldn’t be so lucky. This body, it seemed, had grown old. It was tired--he was tired. And, at least in this form, he was fresh out of miraculous escapes.
Despite the Master’s having been the catalyst for the entire farrago, the Doctor was grateful to have him here. He could hardly have come up with an identical, equally workable plan in the time on his own--the Master was the mechanic, after all. The Doctor preferred to think his own talents expressed themselves in more esoteric ways.
“Pass me that spanner, would you?” the Master asked, obviously failing to appreciate the Doctor’s uniquely-expressed talents. The Doctor felt a sudden pang of sympathy for dear old, brilliant Liz.
“What for?” the Doctor asked, sulkily handing the Master the device. “There’s nothing to do now but to wait for the code to compile.”
They’d made their program, and would have to let it compile for some hours before they could try the proof of the pudding. There was no other avenue of thought to pursue, no way to speed the process with this antediluvian equipment. They’d worked furiously into the early hours of the morning, so much was at stake, and yet all they could do now was wait.
Even the seemingly inexhaustible Australian girl, Tegan, had seen that, and had made herself a make-shift bed in the break room. She was huddled on shoved-together chairs under the lab technician’s long coat. Very practical, that girl-she had it in her to be a fine co-coordinator. Which was a very useful quality, he really must try and remember that about her. He had too often overlooked the skills of his companions (or so Sarah Jane, Leela and Romana had all see fit to tell him). Well. In this body-he supposed he might not have that particular personality flaw for very much longer.
“No reason,” the Master admitted, passing the wrench from one hand to the other with a smirk. “I just wanted to see if you would do it. You make a very good lab assistant, you know.”
“You-why you-” the Doctor lunged towards the Master, grabbing his lapel, and abruptly stopped, laughing. “That’s very good, you know, I didn’t suspect a thing.”
“Excellent, Doctor,” the Master grinned, and his eyes (blue this time), which had widened at the Doctor’s unexpected aggression, relaxed into crinkled slits. “I’m told truly great men are above suspicion.”
“You’re too great to be suspected anything, or I’m too great to harbor any suspicions?” The Doctor raised an eyebrow.
“Precisely.”
“That’s nearly recursion, you know.” The Doctor dropped his hand and leaned back against the wall. “If you were great, I’d have no reason not to be great myself.”
The Master’s smile illuminated those startlingly pale eyes-surely Tremas’s had been darker.
That was another thing he couldn’t find it in himself to properly hold against the Master. Tremas had had perhaps ten, maybe fifteen years of life left to live, while, making use of his body, the Master could survive him by centuries. Tremas would have spent the remainder of his days on a planet that had just lost its political centre. Without the force that kept the Empire in order, the means to restore it, or even much of a public memory of the republican traditions prior to the installation of the Keepers, Traken hadn’t had a pleasant near-future ahead of it. Additionally, the man’s spouse had just died, and the Doctor knew first-hand how seriously the Master took such losses. The choice to seize and consume him had been as desperate as a wolf attacking a man during a bad winter, and while not excusable, if you thought like the Master, it had a certain grim logic to it.
And then the planet had been lost in a great catastrophe hours later. If the Master hadn’t stolen the man’s body, it would have been reduced to ash-along with that of his young daughter. An act of cruelty to a man condemned remained an act of cruelty. But the end result was much the same, and the Doctor felt too old and too resigned to passionately condemn the Master’s self-preservation.
After all, had he wanted the Master dead? Like that? A shell of himself, veined with cracks? True, when the Master had attacked the President the Doctor had been appalled, disgusted, had pitied his former lover and wished him death-anything was preferable to living like that, anything was less a violation of his body and the man he’d been.
But in the moment, if he’d known that Tremas’s life was forfeit and that another man had an opportunity to live again, to properly live, after years of hellish confinement-the Doctor didn’t know that he wouldn’t have sided with the man with a chance.
That the man in question was the Master did rather complicate matters. For one thing, he’d probably learnt nothing during his confinement about the value of others’ freedom, and would use his newfound strength to needlessly complicate the universe with his sordid little schemes. For another, he was brilliant, vital, and the Doctor had once loved him very deeply. He felt for him still, with an ache older, sourer, and stronger than anything he felt for the recently departed Romana. It had been difficult to see him so reduced, and difficult to imagine dying and being reborn in a world without him.
Which was perhaps why laid a hand on the Master’s arm.
“Come on, we’ve spent long enough hunched down here.”
