Zero-Sum Convictions

by DannyAD

Summary:

It was a story the Doctor would go on to tell many a companion: He'd fled Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS and never looked back. And it was the truth.

He just hadn't told them why.

Notes:

I wanted to write something short and light-hearted. Accordingly, I've come up with a multi-chapter long fic about the Big Break that pre-dates the series and inevitably ends in tears.
Current estimation puts this fic between 20,000-30,000 words (but we know how that goes).

Chapter 1

It started with a note:

“I’m sorry. Come home.”

The Doctor wasn’t sure which crumpled with less resistance: the paper in his clenched fist, or his remaining willpower. As he readied the engines and laid in the familiar coordinates, he allowed himself to believe he was being kind. That this wasn’t cowardice. That forgiveness was a blessed trait, and one that he should take pride in wielding. After all, it was only fair and reasonable to hear the Master out, wasn’t it? Certainly, their shared history was significant enough to deserve a reappraisal? And didn’t all peoples deserve a second chance?

But it was muscle memory that brought the Doctor’s hands around the navigational lever, not good faith. And it was whispers honed by weeks of loneliness and doubt that convinced him to press it downwards and throw them into the vortex, not ideations of charity. And as his TARDIS tumbled back towards Gallifrey, he thought only of dark hair on familiar sheets, the stillness of their hillside house in the early hours of the morning, and the bustle of the citadel just beyond the window. Not about benevolence, or forgiveness, or what was right.

Nor what had driven him away in the first place.

***

The note in question was actually the third message he’d received— in under an hour, no less, following nearly two months of silence since he’d left the Master.

The first message had taken the Doctor by surprise on his way to the kitchen, as the near-forgotten transceiver beeped noisily with its burden from a dusty workbench. It had been less of a letter, and more of a lengthy proclamation, embellished onto heavy cardstock and stamped with the trappings of the Oakdown house. Gold-encrusted high-gallifreyan circulature, looping with meticulous precision that offered several compelling arguments for their author’s clemency. This was interspersed with narrative evidence that (should the Doctor disregard his many excuses) offered proof of the Master's changed behavior. This change, it appeared, was largely due to the decorum required of his new position with the High Council, one that he could only imagine thrilled the Master’s ego to no end. It was a venerable point-by-point list of reasons the Doctor should return, complete with allusions to the many benefits awaiting him if he did.

In short: I wasn’t wrong. And if I was, I won’t do it again. And even if I did, you’d be best served by my side.

Naturally, the Doctor had folded it in half and stuffed it into his robe pocket, continuing his way to the kitchen with no intention of responding. He might still be in his first regeneration, but he wasn’t born yesterday. It was not enough to sway the Doctor’s hearts, not by a longshot.

The second message arrived only fourteen minutes later and took an entirely new tactic. Having quickly surmised that litigation and flattery alone wouldn’t summon the Doctor, the Master’s next letter (an elongated scroll, only run-of-the-mill black ink this time, but no less precise than the first) spoke mainly of Susan. Updating him on her recent accomplishments at the academy, the applause she had garnered for her recent work in proto-gallifreyan translation for the department of preservation, the face she’d made yesterday when she’d tried Venusian sladfruit for the first time on a dare (nigh unpalatable, astonishingly bitter to most sentient tongues) and above all else, how desperately she missed him.

Or, in short: Our life is here. Our granddaughter is here. Your absence is hurting us both.

Oh, Susan. How the Doctor missed her so. He had rehashed the circumstances of his departure over the past two months more times than bared mentioning. Conclusively and unequivocally, the Doctor was forced to admit that leaving without saying goodbye to her had been unconscionable. What kind of grandfather did that make him?

But then, what could he have said? The Doctor leaned over the console of his newly-commandeered TARDIS with his fists clenched tight. How possibly could he explain to her, a mere child, the complexities of the wrongs that had occurred? It was cowardice. But this TARDIS of his, dear girl that she’d always been on his visits to her storage bay, tried her best to send him psychic comfort and soothing thrums from her console. It was a lovely gesture, and one that he didn’t come close to deserving.

The second letter had not been enough to bring him home, albeit a far better attempt than the Master’s first.

The final letter hadn’t arrived for another forty minutes and found the Doctor deep into a cup of tea and as far away from the Master’s messages as his mind would allow. He startled as the transceiver dinged in a manner that was far too cheery for its purpose. He’d see to having that changed as soon as he was able; it was unbecoming. But no grumbling digressions could prevent him from snatching up the letter it spat out, bringing it close with trembling fingers.

“I’m sorry. Come home.”

Blunt statements, no subtextual implications necessary. Forty minutes for four words. Only two symbols, when penned in circular gallifreyan as they were now. But although there was a notable lack of the word ‘please’, the tense structure of the latter symbol implicated the verb ‘to come’ with an expression of urgency; penned with shaky lines that had been pressed into the page with visible strain, in a way their writer must have loathed.

It was as close to begging as the Master would ever get.

It was also the first time, in any letter, that he had ever apologized.

And it was enough.

***

“Grandfather!”

The door looked the same. Weathered yet stately, its woodgrain bathed in the warm afternoon suns. Then again, all logic would’ve assumed it would be the same, but there was always something peculiar about returning home that made him expect things to look different for his absence.

“Susan,” the Doctor greeted her with an oof as she hurdled into his chest, squeezing him with all the strength of her youthful arms. “It’s lovely to see you my girl, I’ve missed you terribly.”

She looked the same too, for the most part, although parental foibles tended to make him think she’d grown another inch whenever his back was turned. Same dark hair, same pointed cheekbones, the only sharpness on her otherwise cherubic face. Same eyes that had always looked so eerily like Koschei’s, despite the lack of genetic relation.

“Where have you been? Why did you le— are you really back for good?” Her questions had the demanding urgency of a child, but even she had the maturity to stop herself from asking why he’d left directly. Or, more likely, her innately crafty nature informed her that blunt-faced questioning would prove less effective than wheedling the truth from him through attrition.

But before the Doctor could open his mouth to provide what he hoped was an answer, another figure stepped into the hallway.

Susan whirled around at the sound. “Grandpapa, look— Grandfather is back!”

“So he is,” the Master replied faintly, and the look of astonishment that he attempted to smothered revealed just how little faith he’d put in his own letters’ success. He redirected Susan’s attention with a hand to her shoulder. “Would you mind setting the table? I’ve only just laid out our meal, but it appears we’ll be needing a third place set.”

Her eyes darted between them as she grinned cheekily, reading it for the signal it was. “Of course! I’ll leave you two to it,” she chirped merrily, throwing the Doctor one last look of joy before wandering back into the house, leaving them alone.

“Doctor.”

“Master.”

Even after decades of use, he still had yet to wrap his tongue around the questionable name choice. The Master had earned his right to choose upon graduation like anyone else, but he wasn’t sure it would ever sit right in his throat.

The Master’s lips were pressed thin. “You left,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with several emotions and no fewer accusations.

“And now I’m back,” the Doctor replied, immediately wincing at the flippancy with which it sounded. “As you requested.”

“Obedience? You? What a novel change, I hope you didn’t strain yourself from the effort.”

He’d forgotten that this regeneration of the Master’s was particularly prone to sarcasm, in a way that felt at odds with his own body’s stiff earnest. “Look,” he faltered, glancing longingly towards the house’s interior where the smell of lunch was wafting thorough. “This isn’t the time or place for this sort of discussion; can it wait?”

The Master’s stilted frown made it clear that he’d like to refuse, but there was hesitation there. He still seemed half-shocked to see him and the hope behind his eyes was a wary sort, as though he feared that any sudden movement could reverse such an improbable turn of events.

Between the way his expression tugged at the Doctor’s hearts and his own urgency to delay the inevitable, he found himself falling back onto flattery. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had your cooking, you know.” Upturned lips and wide eyes met the Master’s guilelessly. “TARDIS replicators are no match.”

It didn’t dissipate the wariness, but there was a sparkly of warmth now too. “Indubitably. As if I’d be outdone by a mere machine.” He stepped aside, gesturing to allow the Doctor passage through the door.

He wasn’t sure what did it. Perhaps it was the brush of the Master’s robe against his own as he passed; the doorframe was too small for two full-grown Time Lords to inhabit comfortably, but that hadn’t stopped the Master from lingering there, regardless. Perhaps it was the familiar smell of the hearth, of the clink of dishware from the kitchen in the distance. Susan still hummed to herself as she worked, doubtlessly something she’d inherited from himself. Was it the friendly and familiar squeak of wood under his feet, or the firm hand that pressed against the small of his back?

For the first time in two months, the Doctor felt hope.  

It was almost enough to make him ignore the way time buzzed and convulsed around their peripheries, pulsating like the gut of a great beast around a meal half-digested, or a job half-done. Almost enough for him to turn a blind eye to the unease sitting heavy in the pit of his own stomach.

Almost.

***

His flattery hadn’t been baseless. The Master had always been an exemplary cook.

“Where did you go?” It was Susan who finally put an end to the delay he’d bought himself with light pleasantries and mouthfuls of food. Her eyes were large and curious, and to her right he saw the Master stiffen imperceptibly, awaiting his answer with equal scrutiny. “Grandpapa said you had to leave on an adventure.”

“Did he now?” The Doctor dabbed at his mouth with a napkin as he shot the Master a frosty look for his lack of warning. “I suppose I did. The TARDIS picked up a distress call on Regus Four, and I found myself obliged to answer.”

It wasn’t a complete lie. He’d taken that same call one week after he’d made his escape.

“What, for two whole months?” Even Susan looked disbelieving at that, and next to her the Master was making no attempts to assist his story. His hands were folded on the oaken tabletop with all the poise of an inquisitor, prepared to bear witness to any measure of torture for the right information.  

“Dictatorships don’t exactly overthrow themselves, you know,” the Doctor said, sounding a tad harsher than he’d intended if her brief look of hurt meant anything. “One has to free the insurgents, bolster the revolution, languish a few weeks in a jailcell, design a genius escape, dethrone the head of the operation— you know how it is.”

“No, I’d daresay we don’t,” the Master cut in firmly.

There was a moment of silence punctuated only by the clink of cutlery, in which the Doctor was tempted to interject with multiple memories from their youth that evidenced the contrary, but he decided that would only invite further questioning.

“Even so, it sounds fascinating!” Susan enthused, and there was a wanderlust in her eyes that was all too familiar. Between them, the Doctor wasn’t sure whether it was he or the Master who should take credit or blame for having put it there.

He couldn’t find it in his hearts to dampen it. “You would have loved it. It’s an island planet, chunks of free-floating soil that change the layout of the continental structure with the mathematical precision of the tides.” Even the Master’s expression had softened now, and he couldn’t help a whimsical smile. Three peas in a pod, they were— incorrigible. “And the people there, they have the most distinctive rank system signaled through their hats…”

The Doctor spent the next hour regaling them with anecdotes, ranging from the dangerous to the absurd. Although, he took care to edit out the worst moments of peril; it wouldn’t do for neither Susan’s worry nor the Master’s wrath to mention how sharp the guards’ spears had felt under his chin, or how his escape had come not minutes before he was designated for the execution block.

“Maybe next time I could come along?” Susan appeared so hopeful, darting her gaze between the two of them in silent assessment of which would be more likely to grant permission. “All three of us, together? It doesn’t have to be Regus, we could try somewhere new! You did promise me, after your trip to Xerbos.”

He went rigid, and across from him the Master did the same.

Xerbos. The final matchstick, kindling as they both were.

“And what about you?” the Doctor pressed onwards, giving her request no more than a half-smile’s acknowledgement. “Both of you? What have I missed in my absence?”

The following hour was spent being recounted tales of Gallifrey in turn, all that he’d missed of their lives during his time away. Susan had taken a research sabbatical that oriented her work around home rather than remaining in the dormitory halls. He tried not to read into that, nor the way her voice waivered or the Master’s brow creased as she said it. She was a brilliant child, but she had never quite integrated into academy life or the company of her peers. Always the outcast, despite her academic achievements, in a way with which both he and the Master could sympathize. But at least they’d had each other to liven their days, rendering the stuffy academy halls nearly tolerable. Susan chose to come home in her free time fiftyfold more than either of them had ever bothered returning to their own families.

As his first letter stated, the Master had landed a job in the citadel after the untimely passing of an old chancellor, in his eleventh regeneration and well-past his ten thousandth year. A job in the Matrix chambers— as Underkeeper, no less. But despite the clear pride in his voice as he reported it, there was restlessness brewing there too. It was written into his fingers as they tapped along the table’s surface, stroking absently along the crystal of his drinking glass, and in the scornful tilt of his mouth as he griped about his colleagues’ repression, their lackluster minds, the mess of red tape that hindered the council.

By the time their voices fell quiet, evening had crept its way through the windows. With it came a fatigue in his bones that made him feel twice his hundred and eighty-three years of age. Susan excused herself to their basement lab with a last hug from behind his seated shoulders, leaving himself and the Master alone in the dusk.

They waited until the heard the basement door click before beginning the inevitable.

“You left,” The Master repeated it again, colder and more matter-of-fact than he had been in the entryway hours before.

“I did.” The Doctor steadfastly fixed his gaze out the window and onto the moonlit hillside.

“Without a hint as to where you were going. Without a word to Susan, to me—”

“I watched you kill someone.”

It was as good of a conversation-stopper as any. He wrenched his eyes away from the window, only to find the Master’s features twisting in frustration, harshened by the moonlight. “An armed insurgent,” he hissed, with the stress of an old would stirring, “who wanted to kill you, kill us both.”

“We were on their side! the Doctor cried out, turning to face the other Time Lord fully. “He was just confused! They hadn’t expected us to infiltrate the palace so quickly, and—”

“No, you were on their side!” the Master cut him off to interject, quieting only when realized they had escalated to a volume Susan might overhear. “You were,” he hissed. “We were only there because you felt the need to interrupt our travels by joining a revolt.”

“Against a dictator! One who was killing people in the streets! Who might have reigned a hundred years had we not stopped him.”

“And how is that our duty to enforce? To intervene?”

“Well you didn’t seem worried about ‘undue interference’ when you tried to take the throne straight after!” The words poured from the Doctor's mouth involuntarily and had the notable weight of having finally reached a point.

The Master glared at him in silence, shoulders tensed. “I take it we’ve found the crux of the matter then,” he said eventually, tone clipped. “It’s not the murder you’re worried about after all, it’s the idea that I’d stay behind and make something useful of the mess we helped sow. Yes, clearly destabilizing a foreign government and fleeing straight after is far more responsible—”

 

“It’s both!” the Doctor's fist slammed into the tabletop for emphasis, startling them both with its unexpected force. “You killed someone, and then you genuinely considered staying on as their king! You tried to talk me into staying, ruling with you, and what’s worse— none of that seems to bother you! You don’t seem to think any of that is wrong!” He resented the way his voice cracked towards the end, driving his point somewhere infinitely more vulnerable.

There was silence again. It dragged on for full minutes this time, neither Time Lord willing to concede their point. But eventually there was a warm hand over his fist, still clenched tightly on the dining table. “You left,” the Master repeated again, stroking a thumb over his tensed knuckles until they fell limp in his grasp, “but now you’ve returned. And any disagreement of ours can be cast aside, so long as you stay here.”

Stay with me.

The Doctor wanted to press his point. He wanted to remind him that that’s exactly what he couldn’t do if things continued, how could he? How could he be expected to be party to any of that?

“—And as I said previously, I am sorry.” That hand was grabbing the Doctor’s now, lifting it gently towards a mouth that had nearly two centuries of experience at relieving tension from its grip, and it did so now with precision. “Xerbos was an ill-planned venture. It shan’t happen again, not while there’s so much at stake here.”

The Doctor should have forced him to elaborate on what he deemed at stake. Moreover, he should have asked him to explain which actions he was sorry for, to ensure they’d met a genuine understanding. But it had been an exhausting day, after a hearts-wrenching two months, and he knew precisely how many steps lay between them and the mattress they had specifically purchased decades ago, renown throughout the seven systems for its ergonomic finesse and feather-light fibres.

It was a simple choice. Their debate could stand unsettled for another day.

“Master.” He allowed himself to be guided out of his chair by his captive hand; to have his mouth pulled closer in its stead.

“Doctor,” the Master murmured, fingers stretching around the nape of his neck. “Husband.” The word was more a breath of reverence across his lips than it was a sound before he leaned in to close the gap between them. “My husband.”

It was whispered directly into his mind, bolstered by their physical contact and without invitation. An audacious move, downright immodest, considering the ongoing animosities between them. An action that was so classically him that the Doctor couldn’t help but feel fond for it, as though the strength of his affection was seeping straight through the barriers that two months of solitude had erected.

“Mine,” he allowed himself to project in kind, and the Master groaned involuntarily against his lips.

Mine. Such an irresponsible word, one might think they were still children. Laden with a gallifreyan case-tense to indicate perpetuity, a fixed-point fact. Something saved for marriage vows and certain death, if one risked vocalizing it at all. But impropriety had never stopped them from saying it— regularly, since they were teenagers, and he supposed not even a murder could make the Master stop now.

”Bed?”

The wasn’t sure which of them thought it, but they both nodded their agreement and strolled towards the stairs, and every creak of the floorboards underneath his feet felt like a promise. Like a measure of Pavlovian conditioning, reiterating that he was home. Home. Home.

Let me have this. The Doctor didn’t know who he thought it towards, within the closed privacy of his own mind. To the universe at large perhaps; or any powers that might be listening as he kissed weeks of loneliness, fear, and frustration into the Master’s welcoming embrace. Please, please let me keep this. Let this work!

***

He had always felt an odd pang of envy when he saw the Master and Susan together, matching dark hair and mischievous brows alike. It was ridiculous really, to be envious of their similarities. Or of the fact that they were both on their second regenerations while he remained in his first. Almost obscene, considering the circumstances.

Susan’s parents had been colleagues of the Doctor’s, sharing a research position he’d earned hardly past his hundred and twentieth year. While not exactly friends, they’d shared an amicable occupational relationship at one of capital’s more avant-garde laboratories. Discussing one’s personal life with Time Lord colleagues was so rarely done, and as such, he hadn’t even known they had a child until an explosion ate through a chunk of the lab, as well as their living quarters next door. His colleagues had been incinerated in an instant. The Doctor heard the news shortly after, trickling across the citadel in hushed whispers as only gossip could, and by the time he made it back to the laboratory, there were no traces of their bodies remaining over which to mourn.

It couldn’t have taken the Doctor more than ten minutes to rush back to the lab after hearing the news, having just popped out for lunch and a gander. Unfortunately, what had taken him ten minutes, the Master had managed in an impressive seven. As he’d later state, the phrase ‘unprecedented explosion’ coupled with ‘multiple fatalities’ seemed to demand the Doctor’s involvement, and he’d been halfway to the lab before he’d noticed he was sprinting.

Of course the Doctor wasn’t there, but the Master spent the three minutes before his arrival searching frantically through the wreckage all the same. The Doctor arrived at the scene panting and wide-eyed, just in time to see the Master standing there amongst the ash, pale administrative robes irreparably stained and carrying what appeared to be a small child, all with a look of blind terror on his face the likes of which the Doctor had never seen there.

The Master looked up immediately and caught his eyes, and the intensity of the relief that flooded his expression could’ve brought the walls down anew.

It was the last the Doctor ever saw of the Master’s first body.

Mere children know not to touch another Time Lord mid-regeneration, lest your own be swept up with it. It’s one of the fundamental lessons taught at the academy, right alongside walking, talking, not wetting oneself, and fifth-dimensional physics. To the Master’s credit, he hadn’t even been sure the child was alive, much less capable of regeneration, and certainly not that she was conscious enough to open one tiny eye and reach a singed hand towards his face as she did so.  

***

It hadn’t been a question after that. It wasn’t that the Doctor and the Master hadn’t intended on looming children of their own. They’d discussed it once in their sixties, still at the academy and bleary-eyed over a late-night flask of fermented ginger. But without putting words to it, there was an implicit and shared fear that they wouldn't grow out of their own childish behavior long enough to raise one, not to mention their mutual lack of parental role-models.

(Not that gallifreyan parenting required much more than keeping them alive for six years and shipping them off to the academy, but they’d always pledged that if they did it, they’d be better than that. Better than what they’d had.)

But then the Doctor found himself sitting at a bedside in the citadel’s medbay, and the Master’s new face was slack with shock and wonder as they both gazed at the child-sized medical cot aside them, where a girl no more than three years of age slumbered peacefully with Koschei’s features.

She was theirs. It was a fact before it was a question. It had been the Doctor’s experiment that exploded that day, as he’d come to find out; he’d taken her first face, and the Master's own first body had given her a second one.

They loved her instantly.

***

“We’ll need to sort out your return to work.”

He had woken slowly, sliding back to consciousness with the leisurely grace of a dozen familiar sensations and the Master’s lips against his neck. Those lips had followed around to his mouth, collarbone, sternum, chest— and subsequently, they had decided to stay in bed a little longer. But eventually the Master had risen to dress, only to return with a cup of tea (kept in stock, despite his departure, no matter how the Master emphasised his distaste for the stuff) and prying questions about his intentions for the day.

“I’ll need to return to my own duties— the riveting life of mid-level bureaucratic administration calls,” the Master said, straightening the collar on his formal robes.

The Doctor watched his reflection in the bureau mirror, noting the way this body of the Master’s made even the most pretentious lines of the outfit look refined. “I suppose it can’t hurt to tag along.”

“I suspect the laboratory will welcome you back with open arms,” collar fastened, the Master turned his attention the Doctor’s nightshirt, “assuming you remember where your closet is.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” the Doctor grumbled, but stepped from the bed nevertheless. “About the lab, not the wardrobe. My departure was graceless, I didn’t exactly hand in my month’s notice.”

The Master bit his lip, visibly refraining from responding with how intimately familiar he was with his lack of grace. “They’ll take you back nevertheless. Plodders, the lot of them. There’s not a mind in all the laboratories of Gallifrey that contains a fraction of your genius.”

The Doctor pulled a robe over his head, grinning from behind his ruffled hair. “Not even your own?”

“In the lab, I said. I was aiming for flattery, not lunacy.” The Master stepped forward to smooth the hair from his eyes, noting the strands of grey that had sprung out amidst the blond. “Although, I’d rather you didn’t tell the Rani I said that.”

He snorted. “Duly noted. The last thing you need is to lose another body on such short notice.”

“Oh?” the Master feigned surprise, letting his eyes rove over his own body before bringing them back to meet the Doctor’s with a gleam of mischief. “Do you like this form then? I’d love to have your thoughts.”

Something indulgent stretched his lips as he played along, stepping back and letting the Master feel the heady weight of his own eyes as they traced him over head to foot. His new departmental robes were black, punctuated only by the copper-encrusted shoulderpiece. One would think it had been designed specifically for this form of his, a striking compliment to his olive skin and salt-and-pepper hair. Broader across the chest and face then his first body had been, though he wasn’t sure those eyes had changed in more than color; now a rich brown rather than blue.  

“I see you’ve kept the facial hair,” the Doctor offered offhandedly, brushing a hand along his jaw.

The Master leaned into his hand, his eyes darkening. “You like it,” he pressed.

“I do no such thing,” he protested, even as his fingers continued to stroke.

“You do,” he rumbled, and the Doctor momentarily conceded the point. (Mentally— he’d certainly never tell the man, far better to keep him guessing.)

“You’re still vain, no change there,” he drawled, letting his fingers stretch towards the fine lines at the corner of the Master’s eyes that he knew his own held similarly. Although occasionally I wonder if I should force myself to regenerate early, just to keep up with you. I’m afraid this body of mine will be fully grey within fifty years, and I’d loathe to look old while you don’t.”

