Dr Who; Doctor/Master; PG-13
Title: Illusion is the First of all Pleasures
Author: kiwi_from_hell
Pairing: Doctor/Master
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: Approx. 3000
Notes: This was written for nebularific, as part of the masterficathon. The request I have chosen is "Request 1: Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords AU(s)." It is probably worth noting that the title of this fic, and the final line, are both Oscar Wilde quotes.
Summary: Last of the Time Lords AU. A prayer cannot save the world.
The girl is on her knees before him, head bowed, her family looking on. It’s beautiful, really. Like a sacrifice, a symbol, and it’s exactly what this play has been lacking. The poetry of the first blood of a war, to be spilt where it will hurt so much. All the pain they will feel, he muses, the onlookers having their hearts torn out so thoroughly, making the last year of servitude seem like bliss. Such immense power is contained in every person, he marvels that they can hurt so much, so much that the emotion seems like burning suns coursing through ice cold veins. And he controls every one of them.
“And so it falls to me, as Master of All, to establish from this day a new order of Time Lords. From this day forward - ” And the girl is laughing, laughing and interrupting his speech. “What’s so funny?”
She raises her head. Impudent child. “A gun?”
“What about it?” The Master does not have the patience for this. The clock is ticking and her voice is covering the countdown. She’s saying lines that were not written for her, stepping on his cues.
“A gun in four parts?”
Her tone is bothering him; one facing execution should have a considerably smaller amount of confidence. The back of his neck starts to prickle, and thoughts of where she is leading with this whisper between the drum beats. “Yes, and I destroyed it.”
“A gun, in four parts, scattered across the world? I mean, come on. Did you really believe that?”
“What d’you mean?”
The wizened figure in the cage raises it voice, now barely recognizable. It’s not someone who matters, anymore. A toy in a cage; the Master is free from whatever judgment he may pass. “As if I would ask her to kill,” the creature rasps.
“Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got her exactly where I want her.”
“But I knew what professor Doherty would do. The resistance knew about her son. I told her about the gun so she’d get me here at the right time.”
“But you’re still gonna die!”
“Don’t you wanna know what I was doing? Traveling the world?”
Fine then. “Tell me.”
“I told a story, that’s all. No weapons, just words. I went across the continents all on my own and everywhere I went I found the people and I told them my story. I told them about the Doctor, and I told them to pass it on. To spread the word, so that everyone would know about the Doctor.”
The Master feels like laughing. “Faith and hope? Is that all?”
“No, because I gave them an instruction, just as the Doctor said. I told them that if everyone thinks of one word at one specific time-”
“Nothing will happen! Is that you’re weapon? Prayer?”
“Right across the world, one word, just one thought at one moment, but with 15 satellites.”
“What?” No, no, no, not this. Not another plan of the Doctor’s, the sickly little creature getting the best of him again. It sounds like it could work, it could…no.
“The Archangel Network.”
“A telepathic field, binding the whole human race together with all of them, every single person on earth thinking the same thing at the same time, and that word is Doctor.”
The countdown is at zero. The steady beeping has stopped, Martha’s voice is gone. There’s a pause.
The word Doctor echoes around the room. First from his prisoners and camera screens, then one by one, his crew betray him. Even his wife.
Nothing happens.
Now the Master does laugh, and the stricken horror on the faces of everyone else in the room is simply delightful. He stops abruptly - oh, the wonder of that effect, the sudden silence. He is giving a fine performance today. All the puppets are trembling, just begging to bend to his will. He walks over to his real live toy, and looking into its pitiful eyes says, “You see, Doctor? How cruel you are to your disciples. You are not the messiah you trick them into believing you are.” As he speaks, he raises his arm to point out behind him, the laser screwdriver gripped in his fist. “You can’t save any of them.”
“Martha!” her mother wails, a split second before the thud of her daughter’s body hitting the floor.
The Doctor recoils, pressing his small body to the bars at the back of the cage, and though it’s hard for the Master to judge, his expression seems like one of horror. He may even be slightly surprised.