The Master nodded and stood with him, weaving out from behind the terminal bank and walking down the hall, past the open door of the room where Tegan slept. The Doctor spared her a short glance, long enough to access the movement at the corner of her eyes. The jerks indicated REM IV stage sleep in a human-they had hours before she’d wake. Good.
The Master entered his own TARDIS, seeming confident that the Doctor would follow him.
“Do you really envy me it?” he asked with a smile, flicking the door lock with something like fondness. No, with fondness, the article and not any imitation thereof. The Doctor refused to let his distaste for the Master’s choices cloud his thinking. Wanting the Master to have no good qualities left, so that everything might be easier, didn’t make it so. The Master was prone to fondness. He was capable of true, immense affection for the things he considered his.
“Your TARDIS? Of course I do. Naturally I wouldn’t give mine up for a type infinity, but yours is lovely. Given, of course, that it could never hope to measure up to my old girl.” The Doctor gave the Master a mad grin.
“Sentimentalist,” the Master scoffed.
“Sensibly sensible,” the Doctor corrected, crossing to him, not touching him, fiddling with a switch he didn’t recognize.
The Master placed his hand on the Doctor’s. “Stop that, unless you want to vaporize the complex, and our work along with it.” He didn’t move his hand.
“Apologies,” the Doctor murmured huskily. He didn’t mean it.
He didn’t move when the Master kissed him. He sighed into the Master’s mouth as he pressed his luck, sliding his tongue against the Doctor’s with the repressed energy of a man who hadn’t known physical pleasures for decades-who hadn’t known them with the man he loved for centuries.
“We may die,” the Master said, explaining himself when he didn’t need to, pressing the Doctor when he’d already surrendered. “We should take this chance,”-he meant ‘you,’ as if he needed the persuasion-“it could be our last. This may fail, we might never-”
The Doctor spoke for himself, unequivocally. “It is, and it won’t. But I’m dying regardless.”
The Master gave him a troubled look, and spoke more sharply than he intended to. “What do you mean?”
“The Watcher paid me a visit.”
“There’s no such entity,” the Master said automatically, because they’d learned as much in school, and because he wanted desperately to believe it now.
The Doctor understood, and didn’t bother arguing the point. He’d seen what he’d seen, and he felt almost a sense of relief.
“It’s not forever,” he said almost comfortingly. It was ironic that he should have to be reassuring in the face of his own death, but the way the wild, panicked intensity melted away slightly from the Master’s expression somehow soothed him too. “I’m buying your argument, by the way. You were very convincing.”
The Doctor noted with amusement the way the Master’s hand drifted sneakily up to his hair, toying with a springy curl. He’d obviously been a bit fascinated them even before, when he’d been bluffing at seizing the Doctor’s body for less agreeable purposes.
“Not forever,” the Master repeated, conceded, recited once more, like sealing a spell. It was as if a return to the world of the living would mean nothing to him if, cruelly, it was accompanied by the Doctor’s departure from it. The Doctor was frankly impressed. Lazy affection born of habit was one thing, and affection maintained in defiance of time and obstacles another entirely. Depth of feeling was something to be respected.
Profound feelings were something he hadn’t had to worry about for some time. He’d been so hurt the last time around, but in this incarnation he’d had too few sentiments to bruise. The drum-like hollowness in his chest had worn at him. Now, aware of the nearness of death this body--so much less vulnerable than his last, less prone to attachments, to picking up lasting obligations and binding loyalties--had finally acquired a millstone around its neck. He’d gone too far, this regeneration. If he over-balanced again, this next time, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Better a feast than a famine.
The Master kissed him solidly, undeniably tenderly, shoved him back against the wall with a hand behind his head, so he hardly felt the impact. He slid down the Doctor’s body, adroitly working at the buttons of his trousers. He freed and sucked the Doctor off with a lovely mixture of reverence and greed, seeming to need this as much as if he were the one being pleasured.
After so long an abstinence, the restraint was difficult to believe. The Doctor could see the hard bulge of the Master’s cock against his thigh, and it was almost better than the deft plunge of the Master’s head, which took the Doctor’s cock fully into his throat. The Doctor groaned, and the Master murmured appreciatively around him. The Doctor mussed his hair, fisting his large hand in it and using that hold to insistently guide him. The Master swallowed hard.
The Doctor felt like making a teasing comment about having missed working together, like laughing, like whimpering, like babbling embarrassing expressions of gratitude, like fucking the Master’s throat. He felt--the Master had always elicited strong, visceral responses in him. The Master counted on it, and treated the Doctor’s attention as though it were his birthright.