“Now who’s vain?” the Master snorted, before bringing his own hands up to stroke under the Doctor’s eyes similarly. “Don’t you dare,” he murmured, a threat accompanied by an overabundance of adoration for the delicate lines under his fingers, so strong that it bled in through the Doctor’s mental defenses.

The Doctor shivered, momentarily overcome by the unexpected surge of emotion. No one, Time Lord or otherwise, loved with the intensity of Koschei, and it never failed to leave him shaken. “And—” he interjected, unable to stop himself from breaking the intimacy of the moment by stretched the world out, pulling his face into an expression of mock-assessment as he scrutinized the top of the Master’s head, “—yes, that settles it. You’re still a full three centimeters shorter than me.”

The Master’s face twitched, taking multiple seconds to process the Doctor’s ribbing as he was pulled gracelessly from the moment’s sentiment. “Such insults,” he murmured, and the Doctor found himself pushed none too gently backwards to land back on the mattress. The Master strode forwards until he was towering above him, dark and menacing as he stepped between his legs. “What’s to be done about that?”

“Is this a threat?” the Doctor continued their game, even as the Master’s gaze raised the hair on his arms. “Yet another similarity then. This body pulls off threatening nearly as badly as your first.”

It was a plain-faced goad, but it worked all the same.

“Well then…” There were hands on the Doctor’s knees, inching up the robe he’d only just donned. “I’ll be sure to threaten you regularly until it sticks— perhaps I simply require practice.” 

***

They had parted ways in the vaulted entrance of the main amphitheater, as the Master headed towards the panopticon center and the Doctor had made all pretenses of heading towards the laboratories.

In reality however, he'd hovered by the entrance to the lab complex before walking straight past, strolling instead towards a nearby grove of trees in the central common. For a moment he just allowed himself to bask, sinking down onto a bench to enjoy the warmth of the twin suns, the chatter of gallifreyan tongues on their daily commute, the breeze from the mountains trailing down through the leaves.

Home. The Doctor smiled, tilting back his head into the warmth and shutting his eyes. What a foreign concept, for such a familiar set of sensations.

“Shh!”

He cracked an eye open, watching as two children clambered from a nearby window, attempting to stifle their giggles as they landed on unsteady feet. They paused when they saw him looking, frozen like foals in the spotlight at having been caught. He brought one finger to his lips, the universal sign of a secret kept, and shut his eye as he heard the patter of footsteps hurry off into the distance.

“You really shouldn’t encourage such behavior.”

This time the Doctor opened both eyes, straightening his head to see Borusa standing before him and watching the students turn the corner behind the amphitheater despairingly. “It’s unbecoming for a graduate, recent as you may be— much less a Time Lord.”

“Recent?” he snorted, eyeing the other Time Lord. Cropped greying hair, sour pout of a face— truly, it was a day of unchanging things. “Try sixty years ago, give or take.”

“A hairsbreadth, in the grand scheme.” Borusa's gaze had turned onto him now, with even greater distaste than it had held for the errant students. “The last thing this academy needs is anyone following in your footsteps.”

“Not quite in our footsteps,” the Doctor replied, flashing him a brief smile that made his frown all the worse. “Koschei and I my feet would’ve waited until third period and found themselves stepping out the south-facing cloister window; far less foot-traffic down that way.”

“Koschei,” Borusa intoned dryly. “Yes, I take it the Master is pleased at your return? Your absence was noted in his workplace mood.”

He raised his eyebrows at that. “Bad enough that it made the rounds to the academy staffroom?”

“Hardly. I’ve relinquished my teaching duties in favor of acting as Chancellor, as well as supervising the Matrix while we seek out a new Keeper.”

“Impressive,” the Doctor said, and he meant it. Although Borusa had never been a fan of his or the Master’s antics, it was always heartening to see an old face doing well. “A new Keeper, and so soon after the death of the underkeeper as well?”

“Yes, a pity.” There was something stiff in Borusa’s eyes as he said it, deeper than his distaste for the Doctor. Worry, perhaps? “—Similarly impressive was the way the Master swept in to take it. He had the department under his thrall in days.”

“It’s a talent of his,” the Doctor said, his smile thin. No, he didn’t like the way the other Time Lord’s face tightened when he said the Master’s name one bit. “Have there been any issues?”

“None. At least, nothing has evidenced itself. Rest assured, your husband has already received far more appreciation from the staff than his predecessor, although it would be unfair to speak ill of the dead.” He didn’t need to speak ill of him. Borusa’s tone alone made it abundantly clear what sort of figure had held the position before the Master sidled in. He’d heard similar stories over the previous night’s dinner, vignettes of a career bureaucrat who’d been a hindrance at best, and a brute at worst.

He only wondered why the Master had neglected to mention the Keeper’s death alongside the Underkeeper’s own.

“Well, I’d best be off," the Doctor stood, dusting off his robes against the dry grass that clung to its hem. “Lovely catching up with you Borusa old chap— and in the common, no less! How refreshing to stand here with you during school hours without risk of a bollocking.” What shade of pink had settled onto the other Time Lord’s face at his casual manner turned puce at his use of vulgarities. He almost wanted to risk a collegiate pat on the shoulder, just to see if the Time Lord could faint from outrage alone. “Give my love to the Master and tell him I’ll be home in time for tea.”

“I will give him no such thing!” Borusa exclaimed, blustering even as his face darkened and puckered to match his robes, but the Doctor only threw him a final wave over his shoulder as he strolled towards the laboratory complex.

The unexpected humor of the encounter had almost pushed the day’s purpose out of the Doctor's mind entirely. Here I go— off to re-join polite and productive society at last, he thought to himself, amidst the echo of his footsteps as he made his way up the spiraling stone stairs. He winced even as he thought it, scowling as his hand reached the door.

No, even his mind hadn’t been able to imbue the words with the enthusiasm his hearts lacked for the idea. 

Chapter 2

Summary:

Trouble brews, the Doctor introspects, and the house receives an unexpected visitor.

The fact that the Master had been right left the Doctor unexpectedly irked. The laboratory had welcomed him back instantly, with as open of arms as any council-funded scientific venture could manage.

“Why certainly— please take all of our most precious supplies, we’d like nothing more than for you to waste a week’s worth of our quantum filament making a seven-dimensional yo-yo!” the Doctor seethed, voice pitching uncharitably before frowning at himself. Hadn’t he just been complaining about the Master’s immutable sarcasm this time around? Rassilon, his bad habits had always clung to the Doctor like cat hair.

Off to the left, the Master was smiling to himself as he cleared the remainder of their supper into the kitchen's disposal shoot.

“It’s not funny!” the Doctor protested.  The way the Master’s lips curved further upwards with every gripe was somehow more of an insult than any verbal rebuttal. “Tivanakorasan always hated me, and now he wants to— what, promote me?”

“Yes, it sounds truly intolerable that your co-workers hold you in such high regard. Shame on them.”

There it was. Another incremental smile, proportional to the glower the Doctor could feel stretching across his own face. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate their support,” he urged, despite the way his lips twisted around the word like a curse. “It just seems odd. Unseemly. It’s beneath them, to grovel for my help like that. Why, they’re one of the preeminent labs in the citadel!”

“Yes, and you’re their star.” The kiss the Master pressed into the top of his head toed the fine line between affectionate and patronising. He sank down into the chair opposite, regarding him evenly. “But it’s not their recognition you find so aggravating, is it? You’re angry that they’re not angry at you.”

“Ridiculous,” the Doctor sniffed, dropping the Master’s gaze. And it was. Unfortunately, it was also true. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly why their complacency bothered him, but it did. He’d left, hadn’t he? Unceremoniously, and having taken multiple lesser-used lab instruments with him as he did so. And the only thing it had earned him was a tentative question about whether they’d be expecting to see their temporal fusion tank returned anytime soon. Of all the nerve.

But before he could think anything further, Susan came bounding into the room with arms full of a thermos, a blanket, and a nanoscreen. “I think that’s everything,” she said, shifting the bulk in her arms to peer at them both. “Are we ready?”

“But of course,” he said, rising towards the back door as the others made to follow.

They passed through a small garden of herbs and foreign shrubbery that the Doctor was pleased to see had survived his absence, until the stone walkway gave way to soft dirt beneath. Only a few steps later and the terrain became steep; not so much as to be treacherous, but enough that he started to feel this regeneration’s age throbbing in his knees. Up, up, and further—up until the tin rustle of tall grass gave way to the stillness of the treeline beyond. He turned as they walked, looking first back down at the house, then towards the citadel beyond. It always appeared so quaint from here, more of a child’s snow globe than a metropolitan from this vantage point; beautifully ornate, but unfathomably fragile when compared to the cliffsides and forests surrounding it.

“Here it is!” Up ahead, Susan’s voice rang out triumphantly as she plonked down the burden in her arms. She’d found a suitably flat clearing, without any overhead obstruction from the nearby trees. The Master was close behind her, fastidiously straightening out the edges of the blanket on the dirt as her gaze fixed upwards delightedly.

Susan was too old to fit comfortably in either of their laps anymore, but that didn’t stop her from settling between them on the blanket, knees to her chest as she fiddled with the screen.

“Where shall we start today?” The Doctor asked. More than half of all sentient planets he’d seen had some form of stargazing, but none did it quite like the Time Lords.

“Hmm.” She lowered the screen and stared up into the vast dark. “I think…there!” she indicated towards a cluster of stars in the distance, faintly green and half-covered by a circumferential mist.

The Doctor smiled, flicking through snippets of near-forgotten memories. “Ah, the Ehigii system,” he murmured, directing her attention as the Master lifted the screen from her hands. “An excellent choice. As we see it now, the nebula has reached the end of its life. The remaining planets have lifted their continental shelves so high that their cliffs rise in the thousands of meters above the water. But you can still find ruins of the people that lived there— whole complex metropolitans carved into the ground.”

“But if we look back a bit further,” the Master interjected, lifting the screen over the nebula and fiddling with a dial until the stars brightened and dilated on the viewer, sharpening into focus, “we can see just how thoroughly they flourished. The planets of Ehigii have some of the most sophisticated metalwork in the universe— even further and we can even visualise the transport tracks they used to tie twinned planets.”

It was a child’s trick, gallifreyan science at its most basic. They might be locked to a temporally-linear Gallifrey, but with a nanoscreen and a little patience, they could peak into the complete lifespan of every nearby galactic body.

A child’s trick...but one that never failed to leave them mesmerised, nevertheless.

For a moment the Doctor was distracted by a pang of nostalgia for his TARDIS, momentarily relocated to a seldom-used corner of their basement. He hadn’t even told the Master where he’d stuck her, nor had he asked, in what he suspected was a gesture of good faith. He clenched his knees to his chest, shuddering in a way that had nothing to do with the sharp chill of the evening. He supposed he’d have to return her to the citadel eventually. No more unscheduled jaunts to the golden age of Ehigii, or anywhere else for that matter.

He was startled by a tap on his knee as the Master passed him a steaming mug from their thermos, casting a critical eye over his shivering. The Doctor smiled thinly but was saved having to come up with an excuse by Susan’s excitement. “Incredible!” she breathed, with the dual wonders of a scholar and a child. “Absolutely stunning— can we go there grandfather?”

“Yes,” he whispered, still lost in thoughts about his ship. “I can only hope so.”

The Master was still watching him, something tight in his eyes at his tone. “Where to next, my dear?” he asked, passing Susan the nanoscreen.

She paused, dark hair shining in the distant lights of the citadel and brow scrunched as she contemplated the view. “There!” she pointed, decidedly. “And there too, of course! And then that bright pair, a little to the left.”

He chucked, zooming the view onto the first of her requests. “But of course,” he nodded, meeting the Doctor’s gaze over her head as he said it. “All of them, anything you’d like— it’s all yours. We have nothing but time.”

The Doctor’s hearts clenched, in a way he couldn’t categorise as either affectionate or ominous alone.

***

“I ran into your boss earlier today.”

The Master paused while unfastening his dark robes to throw him a puzzled glance, silhouetted by the evening light streaming through the window.

“Borusa,” the Doctor clarified, stowing his own overcoat into the wardrobe before sitting down heavily on the bed to unlace his shoes. “He seemed well— or rather, as well as he gets. Same as ever, really.”

“Hardly my boss,” the Master grumbled, his hands resuming their work. “But as acting Chancellor, we do see more of each other than either of us would prefer. Only until a new Keeper is chosen, of course.”

“Of course,” the Doctor repeated dutifully. He paused, watching as the Master walked into the en-suite and waiting for further elaboration, but none was given. “You never mentioned the Keeper had died,” he began again, forcing his voice to remain casual. “As well as the underkeeper. That’s quite the stroke of bad luck.”

The Master’s dark chuckle trailed into the bedroom before the man himself. “Bad luck? That all depends on who you ask.” He paused, standing at the foot of the bed with a severity that belied his ruffled hair and nightshirt. “Not necessarily dead though; for the moment, he has simply been declared missing. But one goes missing long enough and it might as well be a death, as far as bureaucratic practices go. If they find out he has shirked his duties without having the decency to die first, they’ll make him wish it were so.”

“Hmm. I suppose he should have been a researcher then,” the Doctor grumbled, re-imbittered at his own forgiving re-hire.

The bed sagged minutely as the Master sat next to him, enough weight that the Doctor’s body was tilted to press against his. “What is it you really wanted to ask?”

“Will you be applying for the position?” he said plainly, turning to meet the Master's eyes.

“No.”

The Doctor breathed a sigh of relief he hadn’t been aware of holding, one whose source he didn’t quite understand.

“I have already applied for the position. Four days ago.”

The Doctor froze, shoulder stiffening where it was pressed into the Master’s warmth. “Already?” he breathed, stomach clenching. “But you only took the position of underkeeper weeks ago!”

“Six weeks ago,” the Master clarified, running a hand down the Doctor’s exposed thigh where his nightshirt had bunched up. “Quite long enough to be in a position of subservience, I think. Long enough that I’ve gained the favour of most of the Matrix chamber staff.”

“But you’ll need validation from the high council for the Keepership. Do you think they’ll give you the position while you’re only in your second regeneration?”

A sudden coldness fell over his eyes that the Doctor hadn’t seen since— well, not since Xerbos. He swallowed, throat suddenly dry and inordinately wary. “We’ll see,” the Master murmured, jaw clenching visibly as he said it. “If not, they shall simply have to be made to see reason.”

“Reason?” The Doctor laughed, but the knot in his stomach was intractable. “Not something the council has ever been known for.”

“Perhaps not.” The determination behind those eyes was still verging on worrisome, but there was warmth there now too. “However, I flatter myself for being quite good at persuasion—especially when it comes to getting the things that I want.”

“Oh, really? And just what is it you want?” The Doctor feigned ignorance at his blatant intentions, as much as he did the hand on his thigh as it escalated from soothing to covetous, sliding under his nightshirt.

He allowed the shirt to be pulled over his head as the Master stripped his own similarly. When a hand rose to push the Doctor down onto the mattress he grabbed it tightly, pulling the Master down with him as he fell. “So many things,” the Master whispered, running a hand up from his naval to his chest, before settling over his right heart. “Occupational success is amongst them, certainly. Along with absolute power and unwavering admiration.”

Each word was punctuated with a kiss, trailing further down his navel as the Master sunk down between his played legs, one hand still laid solidly over his heart. “An escape from the crushing superiority of feeble-minded elders who would think themselves smarter for naught but their age. To see Susan flourish under the recognition she so rightfully deserves. To see you, your brilliance, your spirit—” The Master's mouth paused as it reached the base of his hardening cock before swerving, eyes glinting gleefully as lips, teeth, and beard alike scraped along his inner thigh. “—revered, as you so rightfully deserve.”

The Doctor knew his cheeks were flushed, in response to far more than the hot breath teasing alongside sensitive skin.“Never let it be said that you lack ambition,” he started dryly, before stuttering out in a moan of pleasure as the Master’s mouth finally wrapped around his cock. “Or hubris,” he continued petulantly, full minutes later as he clawed his way back towards coherency. “Although sanity seems woefully underrepresented.”

He could very nearly feel the Master’s eyeroll, letting out another unintentional yelp as he let his teeth brush lightly over his cock in retribution. “If it helps, I also want to fuck you into the mattress,” the Master said eventually, withdrawing his mouth and kneeling back on the bedspread to grab a salve from their nightstand. “How’s that for ambition?”

“The very height of hubris,” the Doctor declared, but his smile was as broad as the Master’s own. He was still stretched from their morning’s digression. Faintly sore, and undeniably stiff. But he knew that the insistence with which the Master’s fingers pressed into him was more for the man’s own indulgence than any necessity.

“And yourself?”

He glared at the Master for having the nerve to ask questions while his fingers stroked and prodded all reason from his brain. “Yes, alright, I also have my share of hubris—”

“What do you want, Doctor?” The Master’s eyes stared him down, uncannily visible despite the darkness that had swept the room.

And, for a moment, the Doctor allowed his own to fall shut and give the question thought. What must it be like to be him? He had no doubt that all of the claims the Master made had been in earnest. Koschei had always possessed more self-assurance and concrete want than any single individual had the right. Goal-driven, always, with at least fifteen different roadmaps to success behind any single scheme. He never worried about where he fit; places and people were simply things to stretch to fit his will.

“I want…”

What exactly did he want? The Doctor's mind flashed to the morning at the lab. To his own ire at having been allowed back, as if nothing had changed. As if things were fine. As if everyone would be just fine with him languishing there for years, decades— leading the lab within a century, perhaps? Passing a whole millennium or two creating devices for the council to fawn over and file away at will? He thought of the tall grass around the citadel, of its passers-by in their austere robes, and the familiar amphitheatre of his youth alike— and how they all seemed to sit in his head like loose teeth; unrooted and inevitably outgrown.

Then the Doctor thought about how lonely he’d been whilst he’d been gone. How much he’d missed the sheer notion of home. How he jumped planet to planet fruitlessly looking for any being who might have the slightest chance of understanding him. How much he’d missed them, missed this, him—

“I want you to fuck me into the mattress too,” the Doctor settled on eventually, purposefully flippant. As much of a truth as it was an avoidance, at any rate.

The Master’s teeth were bright in the dark, reflected off the moonlight shining in through the bedroom window as he laughed, open-mouthed and satisfied. “See?” A hand ran down his abdomen lovingly one last time before hitching up his hips. “My perfect match— equally as sane as I am.”

The Doctor could only worry that he was right.

***

The Doctor awoke to the sound of a bell.

It took him full seconds of bleary-eyed blinking and stretching his muscles before he recognised it as the doorbell. Sprawled over his left side, the Master grumbled half-conscious reproach against his chest; face buried, one arm held fast around the his torso, and without a single intention of waking fully to answer it.

As the noise trailed off, the Doctor let himself relax back into the warmth of his hold, lids drooping as he basked in the softness of the pillow beneath his head and the luxury of the silken sheets around them. He may not have the Master’s indominable ability to sleep through disruption, but even he could admit that remaining in bed and leaving the door unanswered was the preferred thing to—

BZZZZZZZT

Alright! He pressed wordless apologies against the flare of low-level psychic annoyance that leaked across the Master’s mental barriers as he freed himself from under his arm, joints cracking as he clambered to his feet and threw on a dressing gown. He padded dully down the stairs, wincing against every loud creak of their aged wood as he stumbled to open the door.

The pallid and pinched face of the Time Lord on his doorstep was abundantly familiar, in a way that did nothing to improve his mood. “It’s about time you—” the man paused, wrinkling his nose as he took in his haphazardly tied gown and mussed hair. “Sleeping? Still? At this hour?”

For all his disdain, the Doctor might have answered the door wearing only a tea cosy and a smile. “Hello Braxiatel,” he muttered stiffly, unconsciously re-tying his gown. “I’ll have you know it’s my day off, and I was rather intent on not leaving my bed.”

“Yes, well the less I know about that, the better,” came the stiff reply as his brother crossed his arms in a flurry of formal navy robes. He paused expectantly, eyes jumping over the Doctor’s shoulder to his face before huffing. “Would you be so kind as to let me in?”

“Do you want to come in?” the Doctor responded with genuine bafflement. In all the decades they’d resided there, he could count the number of times Braxiatel had voluntarily visited their home on half a hand, much less asked to come inside. 

Despite the early hour, the morning suns were already peaking over the hilltops in a manner that promised a sweltering noon, bringing visible sweat to Braxiatel’s hairline that he fastidiously dabbed with a handkerchief. “More than I’d like to conduct business on your doorstep, certainly.”

Wordlessly, the Doctor stepped aside to let him in, sweeping him towards the kitchen.

“Where’s Arkytior today?” Braxiatel questioned, casting a critical eye over the off-world artifacts lining the shelves as they passed.

“Susan,” the Doctor corrected, ushering him towards the table. “She prefers to go by Susan, as you well know. We don’t stand on ceremony in this house.”

Braxiatel’s eyes fell towards a curio cabinet in the room’s corner; one that had been the cause of furious debate, displaying a menagerie of brightly-coloured earthen knick-knacks that never failed to make the Master wince when he saw it. “Evidently not,” he drawled.

“She’ll have left for the academy early this morning, likely she’ll return in a day or two when her schedule allows,” he continued, ignoring the slight. “Can I offer you tea? Coffee? Fermented ginger? Slitheen milslough?”

The way his face twisted further with every offer almost made the Doctor’s rude awakening worth it. “I’ll pass. I don’t plan on dawdling, I’m here on official business I’m afraid.”

“Oh?” The Doctor stirred his tea, sinking down into the chair opposite. “And what’s your business these days, vice-minister of stern looks? Ambassador of over-starched linens? Chief executor of—”

“Acquisitions,” Braxiatel interrupted, throwing him a pointed glance. “Head of, actually, thanks for asking.”

“Ah, accounting then? How predictably dreadful.”

“Accounting yes— and legislative tax,” he continued, as if the addendum would help liven up the description. “But we also oversee storage and administration of TARDISes, as well as their safe return.”

“Ah,” the Doctor replied faintly, and left it at that. He sipped his tea, unwilling to take a step closer to the implicit matter at hand.

When it became clear he had no intention of breaking the silence, Braxiatel pressed on. “Word is, you’ve recently returned from months off-planet. A rather impromptu jaunt, if my sources are to be believed.”

The Doctor’s smile was brittle and toothless. “What can I say? I found myself in immediate need of a vacation.”

“And yet— so soon after your vacation with the Master to the Presthik system; a trip whose location was similarly unregistered, I might add. Has it slipped your mind that unlicensed TARDIS travel is illegal?”

“I’m a scientist,” he bit out, irascible to hide his worry. “I’m allowed to utilise the older models for supply runs.”

“Yes, but supply runs don’t usually involve bringing one’s spouse.”

The Doctor took another sip of his tea, purposefully noisy, for lack of any plausible excuse.

“Although, the Master didn’t come on your latest venture, did he?” Braxiatel held his gaze, eyebrows raised. “Trouble in paradise? Perhaps not so much a vacation as a—”

“Did you have a point?” he snapped, setting down his mug with a loud clatter. “Or did you wander over just so you could cast aspersions with an audience?”

“You need to return the TARDIS, Doctor,” Braxiatel stated bluntly. “Its absence has been noticed, alongside your own. The council will overlook its loss for a week longer, but no more.”

“But she has been decommissioned!” The Doctor cried out, hearts clenching at the thought. “They don’t use her anymore— she means nothing to them!”