“That’s one,” the Master grins. And there are so many more to be taken care of now.
There is a loud blast as thousands of rockets break the sound barrier. They flash past the windows of the Valiant. It has begun. He runs to the window for a better view, and glances at the monitors of earth as he passes. Everywhere, people stand crying in the street as hope abandons them. His ships look glorious, divine. There is such beauty in the world.
“Guards!” He is confident that his command of their fear is enough to guarantee obedience, even now. He needn’t turn around, nor be afraid of a bullet in his back. “Line everyone up. That includes Lucy. The Doctor can stay in his cage, and take Jack back to his chains.” God, to tear himself away from the spectacular sight of his weapons flying past the window, it’s cruel. But there is work to be done, and though his pulse is racing from this vision, the next thing on his to-do list will provide equal thrill.
Oh, look at that. He smiles at his lovely, well behaved subjects. All lined up already, even the Jones woman, though his guards are holding her as she reaches for the body of her dead daughter with hands twisted by anguish.
“It is a glorious new day, and I’m so disappointed that it started with betrayal. The guards are forgiven because, let’s face it, I need staff and I’m too busy to fly anyone new in right now - though don’t any of you go thinking you’re indispensable, this is a decision based on convenience. Everyone one else,” he tuts, “What can I say? It’s been fun, but we all knew it couldn’t last forever. Doctor, I hope you’re watching.”
One by one, they fall. A delicious shiver graces his spine as he feels life escaping the room, leaving a silence that only gets heavier and heavier. The peace is so clear, like waking up on a cold morning. So quickly, the Jones family have joined their daughter in the imagined afterlife. It’s almost sad that he’s losing so many of his staff; they’ve almost bonded over the past year. Oh, and dear Lucy. She’s trembling ever so slightly, her eyes are watering, but she is holding her lip stiff and desperately groping for a look of defiance. It’s such a shame, the Master muses, that the aspects he had cared for of her personality are only starting to show themselves again now, after her steady decline throughout the year. He almost recalls entertaining the thought he could love her. How terrible, that it should only be shown in her last moments.
He nods to the door, and the guards leave as commanded. Amongst the bodies, he lifts the Doctor’s cage down, sets it on the table and opens the door. He instructs him to come outside.
The feeble being cringes as the Master points his laser screwdriver at it. Churning and whirring and moaning, and the Doctor, back to his young self, is sat naked on the table. He shivers. His knees are drawn up to his chest.
“You’re no fun when you can’t do anything,” the Master says by way of an explanation for granting the transformation.
“You can still stop. Call them back. You don’t have to…no one else has to die.”
“Oh, Doctor, but I have great plans! I put a lot of work into this, and I’m not a quitter. Would you like to hear my plan?” he asks, and then continues without pausing for an answer, “Firstly, we’re going to gather some people from the slave colonies on earth to make sure we’re fully staffed. I’ll drop Jack off while we do that; I would have rather liked to kill him but that pesky immortality gets in the way. Still, he’ll make a good worker. Then onwards. The children are headed for the Wolf 359 system, and the rockets for Luyten 789-6. It all sounds rather messy to me, especially these early stages, so I rather fancy keeping up with orders from a distance. We can go anywhere.”
“You mean hide anywhere. Stand well back so you can destroy them, but they can’t fight back. Like blanket bombing people throwing stones.”
“Precisely. Haven’t you noticed the bombers always win?”
~
It’s been weeks, so long that the Doctor can hardly believe anything has really happened. He remembers things like a dream; Martha dying, Jack being sent to fight, fifteen people executed in front of him. It’s all been lost in the monotony of the day to day routine of the space ship. They drift.
The Master is almost like a friend. However much he hates him - and he does, he can’t deny it any more than he can pretend that hate is the only thing he feels - time together is always the same. From the first heart break to this, the final destruction, their connection always wins out.