The Master licked at his mind, and the Doctor, who’d assumed this new body came with certain limitations, rasped “Oh you clever man.” The Master fumbled at his gloves, and, tossing them aside, dug bare nails into the Doctor’s ass, his warm fingertips pressing into the skin. He brushed his tongue against the head and swept down, insinuated himself in the periphery of the Doctor’s thoughts and slammed in, took and wanted more. More than the Doctor, than this Doctor, could give him-he had little time, he drew on limited resources.
Still, the Doctor thought, dazed, it was something to die well-loved, wasn’t it.
The Master slipped away from the Doctor in his moment of distraction, and the Doctor gawped at him in indignant protest, as affronted by this insult as a queue-jumped commuter.
“Excuse me, I was rather enjoying that!”
“Obviously,” the Master smirked. “But as you were so fond of telling me in your last regeneration,” he switched to a merciless, uncanny parody of the last Doctor’s accent, slight sibilant s and all, “there’s a time and a place for this sort of silliness.”
“I think the time is now,” the Doctor pressed. “If ever there was one.”
“Oh, I agree with you. For once. I contend, however, that the place is my bedroom. This way.”
Awkwardly, the Doctor gathered his trousers. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how difficult it is to walk in this state?”
Without missing a beat or turning around, the Master snapped, “I believe we were just discussing your last regeneration’s charming habit of blustering off whenever things became interesting.”
The Doctor trailed after him, scarf sweeping the floor behind him like a train. “Are you punishing me for something I did half a century ago?”
The Master reached a door, keying in an entry code-paranoid even within his own home. “Why not? You are, and it’s been considerably more than half a century.” He said it quietly, walking into the bedroom and shucking his jacket, tossing it neatly onto a chair at a desk beside a large, silver wooden bed.
“You don’t typically take your cues from me, Master.” The Doctor removed his own coat and dropped it directly on the floor. It pooled at his feet. The Master took this in, sighed as if gathering strength, and chose to ignore the petty insult. “And you know very well you’ve compounded your offenses since then,” the Doctor continued, not willing to bend on this point.
“If the reverse were true, and you simply took cues from me, things might be much simpler, for both of us. And you speak,” the Master took a step closer to him, hissing through his teeth, “as if you might have forgiven me.”
“Once I would have,” the Doctor said quietly, watching the Master’s eyes flare wide at that admission. “Once you were foolish and young, and made a grave error of judgment, or several. And so was I, though with less devastating consequences. Now you seem determined to prove me wrong, no matter the cost. Every time I think you’ve reached a new, unforgivable low-that you’ve discovered the absolute rock-bottom-you somehow find a shovel and dig that extra foot deeper. I don’t forgive you, but then that’s never much mattered to you, has it? Oh, you want the consequences of forgiveness, the benefits it would offer you, certainly. And those,” he stepped forward, pressing into the Master, looking down at his expression, “are on offer.”
“For one night only,” the Master said, half mocking and half earnestly bitter.
“Roll up,” the Doctor snapped back.
“For the greatest show on earth?” A smirk quirked at the edge of the Master’s lip.
“Well, I might not go that far, no. But I do try.” The Doctor gave a weary grin and kissed him, hard.
He pressed the Master down to the neatly-made bed, which clearly hadn’t been slept on it years-probably in his previous, more painful condition he’d opted for something less abrasive even than these ridiculously soft sheets. The Master gripped the Doctor’s scarf, pulling him down with it.
“I hope you’re not thinking of tying me up with that,” the Doctor broke off to comment. “It’s just awfully obvious, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” the Master unwound the scarf from the Doctor’s neck and tossed it across the room. Perhaps he didn’t like it-the Doctor made a note of that. “I’d hate to be so predictable.”
“Naturally! You don’t fool me for a moment, you know.”
“No?”
“Oh no,” the Doctor said, propping himself up on his hands and elbows above the Master. “All that business in the console room, leaving it half-finished-not your style at all. You don’t think you’re going to last very long-perfectly understandable, in a brand new body, and after such a period of enforced abstinence, it’s only to be expected. You thought you’d soften me up a bit first, even the odds.”
“You’re so sharp it’s a wonder you don’t cut yourself.”
“I do, shaving, frequently-very clumsy of me, I know. But really Master, I don’t mind a bit-I suppose you’d like to do the taking, rather than the other way around? We are on something of a tight schedule.”