“Yes, but its time she was rendered for parts and her journey logs committed to the Matrix,” Braxiatel pressed, unmoved by the way it made the Doctor’s expression drop. “It’s her duty, same as ours.”

“Parts?” he whispered in quiet horror. “You want to scrap her?”

“She’s a scientific instrument Doctor, not a pet! Her purpose is to facilitate the collection of foreign data for the purposes of research. That task has been completed, it’s time the information was put to use.”

“I don’t have her,” he said automatically, not even attempting to hide it as a lie. “She must have wandered off on her own, silly me.”

The eyebrow Braxiatel raised in response was neither sympathetic nor trusting. “Well, let’s hope she finds her way back within the week,” he enunciated, slow and scathing. “Lest a collections team pay a visit and search the property. Only to see whether she’s gotten herself lost amongst the fields, of course. Or perhaps the basement?”

“Of course,” he parroted back quietly, wide-eyed and hearts pounding.

Braxiatel watched him in silence for a moment, expression calculating. “My department has an unfortunate habit of being single-minded in its attention,” he began, regaining the Doctor’s full attention with the digression. “When we receive a large case, all the others tend to fall to the wayside, and I’m ashamed to admit that few are ever reinstated. It’s the way of things, sometimes cases get lost.”

He stared at the Doctor emphatically, as though he should be piecing together some hidden depth to his words, rather than sitting at a loss. “Acquisitions also works in-tandem with security, you see— clerical crimes, mostly. Nothing untoward.” Another pause, but still the Doctor remained nonplussed. “Recently, our attentions have turned towards our missing Keeper. Such a pity, him disappearing. But I’m sure your husband has told you all about that.”

“He has,” a third voice chimed in.

Both Braxiatel and the Doctor startled to see the Master leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed.

“Braxiatel,” the Master greeted, in a tone that others might have mistaken for polite.

“Master,” Braxiatel acknowledged, expression tight. “I understand that congratulations are in order, Lord Underkeeper.” Despite his words, not a single muscle in his face appeared the least bit congratulatory.

The Master’s responding head-tilt was a mockery in its own. “You’re too kind,” he intoned, gliding across the kitchen to stand behind the Doctor’s chair, placing a firm hand on his shoulder as he stared Braxiatel down. “Will you be joining us for breakfast?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said, not looking the least bit sorry as he hurried to stand, straightening his robes before glancing towards the Master with blatant accusation. “I rather liked your predecessor, you know.”

“Understandable; his infamous charm could only be matched by your own.” Even if the occupants of the kitchen hadn’t been aware of previous Underkeeper's reputation for the exact opposite, the Master’s tone alone would have signified it as an insult.

“Consider what I’ve said, brother mine,” Braxiatel continued, dropping his gaze. “You’ll be seeing me again soon, either way.”

“Goodbye, Braxiatel.” It left the Doctor’s lips with all the force of a command.

He nodded curtly, not sparring so much as a gaze towards the Master as he turned the corner for the hallway. It wasn’t until he heard the familiar click of the front door falling shut that the Doctor allowed himself to exhale, feeling the Master’s tense hold on his shoulder fall similarly lax.

“Ah, Icicle. I haven’t missed him.” The Master’s hand gave him a fortifying squeeze before withdrawing as he busied himself with the replicator. “What persuaded him to dig up our address after all these years?”

“I think—” he started, choosing his words carefully as he stared into the dregs of his tea. His own reflection stared back at him, equally as pallid as he felt. “I think he was accusing you of murder.”

The rustling behind him fell silent. “Ah,” the Master said eventually. He circled around the Doctor’s right side, leaning against a chair. “Who of, exactly?”

“The Keeper.”

The Master’s expression fell blank, entirely closed off to interpretation. They remained quiet, starting each other down as though waiting on the other for some unspoken assumption to be met. “Well?” the Master started.

“Well nothing,” the Doctor responded, unexpectedly clipped.

“I insist. Ask it,” the Master said flatly, and there was a flicker of challenge behind those eyes.

“Did you k— you don’t have any information on the Keeper’s whereabouts, do you?” It was almost what he meant to ask. It was adjacent to what he really should be asking, circumvential of the point they’d been dancing around since his return, but he couldn’t bring himself to utter the words.

The Master watched him a moment longer, with a flicker of something akin to disappointment. “Information?” he repeated slowly, lips quirking into a sardonic smile. “Always, my dear. But nothing concrete, and nothing worth bringing to the attention of the council.” He disappeared from the Doctor’s line of sight again momentarily before returning to sink down into a chair with his own mug.

“You know I can’t stay if you kill anyone. I won’t,” the Doctor said softly, cursing the cowardice with which his eyes remained resolutely locked to the woodgrain of the table rather than the Time Lord across from him.

The Master’s breath caught audibly, before puffing out in a scoff. “Am I to be punished for Xerbos for the remainder of my regenerations?”

“You can’t tell me my concerns aren’t warranted,” he snapped, irritation fuelling him to rise to the Master’s gaze. 

“Just as you cannot expect me to apologise daily for something you claim to have gotten past,” the Master retorted, arms re-folded and drink forgotten. “Or should I prepare to explain away every passing accusation your brother throws at me? I’m sure he’s built up quite the list over the past two centuries, and you certainly seem keen to believe his word over mine.”

“That’s not— you know that’s not true!” He cried out, suddenly exhausted by the topic. He sighed, rubbing his own eyes wearily. “I trust you. If you tell me you have nothing to do with the Keeper’s disappearance, I’ll believe you.”

He could feel the weight of the Master’s gaze on him, considering, before a hand reached for his own. “I didn’t kill him,” he murmured softly, and the Doctor urged himself to buy into the conviction that bolstered the words.

“Okay,” he said simply, permitting himself a small smile.

And it would be. It had to be okay.

The alternative was unthinkable.

Chapter 3

Summary:

The Doctor attempts to re-establish normality, with minimal success. And all signs point to the Master keeping secrets.

The next morning the Master was gone.

“Sincerest apologies my dear, but duty calls. For a rare change, the council has deigned to give me something other than clerical work. I will be off-planet on a brief recon task until evening. All my love, M.”

The letter was nestled into the dip in the Master’s pillow; indented, still warm from his slumbering weight, and inches from the Doctor’s own. Fingertips that traced lazily over the penned symbols withdrew darkened with ink that had yet to dry.

He flopped back down onto the mattress. The letter slipped from his hands, and he stared aimlessly up at the ceiling as the first prickles of jealousy grazed his thoughts. Off-planet?

While not unheard of, it was a privilege the council only granted to a select few. The Doctor would surely feel happier for the Master if he weren’t so busy envying him the chance. He rolled over onto his stomach, and the groan he pressed into his pillow at the thought of trudging off to work was downright petulant. Still, after another minute he rose from the mattress, posture slumped in defeat as he crossed to the wardrobe and stared blankly down his laboratory robes.

In a moment’s weakness, he considered the merits of dashing off into the TARDIS instead. It would be so simple. All he’d need to do was push aside his work clothes, grab a jumper, throw on a pair of trainers, and hop down to the basement. He could be back before the Master returned even— cover his tracks so that his absence would never be noticed.

Then he thought of how the Master’s expression would tighten if he did find out. How, in all likelihood, he wouldn’t say a word on the subject; he’d barricade an armada of anger and accusations behind clenched teeth for fear that permitting them a voice would make the Doctor leave again. How hurt he’d be, at the notion that the Doctor ran from their home at the very first opportunity, as soon as his back was turned…

Jumpers and fantasies of escape set aside, the Doctor grabbed his laboratory robes.

***

“What have you got there?”

The Doctor was almost certain that he didn’t deserve the suspicion with which the question resounded. He turned to Jarvinderluktanan (or Jarvi, as he’d strong-armed him into letting himself be called, and whose respectful meter of distance between them was undercut by being nearly on his tiptoes in an effort to peek over his shoulder) and sighed, willing his mood into something more tolerant. “Oh, nothing much,” he said mildly, giving the device’s nozzle a final absent-minded tweak before holding it aloft. “It’s a short-wave beam device that sensitises the chloroplast in photosynthesising flora— or procaryotic fauna, should you happen to be on Vercritius-Beta.”

Jarvi remained expressionless, staring at the device with a blank confusion.

“It’s not all that complicated,” the Doctor pressed on. “It simply increases the density of light-harvesting complexes per grana, although I’m working on widening the beam’s breadth as we speak—”

“But why?”

Across the room’s sleek interior of marble tabletops and vaulted windows, Tivanakorasan (who utterly refused to be called Tivan) released an audible sigh of resignation, hunched over his own work as he was.

It was the Doctor’s turn to be confused. “What do you mean why?” He asked, waving the device as though a better look at the thing might render it self-explanatory.

“Is it…useful?” Jarvi asked tentatively, eyeing the invention as it waved directly under his nose.

“Useful?” The Doctor’s poor mood from this morning re-reared its head, fuelled by the indignity of the question. “Jarvi my dear chap, of course it is! This could render crops viable on planets with negligible electromagnetic radiation— a vast majority of the universe, I’ll have you know!”

“But—” Jarvi’s eyes shot towards the window, eyeing the sun streaming in and highlighting the angulations of flagstone floor that the Doctor frequently mocked for being more at home in a medieval banquet hall than it was a laboratory. “We have no shortage of sunlight on Gallifrey.”

“Twice as much as most planets, even,” Tivanakorasan muttered dismissively from the back.

“Yes, but this isn’t for us!” The very concept of this conversation was sure to leave him with a headache, not to mention less faith in his co-workers than he’d started with. His eyes shot between their twin disparaging looks, urging them to understand. “Not everything can be for us!”

With another (even more audible) sigh, Tivanakorasan set down his equipment and walked towards their table, gently plucking the device from the Doctor’s hands and giving it a brief inspection before setting it back down. “I take it you’ve registered the patent with the Quartermaster’s office?” he asked, tone flat with foreknowledge that the Doctor had done no such thing.

“Ah— I was just about to do that now, thank you for reminding me,” the Doctor lied, without a hint of gratitude.

“Please do,” he said, running stressful fingers through what was left of his thinning ginger hair. Tivanakorasan might have allowed him his old position at the lab, but the Doctor had staunchly insisted that the other man continue as the department’s lead; his seniority was second only to the Doctor’s own, and far more consistent. Unfortunately, this tasked him with the responsibility of managing the Doctor, a role both could admit to being a challenge. “I’m sure the Quartermaster themself should be available, if you depart right now.”

It was halfway between a dismissal and a plea.

“Of course,” the Doctor replied dutifully, picking up his device from the table and marching stiffly towards the door. Only once it had clicked shut behind him did he allow himself to slump, feeling somewhat dejected as he padded down the corridor to the administrative offices, his invention tucked safely under his arm. To think he still had to explain the concept of charity. Tivanakorasan and Jarvi were from less-established houses than his own, and might never hold the status of a Time Lord, but for their overwhelming cultural myopia, they might as well be seasoned council chairmen.

The Quartermaster’s office was at the far end of the citadel’s north tower, atop a frankly exhausting number of stairs. By the time the Doctor arrived at the door he was panting from the effort, and he took a moment to lean against the cold stone wall and catch his breath before raising his knuckles to knock.

But he needn’t have bothered. The door swung open, seconds before his fist could touch its burnished metal panelling.

The Quartermaster’s newest regeneration was an austere woman with sleek dark hair, pinned back expertly above an unwavering brow. Although she was more than a thousand years his senior and had delivered him countless reprimands over the course of their acquaintance, he liked to believe he’d always seen a glimmer of affection for him behind those formidable eyes. “Doctor,” she greeted him curtly before opening the door wider, allowing him entrance.

“Lovely to see you,” he replied, stepping inside. The office’s interior was auspiciously modern, a pleasing contrast to the rest of the citadel’s vaulted antiquity. Rows upon rows of contraptions were piled into sleek containment cages like wild beasts, lining walls that glinted like dark metalwork more than they resembled stone.

The Quartermaster beckoned him towards a desk by the room’s only widow, from which he could see the bustle of the courtyard like a child’s diorama far below. “Well,” she began, sinking down into a stately armchair and interlacing her fingers on the desk, “this is a rare occasion— you, utilising the appropriate channels. What is it you’ve brought us?”

“This!” he enthusiastically pressed the device into her awaiting palm. “Essentially, it’s a photosynthetic stimulant beam. And before you say anything, yes, I know Gallifrey is blessed with more than enough sunlight, but its design may be fruitful— literally, on planets less fortunate. Bearing fruit in otherwise unfertile soil.” He couldn’t keep the pride from his voice as he spoke. Despite his co-workers’ lack of appreciation, he’d been particularly fond of this newest creation.

“Hmm. It’s an ingenious design,” she said after a moment, charting down its specs onto her register. “Simple, replicable—” her gaze flickered upwards imperiously to meet his as her hands continued to type, “—dangerous too. It would not take much alteration to turn this into a weapon, perhaps to render armour plating hyper-reflective.”

“It’s not a weapon!” The Doctor cried out, plucking the device from the table and clutching it to his chest. “It’s an agricultural aid!”

She straightened up, holding his gaze evenly. “If I were you, I’d claim the opposite,” she said, fingers pausing their work. “I trust you understand that an agricultural tool— one specifically designed for terraforming foreign planets, no less— will be taken unkindly by the council. Why, they might even infer that you intend on using it to change the temporal course of otherwise uninhabitable planets.”

“Only to end starvation— it could make food for millions. Billions, even!”

“And I don’t need to tell you how much more dangerous the council considers untempered survival, as opposed to rightful death. We both know how unkindly they take to meddling with the natural course of things.” She appeared to take pity on him, watching as the Doctor's face twitched between irate and crestfallen. “Lying on an official record would be unconscionable,” she continued slowly. “However, if you agree that this could be used for armour reinforcement, I might consider labelling this as a G-class defensive weapon. In which case, I suspect it will fly under their radar entirely. Or they might even give you a commendation, should it catch their eye.”

“Great,” he whispered dolefully. “I suppose it’s a weapon, then.”

“Lovely,” she clipped, tapping a final note into the register before snapping it cut. “In which case, the council thanks you for your contribution, Lord Doctor. You can keep the prototype; its patent will be uploaded to the public Matrix interface in due course.”

He swallowed, fighting back the wave of helplessness he felt as he stood from his chair and tucked the device back under his arm. But halfway to the door he paused, swivelling back around. “We could do so much more,” he murmured, voice low as he pleaded with the Quartermaster to understand. “So much more, so much better— for the whole universe! Gallifrey alone has that privilege, and that makes it our responsibility to help.”

She sighed, rubbing at her eyes wearily before turning them back towards his own. “Theta Sigma,” she began sternly, and the Doctor steeled himself for a chastisement. “We’ve had iterations of this discussion more times than it bears counting— ever since your first academy thesis. You, more than most, should know better than to reduce temporal interference down to a simplistic moral binary.”

“I should,” he agreed, shifting the device upwards to grasp it all the tighter, “but I don’t. I don’t know better, I don’t agree, and I hope I never will.”

Her lips were a firm line as she nodded, excusing him wordlessly. But just as he was about to shut the door behind him, it was the Quartermaster’s turn to stop him. “Oh, and please inform the Master that I expect his presence, post-haste. My department is well-aware that he has been tinkering in the labs for weeks, and it might serve to remind him that we expect any completed invention of his to be registered, same as everyone else.”

The Doctor froze, turning to poke his head back through the door and squint at her curiously. “Tinkering where, exactly?”

“In your lab, of course.” The dim light streaming from the window fell across her eyes, highlighting their angled scrutiny. “Has he not informed you?”

“I’m sure it just slipped his mind.” But as his footsteps clamoured back down the spiralling staircase, his stomach felt beset by unease and gnawing doubt.

***

This is ridiculous, the Doctor told himself firmly, even as he took a sharp left turn at the next fork in the hallway. Turing right would have him back at the lab in under a minute. The left, however, would bring him back to the lab too, after an expansive loop that ran past the major bureaucratic centre of the citadel. And at its heart— the Matrix’s keep.

But ridiculousness aside, he didn’t have the patience for lingering doubt. It would be far simpler to find the Master and ask about his laboratory work than let his paranoia get the better of him. And, as the setting suns along the planet’s west-facing mountains could attest, he must certainly have returned from his excursion by now.

The Doctor descended towards the ground floor of the central complex, where the department’s offices sat in a position of central authority, directly above where the Matrix itself was tucked, safe in the basement of the panopticon and away from external interference. It was one of the more grandiose sectors in the capital; its ceilings curvilineal with ornate stonework, an imposing design that positively oozed aged pretention.

Only the best, to house the composite history of all Time Lords.

Something about entering the keep had always made him feel out-of-place, like a misbehaving schoolchild, despite his age and rank, and the invention tucked conspicuously under his arm did nothing to help. He nodded and murmured quiet greetings to the rows of starched headpieces that eyed him disapprovingly as he passed, doing his best not to sprint as he made the long walk towards the back of the grand hall where he knew the managerial offices were located. They rose up from the floor in stately cubicles of tinted glass, offering privacy from the prying crowds that he envied immensely.

Once there, he scanned the doors until he spotted a plaque for the Underkeeper, newly minted in ostentatious gold. The Master’s own choosing, without a doubt.

“He’s not in there.”

The Doctor jumped, startled as he whirled around to find Borusa striding towards him with a stack of files in-tow. “I should know, I’ve spent the past fifteen minutes waiting for him.”

“He mentioned being sent off-planet today,” the Doctor said.

“Yes, retrieving data from a TARDIS left pilotless in an asteroid field by one of our emissaries. Careless. Clearly the licencing office passes just about anyone who attempts their flight test these days.” He sniffed, raising a single-brow as an afterthought as he stared the Doctor down, as though he’d just remembered how poorly he’d done on his own TARDIS flight exam. “Was there something we could help you with?”

“No, just wanted a tête-à-tête— for the Master’s eyes and ears only I’m afraid.” It was only after he said it that he realised how tawdry it sounded, and the high flush that rose in his cheeks was matched only by Borusa’s grimace. “Laboratory business, you see,” he added hurriedly.

“I really don’t,” Borusa said tightly. “Nevertheless, the Master isn’t here.”

“When is he expected to return?”

“Precisely forty-two minutes ago,” he replied, frowning all the harder.

The Doctor’s face fell, a whole new type of unease unfurling in his chest. “You don’t suppose something has happened to him?”

“It’s always possible,” the way he said it, the Doctor wasn’t sure whether the thought delighted or concerned him, “but I doubt it. Have you tried contacting him?”

The Doctor paused before letting his eyes fall closed, willing his mind to rise above the clamour of the department hall.

Contact?

He reached out tendrils of thought along their psychic connection, following it towards the Master’s mental signature full parsecs away—

—Until, all at once, he slammed unexpectedly into a mental barrier, jolting him from his concentration.

“He’s alright,” the Doctor replied after a moment, willing his voice not to betray how shaken the impact had left him. “Alive and well, just highly focused.”

Borusa said nothing, only continuing to watch him, disbelievingly.

“I suspect he’ll be returning shortly,” he ventured, and he could only pray it was the truth.

“I hope so,” Borusa replied shortly. “Lest we need to talk about his dwindling capacity for time-management.”

“You do that,” the Doctor muttered automatically, slightly cheered by imagining the sheer outrage any accusation of tardiness would bring to the Master’s face.

Borusa appeared to finally take note of the device tucked under his arm. “What’s this that you’ve snuck past the keep’s security?”

“Oh, this?” The Doctor replied, already turning away to walk towards the exit. “A weapon, or so I’m told. Terribly dangerous— I’d better get it back to the lab, lest I trip and destroy all of Gallifrey’s history, or something equally dramatic.”

“I don’t find that amusing, Doctor!”

He didn’t have to turn and look; he could imagine the glower directed at his retreating back just fine.

“No?” He called back, glancing down at his gardening tool-turned-weapon with a small frown. “No,” he reiterated to himself, his hearts crestfallen anew. “Neither did I.”

***

When the Doctor got home, the door was already unlocked.

A surprise, but not an unwelcome one. He entered and headed straight towards the kitchen, eager to get to the bottom of the Master’s laboratory secrets and unclench the knot in his stomach once and for all. But when he turned the corner, he found the space unexpectedly empty.

He paused and listened carefully, only to realise that the faint rustle of activity he had heard was coming from further down the hall. Not from here, or from their own bedroom, but from Susan’s.

The door to her room was uncharacteristically ajar. After a polite knock, he pushed it open, only to find her hunched on the edge of her bed, staring glumly out the window and into the night sky.

“Susan?” She perked her head up, pulled from her thoughts. “How are you my girl? I didn’t expect you home until later in the week.”

“Hello Grandfather.” She appeared visibly drained, with dark circles undercutting the usual liveliness of her eyes and a smile that didn’t contain an ounce of cheer.

“Is everything alright?”

She sighed, kicking her feet against the edge of the bed listlessly, in a way that made her appear half her age. “It’s fine— I suppose. I finished up my work in the academy physics lab and just thought I’d rather come home than head back to the dormitories.”

“Well, you know you’re always wanted here.”

She gave him another stunted smile before turning back towards the window.

The Doctor crossed the room at sat down next to her, throwing a comforting arm around her shoulder and pulling her in to lean against him. Together they sat in silence and observed the sky, dancing with its plethora of stars and nebulas. While his eyes adjusted to the dark, the room’s walls almost appeared to blend seamlessly into that of the cliffs and treeline beyond the window, as well as into the night sky beyond that. One continuous spectrum of inky blackness, as comforting as it was oppressive, punctuated only by the glimmers of life beyond Gallifrey’s own.

“I’m sick of it here.”

The Doctor turned to her, but her eyes still locked on the sky beyond. “I thought you were enjoying your work?”

“I do,” she urged, finally turning to him with lips that were pressed into a thin line. It was an expression of helpless exasperation she’d inherited directly from the Master; one that always appeared so uncannily nostalgic on her face, distorting those familiar features. “It’s just— I’m just so tired, and I hate it here!”

Her voice pitched up at the end with a child’s frustration. Sometimes, in the face of her poise and intelligence, he forgot just how young she really was. “Have you had a fight with your roommate again?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, but Roxanastradal is still a bore. She still refuses to let me bring any of my experiments back to our room, and I’ve promised I’ll be tidy!”

She would be, he believed it. The Doctor himself wasn’t known for his neatness, and while the Master was far from cluttered, Susan was more organised in her forty years of age than either of them had ever managed in nearly two centuries.

He squeezed his arm around her affectionately. “I know the academy isn’t for everyone— believe me, I know. I was counting down the days until graduation by the time I was twenty. But you’re so close now Susan, you’ve less than forty years left.”

“I know, but I’m sick of it! I want to travel like you— see the universe!” She gestured towards the window; movements tensed in frustration. “Don’t you miss being out there?”

It was the Doctor's turn to look away from her and stare back at the sky, swallowing as he attempted to formulate an answer that would be both true and parentally responsible. “I do,” he said carefully, voice wistful at the very thought. “I really do. But not as much as I missed you and the Master while I was away, of course.”

“Then why don’t we all go together? You, grandpapa, all three of us!” Her eyes glinted, and he could tell she was trying to calculate precisely which words would persuade him. “You’ve already got a TARDIS, I’ve seen her downstairs—”

“Susan, stay out of the basement,” he said reflexively, voice falling stern. “You know there’s all manner of danger down there— Rassilon knows the Master and I have left the remnants of a dozen half-baked experiments down there without proper containment. It was a place that he himself hardly dared to tread, and he’d never forgive himself if she got injured because of them.

“But she’s right there,” Susan pressed. “We could go any day now, just tell your laboratory that you went out looking for new materials.”