Perhaps the most distressing thing is that the Doctor can’t stop it, even by calling Martha’s dead face to his mind. It wasn’t the Master that killed her, it can’t have been, not the boy who was with him at the academy, not the man who convinced him to be a renegade, not the man who had changed the worlds when they met. He can almost make himself believe it when they’re sat talking about times that have passed. He wants to believe it. It would be easier, and he’s so tired.
“Do you remember that night at the Academy?”
The Doctor is sat leaning on the side of the ship, on a closed in deck as they spin through space, engulfed in darkness. The Master’s words are like crystal in his ears, they feel like the most real thing in the universe, the only real thing, with that ringing clarity. But he can’t see him; the night is so black. Above, the moons of the planet they are orbiting glitter. It is a kind of eclipse, a rare occurrence, as the angles and atmospheres aligned perfectly to cast the effect of the Northern Lights on the three objects floating through the sky. He’s never seen it from above before.
“The one when the flare hit the Citadel roof?” the Doctor asks, though he already knew the answer. The Master could’ve been talking about hundreds of nights, but the Doctor could always tell exactly what he meant.
“Yeah. We were both so afraid when the Prefects told us what would happen. You couldn’t understand how that could happen, and the city wouldn’t burn.”
“Well, come on, I was only 14. We’d barely covered astrophysics, and I thought the Citadel roof was just made of glass. I may be brilliant now, but it took an architecture course or two.”
The Master laughs. “You hid under the blankets in your bunk.”
“I was sleeping!”
“You thought the world was ending. So did I.”
“Then you can stop making fun of me and watch the pretty lights.”
The Master has edged closer in the dark, and now the Doctor can feel his body heat radiating. He moves his hand instinctively and their fingers brush, just lightly, just in quiet affirmation of presence. Turning his head, the Doctor finds even with mere inches between them, the darkness is too thick.
“You took me outside,” the Doctor whispers.
“I wanted to watch the world end.” The Master places his hand over the Doctor’s. “And I wanted you to be there when the sky would fall.”
He’s just too tired. So much has been lost, so much, home, friends, family, everything he loves, everything he fought for, it’s all dying. The Master is sat beside him, and it’s the person he always knew. His old life, old moments of happiness, breathing beside him and waiting to be reclaimed. There’s nothing left to save, and he might as well tear himself apart.
The kiss is soft and slow at first, tentative like their first, even though it’s already too late to stop. He might as well let the Master tear him apart.
In the midst of their desperate grasps for each other, harsh kisses and pounding hearts, the Doctor murmurs, “I forgive you.”
~
“Look.” The Master’s voice is a whisper in his ear, so quiet he isn’t sure if it is really spoken, or just a shared thought.
The Master has been blank for so long. He’s watched his empire expand over light years. He has shown the Doctor one example of carnage after another, and always asked the same question.
They are stood on the deck of the ship, almost identical to The Valiant, but for the encasing glass dome. Instead of clouds, the surrounding is nothingness, urgently pushing at the edges, searching, striving for a point of entrance. The light from a far off star, someone else’s sun, casts a cold illumination over them and stretches their shadows into dark spectres. The constellations are new.
Below them, a civilization lies in ashes. The Doctor has watched the Toclafane - he still cannot bring himself to use their real name - descend upon the planet in swarms of silver. He has seen the faces of the dead on the monitors, and now here he stands in the perfect, crystal silence.
The Toclafane have moved to their next duty, and this solar system can now be classified as uninhabited. All is quiet, but for the imagined screams ringing in the Doctor’s ears. But it’s an illusion; there is nothing in the darkness. It is the first of the battles he has witnessed up close. It’s the first time he’s seen the fire and smoke rising from the surface of the planets. The Master has bought him closer and closer to the destruction.
The Master rests his hand on his lower back. The Doctor cannot believe, simply cannot understand, that the familiar touch belongs to someone who commits systematic genocide. It should make his skin crawl. It should be cold.
“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” the Doctor states grimly, if only to fill the air with something other than screaming.
“Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“Liar,” the Master claims instantly.