The Master swallowed visibly. “I wouldn’t object to it.” With a sudden spring of movement he flipped the Doctor over on his back and was at his now-bared neck, hungrily sucking at the sensitive flesh normally covered by clothing, licking the juddering thread of the Doctor’s pulse, just under the skin.
The Doctor’s grin took on a knowing edge. “No, I thought you might not.”
The Master fucked him with feverish desperation, his hands trembling where they clutched at the Doctor’s arms, making sounds that were something like the Doctor’s name, over and again, that were almost whimpers, high and needy keens. The Doctor’s hands clutched at his back, his shoulders, soothing and steadying him even as his eyes rolled back under the ferocity of the Master’s attentions. Seeming determined not to succumb first, not to be so pathetic as to reach his own quick pleasure and then be unable to attend to him, the Master wrung an orgasm out of the Doctor with an unsteady hand. The Doctor came with a low shout, releasing the Master, freeing him to follow and collapse, boneless, on top of the Doctor.
The embrace was comfortable-the Master was smaller, his head rode the rise and fall of the Doctor’s chest easily, an old boat on a familiar sea.
The Master traced slow patterns on the Doctor’s chest, and while the Doctor thought of an irritating song he’d heard once on Mars, what he still had to do when the code finished compiling, a chess game he’d played with K9, and nothing at all, the Master pieced him together.
“You don’t love me, this time. Do you?”
The Doctor was quiet for a moment, wondering how the Master knew these things, and if he could or should try and deny it. He’d always been able to tell when the Doctor had been lying about that.
“I care more for you than I do anyone, if that sort of thing is important to you.”
The Master made a dismissive motion with his hand, because it was, the Doctor knew it was. He refrained from further comment, forcing the Doctor to fill the silence.
“It isn’t you. It’s me.”
The Master gave a derisive bark of laughter, and the Doctor pushed on. “It’s the way I am, this time around. I’m sorry. I’m not very well-suited to-this sort of thing.” He thought of the girl he could have been in love with, if he’d bothered to notice her before she left. He thought of everything his previous self would have made of this moment, everything he’d felt when the Master shot him, when Liz and Jo left him, when Yates betrayed him, the last time he’d walked knowingly into death. He really detested knowing. But it was a light detestation, and the recollections came like facts-unable to catch at him, to reopen sealed wounds.
“I suppose next time will be different.” He patted the Master, almost ironically. “You know they say a change is as good as a rest.”
The Master was tense. He obviously wasn’t of a humor to joke about the Doctor’s impending demise.
“Cheer up,” the Doctor swung his legs over the side of the bed, standing. “There’s nothing that can be done about it. Besides, what if next time, I’m as mad for you as I was last time? Maybe moreso, eh? Three out of four is very good odds, you know, and I feel I should be something of an exemption.”
The Master snorted. “Supposing you were-you’d still refuse to do anything about it.”
“Of course I will, if the universe isn’t about to collapse into a singularity, if I’m not ludicrously tired, and if I have any sense. But even if I don’t-surely it’s the thought that counts. Action without sentiment, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to agree with you.”
The Master didn’t seem greatly appeased.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said. As much as he could, he meant it.
“So am I,” the Master murmured, shifting away from him and flicking at the bed linen, no doubt thinking about cleaning himself up.
Author: x_los
Rating: NC-17
Pairing/Characters: Four/Ainley!Master
Summary: from the Best Enemies Kink Meme, "Four/Ainley - sex at Logopolis, in which they genuinely connect and the Doctor thinks the Master isn't so bad after all..." Now with more DOOM. Also a Prelude to Scarf Destruction.
Beta: aralias, who dealt with my whinging over tone and how I didn't know how it ended, waaah, and beta'd it.
For once in their lives the Doctor didn’t actually blame the Master for their current sticky situation. Well, he did, somewhat, but only because blaming the Master for things had become something of a habit with him. After all, he was usually perfectly right to do so.
The trouble with Logopolis was its opacity. Tying central causality to a specific point in order to suspend entropy was such a ludicrously bad idea it was no wonder the Master had thought it preposterous. A ridiculous scheme-the entire idea was fundamentally scientifically unsound. If the universe was a closed system, a ship in a bottle (and he had his doubts about that), all it needed was to be blown open-and he could have managed that with a K9 unit, a handy sun about to go nova, and a copy of Three Men In A Boat (not for the plan, just because he was bound to get bored and to want a bit of reading material. An apple wouldn’t go amiss, either).
