5x13: Time Lock
And here we are at the end. Final notes to follow at some point, you know the drill. <3
5x13: Time Lock
(The Vortex)
He wakes slowly, groggy and aching. His shoulder aches and his head throbs, but the TARDIS hums around him, his TARDIS, and his fingers twitch. He makes a soft inarticulate noise. At once hands are helping him sit up and a hot cup of tea is pressed into his palms. He drinks it in scalding gulps and manages to crack his eyelids open.
The Doctor is in a small bedroom, the TARDIS' walls curving around him, and the Master is sitting on the coverlet, looking quite pale and very angry.
Memories begin trickling in mercilessly. "Hi," the Doctor croaks.
"You fucking idiot," the Master hisses. "What the hell did you think you were doing?" He doesn't actually give the Doctor a chance to answer, but goes on in a furious rush, "You're lucky she wouldn't listen to me. Your TARDIS. She was going mad trying to track you down, did you know that?"
"Can't live without each other," the Doctor says somewhat apologetically. Swallows.
The Master laughs, a mad little giggle, and the Doctor thinks: You thought I'd abandoned you; of all the arrogant --
"There is something nice about it, though," the Master says, having controlled his giggles, addressing this observation to the coverlet. "Getting shot. Not wanting to be rescued." Darts a glance at the Doctor. "Yes?"
"I don't know," the Doctor confesses, tipping his head back against the headboard. He swallows and looks back at the Master. "Thank you."
The Master sneers. "It was your TARDIS, not me."
"You're clever," the Doctor says quietly. "You're very clever. You've made her do things against her nature before." He struggles a bit more upright, which doesn't hurt; he's still stiff, but otherwise fine. Reaches out and curls a hand around the Master's.
For a long moment the Master's silent; twists his wrist in the Doctor's grip until their hands are clasped together, and both of them shiver a little. The Master leans forward and kisses him softly, pulls away before the Doctor can properly reciprocate. A faint smile darts across the Master's face. "You're going to tell me a story," he says.
The Doctor blinks. "What?"
The Master settles back, looking pleased with himself. "You're going to tell me how you made Gallifrey burn."
The Doctor starts to recoil in horror, but the Master has already squeezed their clasped hands, sent through a psychic pulse of calm. The Doctor blinks, in surprise more than anything else; he hadn't been aware the Master had any calm to send. He takes a shaky breath.
"Destroyed the Eye of Harmony," he says. "Took a time-freeze grenade and threw it in."
"A time-freeze grenade in the nucleus of a black hole." The Master's eyebrows go up. "Surprisingly simple." He grins. "The state you must have been in!" The Doctor tries to tug his hand away and the Master subsides, becomes serious. "That would have given you plenty of time to run away, too." He props his chin in his free hand and stares thoughtfully at the Doctor. "It's all very elaborate."
"What is?" the Doctor asks dully.
"This whole business with Donna Noble." The Master frowns. "I took a good look at Arcadia after I picked you up. Very impressive timelines, I've got to admit. But do you really think the entire point of the thing was for you to go forward in order to fetch people to save you in the past? It has to be more than that."
"No," the Doctor says. Slumps down. "I found the fixed point. All that's left to do now is seal up the time lock."
The Master snorts. "You're really just going to ..." He trails off, an arrested look on his face. "Seal the ..." He springs to his feet. "Up. Get up. Now."
There doesn't seem to be much alternative, so the Doctor does. Barefoot, in rumpled trousers and t-shirt, he follows the Master along a corridor, through the greenhouse, past an orphaned umbrella stand, down a staircase, and the back way into the game vault. The remnants of their last chess game, string and overturned game boards, litter the floor. The Master bounds across the room to erase their complicated score from the whiteboard, then whirls on the Doctor.
"For my king, Skaro," he says without preamble. "For my queen, the Dalek Emperor. You'll have Gallifrey and yourself."
The Doctor stares at him. "You want to play a game."
"Actually," the Master says, writing up the new columns on which to keep score, "I want to do a staged recreation to see if there's anything we've missed. Actually I'm sure there's something you missed, you're really not as clever as all that, but --"
"All right," the Doctor snaps. "But I can't very well move a pawn first. It starts when I check Skaro."
The Master smirks. "You have plenty of pawns, Doctor," he says, and shrugs. "But it's not a proper game without conditions, is it? If you lose I get ... oh, I get to start growing my own TARDIS."
"If I win?" the Doctor asks.
The Master beams. "Oh, if you win you get your planet back."