The Doctor doesn’t know anymore. He forgives, of that he is certain. But ‘me’? That is more complex; the Master can’t be the same person the Doctor has been holding in his mind for so long. He forgives what he has become, and mourns for the soul that has been lost.
The Master’s hand on his back moves in slow circles, his thumb dipping below the waistband of his trousers.
“Don’t.”
“Look around you, Doctor!” The Master flings his arms open and spins, looking to the emptiness above them and laughing. “There’s nothing left to be righteous for! It’s just us amongst the wreckage.”
“I’m going inside.” The Doctor walks away, feigning confidence to hide his fear of the all too likely punishment. The sound of each footstep rings out across the deck.
The Master’s harsh laugh follows him over the floor.
The Doctor sits picking at his middle fingernail with his thumb. He’s taken to biting them again, an old habit he had thought he was rid of. The skin around his nails is red and cracked. It feels like hours before the Master comes inside.
“Let me go.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let me go,” the Doctor repeats.
“I’m not sure you entirely understand how this prisoner thing works.” The Master sits down at the long conference table and looks at the Doctor, who is sat opposite him. “Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“If I keep you here, if I keep you like a real prisoner, put you in a cage and abuse you whenever I’m bored. Would you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
The Master reaches across the table and smacks the Doctor with the back of his hand. Steadying himself of the table, the Doctor wipes blood from the corner of his lip.
“Well?” the Master asks.
“I forgive you.”
~
“You know I’m going to fight against you?”
“Of course.”
The Master is sure he cannot remember a more bizarre situation. They are in a destitute corner of some world or other, with ships of war waiting just above the atmosphere. He is bidding his prisoner farewell, at his request. This is a beautiful planet; it’s like home. Mountains rise far into the distance. The sun is coming up opposite them, casting shadows and highlights.
They’ve never said goodbye before. It always used to be a promise of when they’ll see each other next, when they were young. Even when it was a casual “Catch you tomorrow,” it was a promise. They stopped promising long ago, instead leaving in silence, leaving with the lights out.
It still doesn’t feel right. Instead, the Master says, “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”
Author: kiwi_from_hell
Pairing: Doctor/Master
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: Approx. 3000
Notes: This was written for nebularific, as part of the masterficathon. The request I have chosen is "Request 1: Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords AU(s)." It is probably worth noting that the title of this fic, and the final line, are both Oscar Wilde quotes.
Summary: Last of the Time Lords AU. A prayer cannot save the world.
The girl is on her knees before him, head bowed, her family looking on. It’s beautiful, really. Like a sacrifice, a symbol, and it’s exactly what this play has been lacking. The poetry of the first blood of a war, to be spilt where it will hurt so much. All the pain they will feel, he muses, the onlookers having their hearts torn out so thoroughly, making the last year of servitude seem like bliss. Such immense power is contained in every person, he marvels that they can hurt so much, so much that the emotion seems like burning suns coursing through ice cold veins. And he controls every one of them.
“And so it falls to me, as Master of All, to establish from this day a new order of Time Lords. From this day forward - ” And the girl is laughing, laughing and interrupting his speech. “What’s so funny?”
She raises her head. Impudent child. “A gun?”
“What about it?” The Master does not have the patience for this. The clock is ticking and her voice is covering the countdown. She’s saying lines that were not written for her, stepping on his cues.
“A gun in four parts?”
Her tone is bothering him; one facing execution should have a considerably smaller amount of confidence. The back of his neck starts to prickle, and thoughts of where she is leading with this whisper between the drum beats. “Yes, and I destroyed it.”
“A gun, in four parts, scattered across the world? I mean, come on. Did you really believe that?”
“What d’you mean?”
The wizened figure in the cage raises it voice, now barely recognizable. It’s not someone who matters, anymore. A toy in a cage; the Master is free from whatever judgment he may pass. “As if I would ask her to kill,” the creature rasps.
“Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got her exactly where I want her.”
“But I knew what professor Doherty would do. The resistance knew about her son. I told her about the gun so she’d get me here at the right time.”