“You know unlicensed travel is illegal,” he protested, acutely aware of the irony of him being the one to say it.

 The way Susan’s eyebrow raised implied that the hypocrisy hadn’t been lost on her either.

“Besides,” the Doctor continued quickly, “the council already isn’t pleased with me for my last journey. I promise you we’ll travel— but we need to give it time before it’ll be safe again! Time enough that they forget all about it. And right now, you have work to do here.”

She slumped, visibly dejected as she realised that he wouldn’t be swayed. “I guess,” she said sullenly.

He gave her a final squeeze before turning her from the window. “Now, why don’t you tell me about the research you’ve been working on during your sabbatical. What was it that you mentioned a few nights ago, a time-loop study?”

“Temporal eddies,” she corrected, and already he could see that the distraction was working. A spark of enthusiasm had returned to her eye, and her posture became incrementally more alert. “Points of abnormal temporal interference than result in significant, but non-catastrophic, change to the timeline. Less than a paradox, but a notable divergent from their natural fate.”

“Fascinating,” he said, and he meant it. “I believe I’ve seen my fair share of those in my travels, potentially even caused a few— not that your professors need to know anything about that,” he added hurriedly, causing her to laugh. “And what are you doing with these eddies?”

“Nothing, yet. I simply thought I’d start by charting those local to Gallifrey. Current research has overlooked them in favour of complete paradoxes, but I’m designing a system interface that I believe can detect them from hundreds of parsecs away.”

“My genius child,” he praised, and Susan positively beamed. “You’ve the best mind of us yet. I’d love to see your designs, if you wouldn’t mind…”

***

It wasn’t sound nor touch that woke the Doctor, simply an awareness. A brief brush of fingers across the surface of his mind.

His eyes blinked open sleepily to the dark of the room. The only sliver of light was streaming through Susan’s bedroom door, cracked open anew. Against his shoulder, Susan shifted listlessly where she’d fallen asleep against him, and the Doctor almost let his eyes close to return to sleep similarly. But a moment later and he startled to find the Master standing amongst the door’s shadow, nearly invisible against the hallway’s contrasting glow.

He'd clearly been there for some time. There was only the faintest hint of illumination along the side of his face that was closest to the door, just enough that the Doctor could see the hint of a cheekbone, the outer corner of one eye. But it was enough to recognise the look on his face as contentment, albeit a strangely frantic one. For a moment, he appeared so beset by his own affection for them that his features appeared nearly hostile for it. The Doctor had no doubt that if he hadn’t woken, the Master would have stood there for some unknowable length of time further, bordering on overwhelmed whilst basking in the privilege of watching them rest.

Taking care not to wake Susan, he shifted her from his shoulder to the pillow and made his way to the Master. There were no words, they didn’t require it. Only a smile exchanged, a last shared glanced back at her sleeping form, and the quiet patter of feet slipping from the room, closing the door behind them.

“I take it your reconnaissance was successful?” The Doctor began, once they were in the safety of the hall.

“Quite. No noteworthy tales I’m afraid, but another TARDIS has been returned to the fold.” The Master had walked towards the door to hang his travelling coat, and in doing so, the Doctor couldn’t help but notice his gait was unexpectedly stiff.

There it was again— that unshakable unease.

“Are you alright?” He asked cautiously, trailing after his steps with more than one type of concern. Someone less familiar with the other Time Lord wouldn’t have noticed him stiffen, just for a moment, but the Doctor did.

When the Master turned around, his features were amicable. “Only the results of a misstep in her engine room. She was thoroughly confused when I found her and didn’t take kindly to me prodding at her controls.”

There was no reason for the Doctor not to believe him, his own gut-instinct be damned.

The Master walked back towards him, meeting him halfway to intercept the Doctor’s worried approach. “And what about you?” he asked, smoothing down the collar of the laboratory robes the Doctor hadn’t had time to remove. “Working late?”

“Hardly. I got distracted hearing all about Susan’s latest research. Temporal eddies, if you’d believe it.” His raised eyebrows were matched by the Master’s own as his expression stretched with genuine curiosity and no little pride.

“Inspired. But then again, how could she be anything but, given her parental influences.” 

The Doctor rolled his eyes good-naturedly (as though he hadn’t privately thought the same). “The academy doesn’t deserve her,” he said softly, hearts clenching as he remembered the fatigue on her face when he’d found her.

“On that, my dear, I couldn’t agree more.”

As he said it, some of that besotted madness that the Doctor had witnessed minutes earlier returned to his face. That look of fanatical affection the Master wore so well, elevated to the point of aggression and underpinned by determination— as though challenging the universe to dare stand against them. Then there was a hand on his own, pulling him towards the stairs. But he stood fast, refusing to be budged. “I was in the Quartermaster’s office today,” he said casually.

The Master snorted. “My condolences,” he replied, before another second of ensuing silence passed and his face grew wary, realising that there was a question hidden in the otherwise innocuous comment.

“She mentioned you’ve been in the lab,” the Doctor continued, trailing his thumb over the well-articulated tendons and smooth skin of the hand still grasping his own. “Building something, in my absence. Just what have you been up to?”

“Must I be up to something?” He was. The Master’s tongue might be an excellent liar, but his eyes were not. “Perhaps I simply missed you and found solace in a place that still held so much of your presence.” 

The Doctor smiled, but it fell short of his eyes. It’s a lovely thought. “Perhaps,” he conceded, crossing the last step between them until he was encroaching the Master’s personal space, close enough to see his pupils widen. “Almost certainly a half-truth, at any rate. Now tell me, what is it?”

It was an underhanded move. One he had delighted in making for centuries, thrown as the Master had always been by a direct approach.

“A surprise,” the Master admitted finally, even as his pulse thrummed under the Doctor’s fingertips as they found their way along his jaw, visibly determined to remain motionless against him. “I’ll show you when the time is right.”

“Have you ever known me to be particularly patient?” the Doctor inquired, mockingly mild even as his fingers slid incrementally under the neckline of the Master’s robe, seeking out the warmth of the skin he found there.

“I’ve been told it’s a virtue. And you do go on about how much you love virtues, Doctor, so it’s high time you developed some.”

He couldn’t help but laugh aloud at that. And as his mind brushed against the Master’s own, he found only the other Time Lord's usual fortifications which invited him in willingly, the afternoon’s mysterious barrier between them entirely dissipated. The familiarity was reassuring, enough that he allowed himself to be pulled again towards the stairs as the Master’s self-restraint crumbled.

It was a start. By no means a complete answer— hardly any answer at all. But it opened the door for further discussion, and it was enough to stop him from wasting the night away in sleepless paranoia.

Or it might have been, had he not seen the Master’s coat.

The other Time Lord continued up the stairs, paying him no heed as the Doctor paused by the coatrack and briefly fingered over a charred hole in the material he’d cast aside minutes before. It wasn’t as though he claimed to be an expert on the subject. It’s just that his one hundred and eighty-three years had exposed him to more than his fair share of skirmishes, traps, gunfights, swordfights, brawls— and any number of other sticky situations, really— of all types.

And it didn’t exactly take a forensics expert to recognise a staser burn when he saw one.

Chapter 4

Summary:

The Doctor reaches the (admittedly shallow) depths of his own professionalism, and realises that 'freedom' has disparate definitions.

By the time the Doctor awoke and made his way downstairs, the coatrack was empty.

The Master was engrossed in an academic journal of some sort, one of the infinite stuffy old tombs that the Doctor couldn’t find the patience to appreciate despite his love for both research and literature alike. But as he passed the dining table, the Master’s unoccupied hand reached out to grab the Doctor’s, wordlessly pressing his lips to it before letting it fall. He did it expertly, reflexively— his dark eyes were nearly indistinct behind the thick steam rising from his mug, but the Doctor knew that he’d accomplished it without a moment lost on the page.

The Doctor bit his lip and said precisely nothing about jackets or staser burns of any sort.

The next day passed like an insult. Offensively quick, as if it were taunting him for his inability to act. Night had fallen by the time he trudged home from work, and the light coming from inside their house was unfathomably tempting, accompanied by sounds of an amicable debate that he could hear trailing out from the Master and Susan, punctuated by their protests and peals of laughter.

The Doctor gave in. He joined them in the light and said nothing about the jacket.

He couldn’t help himself the on the third day. Or at least, that’s what he told himself as he laid in bed, listening for the tell-tale signs of the Master’s morning routine beginning from within the bathroom. It would give him precisely four minutes in which to act. When he heard his cue, he crept silently from the bed and towards the other Time Lord’s closet, thumbing through the orderly rows of clothing inside whilst taking care not to nudge anything from its place.

No jacket.

It was all he could think about as he cleaned his teeth minutes later, staring blankly into the mirror. The eyes looking back at him seemed far too suspicious to be his own.

Perhaps he had misinterpreted things? The eyes in the mirror looked far from amused at his attempt to deflect the matter.

There were more parts of a TARDIS capable of burning a hole through cloth than he could count. And the Master was surely vain enough to bin a garment at the first hint of damage. But nothing in that rationale helped his gnawing fear, and the more astute of his colleagues spent the day giving his thunderous mood a wide berth.

The Doctor could tolerate fear. He could even, unbelievably, withstand lies. Doubtlessly he’d be furious if he discovered that the Master had been lying to him for whatever untold reason, but it was a surmountable lapse. No— what he couldn’t stand was his own inability to act. There was no getting around it, the only thing he wanted less than this mystery was to actually know what had occurred.

Knowing would mean an impetus for action. Re-action. Next steps; a moral imperative to respond.

And despite his threats several nights prior— despite his insistence that any further violence or betrayal would give him no option but to leave— the Doctor did nothing. And as the days ticked by without a word from his mouth, and nothing but denials and excuses from his own head, he started to worry that leaving or retaliating in any real manner wasn’t something he’d have the strength to do twice.

***

It had been a week since the Master’s voyage off planet. Seven days of life that felt unbelievably and infuriatingly normal. Seven days of stilted conversations in the lab, the tedium of which was balanced only by the depth of affection the Doctor felt for his family and home. It was for them that he’d kept his head down, dutifully toiled and produced trinkets for the council, smiled at every infuriatingly banal and unfunny quip in the panopticon’s grand meeting hall, chipped in with a sensible anecdote (polished and honed for professional decorum) when it was called for, kept his robes tidy, his hair coiffed, his workstation clean, and his smile polite— the very model of a Time Lord.

Seven days.

And the Doctor felt positive that, were he to face an eighth, he’d certainly implode.

He wasn’t sure how the Master did it. He stared gloomily into the dark liquid at the base of his cup as he mused, swirling it around for good measure. They’d both been roped into one of the soulless interdepartmental socials he so despised, and as he peered desperately over the bulk of a chancellor who’d been ignoring all cues of his disinterest for the better part of an hour, he watched in abject bafflement as a circle of stiffly-dressed Time Lords fawned and tittered— the Master at their centre, head tiled in modest reception. 

Faux-modest, obviously. There was nothing humble in the curve of his lips. Nothing left uncalculated in the angulation of his stance, or the flattery he doled out to his fans (proportional to their spheres of influence, of course). The Master caught him looking over the rim of his own glass as he paused for a drink, giving him a near-imperceptible wink before turning back to his crowd with a grandiose swoop.

The Doctor stifled a snort, rolling his eyes and using the excuse of refreshing his drink to break away from his pursuant chancellor at last. A snake-charmer to the last. Uncanny, the way he could wheedle his way into even the most well-fortified of inner circles.

But that was just it, he knew the Master hated bureaucratic tedium as much as he did. Moreso, maybe— he saw it in the clench of his jaw as he conceded respect to even the most loathsome of department heads, in the way his expression fell and sneered the second he was sure there was nobody watching. In the strength of his grip on the Doctor’s skin every night, bruising muscle as their bodies became a canvas on which to illustrate the day’s frustrations.

(Not that the Doctor had done much better. The Master had taking to wearing the high collars they both so vehemently loathed, just to maintain propriety and cover up the marks. Any less propriety and they’d surely have to dig out their tissue regenerator.)

So how was he able to fake it so well? The Doctor's grip on his cup tightened involuntarily as he watched the Master lean in, conspiratorial and intimate as he whispered into the ear of the nearest onlooker, brow jaunty and cocked. To participate? To excel so thoroughly at something they both detested, when the Doctor himself felt sure he’d start screaming any minute.

***

The event lasted another three hours.

Ten minutes after their return home found them tearing at clothes and skin alike in their desperation to be rid of the evening’s stifling grip. The end result was at least as satisfying as it was troubling, but as they fell back onto the mattresses, hoarse and gasping, too fatigued to extend more than a hand to the other before succumbing to sleep, physical satisfaction alone couldn’t stop the Doctor from thinking that maybe, just maybe—

Neither was coping as well as he’d hoped.

***

The Doctor woke to the suns rising over the eastern hills. The Master rose from their bed stiffly, grumbling and hardly sentient as he dressed and bid him goodbye, off to what he’d assured him would be a particularly long and irksome day.

As gentle thud of the front door rose to meet his ears, the Doctor allowed his eyes to fall closed again. He was a Time Lord. There was no need to watch the relentless tick of a clock as the minutes fell. He knew precisely when an hour had passed without him rising similarly.

Two hours.

Two and a half.

When it had been nearly three hours, he pried his eyes open once more. The suns shone brilliantly around the edges of their thick curtain, obstinately cheerful, and the Doctor was forced to acknowledge that he had no intention of showing up for work that day.

It was a compromise, of a sort. Or so he argued with himself as he pulled himself out of bed and into a dressing gown before stumbling towards the kitchen. Tea in hand, he sunk into a chair and resisted the urge to lay his head on the table or bury it into folded arms. He could withstand pulling himself out of bed and facing the day, just barely— but going to work was a step too far. Where was the spark? The adventure?  Mischief had been his and the Master’s only currency worth trading for decades, and freedom their only ambition, so how exactly had they wound up here? It seemed woefully misplaced that his life— their life— above any others, would force them to become reasonable.

The Doctor's mug hit the table with a dull and decisive thunk, and in the back of his mind, impetus began to pave the way for planning. No, there were some things that didn’t bear tolerating, not a second longer.

***

Tap Tap

The Doctor might have his gripes with his first regeneration’s ageing, but he prided himself on still being nimble enough to clamber onto the windowsill of the Master’s office with near-record speed.

Beyond the tinted glass the Master sat frozen, too stunned to react further than dropping his stylus and widening his eyes.

Tap Tap

It’s not like the Doctor hadn’t climbed higher and more perilously before, but it wasn’t half drafty today, was it? And the morning dew had collected on the brickwork in a way that was dampening his trousers and loosening the traction of his shoes. “Are you going to let me in?” He called out, in lieu of further taps. Loud enough to be heard through the closed window (hopefully) but quiet enough that his voice wouldn’t trail in through the neighbouring office whose window was scant meters to his left. Finding the right one had taken some trial and error, and he was still half-certain that the tip of his head had been spotted before he’d managed a speedy retreat. “I was mostly joking about forcing myself to regenerate preemptively, but a minute more and I might be calling my own bet.”

That sprung the Master into action. He shot up from the desk and opened the glass panelling in a flash, allowing the Doctor to tumble onto the relative safety of the stone floor.

“That’s much better,” he said, brushing the dust and damp from his sleeves as he straightened up with what he hoped was a winning smile. “Hello!”

What victories his smile might have won, the Master’s appreciation wasn’t amongst them. “What,” he began, voice thick and incredulous as though he worried the Doctor had grown slow, “in the name of Rassilon, Omega, and all the founders of old— are you doing?”

“Just thought I’d drop in for a visit.” He’d figured that much was self-explanatory, but the Master’s flabbergasted silence seemed to think otherwise.

“I have a door,” the Master managed eventually, after several more seconds of bafflement. “A rather lovely and impressive door— which opens onto an admittedly less lovely but suitably utilitarian hallway, seven minutes’ walking distance from your own laboratory. Five, if you really put your back into it. I trust you remember the route?”

“I didn’t feel like being seen,” the Doctor admitted with a self-deprecating smile. “Your department is rather known to pry. Nor did I feel like going anywhere near the lab, not on a lovely day like this. Now come with me, I’m breaking you out.”

The Master had almost clawed his way to understanding, but the final statement brought comprehension to a visible halt. “Breaking me o— out where, the window? Now?”

“No time like the present!” He chirped merrily, hoping that none of the morning’s desperation was showing on his face. He grabbed the Master’s hands, who allowed himself to be tugged forward, leaning into the Doctor’s grasp intuitively.

“This is juvenile. We are one hundred and eighty-three years old!” But despite his protests, the Doctor could see a spark of interest flare in his eyes.

Slowly, unremittingly, he led the Master closer to the window, step by step.

“Doctor, I really do have a busy schedule today—”

“Skip it.” This time he was sure that the strength of his need had seeped into his words.

The Master looked pained, torn between intrigue and concern. “In naught but five minutes, Borusa will be here to fetch me for a meeting—”

“All the more reason not to be here,” the Doctor interjected steadily. “Not to mention, all the better reason to exit via the window. Consider it a foray into nostalgia— us, dashing out the window in the nick of time, evading detection by the skin of our heels.”

He could hear footsteps beyond the office door now, distant but growing closer with every passing breath, and the Master still looked unconvinced.

“Please.”  This time, the desperation that infused the word was purposeful. “Just this once— if I have to be sensible a second longer, I think I might drop dead. Don’t we deserve a quick break?”

The footsteps couldn’t be more than ten meters away now.

The Doctor held his gaze, lids heavy with need. “Please, Master,” he repeated, more begging than a request.

The way the Master’s pupils flared wide was nothing, if not a predictable victory.

***

The Underkeeper’s office was only two floors from the ground, but the lattice he’d used to climb stopped a lengthy span from the window’s edge.

“This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” Master moaned, even as the Doctor reached an arm back to help connect his shorter one with the lattice edge.

“The stupidest thing we’ve ever done,” the Doctor corrected him, readjusting his own grip as the Master freed himself fully from the windowsill. “You’ve agreed, I’ll have you remember—” he cut himself off as a knock sounded at the door, freezing them in place and nearly dislodging their tenuous footing.

“Lord Underkeeper? Are you in there?”

“Shhh!” the Master whispered furiously, even as peals of the Doctor’s laughter rustled the foliage under his hands. “Would it kill you to be quiet— even for a single moment? This is not funny in the least!”

The Doctor disagreed. There were few things to call the picture they made but funny; two fully-grown and visibly aged Time Lords clinging to the ivy-strung lattice in a desperate hush, if not hysterical. Even the corners of the Master’s lips were quivering, despite trying his best to look stern.

His hearts pounded at the sound of a door squeaking open, but after only a brief silence he heard the sound of retreating footsteps, and both he and the Master sagged in visible relief. They clambered hastily down the remainder of the wall and had just began smoothing both their clothing and expressions into something more befitting their age when they heard new footsteps padding towards their position from around the tower’s corner.

Immediately, he grabbed for the Master’s tensed arm. “Into the hills,” he whispered frantically, even as he tugged him along, giving him little choice but to follow.

True to form, the Master did just that.

They ran at an incline, red grass whipping at their shins as they clambered for cover, until their breath transformed into in labored pants of fatigue and childish giggling at their own escape. After a few more minutes, once the walls of the citadel were toylike in the distance and they were alone amidst the dry rustle of the afternoon breeze, did they allow themselves to fall to the ground in an exhausted heap.

“Happy now?” The Master’s reproach was undercut by his own chortles as he rolled over, nearly kicking the Doctor and widening the indent their fall had made in the grass. “Fleeing responsibility and dignity in one fell swoop— was that nostalgic enough for your tastes?”

He didn’t bother verbalizing a response. Instead he rolled over, his mind a jubilant haze as he pinned the Master where he laid and silenced any further complaints with his mouth.

The Master’s responding groan and demanding press of a tongue as it slid past his lips only served to fuel the moment’s victory, and within seconds they were ripping at each other’s robes as with as much fervent desperation as they had done their first time in these very same hills— over one hundred and fifty years after the fact.

The stiff collar of the Master’s underkeeper robes was certainly torn, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever get the grass stains out of what had been his second-favourite pair of trousers, but as the Master’s fingers clenched around the lobes of his arse and his own hands buried into irreparably mussed dark hair, he couldn’t find the hearts to care. There were certainly no gripes about the juvenile nature of their outing when the Doctor scooted down to wrap his lips around the Master’s cock (or if there were, they were choked-off short). And for a moment it was the exact catharsis he’d been needing all week. Adrenaline from their escape numbing the sharp blades of grass crushed under his knees, his hands stealing warmth from strong thighs as they smoothed over skin and fine hair alike, another set of hands sifting their way through his own blond curls, the Master’s taste on his tongue— it was familiarity at its finest. The combined sensations of home at their most comforting.

Perhaps the very best of Gallifrey itself. Or so he thought; absently, and with perhaps a hint of smug superiority, as he withdrew until only the very tips of his teeth were brushing over the Master’s cock and the noises from his mouth became downright indecent. Smugger still as he slid his lips back down, deep as he could, nearly choking himself as the tugging in his hair neared violence.

Another second later and it wasn’t enough.

He didn’t give the Master time to reorient himself before was clambering astride him and guiding his fingers back towards his arse with blind need. He hadn’t even given the other Time Lord the chance to remove his formal gloves— nor did he intend to, he realised in a flood of unexpected arousal. The Master understood it for the request it was and obediently pressed a single finger into him; unrelenting yet unforgivably restrained, in a way that set the Doctor’s teeth on edge even as a wave of pleasure washed through the pit of his stomach. He rocked back impatiently, the hair on his arms rising at the stretch of yet another finger he prompted to push alongside the first prematurely, before batting them aside altogether and rising onto the balls of his feet. In one fluid motion he grasped for the Master’s cock and positioned himself before sinking down heavily. His legs were trembling, and from behind the static buzz of blood rushing past his ears he heard the Master’s half-hearted concerns melt into a moan.

Sturdy hands rose to stabilise his torso before he knew he was tilting. “That was foolish,” the Master gasped out, and the Doctor momentarily conceded the point. Are you alright?  “You’ve already carved yourself into my schedule— rudely, and with the precision of a sledgehammer, I might add— so there’s no need to hurt yourself in haste.”         

“Says you,” the Doctor replied with a breathless laugh, his voice only slightly strained. Already, the blunt pain of his impatience was starting to ebb. He bounced himself once, experimentally, and let his eyes fall shut with a hiss as the ache transformed into bone-deep pleasure. When he opened them again, the Master was gazing up at him with half-lidded calculation. “And you’re the last person I’d have expected to shy away from recreational pain.”

He let out a yelp as the Master canted his hips in response, jolting him into another exquisite and agonising thrust. It was all of a concession, admission, and admonishment in one, and it was exactly what the Doctor had hoped for. He took his revenge to their mutual benefit, pinning the Master’s shoulders flat against the dirt as braced himself to set a punishing pace. It was reckless. His head was thrown back helplessly, the Master’s nails were drawing blood at his hips, and at that moment he wagered that panopticon itself could have crumbled to dust without either of their notice. He could only hope that they’d run far enough to not be overheard, because his world had narrowed to the overwhelm of fucking himself on the Master’s cock in the fields of their childhood and he didn’t have anything like the attention span for vigilance remaining.

His thighs began shaking from the effort, and just as he’d been afraid of collapsing, the Master pushed him backwards— forcing him to do just that. A split second later and he crawled over to him, over him, snapping his knees back towards his chest like a man possessed before thrusting back in with hardly a beat missed. The Doctor came like that, eyes rolling back towards the patchwork afternoon sky of dappled oranges and blues that silhouetted the Master as he shuddered through his own orgasm, staring fixedly down at him all the while, as though resolute not to let his eyes fall closed and miss an instant.