***
Quite a few hours later, with a few breaks for tea and biscuits and discussions of strategy, the Doctor is looking markedly better. The light is back in his eyes, the colour back in his cheeks; even his hair has perked up a bit. The Master feels quite pleased with this. Traveling with the Doctor, were he unresponsive, would be frankly dull and probably a bit embarrassing. But the Doctor is responding quite well, racing about the room, his mind easily keeping up with the Master's, hooking bits of string back and forth, waving the tennis racket that represents the Medusa Cascade, generally being exactly the Doctor the Master wants him to be.
Rose is the first pawn to cross the board and be queened; she demolishes the Dalek Emperor at once. The Doctor is positively gleeful as he loops the string of her timeline around the room -- Bad Wolf here and there; scribbles it on a sticky note and sticks it to the Master's forehead, laughing. The Master indulges this, and snips the Dalek Emperor's timeline, effectively cutting it off at the blast that ended the Time War.
There's a rather awkward bit when the Master runs his own timeline from the war to the end of the universe and back to the twenty-first century. (Actually his entire string is a spectacular mess, with full stops here and there, cut off at the turn of the millennium and being pulled up out of the Matrix back in Gallifrey some relative time later. He's somewhat mollified by the spectacular tangles that the Doctor's bit of string has long since become.) Martha despite being a pawn corners the Master so the Doctor can take him out, which doesn't seem entirely fair, so the Master hurriedly snips his thread -- he rather fondly thinks he'll call the scissors Lucy -- and reconnects it with Donna's. Donna has meanwhile also crossed the board and been queened. They send her off to meet Jenny after joining up their own threads.
"Found any patterns yet?" the Master asks, jotting down the latest score.
"It's a bit of a mess," the Doctor says dubiously, holding the ends of his and the Master's twisted-together threads. He seems to recognise the irony in this and smiles lopsidedly. "Right, where's Romana's thread gone?"
At the end the scoreboard reads an astonishingly even match, which means they were quite accurate; Donna's and Jenny's threads end back on Gallifrey with a hint of uncertainty, tugging faintly at the Doctor's thread from two regenerations ago. The Doctor's and the Master's threads, which the Doctor has twisted rather worryingly tight together, are still in the Doctor's hand out in the vagueness of space while the Master stalks around the room, looking for points of tension, pullings they might not yet have seen.
He comes back to the Doctor and tugs gently on their twined threads. Jenny's, Donna's, and Romana's threads all bounce a little in their direction. The Dalek threads, snipped off by the Doctor's eighth self, by Rose, by Donna and the little bit of string that is the other Doctor, stay sitting where they are.
The Doctor's eyes widen. He tugs too, harder. The Dalek threads lie still and everything connected to Gallifrey strains harder. "Did you --?" he says, and the Master nods. He wraps his hands around the thread over the Doctor's. They look at each other, and the Doctor grins, and they both tug as hard as they can.
A moment of delicate trembling, and the whole Gallifrey timeline delicately unravels itself from the surrounding threads, leaving Arcadia, leaving Skaro. The Master's thread has been snapped so many times that it makes no difference; the Doctor's thread is tied so tightly into a hundred different timelines that it holds, and by virtue of this keeps all the Gallifreyan strings steady too.
"It's entirely theoretical," the Doctor ventures.
"Believe me," the Master says, eyeing their solution, "I'm less than fond at any proof you really are the centre of the universe." He can't help a trace of smugness, though. He's the only one in the universe smart enough to always keep tabs on the Doctor; it turns out both he and the universe are listening.
"That's glorifying things a bit, don't you think?" the Doctor asks awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. "I mean, it's not me, it's just the sum of my --" He stops, apparently remembering that a Time Lord is, at the most basic level, a being defined by the sum of his actions. Swallows. "I still destroyed the Eye of Harmony."
"Mm. If you say so."
The Doctor gapes at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I've been quite curious for some time," the Master says, picking his way carefully out of the threads and going to the whiteboard, "how this old clunker managed to run at all if its source is gone."
"She's very independent," the Doctor says, as though this really is a reasonable explanation.
The Master laughs. "Seriously? All right." He turns to the whiteboard, uncaps the pen again, and begins scribbling, going on as he does so. "Assume that a time-freeze grenade, interacting with the nucleus of a black hole, causes a catastrophic reaction resulting in a nuclear explosion and therefore in the annihilation of the planet and the surrounding Dalek fleets."
"Right." The Doctor comes over. "What are you getting at?"
"Assume instead a time lock of a particular duration," the Master says. "The time-freeze grenade does not cause a nuclear reaction. Instead, it induces stasis."