“But you’re still gonna die!”
“Don’t you wanna know what I was doing? Traveling the world?”
Fine then. “Tell me.”
“I told a story, that’s all. No weapons, just words. I went across the continents all on my own and everywhere I went I found the people and I told them my story. I told them about the Doctor, and I told them to pass it on. To spread the word, so that everyone would know about the Doctor.”
The Master feels like laughing. “Faith and hope? Is that all?”
“No, because I gave them an instruction, just as the Doctor said. I told them that if everyone thinks of one word at one specific time-”
“Nothing will happen! Is that you’re weapon? Prayer?”
“Right across the world, one word, just one thought at one moment, but with 15 satellites.”
“What?” No, no, no, not this. Not another plan of the Doctor’s, the sickly little creature getting the best of him again. It sounds like it could work, it could…no.
“The Archangel Network.”
“A telepathic field, binding the whole human race together with all of them, every single person on earth thinking the same thing at the same time, and that word is Doctor.”
The countdown is at zero. The steady beeping has stopped, Martha’s voice is gone. There’s a pause.
The word Doctor echoes around the room. First from his prisoners and camera screens, then one by one, his crew betray him. Even his wife.
Nothing happens.
Now the Master does laugh, and the stricken horror on the faces of everyone else in the room is simply delightful. He stops abruptly - oh, the wonder of that effect, the sudden silence. He is giving a fine performance today. All the puppets are trembling, just begging to bend to his will. He walks over to his real live toy, and looking into its pitiful eyes says, “You see, Doctor? How cruel you are to your disciples. You are not the messiah you trick them into believing you are.” As he speaks, he raises his arm to point out behind him, the laser screwdriver gripped in his fist. “You can’t save any of them.”
“Martha!” her mother wails, a split second before the thud of her daughter’s body hitting the floor.
The Doctor recoils, pressing his small body to the bars at the back of the cage, and though it’s hard for the Master to judge, his expression seems like one of horror. He may even be slightly surprised.
“That’s one,” the Master grins. And there are so many more to be taken care of now.
There is a loud blast as thousands of rockets break the sound barrier. They flash past the windows of the Valiant. It has begun. He runs to the window for a better view, and glances at the monitors of earth as he passes. Everywhere, people stand crying in the street as hope abandons them. His ships look glorious, divine. There is such beauty in the world.
“Guards!” He is confident that his command of their fear is enough to guarantee obedience, even now. He needn’t turn around, nor be afraid of a bullet in his back. “Line everyone up. That includes Lucy. The Doctor can stay in his cage, and take Jack back to his chains.” God, to tear himself away from the spectacular sight of his weapons flying past the window, it’s cruel. But there is work to be done, and though his pulse is racing from this vision, the next thing on his to-do list will provide equal thrill.
Oh, look at that. He smiles at his lovely, well behaved subjects. All lined up already, even the Jones woman, though his guards are holding her as she reaches for the body of her dead daughter with hands twisted by anguish.
“It is a glorious new day, and I’m so disappointed that it started with betrayal. The guards are forgiven because, let’s face it, I need staff and I’m too busy to fly anyone new in right now - though don’t any of you go thinking you’re indispensable, this is a decision based on convenience. Everyone one else,” he tuts, “What can I say? It’s been fun, but we all knew it couldn’t last forever. Doctor, I hope you’re watching.”
One by one, they fall. A delicious shiver graces his spine as he feels life escaping the room, leaving a silence that only gets heavier and heavier. The peace is so clear, like waking up on a cold morning. So quickly, the Jones family have joined their daughter in the imagined afterlife. It’s almost sad that he’s losing so many of his staff; they’ve almost bonded over the past year. Oh, and dear Lucy. She’s trembling ever so slightly, her eyes are watering, but she is holding her lip stiff and desperately groping for a look of defiance. It’s such a shame, the Master muses, that the aspects he had cared for of her personality are only starting to show themselves again now, after her steady decline throughout the year. He almost recalls entertaining the thought he could love her. How terrible, that it should only be shown in her last moments.