Sweaty, sore, and momentarily appeased, the Doctor passed unknowable minutes afterwards in a half-conscious haze. When he regained his senses, the Master was sitting up alongside him running lazy fingers down the expanse of thighs. He watched with undue fondness as the pads of his fingers trailed through his own spend that the Doctor could feel leaking from him, stifling a permissive snort as they moved to push it back into him, almost of their own possessive accord.

“We should leave.” It was out of his mouth before he could stop it.

The Master paused, fingers still tapping lightly against his rim. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a sense of professional duty at long last?” It was a tease, not a reproach, and the Doctor knew that if he kept quiet, the Master’s fingers would ensure they didn’t leave for a while yet.

But he couldn’t. Not now that he’d said the words aloud.

“No, I don’t mean going back to work— anything but that,” the Doctor deadpanned.

The Master smiled approvingly, and he could just feel his fingers angling to press back inside him when he reached a hand back to stop him.

“I mean we should go— you me and Susan. Away from Gallifrey.”

The Master stilled again, and there was a new line of tension that surpassed any arousal. “And we will, of course. As soon as the council forgets about your last departure and the lab grants you leave. I’m still finalizing the favor I’ve garnered within my own department, but within a month I expect they’ll grant me vacation without a second thought.”

“No.” The Doctor's voice found solid footing, bolstered by his own determination. “I don’t mean research leave, or grants, or vacations, or anything else. I mean we should leave. We could pack our essentials and be gone before nightfall. Susan has asked for as much, I’m sure she could be ready with an hour’s notice. And I’ve still got my TARDIS, we could go wherever we wanted to.”

The hand within his own withdrew, and for a moment the Master was perfectly silent. “Leave as in ‘leave for good’?” he asked quietly.

“Yes!” The Doctor enthused, before reconsidering. “Or maybe not for good, I don’t know. But for as long as necessary— as long as it suited us. We could beg forgiveness and return if the time came, but until then, we could go anywhere and anywhen we wanted. We’d be free.”

There was silence, and in the intervening seconds that followed, the weight of the Master’s quiet scrutiny was palpable. For a moment, the Doctor was so convinced by the conviction of his own words that he allowed himself to dream. In his mind they were already packed, the TARDIS in orbit, Susan between them, and Gallifrey naught but a memory. Until—

“Have you…entirely taken leave of reason?”

It startled him from his daydreams, and he swiveled to find the Master regarding him with a quietly disturbed fury. “What’s there to lose?” he fronted, frowning. “You’re miserable, I’m miserable, Susan is miserable— what else is there to discuss?”

“What else— Doctor, you must be joking.” The Master’s eyes were imploring, and far from humorous. “Please, tell me that you’re joking. I might be miserable, but I have a plan.  You might be miserable, but you have a future—“

“I don’t want it!”  The strength of his rejection of the idea shocked even himself. “I don’t want a future at the lab, or under the council’s thumb. I’m already near screaming from the tedium after a week!”

“I know,” the Master urged, in a tone that presumed itself to be soothing, as though they’d reached some unspoken accord. “I’m working on it. This is but a temporary status, you’re destined for so much greater. We’re destined for—“

“No! No, I don’t want to play the long game, and I don't need greatness. I need freedom, Master. Not gradient levels of leave, granted when the council deigns it.”

“And how do you suppose running will solve that, hmm?” Those familiar eyes were frantic with their own fears now, stretching far beyond the Doctor’s form. “You think you’re the only one who feels trapped? I could burn them alive for the indignities they’ve dragged me through by which to prove myself. I still might!”

The Master’s voice was unprecedented in its strain, as though the toll of the past weeks was hitting him all at once before the Doctor’s eyes. The mere sight made his chest ache, the pounding of his hearts near deafening.

“Then why stay?” His voice sounded as though he’d spent the afternoon crying, rather than intimate and victorious until short minutes before. “Why can’t we leave?”

“Because I agree with you,” the Master said with a humourless chuckle. “Because I want freedom— simple as that. For myself, and you, and Susan alike.”

The Doctor felt boggled, as though their conversation was free-falling in circular loops beyond his comprehension. “That makes no sense! How is staying here freedom in any sense?” He wanted to scream it. He wanted to drag reason from the Master’s lips with his bare hands. He wanted to smash their minds together until their misplaced sense of understanding knit itself together like a bone after so many fractures.

“How can you want to leave?” The Master challenged him back. “What would you have us do— flee? Run into hiding on some backwater planet with stolen technology? We’d never be able to go home, Theta— ever! How is that freedom?”

“We don’t need home! We’re each other’s homes, and we deserve so much more—“

“Exactly!” the Master slammed his fist into the ground before darting his eyes furiously towards the sky, unusually shiny as they were. “Rassilon, I’m sick of agreeing with you from a point of opposition. We. Deserve. More. All three of us. Far more than Time Lord mediocrity, and far more than being banned from out birthright too! There is no freedom while we’re on the run! While we can’t go home— while there’s no home to speak of—“

“And what’s the alternative?” the Doctor rebutted desperately, rising to sit and meet the Masters eye-line. “Watching Susan crumble under an antiquated institution? Waiting decades for incremental promotions that have no promise of any actualisation?”

“And you’d bring Susan into this?” the Master scoffed unkindly. “She has more to lose than either of us, and you’re so myopic as to think you’d be doing her a favour?”

“She wants to travel—!”

“She’s a child!” The Master looked truly furious now, and for the briefest moment, the sheer ferocity in his eyes struck the faintest twinge of fear into the Doctor’s hearts. “Of course she wants to leave— of course she hates schooling— she’s a child! Our child! What child loves school— not the least, a child of ours? Yet you would make her an outlaw for your own whims, for your own discontentment?! You’d take away any chance she has at a normal life all because you were bored!”

His words found their mark, too close to home. Too close to the Doctor’s deep-set vein of uncertainty and self-flagellation, which had been fighting back his discontentment tooth and nail. It wasn’t that the Master was right that worried him—

It’s that he wasn’t wrong.

“I don’t want to take that from her,” the Doctor whispered, clogged and sorrowful even as the severity on the Master’s features faded. “I could withstand exile, and perhaps you could too, but not her— never her. But then what else can we do? Koschei, I can’t take this for forever! It feels like I’m dying a little more every day, I've been dying for years. I can’t. I can’t—“ The tears he’d held back at the morning’s frustration tracked freely down his cheeks now, wetting the bare skin of his chest, and within seconds his breath was heavy with poorly-restrained sobs.

A second later and he was being pulled tightly against warm skin, dampening the hair of the Master’s beard with shuddering heaves that shook the both. “My Doctor.” Somehow, the hand that stroked soothingly across his back made him tremble harder. Kindness made his own failure to cope even harder to stomach; his inability to be anything other than a disappointment unconscionable.

Soon he was being pulled back; not pushed away, but clasped tightly at an arm’s distance so that the Master might see his face. “Try not to despair,” he said evenly, but even in his distress, the Doctor could find anything even about those eyes. “I’ll fix things for us— soon. Very soon.”

Had the Doctor the wherewithal to think deeper on the topic, the resolve he saw in the Master’s expression might have (should have) frightened him. He had all the look of a detonator having received its final ignition codes; of the inevitability of an equation that had found its sum.

But then the Master continued, smoothing past any attempts he might have made to decipher the moment’s significance. “All I ask is that you stay calm in the interim and remember your worth. Don’t disregard your anger— use it. Never forget that you deserve far more than any of them, than any of us. Please, just don’t—“ the Master’s words strangled off into a small noise, pitched and entirely unexpected. The Doctor could only watch as for a brief moment, his fortifications of composure, anger, and determination crumbled alike. Beneath it all there was childlike fear, raw and all-consuming, in a way he hadn’t seen on the other Time Lord’s face since their twenties. “—Just don’t leave,” he finished eventually, jaw clenching visibly in efforts to reassert control. “Whatever else you do. Do anything but that.”

“I won’t,” the Doctor promised— foolishly, but in that moment he’d never been more certain of the truth. Face still damp from his own tears, he reversed their positions to pull the Master into his chest.

The Master’s hands fell limply from their grip on his biceps as he allowed himself to be held. Their embrace fell quiet and assured, just as two centuries of its predecessors had done, sheltered by long red grass and the afternoon suns as each Time Lord redoubled his determination to forge freedom for the other. Each was so sure that the other shared his convictions. That they were reading from the same script; the same story, albeit at two different pages.

***

Decades, centuries, full millennia later— the Doctor would think back on this and was forced to conclude theirs hadn’t ever been the same book. Perhaps not even the same language. And, he’d wonder if it were moments of false unity such as that afternoon, more than any violence or betrayals, that had truly led them astray.

***

It would be a day later before either of them noticed the finger-shaped bruises on the Doctor’s arms, unknowingly bestowed by the tightness of his fear-driven grip, and even once the Master did see them, he wasn’t able to muster up more than a vague outline of guilt.

They were beautiful, after all...

Pleasing aesthetics of mottled blues against pale muscle aside, they were a signature. An ink-stamped embellishment on the Doctor’s promise not to leave, as though it had been made incarnate, signed, and witnessed— as any pledge should be. As good as a legal edict— better even, because it was their edict. Their own word of law, esteemed above all others. The first of their many edicts; the Master would make sure of it. A fitting start to their rulership. What could be more beautiful than that?

For multiple nights after, he’d trace their patterns lightly with an admiring fingertip, but only once he was certain the Doctor was fast asleep.

Chapter 5

Summary:

A worrying conversation is overheard and a spat is had.

The Doctor considered it a personal victory when he walked through the laboratory doors the following morning. On time, no less.

His co-workers had the grace (or possibly the apathy) to leave his absence the previous day un-remarked upon, and they passed the afternoon with a strange façade of normality and professional commiseration. He even earned a small smile from Tivan after an hour spent assisting him in fine-tuning the capital’s replicatior algorithm; a tedious job that would have otherwise taken any individual the full day to accomplish alone.

It was with these successes in mind that he granted himself an extended lunch.

He’d done his part for professionalism today, had he not? Or so he reasoned, blowing steam from a teacup as he nodded silent greetings to a few vaguely familiar faces and proceeded around the central complex and into the warm breeze of the common. One lap around the greenery enjoying the afternoon suns turned into two. Then five. And, by the time the suns had started creeping towards the treeline, the Doctor had convinced himself that he should take his roaming indoors, perhaps inspect some of the capital’s nooks and crannies that he hadn’t explored in half a century. He made his way back towards the building and veered eastward, footsteps tapping across the flagstones as he meandered through the looping corridor that encircled the towers of the citadel.

But after he’d wiped the dust from a few old windows, tapped merrily on one or two old trap doors he was gratified to see still present, and stopped to nudge an answer at a befuddled-looking student hunched miserably over a thermodynamics quiz the Doctor remembered having failed during his twenty-first year— he found his path inevitably twisting back towards the lab, completely out of ways to procrastinate further.  

 Or— not entirely out. The Doctor was almost surprised to find that his feet had taken him to the Keepership department entrance. The Master couldn’t very well berate him for a second day of workplace interruptions if he used the appropriate channels this time. (Namely, the front door.)

Even so, he snagged him a coffee on his way inside. Where formality failed, the Master was reliably appeased by tokens of affection. 

This time, he held his head high as he made the long walk past the rows of desks that barricaded the path towards the Underkeeper’s office, determined to feel more like the esteemed scientist he was rather than an academy student on a walk of shame. But he hadn’t made it more than halfway across the room before an auspicious door off towards the left caught his eye. There was no reason why it should’ve garnered any attention. In fact, there was every reason why it shouldn’t have; the door appeared specifically designed to remain undetected. Sleek and dark, in a way that allowed it to blend into the aligning wall despite its size. But the Doctor was rarely able to resist an ajar door, much less one that appeared as though it was trying not to be seen. He held his own instincts in high esteem, and there was no reason he should disobey their call to investigate now.

Just a quick peek, he promised himself as he sidled quietly up to the smooth marble, and he’d almost given up and left before he heard a familiar voice coming through the opening.

“No trace of him you say? Still?”

It was Braxiatel. Of all people the Doctor had expected to run into as he navigated the keepership floor, his brother hadn’t been on the list. He flattened himself to the door and held his breath to listen more closely as an unfamiliar voice clipped in response.

“There was no warning— no trace of force, and we’ve been utterly unable to recall any of the data lost in the wipe.”

“Nothing from our security records either,” Brax grumbled, and the Doctor could practically hear the scowl across his face as he said it.

“No. As far as disappearances go, his was quite thorough.”

“Disappearance. Or— murder.”

That was unmistakably Borusa. The Doctor wasn’t sure what he had stumbled upon, or why it made his hears race with dread, but he found himself unable to do more than listen on.

“Chancellor, I know you’ve had your doubts but—”

“I believe him,” Brax interrupted the unknown voice, pressing on. “It’s too coincidental, too quick—"

“Yes but why? Who could benefit?”

“Well, there’s certainly one obvious beneficiary, given how the succession has fallen.”

There was a pregnant silence, wherein the Doctor was sure the room’s occupants would hear how his breath caught and his stomach clenched.

“We have no reason to accuse the Master of anything untoward,” Borusa replied eventually, although his tone seemed to cautiously imply the opposite. “He only held the role of Underkeeper a week before the Keeper went missing.”

“And the Keeper had been withdrawing from his responsibilities for months prior. We on the council knew something was amiss, we just assumed it was something personal and better left managed by the individual himself.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” The Doctor was well-versed in how Braxiatel sounded when he was lying, and the lack of conviction his concession held was near deafening. “But his personal reports have been notably sparse, and he’s been accessing departmental logs across the capital without reason. Acquisitions, security, stellar charting— not to mention his work in the laboratory. And there are whole swathes of data missing from the time of the Keeper’s disappearance, but we know someone tried to access the Keeper’s private logs mere days before the data wipe and the man’s disappearance.”

“Bad bookkeeping does not a criminal make,” came the councilperson’s voice, equal parts wary and doubtful.

“And we will continue to monitor his work, as well as his requests to the Matrix, as per your request,” Borusa finished. “But we have no reason to doubt him unduly without evidence or proper cause.”

“All I’m urging is that we stay vigilant,” Brax replied. “He’s notoriously clever when it suits him, and infinitely evasive. He’ll be after the Keepership any day now.”

“Well the role does attract a certain type...”

The Doctor had heard enough. He withdrew in a moment’s rush, lost in thought and trembling as he hurried back down the isles and towards the door, nearly sloshing lukewarm coffee onto a few outraged clerks and narrowly avoided a collision in his haste out the door. It wasn’t until he was halfway to the lab that he realised he had overlooked visiting the Master entirely. Perhaps it was for the best, he thought, resolutely pushing back against the doubt that had started to prod at the edges of his consciousness. In his current state of mind, he wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to face him without melting into a puddle of baseless worry and accusations.

And baseless was the key. It ate at him, almost as much as the words that had been overheard. He had no reason to doubt the Master, just as he had no reason to turn a blind eye, given his past actions. But both of accusations and absolutions required evidence; something that this whole situation sorely lacked. He’d just about had his fill of unfounded allegations— from Brax, Borusa, and himself alike— and if no one was going to put in the effort it would take to clear up this mess, he bloody well would!

By the time he arrived back at the lab, the Doctor’s mood was a venerable storm of determination and ire. He threw open the door without a single word of greeting to his colleagues and thundered straight towards the matrix interface.

“Doctor? Are you—”

“Take this,” he stated flatly, thrusting the forgotten coffee into Jarvi’s confused hand without pause.

“What is—?”

“Coffee. Earth drink, made from beans— or leaves, or something. You’ll like it,” he snapped, without a care if it was true, already turned away and fiddling with the activation controls.

“It’s cold,” came a meek and sullen reply far behind him, but the Doctor didn’t bother with responding.

The interface flared to life under his fingertips, and he made quick work of trapsing through the workbook logs from his weeks of absence. Two months of data shouldn’t take him long to sluice, much less when the lab’s occupants were so few. The Master’s entry credentials should stick out like a sore thumb.

***

Nearly six hours later found the Doctor cursing his own words, right alongside the Master’s talent for subterfuge.

Unauthorised access, he could spot. Inversely, had the Master deleted every trace of his activities, the Doctor could have tracked his actions though the negative space left behind. But unfortunately (and irritatingly) the Master had chosen a far subtler middle ground. There was certainly evidence of his accessing the laboratory records; over number of days, sometimes multiple times in a single day, all over the span of nine days nearly a month ago. Using entry logs alone, the pattern looked like nothing more than the extracurricular tinkerings of a particularly keen government official trying his hand at invention.

The Doctor frowned, brow creasing in unease as he leaned into the glow of the display to confirm what he was seeing.

Or rather— what he wasn’t.

Because entry logs were where the information ended. Like as many novels with their end pages ripped out, the Master’s worklogs showed frequent access with no output; no hint as to what machinery he had accessed, or which resources he’d drawn upon. The Doctor hadn’t been more than academically aware that such a level of secrecy was possible; the Master must have hacked into the record logs of each individual piece of laboratory equipment to pull it off. It was an obscenely paranoid feat of secrecy— not to mention forbidden. While not technically a criminal offence, it was widely understood that the purpose of the lab was to serve the needs of Gallifrey, and this was the exact sort of flagrant violation of that tenement that he knew the Master must have savoured.

It was also the same sort of flagrant violation that he knew the Master counted on being overlooked. Rightfully so, as it required some semblance of effort and more than a single step of investigation— two things for which the council was not renown.

It was dark beyond the lab’s windows, only the pale light of the stars illuminating the Doctor's path as he crossed the threshold to the laboratory door. Nighttime had fallen onto him over an hour ago, shortly after he’d waved off wary questioning of both his co-workers as they had readied themselves to leave. The whole citadel appeared oddly abandoned as the Doctor made his way towards home, the echoes of his shoes sounding nearly as lonely and desolate as the day’s events had left him feeling.

Why? As he had found himself thinking unconscionably often over the past week, it wasn’t necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. Suspicious, certainly— and there was more than enough cause for concern. But the Master had always been self-protective at heart; it wasn’t a stretch to assume he’d hide his work from the council, particularly if it were something he was proud of. Still, on the back of the conversation he had overheard in the keepership, the Doctor couldn’t help but feel ill-at-ease.

And if it was regarding an invention of interest, why not tell him about it in the first instance? The only thing the Master loved more than constructing a slow scheme was regaling any achievement to the Doctor within minutes of completion, with all the beaming pride of a child proferring his prised artwork. If there was the faintest chance of impressing the Doctor, the Master could usually be relied upon to fold in an instant.

The house was as quiet as the night sky by the time the Doctor arrived home. Susan had grudgingly returned to the academy for the week, and the only signs of life were trickling in from the sitting room nearest to the door, catching the Doctor off guard. A perfectly pleasant room— it wasn’t one that was frequently used between them, with both preferring to spend what little idle time they had between the laboratory and garden (when it wasn’t spent conjoined in their bedroom).

But there sat the Master, on the uncomfortably formal sofa they usually reserved for unwanted guests in efforts to facilitate their quick departure. The lines of tension in his face were illuminated by the small lamp aside him, along with stark white pages of the novel in his hand that the Doctor was certain the Master hadn’t taken in a word of.

“Evening,” the Doctor said simply, letting the door swing shut behind him.

The Master must have been lost in thought to have jumped at the noise as thoroughly as he did. But he recovered with admirable speed, morphing his expression into one of nonchalant disapproval rather than the visible apprehension that had overtaken him while unobserved. “Doctor, how good of you to show up. Was there trouble at the lab?”

His tone made it clear that if not in the labs, there would soon be trouble at home.

“Of a sort,” he admitted, both unsure of how to begin and far from willing to do so. He padded across the floor to sink down into the sofa next to the Master who had scooted to allow him room, and willed the stiff fabric beneath his thighs to lend him the fortitude the conversation would require. “I tried to visit you in the keepership today.”

“Tried?” The Master attempted a chuckle, but he was far too terse to allow it any mirth. “Don’t tell me you lost your way again.”

“I made it as far as the department floor this time, but I got side-tracked,” the Doctor said before faltering. He sighed, drawing his eyes up to watch the Master’s own as he continued. “I might have snooped— did snoop, you know me. And I overheard Borusa and Braxiatel speaking with a councilmember about the Keeper’s disappearance. Your name came up.”

If there were any cause for suspicion, the Master’s face didn’t betray itself by flinching. He couldn’t see anything other than the faint wrinkle of distaste that always accompanied each of those names; doubly-so in combination. “Naturally,” he sniffed. “Braxiatel wouldn’t be able to restrain himself from sharing his accusations with the council regardless of truth— any excuse to try and impede my way. Unbelievably unprofessional of him to do so where he was so likely to be overheard.”

“It’s funny you mention unprofessionalism actually, considering what I discovered afterwards,” the Doctor continued dryly. “I happened to take a look at the laboratory logs and noticed that you wiped all trace of your experiments from the system. No use of machinery, no records of the resources used, no hint of a finished product— nothing.”

“Happened to take a look,” the Master repeated slowly, his tone falling flat as his expression prickled with anger. “Tripped and fell onto the system interface, did you? You have a singular knack for removing all personal accountability from any action you can’t defend.”

“I don’t have to defend it!” The Doctor only wished he hadn’t sounded so defensive as he said it. “And don’t deflect the point— you wiped their system, Master! You know that’s forbidden, and it’s exactly the sort of thing anyone looking to defame you would love to find. Why risk it at all?”

“Must I really explain my distaste for giving the council any more of my intellectual property than I already have?” The Doctor couldn’t believe the flippancy with which the Master waved the thought away with an elegant flick of his hand.

Or rather he could believe it— he just couldn’t stomach it; couldn’t hold back the way it made his own anger flare. “A senseless risk, and for what? Pride? What did you create that was so deserving of secrecy that you’d risk your job, and yet so insignificant that it didn’t bear telling me?”

“Ah, and again it all comes back to you, Doctor, does it not? You can take all manner of misbehaviour at the expense of the council, but the mere notion that you haven’t been given every piece of information you want the exact second you want it has you frothing!”

The Doctor felt himself lunge from the sofa like a spring uncoiled, pacing around the lacquered oak coffee table while telling himself it was an expression of frustration, rather than one of avoidance at having been so thoroughly called out. “How can you be taking this so lightly?” he seethed in disbelief, reeling back towards the Master’s position with an irascible pivot. “They think you’ve killed the Keeper, and you’re here risking your own future, for what— spite? How can they be expected to trust you? How can I be expected to trust you? You aren’t nearly stupid enough to think I wouldn’t find this concerning— that I wouldn’t have noticed!”

“Perhaps I hoped you wouldn’t check.” The Master’s voice was low, even having the gall to be laced with disappointment. He must have seen the Doctor’s face tighten, mouth poised to retort, because he continued hurriedly. “Not because I wanted to go undetected, flatter me enough to understand that if I was truly worried about you finding out about my research, I wouldn’t have done so in your own laboratory.”

Even the Doctor had to concede him that point, angered as he was.

“I had hoped that you trusted me enough to know that I’d reveal anything worth knowing to you, the second it was ready to be revealed.”

“That cannot keep being your byline for every secret! You can’t just keep expecting me to have blind faith in you after everything that you’ve done!”