The Doctor is staring at him with shining eyes. "Safe mode," he says. "Everyone who has interacted with a TARDIS -- with the Eye -- is protected inside the freeze until the time lock is broken."
"The friction of dragging a whole world through a small rift would cause a pretty catastrophic burn to anything caught outside the freeze, too," the Master adds. "There go all your Daleks -- and the Emperor, he was caught in the backwash and ended up in 200,000."
"And my timeline," the Doctor says, running back to the threads and carefully walking his hands up his own. "Gallifrey doesn't exist for nearly a decade of my personal time -- it's out of time long enough for the whole universe to adjust to it -- it would be impossible for me to sense it, or you, since you were caught up in my timestream --"
"But it will," the Master completes, beaming. "There's your fixed point, Doctor: we pull Gallifrey back out of the time lock."
The Doctor beams back at him; then it slowly fades.
"It's been ... different," he says. "No one looking over your shoulder. Time feels sharper. And I was the only one ..."
He's asking the Master to talk him out of it. He's actually asking the Master. And the Master knows he's won, finally, unequivocally, because the Doctor crying as he died was only the first point. If he brings Gallifrey back, then every moment of the Doctor's guilt and horror and loneliness, every single painful thing the Time War left him with, will belong to the Master. And all the Doctor's joy and relief will belong to him too. He'll be the Master's, finally, properly.
All of Gallifrey knowing that the Doctor and the Master together saved them will be pretty priceless, too.
"Selfish," the Master says precisely. "Tell me how you're going to live with yourself if you don't save your planet for the sake of your own martyr complex. That will involve some serious doublethink."
The Doctor winces. "I didn't mean --" he starts, and rakes a hand through his hair, and says, "Let's go test this hypothesis, then."
They go up to the console room, where the TARDIS is thrumming with excitement and welcomes the Master easily into her telepathic circuits. There is no elegant way to pull a planet through a time lock; in fact there might be no physical way. But the TARDIS is rather smugly confident of her ability to tow planets, and if anyone is mad enough to pull it off, it's the Doctor. So they run around the console together, setting the coordinates and powering up to maximum.
What they're about to do is not the psychic and scientific equivalent of stopping up a cracked leak in a dam by mixing together cement from sand and chewing gum and then slapping it over with a bit of duct tape. It's more or less the reverse. It's finding the one little crack in the dam and pulling the entire lake through in one go using a piece of string to harness the water and pulling it all with a toothpick.
Which means it's going to work.
The TARDIS finds the hole in the time lock easily enough. They'll have to time it perfectly; bring the magnetism and gravity up to maximum, throw it out through space and that one little point of the timelines bleeding into each other, throw out a lot of psychic energy after it, clinging to each other and to the TARDIS: there, the Eye of Harmony, frozen for a moment. They look at each other. "Ready?" the Master breathes, and the Doctor grins, a wildly happy grin. "No," he says. Together they pull.
Spacetime turns inside out; he's the TARDIS and all of himself and all of the Doctor. Probably all of them scream. Behind them a million million Daleks shriek and die in flames, and protesting all the way, hurtling through impossibility, Gallifrey follows her children out of the wreckage. The time lock snaps closed behind it.
Then everything is still.
Still tangled together they dash to the viewscreen. There, sitting like a glowing jewel, is Gallifrey, red and orange with clouds and continents, glittering, real. They laugh and jump and shout and kiss each other and for the first time in far too long the Master, for one small strange moment, doesn't hate Gallifrey.
They part, but only for a moment before the Doctor laughs and kisses him again. The waves of gratefulness and focus are nearly more than the Master can bear. He ends up clutching helplessly at the Doctor's shirt and basking in it.
"Let's," the Doctor says at length, drawing back, "let's go down and see if Donna and Jenny are all right."
Frankly the Master doesn't care, but he's taking too much pleasure from the Doctor's giddiness to actually be annoying about it. He stays at the viewscreen and watches the curve of the horizon grow as the Doctor flies them down.
Somewhat to his surprise the Doctor lands them in the foothills of the mountains with the Citadel shining in the distance. Wide swaths of the plain are burned to ashes, and some of the Citadel's towers are smoking, but nearly everything is still standing. The Doctor bounds out of the TARDIS and up a hill, actually leaving the Master alone with his ship. But the Master isn't going anywhere.