Instead someone (and he’d be very surprised if the CIA hadn’t left their sticky fingerprints all over this catastrophe) had decided to spend their time and resources shoring up the bottle itself-lining the walls with thicker and thicker glass from the inside, putting ever-greater pressure on the system from within, forcing it to remain unnaturally static. If not the Master, someone else would’ve blundered into a similar mistake-that is if the machinery of it didn’t manage to overload and destroy itself first. The Doctor was only surprised that a people as clever as the Logopolitans had managed to get involved in such a ridiculous scheme.
All things considered, they’d come out of it rather better than he could have expected. The calcified skin of the universe had crunched inward, eradicating perhaps as much as a third of all available space in that first hard snap. Luckily the furthest regions of regular space were largely uninhabited-with the space between worlds growing vaster the further one traveled from galactic centre, naturally. It seemed callous to say, what with the Traken Union snuffed out of existence, but dangerous though the situation still was, this was almost the best possible scenario. Sheer serendipity was all that had prevented this from being a total, absolute destruction.
The Doctor knew that very soon he himself wouldn’t be so lucky. This body, it seemed, had grown old. It was tired--he was tired. And, at least in this form, he was fresh out of miraculous escapes.
Despite the Master’s having been the catalyst for the entire farrago, the Doctor was grateful to have him here. He could hardly have come up with an identical, equally workable plan in the time on his own--the Master was the mechanic, after all. The Doctor preferred to think his own talents expressed themselves in more esoteric ways.
“Pass me that spanner, would you?” the Master asked, obviously failing to appreciate the Doctor’s uniquely-expressed talents. The Doctor felt a sudden pang of sympathy for dear old, brilliant Liz.
“What for?” the Doctor asked, sulkily handing the Master the device. “There’s nothing to do now but to wait for the code to compile.”
They’d made their program, and would have to let it compile for some hours before they could try the proof of the pudding. There was no other avenue of thought to pursue, no way to speed the process with this antediluvian equipment. They’d worked furiously into the early hours of the morning, so much was at stake, and yet all they could do now was wait.
Even the seemingly inexhaustible Australian girl, Tegan, had seen that, and had made herself a make-shift bed in the break room. She was huddled on shoved-together chairs under the lab technician’s long coat. Very practical, that girl-she had it in her to be a fine co-coordinator. Which was a very useful quality, he really must try and remember that about her. He had too often overlooked the skills of his companions (or so Sarah Jane, Leela and Romana had all see fit to tell him). Well. In this body-he supposed he might not have that particular personality flaw for very much longer.
“No reason,” the Master admitted, passing the wrench from one hand to the other with a smirk. “I just wanted to see if you would do it. You make a very good lab assistant, you know.”
“You-why you-” the Doctor lunged towards the Master, grabbing his lapel, and abruptly stopped, laughing. “That’s very good, you know, I didn’t suspect a thing.”
“Excellent, Doctor,” the Master grinned, and his eyes (blue this time), which had widened at the Doctor’s unexpected aggression, relaxed into crinkled slits. “I’m told truly great men are above suspicion.”
“You’re too great to be suspected anything, or I’m too great to harbor any suspicions?” The Doctor raised an eyebrow.
“Precisely.”
“That’s nearly recursion, you know.” The Doctor dropped his hand and leaned back against the wall. “If you were great, I’d have no reason not to be great myself.”
The Master’s smile illuminated those startlingly pale eyes-surely Tremas’s had been darker.
That was another thing he couldn’t find it in himself to properly hold against the Master. Tremas had had perhaps ten, maybe fifteen years of life left to live, while, making use of his body, the Master could survive him by centuries. Tremas would have spent the remainder of his days on a planet that had just lost its political centre. Without the force that kept the Empire in order, the means to restore it, or even much of a public memory of the republican traditions prior to the installation of the Keepers, Traken hadn’t had a pleasant near-future ahead of it. Additionally, the man’s spouse had just died, and the Doctor knew first-hand how seriously the Master took such losses. The choice to seize and consume him had been as desperate as a wolf attacking a man during a bad winter, and while not excusable, if you thought like the Master, it had a certain grim logic to it.
And then the planet had been lost in a great catastrophe hours later. If the Master hadn’t stolen the man’s body, it would have been reduced to ash-along with that of his young daughter. An act of cruelty to a man condemned remained an act of cruelty. But the end result was much the same, and the Doctor felt too old and too resigned to passionately condemn the Master’s self-preservation.