He nods to the door, and the guards leave as commanded. Amongst the bodies, he lifts the Doctor’s cage down, sets it on the table and opens the door. He instructs him to come outside.
The feeble being cringes as the Master points his laser screwdriver at it. Churning and whirring and moaning, and the Doctor, back to his young self, is sat naked on the table. He shivers. His knees are drawn up to his chest.
“You’re no fun when you can’t do anything,” the Master says by way of an explanation for granting the transformation.
“You can still stop. Call them back. You don’t have to…no one else has to die.”
“Oh, Doctor, but I have great plans! I put a lot of work into this, and I’m not a quitter. Would you like to hear my plan?” he asks, and then continues without pausing for an answer, “Firstly, we’re going to gather some people from the slave colonies on earth to make sure we’re fully staffed. I’ll drop Jack off while we do that; I would have rather liked to kill him but that pesky immortality gets in the way. Still, he’ll make a good worker. Then onwards. The children are headed for the Wolf 359 system, and the rockets for Luyten 789-6. It all sounds rather messy to me, especially these early stages, so I rather fancy keeping up with orders from a distance. We can go anywhere.”
“You mean hide anywhere. Stand well back so you can destroy them, but they can’t fight back. Like blanket bombing people throwing stones.”
“Precisely. Haven’t you noticed the bombers always win?”
~
It’s been weeks, so long that the Doctor can hardly believe anything has really happened. He remembers things like a dream; Martha dying, Jack being sent to fight, fifteen people executed in front of him. It’s all been lost in the monotony of the day to day routine of the space ship. They drift.
The Master is almost like a friend. However much he hates him - and he does, he can’t deny it any more than he can pretend that hate is the only thing he feels - time together is always the same. From the first heart break to this, the final destruction, their connection always wins out.
Perhaps the most distressing thing is that the Doctor can’t stop it, even by calling Martha’s dead face to his mind. It wasn’t the Master that killed her, it can’t have been, not the boy who was with him at the academy, not the man who convinced him to be a renegade, not the man who had changed the worlds when they met. He can almost make himself believe it when they’re sat talking about times that have passed. He wants to believe it. It would be easier, and he’s so tired.
“Do you remember that night at the Academy?”
The Doctor is sat leaning on the side of the ship, on a closed in deck as they spin through space, engulfed in darkness. The Master’s words are like crystal in his ears, they feel like the most real thing in the universe, the only real thing, with that ringing clarity. But he can’t see him; the night is so black. Above, the moons of the planet they are orbiting glitter. It is a kind of eclipse, a rare occurrence, as the angles and atmospheres aligned perfectly to cast the effect of the Northern Lights on the three objects floating through the sky. He’s never seen it from above before.
“The one when the flare hit the Citadel roof?” the Doctor asks, though he already knew the answer. The Master could’ve been talking about hundreds of nights, but the Doctor could always tell exactly what he meant.
“Yeah. We were both so afraid when the Prefects told us what would happen. You couldn’t understand how that could happen, and the city wouldn’t burn.”
“Well, come on, I was only 14. We’d barely covered astrophysics, and I thought the Citadel roof was just made of glass. I may be brilliant now, but it took an architecture course or two.”
The Master laughs. “You hid under the blankets in your bunk.”
“I was sleeping!”
“You thought the world was ending. So did I.”
“Then you can stop making fun of me and watch the pretty lights.”
The Master has edged closer in the dark, and now the Doctor can feel his body heat radiating. He moves his hand instinctively and their fingers brush, just lightly, just in quiet affirmation of presence. Turning his head, the Doctor finds even with mere inches between them, the darkness is too thick.
“You took me outside,” the Doctor whispers.
“I wanted to watch the world end.” The Master places his hand over the Doctor’s. “And I wanted you to be there when the sky would fall.”
He’s just too tired. So much has been lost, so much, home, friends, family, everything he loves, everything he fought for, it’s all dying. The Master is sat beside him, and it’s the person he always knew. His old life, old moments of happiness, breathing beside him and waiting to be reclaimed. There’s nothing left to save, and he might as well tear himself apart.