He sits down in the doorway and thinks about this. He tries imagining going around rescuing pathetic ungrateful people for the Doctor's entertainment, and it's just as inconceivable now as it was the last time they had this conversation, lifetimes ago. He tries imagining the Doctor being convinced to rule something, and knows the impossibility of it. Then he imagines stealing a TARDIS from the Citadel, imagines running away and setting up a scheme and waiting for the Doctor to come attempt to stop him; the idea has a certain tried-and-true appeal, with the disadvantage of being apart from the Doctor until such time as the Doctor cottons onto the latest plot. He hates this.
The Doctor comes back down the slope, holding a daisy and grinning fit to break his face. He stops in front of the Master. The Master looks up at him. "Yes?"
The Doctor twirls the stem of the daisy in between thumb and forefinger, then carefully threads it into his jacket. The Master had thrown the last torn and muddy one out. Apparently daisies are the new celery, and he can barely keep himself from rolling his eyes. Instead he gets to his feet.
"We should get inside," the Doctor says, jerking his head in the direction of the Citadel.
"Ask me," the Master says, unpremeditated.
The Doctor stares at him. The red grass rustles and murmurs to itself, and a whirl of ash picks itself up in the wind down on the plain. Comprehension seeps into the Doctor's face.
"Discover the universe with me," he says, a bit haltingly. "See it at -- at my side. Come with me."
The Master makes a show of considering this. "No rulership in the cards? Not even something nice and benevolent? No?"
"Master," the Doctor says, with such deliberate fondness.
"Right," the Master says casually, fooling neither of them. "For a while, then. I will."
(Gallifrey, Kasterborous, 5855.0 RE)
The Doctor can't remember ever feeling quite like this. Out the windows they pass he can see the brilliant orange sky, the distant shining mountains, there, a living planet. He drifts through the Citadel half in a dream; their TARDIS was surrounded by guards at once, but to all appearances it's an honour guard, which the Master seems to be appreciating, at least.
They're taken to the Council chambers, half-destroyed as they are. Romana is there, with the remnants of the Council -- and Donna, and Jenny. Jenny gives a shriek and runs right through their guard to leap nearly into the Doctor's arms and hug him tightly. It jolts him out of his half-dream and into wild awake joy. He laughs and hugs her back, very tightly, while their escorts look embarrassed, the Master looks amused, and the Council looks politely impatient. They'll have to keep looking that for some time, though, because the moment Jenny's done, Donna takes her place in hugging the Doctor.
"I was hoping you'd figure it out," she tells him, beaming; a year older, oh, his Donna. He grins back at her with love and pride, and she adds, in a whisper, "When you go I'm getting a lift back to Martha's wedding day, got that? Jenny and I borrowed some stuff from Romana and we're going to fix my TARDIS up."
He nods to let her know he's heard, and backs up a step. Time to face the music.
And it begins: the Council formally questions them, he and the Master and Donna and Jenny. They're forced to explain the timelines in great detail, and with every passing moment the Council looks graver to hear of their egregious conduct with the fabric of spacetime. The Doctor knows they have no room to criticise or punish, though; aside from the indisputable fact that between the four of them they've saved Gallifrey and probably most of spacetime, the Council's own actions in the final stages of the War were far from exemplary too.
At the end of the questioning, Romana stands. "In accordance with what we have heard," she pronounces, "we are left with no choice but to reward you. Your rather unique skills would be invaluable in assisting us in the rebuilding of Gallifrey, and of the society of the Time Lords. We request that you stay."
As she says this she locks eyes with the Doctor, and he sees that she genuinely means it, but he sees too the amused understanding in her face. She knows him.
"Yeah, well," he says, stuffing his hands in his pockets and shrugging casually, "we'll have to think about it, you know, I need to think of what's best for Jenny and it's not like Donna's a Time Lord properly, and -- if you'll just excuse us, do you mind if we go into the corridor for a moment and discuss it? Brilliant, thanks."
He edges out, Donna biting back a grin, the Master not even bothering to hide his, and Jenny looking puzzled as they follow him.
In the corridor Jenny says, "But Dad, don't you have to --?"
"Nah," Donna says. "This is what he does, see?" She wraps an arm around Jenny's shoulders. "Anyway Auntie Donna has things to show you. Singing towers and frozen waves of ice, Jenny, supernovas ten million miles wide, all sorts of beautiful things." She grins at the Doctor. "And some of us still have to newlyweds to properly congratulate and, oh, I dunno, maybe some people in Ealing to have tea with. Right, Doctor?"
"Right," the Doctor agrees, although he's probably going to hold off a while before he takes the Master to tea with anyone. Might hold off for centuries, even.
"So what are we doing, then?" Jenny asks.
"Jenny, my dear," the Master says, with an air of long-suffering, "we're running away."