After all, had he wanted the Master dead? Like that? A shell of himself, veined with cracks? True, when the Master had attacked the President the Doctor had been appalled, disgusted, had pitied his former lover and wished him death-anything was preferable to living like that, anything was less a violation of his body and the man he’d been.
But in the moment, if he’d known that Tremas’s life was forfeit and that another man had an opportunity to live again, to properly live, after years of hellish confinement-the Doctor didn’t know that he wouldn’t have sided with the man with a chance.
That the man in question was the Master did rather complicate matters. For one thing, he’d probably learnt nothing during his confinement about the value of others’ freedom, and would use his newfound strength to needlessly complicate the universe with his sordid little schemes. For another, he was brilliant, vital, and the Doctor had once loved him very deeply. He felt for him still, with an ache older, sourer, and stronger than anything he felt for the recently departed Romana. It had been difficult to see him so reduced, and difficult to imagine dying and being reborn in a world without him.
Which was perhaps why laid a hand on the Master’s arm.
“Come on, we’ve spent long enough hunched down here.”
The Master nodded and stood with him, weaving out from behind the terminal bank and walking down the hall, past the open door of the room where Tegan slept. The Doctor spared her a short glance, long enough to access the movement at the corner of her eyes. The jerks indicated REM IV stage sleep in a human-they had hours before she’d wake. Good.
The Master entered his own TARDIS, seeming confident that the Doctor would follow him.
“Do you really envy me it?” he asked with a smile, flicking the door lock with something like fondness. No, with fondness, the article and not any imitation thereof. The Doctor refused to let his distaste for the Master’s choices cloud his thinking. Wanting the Master to have no good qualities left, so that everything might be easier, didn’t make it so. The Master was prone to fondness. He was capable of true, immense affection for the things he considered his.
“Your TARDIS? Of course I do. Naturally I wouldn’t give mine up for a type infinity, but yours is lovely. Given, of course, that it could never hope to measure up to my old girl.” The Doctor gave the Master a mad grin.
“Sentimentalist,” the Master scoffed.
“Sensibly sensible,” the Doctor corrected, crossing to him, not touching him, fiddling with a switch he didn’t recognize.
The Master placed his hand on the Doctor’s. “Stop that, unless you want to vaporize the complex, and our work along with it.” He didn’t move his hand.
“Apologies,” the Doctor murmured huskily. He didn’t mean it.
He didn’t move when the Master kissed him. He sighed into the Master’s mouth as he pressed his luck, sliding his tongue against the Doctor’s with the repressed energy of a man who hadn’t known physical pleasures for decades-who hadn’t known them with the man he loved for centuries.
“We may die,” the Master said, explaining himself when he didn’t need to, pressing the Doctor when he’d already surrendered. “We should take this chance,”-he meant ‘you,’ as if he needed the persuasion-“it could be our last. This may fail, we might never-”
The Doctor spoke for himself, unequivocally. “It is, and it won’t. But I’m dying regardless.”
The Master gave him a troubled look, and spoke more sharply than he intended to. “What do you mean?”
“The Watcher paid me a visit.”
“There’s no such entity,” the Master said automatically, because they’d learned as much in school, and because he wanted desperately to believe it now.
The Doctor understood, and didn’t bother arguing the point. He’d seen what he’d seen, and he felt almost a sense of relief.
“It’s not forever,” he said almost comfortingly. It was ironic that he should have to be reassuring in the face of his own death, but the way the wild, panicked intensity melted away slightly from the Master’s expression somehow soothed him too. “I’m buying your argument, by the way. You were very convincing.”
The Doctor noted with amusement the way the Master’s hand drifted sneakily up to his hair, toying with a springy curl. He’d obviously been a bit fascinated them even before, when he’d been bluffing at seizing the Doctor’s body for less agreeable purposes.
“Not forever,” the Master repeated, conceded, recited once more, like sealing a spell. It was as if a return to the world of the living would mean nothing to him if, cruelly, it was accompanied by the Doctor’s departure from it. The Doctor was frankly impressed. Lazy affection born of habit was one thing, and affection maintained in defiance of time and obstacles another entirely. Depth of feeling was something to be respected.