“Blind faith?” the Master snorted, tearing his eyes away from the Doctor’s own to gaze out the window, looking for strength. “Hardly. I would settle for any faith at all. I’d settle for you understanding that I don’t need to keep proving myself to you, Doctor. You’re my husband, not my regent. I don’t owe you an explanation for my every thought—”

“Just tell me!” It rang out like a plea, reverberating around the confines of the rounded sitting room walls. The Doctor's eyes felt heavy and imploring, stealing the Master’s attention back from the stars beyond the window as he begged for some measure of reassurance. Whether he was truly owed an explanation, or whether he simply craved access to the Master’s thoughts with imperious greed like the other Time Lord was suggesting, the Doctor no longer cared. The robes around his shoulders felt infinitely heavy and his eyelids were stinging with hearts-deep fatigue. “Please,” he tried again, a new tactic as his voice fell purposefully soft and beguiling. “I’m sorry I pried, and I’m sorry I keep asking explanations of you, but I need to know so that I can feel any peace with this all.”

“And is it your peace that’s always paramount? Is my privacy of so little importance? My plans, my work towards our future, my trust?”

If it’s for our future, then just tell me what it is you’ve been working on! I don’t care if it isn’t finished! I promise I will never ask similar of you again!”

That last bit was laying it on rather thick, as well as being an abject lie— and they both knew it. Still, the Doctor’s hopes were raised as the Master lifted himself from the sofa and slowly made his way towards his position near the room’s entrance. Strong fingers cradled along the underside of his jaw, part caress and part redirection as the Doctor leaned into their warmth. “Please Koschei,” he murmured again, allowing the rumble of his words to reverberate through the Master’s hand as he held those dark eyes with his own, watching as their lids lagged and the tension eased from their corners.

The Master leaned in, so close he could feel his breath across skate across the crest of his lips.

“No.”

And with that the Master dropped his hand and slid past the Doctor and into the light of the hallway, leaving him alone in the evening’s quiet.   

Notes:

I get so much laughter out of me (a disinfranchised doctor looking for excuses to pack up and leave work/life/the planet behind) writing about the Doctor, who is looking to do much the same. I don't believe in projecting onto fic, but also...

Chapter 6

Summary:

An agreement is made, but the Doctor, the Master, and Susan decide to take one last jaunt before civility strikes.

“You were right,” the Doctor said primly, prodding the words past gritted teeth as he slumped down into the chair opposite the Master’s over breakfast. “Don’t let it go to your head.” He couldn’t help but feel a little affronted by the magnitude of the Master’s startle, and the way his eyes flew wide with shock before he smoothed his expression into something aloof and superior as though he’d expected nothing less. Personally, he’d thought that the two days of frosty silence spent considering the terms of his admission was more than fair. Speedy, even.

“Never,” the Master intoned, dabbing at his mouth before leisurely turning to acknowledge the Doctor’s presence head-on. “Although you’ll have to be more specific, I’m right about a great many things, I can’t imagine to which you’re referring.”

Or perhaps ending his silent protest had been premature.

Had the Doctor not seen the earnest trepidation belaying the Master’s snark, he might have retracted his apology on the spot. But as it was, he had given the subject all manner of thought and was determined to press onward before his resolve could falter. “I haven’t been extending you the trust you deserve. That’s unfair, I can’t well presume to come home in full acknowledgement of what you’ve done whilst still holding those same events against you.”

In an uncharacteristic expression of mercy, the Master chose not to say anything. He simply listened in silence before extending a hand; a gesture of forgiveness as much as it was one of agreement.

The Doctor took it gratefully. “But that’s not all,” he continued stroking along the carpal tendons, buying for time as he padded over the well-articulated joints of his wrist. “I’m going to turn in my TARDIS.”

The muscles under his fingertips tensed in shock. “You’re going to what?” the Master squawked, unflappable poise forgotten. “Why?”

“Because it’s not just you I haven’t been trusting, it’s me too! I need to learn how to be here again— no easy outs, no escape routes, just this. I want this.” Even as he said it, he let himself be carried by the truth of his words, by the sincerity of his own conviction. “I want to complain to you about laboratory drudgery in the evenings over dinner, and I want you to drag me to your insufferable political parties. I want to stargaze with you and Susan and hear all about her latest arguments with her roommate. I want to watch her graduate. I want us to avoid Braxiatel’s house calls together. I want to watch him glare as I pull you out of your office for long lunches, worse so when we come back half-dressed and covered in grass stains. I want—” the Doctor faltered and paused, attempting to find the words that would give his meaning its fullest truth. “Well, I want a lot of things, but I need to try settling down. Maybe it’s time.”

The Master was still giving him a cautious once-over, almost fearful, as though the Doctor were more lit stick of dynamite than person; as though at any moment the Doctor would realise what it was he was promising and rip it from his hands in a flash. “Us,” he said slowly, when after a few seconds’ silence the Doctor hadn’t taken his words back. “Settled. Can you even imagine it?” But his hand had tightened over the Doctor’s as though so hold him to his words now that they’d been spoken.

The Doctor only laughed, but he allowed his hand its newfound trap. “I really can’t, but I suppose that’s half the fun. We settle— not forever, mind you. Just long enough to prove them all wrong. We play by their rules just to prove we can beat them, just to prove that we can. Then we’ll make our own way.”

“You? Follow the rules?” the Master snorted, but the Doctor could see there was real insecurity nestled beneath. “And you think you’ll be able to handle such a show of commitment?”To Gallifrey? To me? The dual meanings were implicit.

“All the more reason I will return the TARDIS; consider it my show of good faith.” The Doctor’s pinned hand was gripping back now, at least as hard as it was being held. His gaze held the Master’s levelly. “No more running for me. No more schemes for you. You know how highly I value my own freedom, but I’ll give it up for this. For now, at least— until we’re ready to do things the right way.”

“For now,” the Master reiterated softly, and he could see how much the demonstration had moved him.

For a minute neither spoke, each lost in his own thoughts and fledgling hopes. From beyond the Master’s right, light streamed in through the window with a glimmering promise that punctuated the vow. It had been a difficult decision, one that pushed against the grain of the Doctor’s very soul, but in the comfortable aftermath of his words, he had never felt so assured.

“—But not quite yet, I should think.”

“Hmm?” The Doctor perked up, reorienting his attention back towards the Master’s profile against the morning light, eyes glinting with newfound resolution.

“One last jaunt then, you and me. And Susan, assuming she can spare the time. I think we’re owed a final indulgence before we start our newfound lives of respectability.”

“One last…” the Doctor turned the idea over in his mind, finding it far too appealing to bear. “But the council will know, they’ll see it as an unregistered departure.”

“What’s one more unregistered departure going to hurt if you intend on handing your ship in soon after? They can file it as a material restock run if they don’t want to cause social outrage, which you know they’d rather avoid. Braxiatel will be far more concerned with receiving accolades for the return of your TARDIS than he will be handing us another citation.”

It was the inarguable truth. He tried desperately to scan the plan for any caveats, any barriers they might have overlooked, but a childlike enthusiasm was winning out over his vigilance. “And I will,” he promised, words beginning to rush together in his excitement as his muscles tensed to spring from the chair and dash towards the basement. “I’ll contact the acquisitions department and turn her over as soon as we return.”

The Master’s smile was broad enough to advertise the deep-seated relief their conversation had wrought, and nearly as gleeful as the Doctor’s own at the idea of an escape. “I suppose we ought to call Susan immediately then,” he declared, plunking down his cup next to his forgotten meal, wooden chair legs squeaking against the flagstones under the weight of his exuberance as he pulled back his chair and rose. “No time like the present, wherever we choose that present to be.”

The Doctor couldn’t have agreed more.

***

“But where are we going?” Susan had been asking since she has arrived five minutes before, though she’d come when beckoned without hesitation.

‘Do you have time for a short vacation?’

It had been enough. By the time the Master had disposed of his breakfast and the Doctor had tugged on his shoes she was through the door. A minute more and he was turning his key in the TARDIS lock while she padded at the flagstones eagerly behind him.

The Doctor smiled to himself— something eager, then triumphant as the lock clicked and they piled through the doorframe and into the console room. “Oh, somewhere marvellous I expect,” he replied off-handedly, walking towards the console and fiddling with the control switch to cover for his own uncertainty. Truth be told, he hadn’t yet thought further than getting them into the TARDIS and off Gallifrey; their actual destination seemed less relevant by contrast.

“Sjurrez?” The Master had wandered over behind him to place a hand on his back, and the Doctor knew his fiddling with the console was being silently judged. “Whole swathes of unexplored jungle, we could materialise right at its centre. And I’ve heard wonders about the weaving trees.”

Susan wrinkled her nose from across the central column. “I’m sure it’s lovely, but I want something vibrant,” she enthused. “Cultural. Something with life to it, and not a single academy robe in sight!”

The Doctor was half listening, but the majority of his attention was spent trying to recall the launch sequence, murmuring recited steps pulled straight from the manual under his breath as his hands glid over the controls. Buttons, ignition keys, and levers gleamed accusatorily at him as he cursed himself for having disposed of the manual after failing his flight test in the first place, but it didn’t stop him from slapping away the Master’s hand as it crept closer in an attempt to help.

You wouldn’t stoop to backseat driving now, would you? A small huff of laughter against the back of his neck was the only sign the Master had heard his thought, but the hand remained absent all the same. And behind him, the debate continued.

“Orpheus?”

“A radio planet, you wouldn’t like it. Veccsa Cruz?”

“I said vibrant grandpapa, not desolate! Please don’t make me go see historical ruins today!”

“Your lack of culture wounds me, child. Beeta-Ai?”

“Why, they don’t have sound there at all!”

“Grinogax?”

With a thrumming energy he could feel seeping in through his fingertips, the Doctor felt the TARDIS finally awaken to his presence. He greeted her non-verbally, letting her consciousness wash over himself and over the Master and Susan’s amicable bickering in a wave of warmth. There was affection there, almost a fond exasperation, as a matriarch looking over her children and pleased for the company. Protective, even.

Would you mind terribly if we travelled? It wasn’t a verbal request, but she understood all the same. A second later and the controls under the Doctor’s hand were moving of their own accord, and within moments he could tell they had sprung free of Gallifrey’s airspace and were free-floating in the vortex. He couldn’t help a sigh of relief as the feeling of freedom unclenched his chest like a hand releasing his throat, allowing room to breathe.

From the TARDIS there emanated a potential space; one that had been psychically left open in request of a simple answer. [Where?]

“Novos-six!” He’d spoken it aloud, lounder than he’d expected even as he programmed in their course and felt the TARDIS readying herself similarly to accommodate his efforts. He winced as the engine shrieked unnaturally under their feet, doubtlessly the result of some error in his own piloting, but he was too excited to give the matter a second thought. The Doctor spun around to face the duo, determined in the face of their wary expectance. “The city of a million tongues. Vibrant you say? You couldn’t ask for better than Novos-six, it’s been the social hub of its quadrant for at least twelve thousand years! And will be for at least another twenty thousand, but we’d best keep that to ourselves— we don’t want that going to their heads. They’re in our timestream even, so we needn’t go far.”

Their expressions had both morphed as he’d babbled on, in two entirely different directions.

“Oh, that’s perfect!” Susan’s look was of utter delight as she circled around the console to peer into the viewing screen with rapt anticipation. “They taught us about the Novos in our thirtieth year— do they really put security nanites into the water to track visitors?”

The Doctor couldn’t help a snort. “Don’t believe everything they teach you in that school, my girl.”

“But perhaps we’ll avoid drinking fountains all the same.” Whereas Susan had fallen enamoured with their destination, the Master appeared less than pleased. His eyes appeared distant, and the hand still clasped across the Doctor’s lower back had fallen stiff. “Novos-six? Isn’t that a little dangerous?”

“Nonsense! Nanites aside, our old tutors didn’t get it all wrong. It’s a controlled state if there ever was one— we’ll be the least strange strangers in the market, but their security is formidable.”

Somehow, that didn’t appear to reassure the Master in the slightest. If anything his expression hardened further, but he let the subject drop.

They’d landed, without turbulence or preamble, largely due to the TARDIS’s own self-control. The only sign that they’d landed at all was the millions of lives suddenly murmuring at the edge of the Doctor’s consciousness; a veritable hive of thoughts, dreams, and fears buzzing right beyond their door. Susan immediately ran towards the door and threw it open with abandon, letting in a wave of foreign sounds and smells, not to mention a wave of scorching humidity that immediately pricked at his skin and left him sweating under the collar of his thick robes.

Vibrancy. In the distance there were three voices bickering in a language the Doctor couldn’t understand, overlayed by a shriek of joy and footsteps that pattered down the street that lay beyond. Life!

Oh, how he'd missed exploring.

The Doctor briefly squeezed the Master’s hand under his own, flashing him a brilliant smile before bounding after Susan, who was already so far out the door that he couldn’t see more than the shiny heel of a single loafer. “Wait— finesse, Susan, you can’t just waltz straight in!” Beyond their door lay an alleyway that opened up directly into a market square, bustling with activity, all under the shadow of an imposing tower block that loomed over the city’s centre from within, like a lighthouse over the labyrinthine waves of commerce surrounding it.

Behind them, with grudging hesitancy, the sound of the Master’s own footsteps and the clink of the TARDIS lock followed the Doctor out.

***

In hindsight, the morning proceeded exactly the way any of them could have expected.

Within minutes, Susan had her hands wrapped around a chilled and off-puttingly viscous looking beverage that the locals swore did wonders against the heat.

Twenty minutes under the dizzying heat of Novos’s triple suns later, both the Doctor and the Master had pushed past their initial scepticism and followed her suit.

An hour later and the Doctor was grilling a sun-fatigued vendor about his worries concerning impurities in the water filtration system while the Master and Susan were carding through his menagerie of off-planet relics and finery.

Two hours— and the Susan was grinning brightly from under a garish sunhat while the Master wiped the last traces of machine oil from his hands and the Doctor was presenting the new filtration system to the baffled but grateful vendor, alongside a haphazard handful of local currency that he estimated would cover the hat (as well as their monopoly on the man’s time).

While it wasn’t the start to their peaceful outing that the Doctor had desired, and he could feel sweat from the afternoon’s heat dripping along his hairline from exertion, he couldn’t shake the heady feeling of a job well done; the simple pleasure of a problem having been creatively and efficiently solved. But there was something else, something that had been lurking at the edges of his awareness since their arrival. While Novos was renowned for its security, something that he’d argued to the others only hours before, the marketplace was patrolled to a level he hadn’t anticipated. Jarring, even— the way twos and threes of security forces wove through the crowds with uninterrupted jurisdiction. The didn’t speak, they didn’t stop, and it was clear that the vendors gave them a wide berth out of fear rather than respect. And the shop keep they’d just assisted— there was something shifty and unspoken behind the man’s eyes when he’d mentioned the city’s broken water system, and something hesitant in his hands when he’d accepted their repairs. It was the same look the Doctor could see reflected in the passers-by as they glanced towards the cameras towering over every street corner, and the way their gazes lowered whenever any figures clad in governmental green came stomping down the alleyways, smooth and impenetrable dark helmets in place of heads, unflinching as the wove around shoppers with near robotic precision.

“I think there’s something amiss here,” he conferred to the Master, indicating his eyebrows pointedly as they watched a trio of locals nearly trip over their feet to get clear of the nearest security patrol.  

The Master watched on, with an expression that was still strung tight with something beyond the Doctor’s understanding. “Evidently,” he agreed lowly, watching from the shadow of a nearby stall as the crowds parted like the seas in front of the patrol’s path. “But I believe we’ve done our good deed for the day. If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to spend the remainder of the afternoon as a tourist rather than a freelance mechanic.”

The Doctor swirled on him with an eyebrow raised. “It’s not all the same to me, not in the least!” From the back of his mind, a voice tentatively asked whether it was wise to press this point of contention, and so soon after their newest truce only hours before. Later, he’d look back and blame the heat, the moral impudence; anything other than the anger bristling in his hearts as he watched the flippancy with which the Master observed the scene. “What would you have us do? Simply allow a potential threat to—”

“Yes!”

It was loud enough that Susan looked over at them from a nearby stall, glancing inquisitively until the Doctor dismissed her curiosity with a reassuring smile and she returned to the conversation she’s been having with a local child who was attempting to sell her bracelets that had clearly been handwoven from local stones and twine.

The Master shot her a similar look of affection before turning back to him, quieter this time as he continued. “Yes, we allow it. We allow this potential threat because that’s all it is— potential. We’ve seen no evidence of any actual crime. Moreover, we allow it because it isn’t ours, Doctor. Not our problem, not our city.”

 “Oh lovely— inaction. Guilty bystanders it is, then.” He couldn’t help but allow some of his indignation to bubble to the surface at the Master’s exasperated eyeroll.

“Precisely.” Ahead of their path, the guards had stopped at the mouth of a stall’s entrance and had begun flipping through the goods on show without a word exchanged, and all the appearance of impunity. Rather than intercede, the shop’s owner had slunk towards the back of the booth, looking as though she’d like nothing better than to have passed through the wall and out of their vicinity entirely. “We take a leaf from the locals’ books and stay inactive and safe, rather than risk ourselves to foolishness. If the government of Novos wishes to subdue its own population—

 “Why— you don’t think they’re hurting anyone?”

They both jumped as Susan appeared at the Master’s side as though summoned, clearly having overheard the tail-end of his comment. Her eyes followed the same path as his own towards the guards’ commotion amongst the displayed goods, but with none of his reservation. Something about her clear distaste of the scene bolstered his own indignation, as though his own distaste was validated for having been matched. He glanced towards the Master with his brows raised, a universal expression of ‘see? I told you so.’

The Master’s returning expression of consternation was pleading and threatening in equal measure, but he paid it no heed.

“Think?” The Doctor laughed but it fell short as his eyes fell back towards the pilfered market stall. “Hardly. I know they are. It’s classic police state mentality, no doubt they’re seeking larger fees from the market’s trade and are attempting to bottleneck the living standard until the locals comply. Water filtration errors, on a wealthy planet like Novos-six? In this heat? It can’t not be a calculated attack.”

“Let it be, Doctor.”

The Master’s pressured warning was nearly lost under Susan’s exclamation of outrage as she turned on them both. “They’re depriving their own citizens of water?! Just for a higher share of trade earnings?”

“Evidently,” the Doctor parroted the Master’s earlier phrase, satisfied by having his own moral outrage reflected in her, but simultaneously unable to keep the exasperation from his voice at her surprise. “My child, this happens quite commonly.”

“But what can we do?” Susan was looking less reassured by his insistence than he’d hoped, and the look in her eyes was swiftly morphing from shock to outrage as she glared daggers at the guards. “We can’t just stand here and let it happen!”

“It’s not ours to—”

“We most certainly cannot,” the Doctor raised his voice to speak over the Master’s attempt to distract from the situation, eyeing him tersely. A moment to teach Susan about correct behaviour in the face of tyranny was not a moment to waste; something for which the Master clearly had less appreciation. “Apathy is the enemy of kindness Susan, and as Time Lords, it’s our privilege and duty to intercede where we can. Perhaps before we leave, we can have a word with the local Magistrate—”

“Hey!”

The Doctor’s hearts stuttered, and neither he nor the Master managed to react in time to prevent Susan from storming over to the guards imperiously, her slight form trembling with indignation.“Susan!” he hissed; pleaded, really, as he attempted to distract her course. This was not what he’d expected, nor the lesson he had planned. “Get back here this inst—”

“Hey! Yes you— both of you! Have you been threatening the people in this city?”

Both guards turned synchronously, and even in the inhuman smoothness of their movements there was a palpable sense of disbelief that anyone had the audacity to address them. “You will remain compliant,” one of them droned in an echoing monotone.

“I most certainly will not!” Susan had reached them now, standing not three meters from where they’d halted in their tracks, and something about the way their forms loomed over hers struck a fear in his hearts that he’d rarely known. He’d been in worse scrapes— far worse, dozens of times over, but something about watching his grandchild hurdle straight into similar had him frozen in terror.

One of the guards tilted its head incrementally, up and down in a slow assessment of her form. “Youth, visitor, of an unregistered class,” it declared, with a short nod of accord from its colleague.

Robotic, but not entirely. An android, of sorts?

Susan stood her tallest, chin tilted arrogantly up in a look the Doctor had nearly two centuries of experience in seeing the Master wield. “Gallifreyan,” she proclaimed stiffly, doing her utmost to loom over them despite her height. “Youth, visitor, and opponent to whatever it is you are doing here. Leave these people alone!”

There was a hairsbreadth of silence, wherein the entire market square seemed to be holding its breath. It was in that moment that the danger of what he’d instigated hit him; that while encouraging his own impassionate tendencies within Susan might be validating, it could prove volatile when combined with the reactive nature she and the Master shared in abundance. The next moment, the Doctor’s parental instincts overcame his shock and found that his feet were moving towards the scene without his permission.

But he wasn’t fast enough.

A dull red glow had begun from within the plating of one guard’s helmet, unmoving as it stared Susan down. “Agitator?” it stated in a gravelly rumble, and the Doctor didn’t fully recognise it for the question it was until its companion gave slow nod. “Agitator.” And with that a beam sprung forth from the helmet and straight towards Susan with infallible precision.

And it would have struck her too, inevitably, had the Master not clearly have found his footing whole seconds before the Doctor.

Susan hardly had the time to look shocked before she was being shoved backwards and to the ground decisively, as the Master stepped directly between her and the beam’s path. It bathed him in red, hardly more than a fraction of a second, but the Doctor could see the way his face was set resolute with fury, and then he was gone.

Blind panic. It was all the Doctor felt, and his mouth was open long before he registered that he was shouting in rage, twinned by Susan’s gasp of horror as their eyes remained fixed onto the spot where the Master no longer stood, as though they could bring him back by sheer willpower alone. The guard who had released the beam trembled once sharply; head cocked as though registering what had occurred. “Error,” it stated, and its tone was almost terse, as though it were confused by the very concept. “Incorrect specimen. Mistaken disapparition.”

Disapparation? Disappeared, not dead? The words flooded the Doctor’s senses with a relief that would have left him boneless, if not for his anger. In his right mind he might have assumed as much, given the beacon of the Master’s consciousness that he could still feel hovering at the peripheries of his own. But his eyes still burned from the red blare of the beam, still remained locked onto the vacant space that was all the more empty for the lack of his husband within it, and he had to admit that his mind did not feel right at all.

In one motion, with a speed that belied its size, the other guard had Susan incarcerated by one massive hand and was indicating to its partner. “Proceed to disapparate the agitator?”

“No!” The question broke through his paralysis and the Doctor was sprinting forward once again, more of a lunge than a run, but the guards paid him little attention.

“Negatory. Return to the high court to make amendments at once.”

“At once,” the second guard reiterated, and they both turned to march swiftly back towards the city’s centre with Susan in tow, struggling and cursing in their grip all the while.

“Wait!” The Doctor threw himself into their path, forcing them to stop in their tracks at the last second lest they step directly onto him. “That’s my granddaughter you have there, and my partner you just stole! We’re just travellers, release her at once!”  

The guard unincumbered by Susan lowered its head, giving him a similar scan to the one they’d bestowed on her only minutes before. “Adult. Visitor, unregistered class—”

“Gall-i-free-yahn,” the other interjected with lumpy syllables, as if sounding the word out for the very first time. Capable of learning then, independent to each unit. The Doctor filed the fact away for later, desperate for any piece of information that could be of use.

“Gallifreyan, yes,” he replied, willing his voice into something less hostile. “Myself, my granddaughter, and my partner, all of us are Gallifreyan travellers. This has all been a mistake— you must bring us to him at once!”