They run.
Previous: 5x12: Arcadia
5x13: Time Lock
(The Vortex)
He wakes slowly, groggy and aching. His shoulder aches and his head throbs, but the TARDIS hums around him, his TARDIS, and his fingers twitch. He makes a soft inarticulate noise. At once hands are helping him sit up and a hot cup of tea is pressed into his palms. He drinks it in scalding gulps and manages to crack his eyelids open.
The Doctor is in a small bedroom, the TARDIS' walls curving around him, and the Master is sitting on the coverlet, looking quite pale and very angry.
Memories begin trickling in mercilessly. "Hi," the Doctor croaks.
"You fucking idiot," the Master hisses. "What the hell did you think you were doing?" He doesn't actually give the Doctor a chance to answer, but goes on in a furious rush, "You're lucky she wouldn't listen to me. Your TARDIS. She was going mad trying to track you down, did you know that?"
"Can't live without each other," the Doctor says somewhat apologetically. Swallows.
The Master laughs, a mad little giggle, and the Doctor thinks: You thought I'd abandoned you; of all the arrogant --
"There is something nice about it, though," the Master says, having controlled his giggles, addressing this observation to the coverlet. "Getting shot. Not wanting to be rescued." Darts a glance at the Doctor. "Yes?"
"I don't know," the Doctor confesses, tipping his head back against the headboard. He swallows and looks back at the Master. "Thank you."
The Master sneers. "It was your TARDIS, not me."
"You're clever," the Doctor says quietly. "You're very clever. You've made her do things against her nature before." He struggles a bit more upright, which doesn't hurt; he's still stiff, but otherwise fine. Reaches out and curls a hand around the Master's.
For a long moment the Master's silent; twists his wrist in the Doctor's grip until their hands are clasped together, and both of them shiver a little. The Master leans forward and kisses him softly, pulls away before the Doctor can properly reciprocate. A faint smile darts across the Master's face. "You're going to tell me a story," he says.
The Doctor blinks. "What?"
The Master settles back, looking pleased with himself. "You're going to tell me how you made Gallifrey burn."
The Doctor starts to recoil in horror, but the Master has already squeezed their clasped hands, sent through a psychic pulse of calm. The Doctor blinks, in surprise more than anything else; he hadn't been aware the Master had any calm to send. He takes a shaky breath.
"Destroyed the Eye of Harmony," he says. "Took a time-freeze grenade and threw it in."
"A time-freeze grenade in the nucleus of a black hole." The Master's eyebrows go up. "Surprisingly simple." He grins. "The state you must have been in!" The Doctor tries to tug his hand away and the Master subsides, becomes serious. "That would have given you plenty of time to run away, too." He props his chin in his free hand and stares thoughtfully at the Doctor. "It's all very elaborate."
"What is?" the Doctor asks dully.
"This whole business with Donna Noble." The Master frowns. "I took a good look at Arcadia after I picked you up. Very impressive timelines, I've got to admit. But do you really think the entire point of the thing was for you to go forward in order to fetch people to save you in the past? It has to be more than that."
"No," the Doctor says. Slumps down. "I found the fixed point. All that's left to do now is seal up the time lock."
The Master snorts. "You're really just going to ..." He trails off, an arrested look on his face. "Seal the ..." He springs to his feet. "Up. Get up. Now."
There doesn't seem to be much alternative, so the Doctor does. Barefoot, in rumpled trousers and t-shirt, he follows the Master along a corridor, through the greenhouse, past an orphaned umbrella stand, down a staircase, and the back way into the game vault. The remnants of their last chess game, string and overturned game boards, litter the floor. The Master bounds across the room to erase their complicated score from the whiteboard, then whirls on the Doctor.
"For my king, Skaro," he says without preamble. "For my queen, the Dalek Emperor. You'll have Gallifrey and yourself."
The Doctor stares at him. "You want to play a game."
"Actually," the Master says, writing up the new columns on which to keep score, "I want to do a staged recreation to see if there's anything we've missed. Actually I'm sure there's something you missed, you're really not as clever as all that, but --"
"All right," the Doctor snaps. "But I can't very well move a pawn first. It starts when I check Skaro."
The Master smirks. "You have plenty of pawns, Doctor," he says, and shrugs. "But it's not a proper game without conditions, is it? If you lose I get ... oh, I get to start growing my own TARDIS."
"If I win?" the Doctor asks.
The Master beams. "Oh, if you win you get your planet back."