Profound feelings were something he hadn’t had to worry about for some time. He’d been so hurt the last time around, but in this incarnation he’d had too few sentiments to bruise. The drum-like hollowness in his chest had worn at him. Now, aware of the nearness of death this body--so much less vulnerable than his last, less prone to attachments, to picking up lasting obligations and binding loyalties--had finally acquired a millstone around its neck. He’d gone too far, this regeneration. If he over-balanced again, this next time, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Better a feast than a famine.
The Master kissed him solidly, undeniably tenderly, shoved him back against the wall with a hand behind his head, so he hardly felt the impact. He slid down the Doctor’s body, adroitly working at the buttons of his trousers. He freed and sucked the Doctor off with a lovely mixture of reverence and greed, seeming to need this as much as if he were the one being pleasured.
After so long an abstinence, the restraint was difficult to believe. The Doctor could see the hard bulge of the Master’s cock against his thigh, and it was almost better than the deft plunge of the Master’s head, which took the Doctor’s cock fully into his throat. The Doctor groaned, and the Master murmured appreciatively around him. The Doctor mussed his hair, fisting his large hand in it and using that hold to insistently guide him. The Master swallowed hard.
The Doctor felt like making a teasing comment about having missed working together, like laughing, like whimpering, like babbling embarrassing expressions of gratitude, like fucking the Master’s throat. He felt--the Master had always elicited strong, visceral responses in him. The Master counted on it, and treated the Doctor’s attention as though it were his birthright.
The Master licked at his mind, and the Doctor, who’d assumed this new body came with certain limitations, rasped “Oh you clever man.” The Master fumbled at his gloves, and, tossing them aside, dug bare nails into the Doctor’s ass, his warm fingertips pressing into the skin. He brushed his tongue against the head and swept down, insinuated himself in the periphery of the Doctor’s thoughts and slammed in, took and wanted more. More than the Doctor, than this Doctor, could give him-he had little time, he drew on limited resources.
Still, the Doctor thought, dazed, it was something to die well-loved, wasn’t it.
The Master slipped away from the Doctor in his moment of distraction, and the Doctor gawped at him in indignant protest, as affronted by this insult as a queue-jumped commuter.
“Excuse me, I was rather enjoying that!”
“Obviously,” the Master smirked. “But as you were so fond of telling me in your last regeneration,” he switched to a merciless, uncanny parody of the last Doctor’s accent, slight sibilant s and all, “there’s a time and a place for this sort of silliness.”
“I think the time is now,” the Doctor pressed. “If ever there was one.”
“Oh, I agree with you. For once. I contend, however, that the place is my bedroom. This way.”
Awkwardly, the Doctor gathered his trousers. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how difficult it is to walk in this state?”
Without missing a beat or turning around, the Master snapped, “I believe we were just discussing your last regeneration’s charming habit of blustering off whenever things became interesting.”
The Doctor trailed after him, scarf sweeping the floor behind him like a train. “Are you punishing me for something I did half a century ago?”
The Master reached a door, keying in an entry code-paranoid even within his own home. “Why not? You are, and it’s been considerably more than half a century.” He said it quietly, walking into the bedroom and shucking his jacket, tossing it neatly onto a chair at a desk beside a large, silver wooden bed.
“You don’t typically take your cues from me, Master.” The Doctor removed his own coat and dropped it directly on the floor. It pooled at his feet. The Master took this in, sighed as if gathering strength, and chose to ignore the petty insult. “And you know very well you’ve compounded your offenses since then,” the Doctor continued, not willing to bend on this point.
“If the reverse were true, and you simply took cues from me, things might be much simpler, for both of us. And you speak,” the Master took a step closer to him, hissing through his teeth, “as if you might have forgiven me.”
“Once I would have,” the Doctor said quietly, watching the Master’s eyes flare wide at that admission. “Once you were foolish and young, and made a grave error of judgment, or several. And so was I, though with less devastating consequences. Now you seem determined to prove me wrong, no matter the cost. Every time I think you’ve reached a new, unforgivable low-that you’ve discovered the absolute rock-bottom-you somehow find a shovel and dig that extra foot deeper. I don’t forgive you, but then that’s never much mattered to you, has it? Oh, you want the consequences of forgiveness, the benefits it would offer you, certainly. And those,” he stepped forward, pressing into the Master, looking down at his expression, “are on offer.”
“For one night only,” the Master said, half mocking and half earnestly bitter.
“Roll up,” the Doctor snapped back.
“For the greatest show on earth?” A smirk quirked at the edge of the Master’s lip.
“Well, I might not go that far, no. But I do try.” The Doctor gave a weary grin and kissed him, hard.