The kiss is soft and slow at first, tentative like their first, even though it’s already too late to stop. He might as well let the Master tear him apart.
In the midst of their desperate grasps for each other, harsh kisses and pounding hearts, the Doctor murmurs, “I forgive you.”
~
“Look.” The Master’s voice is a whisper in his ear, so quiet he isn’t sure if it is really spoken, or just a shared thought.
The Master has been blank for so long. He’s watched his empire expand over light years. He has shown the Doctor one example of carnage after another, and always asked the same question.
They are stood on the deck of the ship, almost identical to The Valiant, but for the encasing glass dome. Instead of clouds, the surrounding is nothingness, urgently pushing at the edges, searching, striving for a point of entrance. The light from a far off star, someone else’s sun, casts a cold illumination over them and stretches their shadows into dark spectres. The constellations are new.
Below them, a civilization lies in ashes. The Doctor has watched the Toclafane - he still cannot bring himself to use their real name - descend upon the planet in swarms of silver. He has seen the faces of the dead on the monitors, and now here he stands in the perfect, crystal silence.
The Toclafane have moved to their next duty, and this solar system can now be classified as uninhabited. All is quiet, but for the imagined screams ringing in the Doctor’s ears. But it’s an illusion; there is nothing in the darkness. It is the first of the battles he has witnessed up close. It’s the first time he’s seen the fire and smoke rising from the surface of the planets. The Master has bought him closer and closer to the destruction.
The Master rests his hand on his lower back. The Doctor cannot believe, simply cannot understand, that the familiar touch belongs to someone who commits systematic genocide. It should make his skin crawl. It should be cold.
“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” the Doctor states grimly, if only to fill the air with something other than screaming.
“Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“Liar,” the Master claims instantly.
The Doctor doesn’t know anymore. He forgives, of that he is certain. But ‘me’? That is more complex; the Master can’t be the same person the Doctor has been holding in his mind for so long. He forgives what he has become, and mourns for the soul that has been lost.
The Master’s hand on his back moves in slow circles, his thumb dipping below the waistband of his trousers.
“Don’t.”
“Look around you, Doctor!” The Master flings his arms open and spins, looking to the emptiness above them and laughing. “There’s nothing left to be righteous for! It’s just us amongst the wreckage.”
“I’m going inside.” The Doctor walks away, feigning confidence to hide his fear of the all too likely punishment. The sound of each footstep rings out across the deck.
The Master’s harsh laugh follows him over the floor.
The Doctor sits picking at his middle fingernail with his thumb. He’s taken to biting them again, an old habit he had thought he was rid of. The skin around his nails is red and cracked. It feels like hours before the Master comes inside.
“Let me go.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let me go,” the Doctor repeats.
“I’m not sure you entirely understand how this prisoner thing works.” The Master sits down at the long conference table and looks at the Doctor, who is sat opposite him. “Do you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“If I keep you here, if I keep you like a real prisoner, put you in a cage and abuse you whenever I’m bored. Would you forgive me?”
“Yes.”
The Master reaches across the table and smacks the Doctor with the back of his hand. Steadying himself of the table, the Doctor wipes blood from the corner of his lip.
“Well?” the Master asks.
“I forgive you.”
~
“You know I’m going to fight against you?”
“Of course.”
The Master is sure he cannot remember a more bizarre situation. They are in a destitute corner of some world or other, with ships of war waiting just above the atmosphere. He is bidding his prisoner farewell, at his request. This is a beautiful planet; it’s like home. Mountains rise far into the distance. The sun is coming up opposite them, casting shadows and highlights.
They’ve never said goodbye before. It always used to be a promise of when they’ll see each other next, when they were young. Even when it was a casual “Catch you tomorrow,” it was a promise. They stopped promising long ago, instead leaving in silence, leaving with the lights out.
It still doesn’t feel right. Instead, the Master says, “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”