***
Quite a few hours later, with a few breaks for tea and biscuits and discussions of strategy, the Doctor is looking markedly better. The light is back in his eyes, the colour back in his cheeks; even his hair has perked up a bit. The Master feels quite pleased with this. Traveling with the Doctor, were he unresponsive, would be frankly dull and probably a bit embarrassing. But the Doctor is responding quite well, racing about the room, his mind easily keeping up with the Master's, hooking bits of string back and forth, waving the tennis racket that represents the Medusa Cascade, generally being exactly the Doctor the Master wants him to be.
Rose is the first pawn to cross the board and be queened; she demolishes the Dalek Emperor at once. The Doctor is positively gleeful as he loops the string of her timeline around the room -- Bad Wolf here and there; scribbles it on a sticky note and sticks it to the Master's forehead, laughing. The Master indulges this, and snips the Dalek Emperor's timeline, effectively cutting it off at the blast that ended the Time War.
There's a rather awkward bit when the Master runs his own timeline from the war to the end of the universe and back to the twenty-first century. (Actually his entire string is a spectacular mess, with full stops here and there, cut off at the turn of the millennium and being pulled up out of the Matrix back in Gallifrey some relative time later. He's somewhat mollified by the spectacular tangles that the Doctor's bit of string has long since become.) Martha despite being a pawn corners the Master so the Doctor can take him out, which doesn't seem entirely fair, so the Master hurriedly snips his thread -- he rather fondly thinks he'll call the scissors Lucy -- and reconnects it with Donna's. Donna has meanwhile also crossed the board and been queened. They send her off to meet Jenny after joining up their own threads.
"Found any patterns yet?" the Master asks, jotting down the latest score.
"It's a bit of a mess," the Doctor says dubiously, holding the ends of his and the Master's twisted-together threads. He seems to recognise the irony in this and smiles lopsidedly. "Right, where's Romana's thread gone?"
At the end the scoreboard reads an astonishingly even match, which means they were quite accurate; Donna's and Jenny's threads end back on Gallifrey with a hint of uncertainty, tugging faintly at the Doctor's thread from two regenerations ago. The Doctor's and the Master's threads, which the Doctor has twisted rather worryingly tight together, are still in the Doctor's hand out in the vagueness of space while the Master stalks around the room, looking for points of tension, pullings they might not yet have seen.
He comes back to the Doctor and tugs gently on their twined threads. Jenny's, Donna's, and Romana's threads all bounce a little in their direction. The Dalek threads, snipped off by the Doctor's eighth self, by Rose, by Donna and the little bit of string that is the other Doctor, stay sitting where they are.
The Doctor's eyes widen. He tugs too, harder. The Dalek threads lie still and everything connected to Gallifrey strains harder. "Did you --?" he says, and the Master nods. He wraps his hands around the thread over the Doctor's. They look at each other, and the Doctor grins, and they both tug as hard as they can.
A moment of delicate trembling, and the whole Gallifrey timeline delicately unravels itself from the surrounding threads, leaving Arcadia, leaving Skaro. The Master's thread has been snapped so many times that it makes no difference; the Doctor's thread is tied so tightly into a hundred different timelines that it holds, and by virtue of this keeps all the Gallifreyan strings steady too.
"It's entirely theoretical," the Doctor ventures.
"Believe me," the Master says, eyeing their solution, "I'm less than fond at any proof you really are the centre of the universe." He can't help a trace of smugness, though. He's the only one in the universe smart enough to always keep tabs on the Doctor; it turns out both he and the universe are listening.
"That's glorifying things a bit, don't you think?" the Doctor asks awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. "I mean, it's not me, it's just the sum of my --" He stops, apparently remembering that a Time Lord is, at the most basic level, a being defined by the sum of his actions. Swallows. "I still destroyed the Eye of Harmony."
"Mm. If you say so."
The Doctor gapes at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I've been quite curious for some time," the Master says, picking his way carefully out of the threads and going to the whiteboard, "how this old clunker managed to run at all if its source is gone."
"She's very independent," the Doctor says, as though this really is a reasonable explanation.
The Master laughs. "Seriously? All right." He turns to the whiteboard, uncaps the pen again, and begins scribbling, going on as he does so. "Assume that a time-freeze grenade, interacting with the nucleus of a black hole, causes a catastrophic reaction resulting in a nuclear explosion and therefore in the annihilation of the planet and the surrounding Dalek fleets."
"Right." The Doctor comes over. "What are you getting at?"
"Assume instead a time lock of a particular duration," the Master says. "The time-freeze grenade does not cause a nuclear reaction. Instead, it induces stasis."