He pressed the Master down to the neatly-made bed, which clearly hadn’t been slept on it years-probably in his previous, more painful condition he’d opted for something less abrasive even than these ridiculously soft sheets. The Master gripped the Doctor’s scarf, pulling him down with it.
“I hope you’re not thinking of tying me up with that,” the Doctor broke off to comment. “It’s just awfully obvious, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” the Master unwound the scarf from the Doctor’s neck and tossed it across the room. Perhaps he didn’t like it-the Doctor made a note of that. “I’d hate to be so predictable.”
“Naturally! You don’t fool me for a moment, you know.”
“No?”
“Oh no,” the Doctor said, propping himself up on his hands and elbows above the Master. “All that business in the console room, leaving it half-finished-not your style at all. You don’t think you’re going to last very long-perfectly understandable, in a brand new body, and after such a period of enforced abstinence, it’s only to be expected. You thought you’d soften me up a bit first, even the odds.”
“You’re so sharp it’s a wonder you don’t cut yourself.”
“I do, shaving, frequently-very clumsy of me, I know. But really Master, I don’t mind a bit-I suppose you’d like to do the taking, rather than the other way around? We are on something of a tight schedule.”
The Master swallowed visibly. “I wouldn’t object to it.” With a sudden spring of movement he flipped the Doctor over on his back and was at his now-bared neck, hungrily sucking at the sensitive flesh normally covered by clothing, licking the juddering thread of the Doctor’s pulse, just under the skin.
The Doctor’s grin took on a knowing edge. “No, I thought you might not.”
The Master fucked him with feverish desperation, his hands trembling where they clutched at the Doctor’s arms, making sounds that were something like the Doctor’s name, over and again, that were almost whimpers, high and needy keens. The Doctor’s hands clutched at his back, his shoulders, soothing and steadying him even as his eyes rolled back under the ferocity of the Master’s attentions. Seeming determined not to succumb first, not to be so pathetic as to reach his own quick pleasure and then be unable to attend to him, the Master wrung an orgasm out of the Doctor with an unsteady hand. The Doctor came with a low shout, releasing the Master, freeing him to follow and collapse, boneless, on top of the Doctor.
The embrace was comfortable-the Master was smaller, his head rode the rise and fall of the Doctor’s chest easily, an old boat on a familiar sea.
The Master traced slow patterns on the Doctor’s chest, and while the Doctor thought of an irritating song he’d heard once on Mars, what he still had to do when the code finished compiling, a chess game he’d played with K9, and nothing at all, the Master pieced him together.
“You don’t love me, this time. Do you?”
The Doctor was quiet for a moment, wondering how the Master knew these things, and if he could or should try and deny it. He’d always been able to tell when the Doctor had been lying about that.
“I care more for you than I do anyone, if that sort of thing is important to you.”
The Master made a dismissive motion with his hand, because it was, the Doctor knew it was. He refrained from further comment, forcing the Doctor to fill the silence.
“It isn’t you. It’s me.”
The Master gave a derisive bark of laughter, and the Doctor pushed on. “It’s the way I am, this time around. I’m sorry. I’m not very well-suited to-this sort of thing.” He thought of the girl he could have been in love with, if he’d bothered to notice her before she left. He thought of everything his previous self would have made of this moment, everything he’d felt when the Master shot him, when Liz and Jo left him, when Yates betrayed him, the last time he’d walked knowingly into death. He really detested knowing. But it was a light detestation, and the recollections came like facts-unable to catch at him, to reopen sealed wounds.
“I suppose next time will be different.” He patted the Master, almost ironically. “You know they say a change is as good as a rest.”
The Master was tense. He obviously wasn’t of a humor to joke about the Doctor’s impending demise.
“Cheer up,” the Doctor swung his legs over the side of the bed, standing. “There’s nothing that can be done about it. Besides, what if next time, I’m as mad for you as I was last time? Maybe moreso, eh? Three out of four is very good odds, you know, and I feel I should be something of an exemption.”
The Master snorted. “Supposing you were-you’d still refuse to do anything about it.”
“Of course I will, if the universe isn’t about to collapse into a singularity, if I’m not ludicrously tired, and if I have any sense. But even if I don’t-surely it’s the thought that counts. Action without sentiment, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to agree with you.”
The Master didn’t seem greatly appeased.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said. As much as he could, he meant it.
“So am I,” the Master murmured, shifting away from him and flicking at the bed linen, no doubt thinking about cleaning himself up.