Susan took advantage of their pause fall limp in their grasp, cajoling her posture into something less feral. “Please, you must,” she implored, eyes wide and fearful as she squared up towards the guard who held her arm fast. “I’m dreadfully sorry if I offended you— it’s just, the people here looked so afraid! But you can’t just take grandpapa instead, please!”

Where the guard remained staunchly unmoved by their shows of emotion, it seemed to register the relevance of their relation to the Master, as well as their direct questioning. “Next of kin to the disapparated should present to court,” one droned dutifully. “The disapparated will be processed in due course.”

With that, the guard nearest to the Doctor grabbed him in another lightning-quick manoeuvre, capturing his wrists just as effectively and unshakably as they had Susan’s. Together, they were led like prisoners with their hands in front of them, step by step in the direction of the tower he’d spotted upon their arrival.

Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the TARDIS, still parked in the shadows of the alley where they’d left her, and he fought back the impulse to fight tooth and nail wrenching his wrists free and make a run for it. “To court it is then,” he muttered, brushing his shoulder against Susan’s on his right in a way he hoped was reassuring as they allowed themselves to be led.

Notes:

This took me waaay too long to update. In my defence, I was stuck in a plot-lull, then right as I got over it real life decided to curb stomp me (it's more or less over now). With any luck, I should be back at it with more regular updates now.

Chapter 7

Summary:

The Doctor and Susan's search for the Master brings them to the heart of Novos, and the Doctor learns a little more about what the Master has been up to in the labs.

Notes:

WE'RE BACK BABY! Got some free time built back into my schedule so it's time to get this story rolling again.

Up close, the tower block was no less imposing than the Doctor had deemed it upon landing. It was a solid rectangular block of brutalist grey concrete with a single sill-less window that entirely encircled the building’s top floor, so far above them it looked more like a reflective metal ring in the late afternoon’s glare than glass panelling. But he wasn’t given long to inspect it; both he and Susan were pulled unceremoniously though the building’s single door, two stories high and imposing in its own right. And as it shut behind them with a dull thud, the Doctor was uncomfortably aware that his back was turned on building’s only route of escape.

The interior they found themselves in was no less austere or grandiose. In contrast to its outside however, visible efforts had been made to make it exude a sleek opulence that seemed at odds with the street markets surrounding it. Though scuffed and dusted, the floors of the lobby were a pale marble, leading towards a single desk where a security guard identical to the two leading himself and Susan sat.

The desk guard nodded wordlessly to its doppelgangers with mechanical precision as their group passed. They were led into one of the adjacent lifts as a guard pushed a button for the subterranean floors, and they descended in a slow hum of machinery that was the only sound brave enough to break the air’s tension. A half-step. A sniffle. A brush against the Doctor’s arm, accompanied by a flood of fear. With her hands still locked in front of her by a single giant fist, Susan managed to shuffle incrementally closer to him, and the Doctor could tell the brief contact of their shoulders was unintentional from the waves of panic that bled through it. It was a fear that Susan would be far too proud to voice under any voluntary circumstances. Every foot further from the exit left the Doctor increasingly ill-at-ease too, but he felt it was his responsibility to gain more information from their captors— or at least, to distract them from the terrible silence.  

“So, er— this is the way to the courts, I take it?”

“Affirmative,” was all he got in response from the guard holding his own wrists, its broad back still staunchly turned.

“All of this for a court? Seems like a disproportionate use of space, not to mention resources.”

“The Centrum is the center of governance on Novos-six,” the same guard parroted, and something about the way it came out in an ambling monotone left the Doctor sure it was a pre-recorded statement, or a code of conduct written directly into the guards’ neural net. “It contains the magisterium office, the legal offices, the jail compound, the office of cultural order, the office for public affairs and reporting, the offices for domes—”

“What, all of that under one roof?” the Doctor scoffed, heedless of the way Susan had begun side-eyeing him with consternation. “That doesn’t exactly sound conducive to a check and balance of powers.”

“There is no balance. Only the power of the magistrate.”

“Typical,” the Doctor muttered under his breath in response, even as he felt the grip on his wrists tighten. “I’m sure the magistrate is a charming man and in no way the ineffectual dictator that kind of phrase implies.”

“Grandfather!” Susan hissed through her teeth.

“Opposition to the magistrate is not permitted by citizens or foreigners of any sort—”

“We have arrived,” the guard holding Susan who had remained silent until this point interjected, and if it were possible for an android of their built to feel irritation, the Doctor could have sworn that its tone was terse. “Proceed.”

It wasn’t as if they were given a choice to do much else. Susan and the Doctor were tugged along behind the guards as they entered a room that was far shabbier than the lobby above, and notably more cluttered. Folding chairs were strewn around the perimeter of the low-ceilinged room, upon which locals sat huddled in pairs and trios in fearful silence, not daring to do more than glance up at the odd spectacle they made as they entered. The Doctor tried throwing a heartening smile towards an elderly man and child he spotted off to his right, but the man only frowned harder, startling and tucking the child into his robes away from both the Doctor and the guards’ eyesight.

There was a desk in this room too, guarded by a smudged plexiglass divider that rendered its occupant nearly invisible under the glare of overhead fluorescent lights. But as the Doctor’s guard pushed him towards the front of the thing, he could see snippets of a Novossite clerk through the speech holes in the glass, watching their approach with wary impassivity.

The Doctor opened his mouth to speak. But before he could utter as much as a hello, his guard was addressing the counter. “Sentrybot 3302, escorting foreigners to visit a prisoner. Disapparated at seventeen hundred hours, thirty-two minutes, and twenty-seven seconds.”

“Feeling accurate, aren’t you,” the clerk muttered, sounding impossibly bored. The man eyed the Doctor through the roundlets. “Name?”

“Hi, yes, I’m the Doctor and this is Susan,” he replied quickly, flashing a tight smile as he side-stepped in front of his guard to approach the counter, pulling Susan alongside. We’re travellers from off-planet, just thought we’d pop in for a visit, maybe take in some of your lovely market. But there was a— misunderstanding with my grandchild here, and you see, you’ve accidentally taken my husband—

“The prisoner’s name,” the clerk clarified dully over the Doctor’s monologing, tilting his head down to peer critically at them over thick spectacles.

“Ah,” the Doctor stated, slightly embarrassed. “Yes, well that does make more sense. His name is the Master.”

The clerk’s impassivity didn’t waver an inch in response, but his eyebrows lifted a tad higher. “If you say so,” the man replied, more to himself than anything as his fingers clacked impossibly loudly over his keyboard in a manner that all receptionists universe-wide seem uniquely capable of doing.

The Doctor waited patiently for a minute. Then less patiently for the minute that followed. By the third minute of clicking computer keys and the clerk’s non-committal humming, the Doctor became seriously worried that his jaw might snap if he clenched it any harder. Mere seconds before he would’ve cracked and let loose the threats and pleas building up in his throat, the man at the desk finally spoke:

“Right. Well, we have no prisoners listed under that name. Might he have been admitted under something different?” It was said with an intonation that suggested that the clerk had played through their joke long enough, and if the Doctor would supply him with a less ridiculous-sounding name, they might have their answers and be on their way.  

“What— no! No that is his name, it’s what he must have been brought in under!” the Doctor cried out frantically, bracing against the lip of the desk as though if he were to get close enough he could peer into the computer display himself. There was no chance in this or any universe that the Master would have listed himself as ‘Koschei Oakdown’ (if nothing else, then purely to avoid the wrath of his chapter relatives, should the word ever get out). “Run your search again!”

“There’s no secret second database; I can promise you the results will remain the same,” the clerk grumbled.

“Just do it!” The Doctor whirled around to face the guard behind him, panic edging at his expression as he peered up into the dark helmet face. “Is there anywhere else he might be?”

“Negative. All prisoners are disapparated to the judicial holding bay.”

“You promised us he’d be here!” The Doctor was jostled to the side as Susan pushed back through their cluster to round on her own guard. “What have you done with him?!”

“Susan!” the Doctor chided with a hiss, tugging her closer to him as the guards redirected their attention from himself to her at her accusations, and behind them he watched as the clusters of locals gasped and clumped closer together as they watched the scene unfold.  

“But grandfather, what if they’ve killed him!?” Susan was peering up at him with more fear and horror than the Doctor had ever hoped to see on her face, and he felt his hearts twinge at the sight as much as he did at his own concern that her words might be true. “What if they killed him right in front of us and they’ve just been trying to distract us all along?”

“As previously stated, the prisoner was disapparated at seventeen hundred hours, thirty-two minutes, and twen—”

“I don’t care when you did it, where is he?” Susan pushed, and worried as the Doctor might be for her safety if she continued in that imperious tone of hers, he couldn’t help but feel equally as desperate. But then it hit him:

“Seventeen hundred hours— excuse me,” the Doctor rounded back towards the clerk with a pleading tone, some of his politeness returning even as the man behind the desk looked as though he had already put their presence aside entirely. “But was there any prisoner brought in at that time? At that exact time— at exactly seventeen hundred hours, thirty-two minutes, and twenty-seven seconds.”

A sigh, and a minute’s more clacking of keys as the clerk scanned the intake files and the Doctor held his breath.

“Hmm,” this time there was an edge of surprise to the clerk’s voice, seeming to surprise even himself at his findings. “I will admit this is strange, but we did have one individual disapparated into our holding cells at that precise time. But he has since been removed from our records, and I can’t seem to tell who it was, or why the data was deleted. Doing something like that is well above my permissions.”

“Okay,” the Doctor said, letting out a sigh of relief as his chest unclenched infinitesimally, and beside him he saw some of the rage drain from Susan to do the same. But there was still a mystery cloying at his hearts. “If not you, who does have permission to do such a thing?”

“Very few people.” To the Doctor’s worry, the clerk now sounded audibly fearful, his voice falling quiet as though he was afraid their conversation would be overheard. “And no matter which of those people did it, the order must have come from the magistrate himself. This is highly irregular.”

The Doctor ignored the clerk as he continued to mumble to himself, facing the guards once more. “Take me to the magistrate! I need to speak with him at once!”

If possible, the room around them fell even more silent than before. Even the clerk’s keyboard had stopped clicking, as though the room’s occupants had collectively startled and caught their breath at their expense.

“Impossible,” the guard closest to the Doctor ground out robotically, but with a harsh sense of finality. “No citizens are permitted to lay eyes on the magistrate. None but those with the highest rank—”

“But we’re not citizens! We’re foreigners, off-worlders, as you keep saying!” the Doctor implored.

“And, your magistrate has clearly decided that grandpapa is worthy of his presence, or so your own records show,” Susan chipped in slowly, persuasively, startling the Doctor from his fervour. Though he initially clenched up and made to shush her from speaking further, he noted that her comment had given both guards pause; something that clearly hadn’t escaped her notice either as she continued. “Or are you suggesting to challenge your magistrates decisions?” Hands on her hips with a head-tilt that the Doctor hoped only he could identify as scathing, she smiled up at the guard still holding one of her wrists. “I’d hate to speak out of turn, but I seem to recall you yourself saying that wasn’t permitted a few minutes ago.”

“Opposition to the magistrate is not permitted,” the guard parroted automatically, but there was something unsure in its tone now, almost sullen. It turned to its comrade with a questioning tilt of its own. “The magistrate has claimed the prisoner from the judicial bay. We must comply with his assessment. The prisoner’s family must be delivered to his location.”

For a moment the other guard remained reactionless, and again the Doctor’s hearts were in his throat, and out of the corner of his eye he was already glancing around the room looking for means of distraction and escape, so that they might make a break for the lifts and find the Master themselves if need be.

“Affirmative.”

A second later and the Doctor was being pulled along by his wrists once again and back into the lift. Instead of pressing any buttons, the guard attached to Susan leaned down to place its visor inches from the lift’s call panel, and immediately a red scanning wave shot out and ran over the length of the helmet slowly. “Input command,” a metallic pre-recording trickled in through the speakers, and finally the guard hit the topmost button on the selection panel.

“Magisterium office, override 3302.”

The lift jolted before rising smoothly in its ascent, and the Doctor could only cross his fingers as they sped towards what must surely be the building’s penthouse floor.

***

The Doctor didn’t know what he expected to find as the lift doors swooshed open onto the penthouse. Given the appearance of the lobby and the near mythology that seemed to surround the magistrate’s person, he expected any living quarters of the man to be flashy and grandiose, and the vaulted room before them was definitely that. They’d landed on the level with the floor-to-ceiling windows that the Doctor had spotted from the building’s base, encircling the entire space in lieu of walls and tinted dark to ensure that inhabitants could peer out into the city without being spotted in return.

But what he hadn’t expected to find— in the middle of the stately entry room and seated at an intimately-sized conference table with a Novossite stranger— was the Master; his expression shuttered, and his fingers clasped tightly around a champagne flute stem. No chains, no handcuffs, no signs of a prison-stay at all. Barring the single sentrybot that lingered against a far wall, the scene looked more like stately evening drinks than a kidnapping.

“Grandpapa!” Susan finally managed to wriggle her remaining wrist from a guard and hurdle herself towards the Master, heedless of the tension in the room or its occupants.

The Master let out an audible gasp as she collided with him, setting his glass on the table just in time to embrace her without accident, and the Doctor didn’t miss the way his torso twisted as though to shield her from the eyes of the stranger at the table. And that when his eyes fell on the Doctor, his expression did a series of acrobatics that jumped from anxiety, to bone-deep relief, then back to worry again as he appeared to recall their position.

“Now, this must be the famous Doctor!”

The Doctor’s attention was redirected towards the stranger at the table who’d stood at their approach. He was a stocky man, slightly shorter than the Master and twice as broad, all rounded angles on ash-grey hair. Overall, he wasn’t the kind of person the Doctor would have usually pinpointed as a source of concern, other than the edge to his expression. There was something patronising in his greeting, much less in the way he dismissed the sentrybot guards with a wave of one thick and ringed hand. And the eyes that were appraising the Doctor’s form up and down felt more like an assessment than a formality, like his worth as both an accessory and a threat were being calculated all at once.

The Doctor smiled, pushing down the unease in his stomach as he attempted to put his best foot forward and stride towards the stranger, hand outstretched. “That I am. And you can only be the magistrate of Novos-six?”

“Of all of Novos, actually,” the man said, turning his head as he said it as though he was pretending to be bashful. And he still had yet to take the Doctor’s hand. He was just about to return it to his side when the magistrate glanced towards the Master before visibly rethinking his approach and not just taking the Doctor’s hand, but bringing it to his lips in a chivalrous kiss.

The Doctor fought off the urge to recoil, but he knew that his face had visibly flinched and that his hand fell back to his side at too quick of a speed to be polite. But the magistrate appeared not to care, and by the way his smile appeared to grow in proportion to the Master’s glowering, it appeared as though he’d achieved his goal. “Impressive, I’m sure.”

“Well, I like to think so. Now, sit!” the magistrate snapped and the guard who’d been skulking towards the back came with a chair and pulled it up towards their table. “And one for their lovely child as well! What was her name again?”

“One far too troublesome for non-Gallifreyans to pronounce I’m afraid,” the Master said smoothly, speaking over both the beginnings of Susan’s attempt to provide her name and the thud of a fourth chair being pulled over. The Doctor allowed Susan to sit in the chair closest to the Master, resigning himself to the chair between here and the magistrate.

For a moment the magistrate’s expression twinged with irritation before smoothing back over. “No matter,” he waved the issue away with the same dismissive flick he’d given the guards earlier. “You can call me Markos. I’m sorry for all the disapparation nonsense earlier, and for monopolising the attention of your dear Master here. It has just been a while since we’ve spoken last, and nearly as long since I’ve enjoyed a chat with someone like-minded. Hard to come by when one’s position requires anonymity.” Though his words were directed at the Doctor, his eyes were fixed on the Master as he spoke.

“I wasn’t aware that you knew each other,” the Doctor murmured, watching the silent sparring match that seemed to be playing out between the two. He didn’t miss the way the Master’s eyes narrowed at the mention of their similarities, and the hand he’d laid on the table with fake casualness was white-knuckled and clenched.

The magistrate smiled, something sickly and patronizing. “Oh, a long while ago, don’t trouble yourself with it. I don’t get out much these days anyway. And I can assure you that we’ve never met, else I’d have made sure you would have remembered the occasion.”

“I’d wager you don’t,” the Doctor replied, fighting back the urge to turn his questioning onto the Master instead. “Am I correct in assuming you’ve never made a public appearance?”

“Of course not! A silent force commands much more threat than an announced one.”

“And much more security,” the Doctor added, his own smile stretched thin. “Safer that way, isn’t it? Your subjects can’t judge you for any foibles or weaknesses if they can’t see the man behind the myth.”

It was one step from calling the magistrate a coward and the man knew it, but after a moment’s mouth-flapping bafflement, he guffawed. “Perceptive, aren’t you! Well, I can’t argue that.” He clapped the Doctor’s arm in a gesture that would have appeared amicable, if the hand hadn’t lingered there. Fingers still pressing into the Doctor’s skin, Markos turned back to the Master. “I take back what I said earlier. Perhaps a man of our standing could be convinced into commitment, if one’s paramour is suitable witty.”

“And as I said,” the Master intoned, tearing his eyes from the man’s hand to return to his face, “the Doctor is a force unto himself. One doesn’t need a council, harem, or much of anything else, if they’re partnered to an equal.”

This was getting less reassuring by the second. “I do hope that you’ve found some topic to pass the time that didn’t concern me,” the Doctor slid into the conversation with forced levity.

Markos smiled broadly. “Don’t worry your lovely head about it, I promise you only featured at the peripheries.” He gave the Doctor’s arm a small pat before finally letting it go, and for a moment he wondered how much harm it would do to their situation if he used the same arm to strike the man clear across the face. “No, your husband and I have just been discussing our mutual interests. I hold him in very high esteem. I wasn’t previously aware that he was a Time Lord. I’ve never met one of those before, but I’ve heard good things.”

That didn’t help his tension in the slightest. It was something the Doctor was acutely aware of, though he’d had yet to run into it in his own travels. Overall, Gallifreyans kept a low-profile by nature of their culture and capabilities with time, but occasionally, those who did know of them were a little too curious. Covetous, in hopes that they’d share some of their secrets of temporal manipulation.

“Mutual interests?” the Doctor inquired, glancing inconspicuously towards the Master as he said it. “I wasn’t aware you had many of those.”

“Both governmental men, both with deep streaks of ambition, rulers of our own domain, in a way— he threw a sly look the Doctor couldn’t quite comprehend towards the Master, who’s hand had fallen so tense he’d withdrawn it from the table entirely. “It’s a difficult life, but men like us understand the necessity,” Markos continued, nodding commiseratively towards the Master, even as the other Time Lord looked as though he’d bite off his tongue in efforts to keep silent every time Markos compared their positions. “My path towards leadership hasn’t been easy, and it remains a daily challenge. The people here need a heavy hand to guide them.”

“Is that why the guards are threatening people in the market?” Susan asked from his right, silent amongst their exchange until now. Much as the Master had done, the Doctor found himself leaning forwards as though to block her from the magistrate’s line of sight.

Markos’s smile fell askew into a mock pout. “Unfortunately yes, little one. Fear is a powerful tool, one that would be stupid to not utilise.”

The Doctor palpably felt Susan bristle at the diminutive, much less from someone likely her same age, and had to bite back his own recoil at the comment. “But a lack of basic food and water might do just the opposite. I’ve managed to fix the purification system in the eastern quadrant’s well, it’s a replicable design that I suggest you use on the others— or was dehydration a calculated decision too?”

The genuine surprise on the man’s face told the Doctor all he needed. No, he might be a despot, but he wasn’t an ingenious one, and didn’t have the capacity to think as deeply as demoralising the people with tainted water. “And smart too,” he murmured finally, looking somewhere between cross and intrigued.

The Master rose from his chair in a fluid motion, his hands uncharacteristically balled in the pockets of his dark coat. “We should be making our leave,” he said with an inclination of his head towards the Doctor. He stood similarly, cajoling Susan to do the same but careful to remain between her and the danger at the table.

“Should you?” Markos hadn’t made any efforts to stand. He was still staring at the three of them greedily, forming some sort of mental calculation behind his eyes.

The Master stiffened where he stood, a meter from the Doctor’s right. “Yes,” he replied, leaving no room for debate. “I believe you and I have said our piece, and anything further can be communicated at a later date.”

“Oh I’m sure it could, but why wait?” The man was rising now, and the slow step towards them was matched only by the stride they took backwards. Behind them all, the Doctor could see the guard tracking their movements with a redirection of his helmet, and he grasped at the Master’s arm to make him aware.

The Master’s face was falling more inhospitable with each step closer. “I thought we’d reached an understanding,” he hissed, in a sentence that raised the Doctor’s concern almost as far as their being penned in by this dictator. Exactly what sort of understanding could they have discussed?!

“We had, but that was before I met your delightful child here, and your remarkable husband.” The Doctor heard Susan bump into the window wall behind them, just as he felt the heels of his own shoes bump up against her own and realised that they’d run out of space to retreat. Markos had realised the same, because the rounded corners of his face were pulled sharp into a smile. “But what resources could you offer me that would compare to having a Time Lord council of my own. All those brains…not to mention the way your kind travel through bodies and time. Why, if I could do that, I don’t suppose I’d need to worry about keeping myself unseen by the public after all!”

The Doctor had had just about enough. He put an arm out in front of the Master and half-stepped in front of him, putting himself between the pair. “Our services are not for sale, nor are our secrets,” he retorted coolly. “If you keep us here, Gallifrey will consider it a hostile act on part of the Novos system. They don’t hold dictatorships in any high esteem.”

“Do they not? So that’s just a personal preference on your part Doctor, how intriguing to know,” Markos chuckled, darting a glance over his shoulder to where he could only assume the Master was hovering. “Oh, I’ve heard all about your husband here. The stories—”

BZZZZZT

A laser flash shot out from under the Doctor’s raised arm, and a split second later the magistrate was gone. The room’s remaining occupants all froze, but the Doctor didn’t have time to so much as gasp before he was tackled to the ground as a second beam of light was shooting across the room towards them, and then a third back at the guard. The window directly behind where the Doctor had been standing was smouldering. He could hear its dark glass as it warped into molten bubbles that would be sure to fracture the whole pane within minutes, but as he looked up to chart their escape route, he realised that the sentrybot guard was nowhere to be seen.

The Doctor rolled over and turned, staring directly up at the Master’s frosty expression as he slowly lowered a sleek black device. A weapon, the likes of which the Doctor had never seen. Behind them he could hear Susan’s breath quickening into something closer to crying, but he couldn’t turn to her. Not yet, not when his face was trained onto the Master’s and his hearts felt like ice in his chest.

“What have you done,” the Doctor whispered, and the Master’s trance-like spell was broken.

“I killed them, before they could do the same with us, or worse,” the Master said shortly, inclining a hand towards the still bubbling window. “Or have you not seen the wall?”

Susan actively began crying now, and the sound put something despairing behind his eyes that the Doctor felt similarly burrow into his own soul. “And how will we get out?” he asked flatly, between lips that were both trembling and numb. “The lift requires a sentrybot helmet.”

Wordlessly, the Master strode across the room to where the guard had stood and bent down, fetching something from the floor unseen. “We still have a helmet. I sincerely doubt the scanner will require it to be a full size to activate.”

The Doctor was confused again until the Master walked back towards him and he saw what was in his hand. The guard. Unmoving and somehow no more than three inches tall, like a broken doll. He swallowed back nausea as he took the guard from the Master’s hand carefully— oh Rassilon it was still warm!— and brought it to the lift, beckoning Susan in as he held the diminutive helmet to the scanner and his breath in his lungs.

DING!