The Doctor is staring at him with shining eyes. "Safe mode," he says. "Everyone who has interacted with a TARDIS -- with the Eye -- is protected inside the freeze until the time lock is broken."
"The friction of dragging a whole world through a small rift would cause a pretty catastrophic burn to anything caught outside the freeze, too," the Master adds. "There go all your Daleks -- and the Emperor, he was caught in the backwash and ended up in 200,000."
"And my timeline," the Doctor says, running back to the threads and carefully walking his hands up his own. "Gallifrey doesn't exist for nearly a decade of my personal time -- it's out of time long enough for the whole universe to adjust to it -- it would be impossible for me to sense it, or you, since you were caught up in my timestream --"
"But it will," the Master completes, beaming. "There's your fixed point, Doctor: we pull Gallifrey back out of the time lock."
The Doctor beams back at him; then it slowly fades.
"It's been ... different," he says. "No one looking over your shoulder. Time feels sharper. And I was the only one ..."
He's asking the Master to talk him out of it. He's actually asking the Master. And the Master knows he's won, finally, unequivocally, because the Doctor crying as he died was only the first point. If he brings Gallifrey back, then every moment of the Doctor's guilt and horror and loneliness, every single painful thing the Time War left him with, will belong to the Master. And all the Doctor's joy and relief will belong to him too. He'll be the Master's, finally, properly.
All of Gallifrey knowing that the Doctor and the Master together saved them will be pretty priceless, too.
"Selfish," the Master says precisely. "Tell me how you're going to live with yourself if you don't save your planet for the sake of your own martyr complex. That will involve some serious doublethink."
The Doctor winces. "I didn't mean --" he starts, and rakes a hand through his hair, and says, "Let's go test this hypothesis, then."
They go up to the console room, where the TARDIS is thrumming with excitement and welcomes the Master easily into her telepathic circuits. There is no elegant way to pull a planet through a time lock; in fact there might be no physical way. But the TARDIS is rather smugly confident of her ability to tow planets, and if anyone is mad enough to pull it off, it's the Doctor. So they run around the console together, setting the coordinates and powering up to maximum.
What they're about to do is not the psychic and scientific equivalent of stopping up a cracked leak in a dam by mixing together cement from sand and chewing gum and then slapping it over with a bit of duct tape. It's more or less the reverse. It's finding the one little crack in the dam and pulling the entire lake through in one go using a piece of string to harness the water and pulling it all with a toothpick.
Which means it's going to work.
The TARDIS finds the hole in the time lock easily enough. They'll have to time it perfectly; bring the magnetism and gravity up to maximum, throw it out through space and that one little point of the timelines bleeding into each other, throw out a lot of psychic energy after it, clinging to each other and to the TARDIS: there, the Eye of Harmony, frozen for a moment. They look at each other. "Ready?" the Master breathes, and the Doctor grins, a wildly happy grin. "No," he says. Together they pull.
Spacetime turns inside out; he's the TARDIS and all of himself and all of the Doctor. Probably all of them scream. Behind them a million million Daleks shriek and die in flames, and protesting all the way, hurtling through impossibility, Gallifrey follows her children out of the wreckage. The time lock snaps closed behind it.
Then everything is still.
Still tangled together they dash to the viewscreen. There, sitting like a glowing jewel, is Gallifrey, red and orange with clouds and continents, glittering, real. They laugh and jump and shout and kiss each other and for the first time in far too long the Master, for one small strange moment, doesn't hate Gallifrey.
They part, but only for a moment before the Doctor laughs and kisses him again. The waves of gratefulness and focus are nearly more than the Master can bear. He ends up clutching helplessly at the Doctor's shirt and basking in it.
"Let's," the Doctor says at length, drawing back, "let's go down and see if Donna and Jenny are all right."
Frankly the Master doesn't care, but he's taking too much pleasure from the Doctor's giddiness to actually be annoying about it. He stays at the viewscreen and watches the curve of the horizon grow as the Doctor flies them down.
Somewhat to his surprise the Doctor lands them in the foothills of the mountains with the Citadel shining in the distance. Wide swaths of the plain are burned to ashes, and some of the Citadel's towers are smoking, but nearly everything is still standing. The Doctor bounds out of the TARDIS and up a hill, actually leaving the Master alone with his ship. But the Master isn't going anywhere.
He sits down in the doorway and thinks about this. He tries imagining going around rescuing pathetic ungrateful people for the Doctor's entertainment, and it's just as inconceivable now as it was the last time they had this conversation, lifetimes ago. He tries imagining the Doctor being convinced to rule something, and knows the impossibility of it. Then he imagines stealing a TARDIS from the Citadel, imagines running away and setting up a scheme and waiting for the Doctor to come attempt to stop him; the idea has a certain tried-and-true appeal, with the disadvantage of being apart from the Doctor until such time as the Doctor cottons onto the latest plot. He hates this.
The Doctor comes back down the slope, holding a daisy and grinning fit to break his face. He stops in front of the Master. The Master looks up at him. "Yes?"
The Doctor twirls the stem of the daisy in between thumb and forefinger, then carefully threads it into his jacket. The Master had thrown the last torn and muddy one out. Apparently daisies are the new celery, and he can barely keep himself from rolling his eyes. Instead he gets to his feet.
"We should get inside," the Doctor says, jerking his head in the direction of the Citadel.
"Ask me," the Master says, unpremeditated.
The Doctor stares at him. The red grass rustles and murmurs to itself, and a whirl of ash picks itself up in the wind down on the plain. Comprehension seeps into the Doctor's face.
"Discover the universe with me," he says, a bit haltingly. "See it at -- at my side. Come with me."
The Master makes a show of considering this. "No rulership in the cards? Not even something nice and benevolent? No?"
"Master," the Doctor says, with such deliberate fondness.
"Right," the Master says casually, fooling neither of them. "For a while, then. I will."
(Gallifrey, Kasterborous, 5855.0 RE)
The Doctor can't remember ever feeling quite like this. Out the windows they pass he can see the brilliant orange sky, the distant shining mountains, there, a living planet. He drifts through the Citadel half in a dream; their TARDIS was surrounded by guards at once, but to all appearances it's an honour guard, which the Master seems to be appreciating, at least.
They're taken to the Council chambers, half-destroyed as they are. Romana is there, with the remnants of the Council -- and Donna, and Jenny. Jenny gives a shriek and runs right through their guard to leap nearly into the Doctor's arms and hug him tightly. It jolts him out of his half-dream and into wild awake joy. He laughs and hugs her back, very tightly, while their escorts look embarrassed, the Master looks amused, and the Council looks politely impatient. They'll have to keep looking that for some time, though, because the moment Jenny's done, Donna takes her place in hugging the Doctor.
"I was hoping you'd figure it out," she tells him, beaming; a year older, oh, his Donna. He grins back at her with love and pride, and she adds, in a whisper, "When you go I'm getting a lift back to Martha's wedding day, got that? Jenny and I borrowed some stuff from Romana and we're going to fix my TARDIS up."
He nods to let her know he's heard, and backs up a step. Time to face the music.
And it begins: the Council formally questions them, he and the Master and Donna and Jenny. They're forced to explain the timelines in great detail, and with every passing moment the Council looks graver to hear of their egregious conduct with the fabric of spacetime. The Doctor knows they have no room to criticise or punish, though; aside from the indisputable fact that between the four of them they've saved Gallifrey and probably most of spacetime, the Council's own actions in the final stages of the War were far from exemplary too.
At the end of the questioning, Romana stands. "In accordance with what we have heard," she pronounces, "we are left with no choice but to reward you. Your rather unique skills would be invaluable in assisting us in the rebuilding of Gallifrey, and of the society of the Time Lords. We request that you stay."
As she says this she locks eyes with the Doctor, and he sees that she genuinely means it, but he sees too the amused understanding in her face. She knows him.
"Yeah, well," he says, stuffing his hands in his pockets and shrugging casually, "we'll have to think about it, you know, I need to think of what's best for Jenny and it's not like Donna's a Time Lord properly, and -- if you'll just excuse us, do you mind if we go into the corridor for a moment and discuss it? Brilliant, thanks."
He edges out, Donna biting back a grin, the Master not even bothering to hide his, and Jenny looking puzzled as they follow him.
In the corridor Jenny says, "But Dad, don't you have to --?"
"Nah," Donna says. "This is what he does, see?" She wraps an arm around Jenny's shoulders. "Anyway Auntie Donna has things to show you. Singing towers and frozen waves of ice, Jenny, supernovas ten million miles wide, all sorts of beautiful things." She grins at the Doctor. "And some of us still have to newlyweds to properly congratulate and, oh, I dunno, maybe some people in Ealing to have tea with. Right, Doctor?"
"Right," the Doctor agrees, although he's probably going to hold off a while before he takes the Master to tea with anyone. Might hold off for centuries, even.
"So what are we doing, then?" Jenny asks.
"Jenny, my dear," the Master says, with an air of long-suffering, "we're running away."
They run.
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