With a sigh of relief, the Doctor watched as the panel sprung to life and the buttons glowed ready for use. He looked up, only to find the Master near where they’d been penned by the magistrate, grinding his heel and wiping it fastidiously onto one of the plush rugs by the coffee table before strolling over to join them. The nausea really did take him then, and he had to brace against the lift’s wall to steady himself as they descended in silence, only grateful that Susan had been too busy curled up in panic to see similar and connect the dots.

They tried their best to remain inconspicuous as the passed through the lobby, though the Doctor would swear the sentrybot at the desk had trained on their position as they passed. Still, he held his breath as they passed through their doors, then as they passed through the centrum’s external plaza, then down into the alleyways. Around them the normal hubbub of the marketplace continued, and not even the sight of the TARDIS fifty meters ahead of them could assuage the lead in his stomach.

“There’s no alarm,” Susan whispered hoarsely, and her hand incrementally released the Doctor’s where she’d been cutting off his circulation with an iron-tight grip since they’d excited the lift. “How? How can no one have noticed?”

“The magistrate has never shown his face in public. It’ll be a while before anyone notices his absence,” the Master murmured, voice dropping even lower as they passed by a vendor loading her wares into a cart to pack up for the evening. “And that was his personal guard. We’ll be long gone before there’s trouble.”

They’d reached the TARDIS. The Doctor fumbled with the key, unable to steady his hand enough to get it into the keyhole before the TARDIS took pity on him and opened her doors of her own volition, beckoning them in.

“But it can’t be that easy—”

Both the Master and the Doctor paused, the Doctor already with one foot through the door as he turned back to see Susan glued to the spot and shaking. “What do you mean—”

“To kill someone. You just…kill them, then they’re dead, and no one knows?!” There was a horror-stricken confusion on her face that the Doctor couldn’t stomach, and he turned towards the Master in silence. For his part, the Master said nothing, only stared her down with eyes that were wide and straining. “No alarm, no consequences, nothing!”

“I’m so sorry Susan.” The Master’s voice was more defeated than the Doctor had ever heard it, lost even to his own ears. “It’s not how I would have liked for our outing to have gone, but I couldn’t let him take you both.”

“That’s your excuse?!” she cried out, loud enough that the vendor they’d past startled in the distance and the Master cast a worried glance back at her position. “These poor people, living under a dictator…and now this?”

The Doctor couldn’t think of anything to say that could help, or anything at all. “No one should have died dear girl, death is always a tragedy,” he said soothingly, stepping back out to place a hand on her shoulder. “There should have been a better way to overthrow the magistrate. But we’ve done what we can for them, now we have to go.”

Susan turned to him, blinking up owlishly as her face flashed through a myriad of expressions before outrage took over and she shrugged him off similarly. “And that would have been your choice, would it?! Just to leave them here like this? Destroying the only structure their society has and leave them to pick up the pieces?”

She was already halfway through the doors by the time the Doctor had gotten over his shock at her outburst, and fully disappeared into the TARDIS before he’d mustered up anything like a rebuttal. Next to him, the Master was still staring at the wall with an expression of tense neutrality, as if he worried that letting his composure drop might bring him to the floor. The sight of him twisted the Doctor’s hearts all the further but he pressed his mouth tight and walked into the TARDIS without a word, and he heard the footfalls of the Master close behind him and doing the same.

Even the TARDIS herself seemed worried for them, sending out pulses of question and concern towards the Doctor’s psyche but he blocked them out. Neither he nor the Master had still said a word, and Susan wouldn’t look at them, nor did she make any efforts to venture from the console room and explore the ship’s depths, as was her usual interest to do.

Susan stormed out the second they landed, and the Doctor could hear her steps as they thundered up the stairs from the basement and towards her room, bookended by the slamming of her bedroom door. The silence left by her absence was deafening, as the Doctor and the Master were left alone in the console room with a palpable tension stretched between them.

The Master walked slowly towards the door, placing his hand on the door before pausing with his back still turned, shoulders tense. “Doctor, I—”

“TARDIS, override the door lock.”

The click of the lock was near deafening, echoing off the blank white walls in the wake of the Doctor’s command.

With infinite slowness, as though withdrawing from a delicate surgical procedure, the Master pulled back his hand and stood tall, smoothing his jacket reflexively before turning to face him. “I won’t apologise for killing a man who was threatening us both Doctor, threatening Susan.”

“I know you won’t,” the Doctor said shortly, and it was true. The Master wouldn’t, and the Doctor didn’t have it in him to argue about what was and wasn’t appropriate out of the Master’s response to the ordeal, especially when he was still unsure where his own opinion on the issue sat. “What was that weapon you used?”

The Master immediately took it from his pocket, holding it out in his palm for the Doctor’s inspection. “It’s my own design, I’m afraid I don’t have a name for it yet,” he said plainly, clearly trying to give the Doctor as much transparency as he could to chip away at their strain. “It compresses organic tissue, eliminating the space between atoms and shrinking the subject to death. Immediate, silent, and it doesn’t show up on any traditional weapons scan, nor does it leave the electrical trace residue of a laser weapon.”

“Ingenious. I can see your time in my laboratory hasn’t been wasted,” the Doctor said hollowly, swallowing as he felt anger rising up past the lump in his throat. “And hardly any bodies left to dispose of to-boot. All the better to squash under your shoe, I suppose.”

The Master bristled, even as he had the decency to look a little ashamed. “This was hardly a common occurrence—”

“I DON’T—!” the Doctor’s voice rose towards a scream before he stopped himself and closed his eyes, breathing through his nose and trying his hardest to neither punch the Master nor break into tears. “I don’t care,” he finished softly, a minute later.

When he opened his eyes the Master had crossed the room and was standing mere feet from his position, watching him with something akin to panic. “You can have it Doctor, I’ll give it to you now—”

“No!” The weapon gleamed in the bright console room lighting and the Doctor’s nausea felt renewed at the very sight of it, and the thought of touching it felt unconscionable. “Put in on the console, or on a shelf— I don’t know or care, just leave it here! I don’t want that anywhere near our house.”

Without argument, the Master laid it atop the console where it stood out against the stark white laminate like a stain. “We can discuss everything. Anything you want, I’ll tell you.”

“I don’t want to discuss anything right now,” the Doctor whispered, unable to look away from the weapon and unwilling to look at the Master face on. “I don’t want to talk to you at all. I’ll thank you to respect that for the time being.”

“Theta—”

“TARDIS, unlock the doors please.” Again, the lock’s click was unfathomably loud.

The Master moved closer and the Doctor fought the urge to shrink back, as much as he did the urge to leap forwards and pummel the Master into the ground, to feel his skin alive and well after the day they’d shared, and kiss him until he was sure that there was breath under those lips. That he hadn’t been lost, as the Doctor had so feared. That they wouldn’t lose themselves now in its aftermath. If the Master touched him, the Doctor wasn’t sure what he’d do.

The Master paused inches away from him, so close that the Doctor could feel the heat of his nearby skin and the weight of his gaze as he continued to avoid it by staring resolutely at the console behind him. “Okay,” the Master said softly, and walked past him and out the door.

His steps up the staircase were nowhere near as loud as Susan’s had been but the Doctor heard ever one of them. Listened as they rose a floor further to what could only be their bedroom, and as the door shut.

Only then did the Doctor feel truly alone, and he was thankful for the soundproof nature of the TARDIS’s exterior as his vision swum, blurring the stark lines of the weapon on the console as he sunk to the floor and sobbed.

Chapter 8

Summary:

The Doctor tries very hard not to look to closely at the Master's actions to-date, until his hand is forced.

They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t touch. They didn’t so much as exchange glances in the week that followed— or as far as the Doctor knew, they didn’t. He certainly kept his vision trained down, schooling his hearts and head against looking up to where he could feel the Master’s eyes burning a hole in him across the table.

The Doctor assured himself that he was working up the bravery to say something. Or at least, the bravery to think about the issue so that one day he might formulate the words that needed saying. But every time his brain tiptoed closer to the vast chasm which was “the Master” and “Novos” he felt as though it threatened to swallow him whole; too many questions, none with a single answer that would leave him any better off. It left him so sick that he could scarcely eat or sleep, not that there were many around to notice. Susan had yet to speak more than grunted requests to him, only a brief remark about seeing them soon before she’d left back to the academy, and the void left by her wake had been palpable. The Master had tried to break the stalemate— was still trying, the Doctor was well aware. His eyes might have stayed firmly shut, but he wasn’t ignorant to the wakeful quickened pace of the Master’s breathing next to him as they both feigned sleep, nor to the way the sheets rustled as the Master’s hands shuffled behind his back; faltering, pausing, so close to touching his skin that he could feel their heat.

Still, neither said a word.

The Doctor supposed he appreciated that. It’s what he’d asked him to do, after all. He only wished having asked for it made it any easier. Or that getting what he’d asked for made his atoms stop screaming out for the Master’s fingertips to cross that short space and touch him. Touch him, for Rassilon’s sake— just end this madness and touch him!

But the Master was nothing but respectful of his request to be left alone.

The one facet of his life that wasn’t left abandoned by his post-Novos gloom was his work. If anything, the Doctor brought an unprecedented level of attentiveness to his job, arriving early every day and remaining hunched and fastidious hours after night had fallen and his co-workers had departed.

His newfound work ethic left his lab partners…decidedly unnerved.

“Are you sure you don’t need any assistance with tha—”

“I said I’m fine!” the Doctor spat, grinding his teeth as the bolt he’d been tightening with a vengeance cracked audibly, undercutting his point. The noise echoed up towards the rafters of the absurdly lofty laboratory ceiling, bouncing off the graveyard of mechanical parts and half-finished gizmos the Doctor had accumulated across the adjacent table, well past the point of overcrowding his desk (and the desk next to that one, and a bit over a third, and the floorspace around it all).

Jarvi had jumped back a foot at his tone, withdrawing his hand from the space between them slowly as though the Doctor was more caged animal than Time Lord. “Maybe you should just take the day to yourself, work on one of your more personal experiments— the fun ones? Updating the sprinkler system in the hydroponics lab isn’t exactly urgent.”

“Fun?” The Doctor harrumphed, not bothering to lift his gaze as he spoke. “This isn’t about fun, it’s our responsibility!” The bolt tightened, seams squeaking under the pressure of his wrenched force. “Our duty.” CREAK. “Just because some people—” SCREECH. “Don’t seem to care about what’s right—” EEEP. “Or just—” SHREEEP. “Doesn’t mean the rest of us get to lax about—”

SNAP

With a metallic warble, the bolt broke fully under his emphatic wrenching and clinked to the floor. Both could only watch in dismay as the bolt halves rolled towards the door, stopped only by the shoe sole of Tivan who’d been standing by the door and watching the exchange with less amusement by the second.

“Doctor— a word?”

With a sigh, the Doctor set down the wrench and padded sullenly towards the door as Tivan let him pass, following him out before closing it behind them both and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Are you…erm, what I mean is, you know how I loathe having to ask considering it’s none of my business, and I prefer it that remains that way—”

“Is there a point to this?” the Doctor asked, perhaps a bit unkindly but it seemed to pull the other Time Lord from his mental paces.

“Are you alright, Doctor?”

No. No he wasn’t alright, and they weren’t alright, and every passing day left him further and further from confident that ‘alright’ was something they’d ever achieve again. “Yes— yes, of course I am, whyever do you ask?”

Tivan looked unimpressed by his evasion, overlaying what seemed to be genuine concern. “Your work, to be frank.”

The Doctor bristled. “I’ve been nothing but productive this past week, I’ll have you know,” he replied stiffly. “I’d dare say I’ve been the most productive member of the scientific corps this side of the citadel.”

“True, your work has been undeniably…plentiful,” the other offered tactfully. “Equipment repairs, external day jobs, systems adjustments— you’ve been nothing but expedient. I can’t fault you for that.”

There was a pause, and the Doctor waited silently and impatiently for him to reach his long-awaited point.

“But—” Tivan continued eventually, eyes askance. “Well. I mean— you must know Doctor, we don’t keep you around for your consistency, nor your route repairs. And it can’t be ignored that your past week’s work has lacked the creativity we’ve become accustomed to from you. Not to mention your attitude.”

The Doctor laughed, flat and unimpressed. “Have I not been animated enough for this lab’s taste? A thousand pardons, I’ll be sure to come in with a jaunty whistle tomorrow.”

“Jaunty? I’d settle for civilised. You practically bit the head off of the interns who attended for their laboratory induction three days ago, and if you break any more equipment, I’m going to have to discuss taking it out of your payment.”

The Doctor’s expression soured, but try as he might, even he couldn’t muster up an excuse for either of those truths. Perhaps his mood had been a little foul this past week, but it was hardly call for an inquisition!

Tivan appeared to notice the way his face flickered and fell. “I won’t ask you to explain yourself Doctor, we all have off weeks.” He said it in a way that tiptoed its way towards reassurance, and the Doctor had a sneaking fear that the other was seconds away from attempting a heartening shoulder pat (an action he knew they’d both find unbearably uncomfortable). “But I think maybe you should take some time…off. Just to recalibrate, I think you might feel more refreshed for it.”

Something about the idea made the Doctor’s stomach curdle, the notion of having his single excuse for leaving the house (and the Master’s scrutiny) taken away. “I don’t think that’s necessary. I’ve only been back a few short weeks after all, and—”

“Doctor, it’s not exactly a request,” Tivan trailed off in a quiet mutter before pulling the corners of his mouth into a falsely cheery smile. “Think about it as a gift! An impromptu holiday, to get your affairs in order following your return to Gallifrey. I’m sure you must have any manner of reacclimating to do, just as I’m sure the Master will delight in your extended company after so long away. It might be just what you need.”

“The Master? Hmm— delighted, yes,” the Doctor broke off gloomily.

Tivan did finally deliver a shoulder pat at that, and it was precisely as awkward as the Doctor had feared. “Chin up then, it’ll all resolve itself in no time. I’m sure we’ll be seeing you back here very soon.” He slipped back into the lab shortly after that, and as the heavy doors clicked shut behind him, the Doctor was acutely aware that he’d been dismissed.

“Sort out your affairs Doctor, how dare you inflict anything other than your brightest mood and thoughts upon us!” he mocked bitterly under his breath as he crossed the courtyard and trotted back towards home. “I’m sure the Master will just be delighted for your company. Why I’m sure he’ll love a ceaseless reminder of how royally messed-up everything has become! I’m sure he’ll jump with joy!”

The Doctor’s stream of complaints got him from the courtyard to the sprawling bridges that led out of the citadel, and only trailed off once his front door loomed into view. He stepped through onto the landing with a weary sigh and let the door click shut behind him, and for a moment the silence was a balm to his nerves.

The gentle rustle of grass in the evening wind, the metronomic click of a grand old earthen timepiece that he’d insisted on keeping near the entryway. The whole house smelled of sunshine on old wood, and the fumes of machine oil they’d never quite been able to contain to their basement laboratory. The senses were familiar, comforting. They represented what was his, theirs, home. It was…

The Doctor’s brow furrowed, noting the lack of squeaking floorboards and murmur of voices that usually filled the space.

…unspeakably lonely.

It was only then, when the Doctor opened eyes that he hadn’t noticed allowing to fall shut and made his way into the kitchen, that he saw the note on the table. He scanned it briefly before snorting, letting it flutter back down to its perch.

“Apologies, I am needed off-planet. I will be back in a few days. Yours, M”

Needed. The Doctor had no doubt that was a stretch, just as he had no doubt that the Master had been thrilled at the chance to avoid more of their awkward non-interactions, and made a note to berate him for taking the coward’s way out as soon as he was able.

Or as soon as they were speaking again, anyway, his treacherous brain added morosely.

For a brief moment he reached out; gently, and in a way that couldn’t be construed as particularly invasive (or noticeable) towards the Master’s mental signature. Close enough to affirm that he was indeed off-planet, but not so close that it could be considered an intrusion, nor close enough to discern where he was. But even from his distance, the Doctor could tell that the Master’s barriers were raised and impenetrable. And he knew that any attempt to knock at their gates, tempting as that may be, would be taken as either of gauntlet or an olive branch. And he hadn’t yet decided which he intended to throw down next.   

Logically, the Doctor knew his feet were moving, that he’d left the kitchen entirely. But still, it was a shock when he found that he was in the basement and at the TARDIS door not a minute later. It couldn’t hurt, he reasoned, even as his hand crept towards the handle and pushed it open, cracking the door open ever so slightly. I mean really, what could it hurt? I certainly won’t be leaving, I only want…

That, he didn’t know. Comfort? Isolation? A space that was slightly less glaring with its absence of his family and the mistakes they’d made? But whatever his reasons, he entered all the same.

Immediately, he was nearly blinded as the console room lights flared to life, glaringly bright against the stark white walls. However, it did the trick. The silence here in the TARDIS did feel safer somehow; secluded from the world around them like his own personal bubble, where he could hide from all troubles outside of her walls in complete peace.

Well, nearly complete.

The Doctor enjoyed nearly a full minute of peace before his eyes fell onto the weapon he’d taken off the Master, still jarring and in its juxtaposition against the room’s utter pallor. He felt a grudging sense of gratitude that the Master had stayed true to his word and left it there, despite how it must have irked him to do with a prototype of such power. He always did despise leaving projects half-finished.

Again, the Doctor felt as though his body was being driven by some force far deeper than his own consciousness as his hand stretch out to touch the thing. Just a finger, at first, stroking along the side of it, the scientist in him unable to stop himself from taking note of its dynamics and seams, whereas the sensualist in him couldn’t help but notice its sleekness, its compact power. And a moment later he was holding it. He couldn’t help a small shudder at just how easily it fit in his palm, at the unexpected weight of the thing, at the clear care and affection that had gone into its design.

The magistrate hadn’t even had time to scream. He could still picture it so plainly in his mind’s eye, how the Master’s hands had looked wrapped around a weapon. How easy the Master had made it all look as he’d watched him, his husband, his Koschei, kill someone without a second thought! It almost seemed practiced. There hadn’t even been enough of him left to make a sound under the Master’s shoe as he’d—

The Doctor’s shudder evolved into something full-bodied, and he let the weapon drop from his fist with a dull clatter. It rolled briefly, half disappearing under the console before his attention was redirected towards a thud from outside of the TARDIS that sounded like a door.

Hearts-racing, the Doctor felt bizarrely guilty as he hurried out of the TARDIS and hurried back up the basement stairs, taking care not to let neither steps nor the basement door make a sound as he passed into the hall. It was ridiculous; he was a fully-grown Time Lord in his own home who should be free to come and go as he pleased, but ‘should’s would be very little help against the wrath he’d face if the Master came home early to find him mooning over the TARDIS’s navigational controls—

“Grandfather?”

Susan’s voice startled him as he came around the corner, mere inches away from colliding with her as he stopped. “Apologies dear girl, I got a little lost in my own head.”

“And in the basement too?” She briefly peaked over his shoulder as though she expected to see some sort of secret lurking in the doorframe.

The Doctor grimaced, and the look of abashment that fell across his face was only half faked. “More or less,” he admitted.

Susan looked as though she had follow-up questions, possibly a joke at the expense of how often his thoughts led his feet astray, before her expression fell flat, seeming to remember her own resolve to keep their communications to a bare minimum. She nodded, mouth set in a firm line as she trudged past him and back towards the front door.

It was only then that the Doctor noticed her overcoat and the nanoscreen under her arm. “Fancy a spot of stargazing?”

“Yes— alone,” she snapped, but even her expression wavered as she watched the Doctor flinch. “Not like that— it’s for my research, is all. I won’t be out there more than a few minutes, there’s no need to make a big fuss out of it.”

“I like making a big fuss out of our stargazing,” the Doctor said quietly, his eyes earnest.

It took the fire out of her expression in an instant. Susan’s lip quivered, making her appear frightfully young. “Me too,” she admitted, equally quiet. “Maybe…tomorrow, we can do it again just for the fun? And grandpapa too?”

“I’d like that,” the Doctor replied sincerely, no matter how his stomach pulled into knots as he imaged what the Master might say, or how he’d disappoint Susan if they couldn’t pull their act together long enough to manage it.

She nodded, hitching the nanoscreen under her arm then. “That’s settled then,” she affirmed, with all the solemnity of a business transaction. But the Doctor could see the dawning relief in the backs of her eyes, and vowed to speak with the Master posthaste so that he’d never again be the cause of wiping that expression from her face. He crossed into the kitchen as she departed, and this time the click of the front door felt far more like a promise than a threat.

His newfound cheer was slightly dampened when, moments later with tea in hand, the Doctor saw the communications panel on the wall blinking with an unread message from Braxiatel. Directed to him, rather than the household as a whole, as politeness would have usually dictated. He sighed and touched the screen, unlocking it with his bioprint, and somehow even the looping scroll of high-gallifreyan appeared stiff when topped with the Acquisitions Department’s formal header.

Brother mine,

The council is asking questions. Have you located our missing TARDIS, or should we assist you in searching your basement? Or have you unearthed new information regarding our missing Keeper after all? You answer is awaited.

Regards,

Lord Braxiatel of the Lungbarrow House, Head of Acquisitions

“Lord Braxiatel? Of all the…and it’s not as though he had to add his house! It’s my house too, for Rassilon’s sake!” But no amount of grumbled reproach or eye-rolling could help the way the Doctor’s chest tightened as his eyes traced the circulature. In light of the past week’s consternation, he’d entirely forgotten about the issue with Braxiatel and the council’s wayward TARDIS.

Not their TARDIS, my TARDIS— ours! His brain supplied unhelpfully.

The Doctor sat down, rubbing at his eyes wearily and flashing intermittent glances from the dregs of his teacup to the message, as though any second now its contents would disappear (and his problems along with them). It went against the grain of his soul, against every fibre of his being, to even consider giving her up! Much less giving her up to be scrapped in some council-led menial data-gathering exercise! But hadn’t he just made a pledge to sort out his affairs for Susan— for them all? Somehow, an impromptu acquisitions raid of their house didn’t quite fit into the picture of ‘positive adjustments’ the Doctor had in mind. Not to mention he had no idea what other contraptions the Master and himself had stashed down there over the decades. Doubtless there were any number that fell into a legal grey area, if one were to be irritatingly scrupulous. Nothing untoward, mind you, but with the right motivation and a pedantic eye, the likes of which Braxiatel had in plenty…

Click.

The front door swung open and shut as Susan wandered past the kitchen entrance, freeing a fine maroon scarf from around her neck that could only have been nicked from the Master’s wardrobe.

“Any luck?” the Doctor inquired, jumping at the chance to delay his answering of Brax’s message a little longer.

Susan’s head poked back around the corner, frowning and squinting as she took in his position. “Have you been sitting here alone in the dark this whole time?”

Come to think of it, he had neglected the lights. “Nevermind that,” he replied, waving the reply away with the hand that wasn’t clenched fast around his mug. “Did you get the data you required?”

“Fortunately, yes— finally,” she enthused, fiddling with the dataset he could see sprawled across the nanoscreen. “Roxanastradal can eat her hearts out— oh, she’ll be cross when these data are published. That temporal physics clerkship is as good as mine!”

Her expression was equal parts vicious and earnest in its victory, but the Doctor couldn’t find it in himself to reprimand her motivations. “I never doubted it for a second,” he settled on, and Susan beamed with pride. She made to leave before pausing and turning back, this time with something like reproach.

“You never told me that Xerbos was a temporal eddie,” she threw back over her shoulder. “You should’ve! I only needed one more to complete my sample, that might have saved me whole days if I’s known where to look!”

The Doctor frowned. “No it isn’t,” he replied automatically, racking his brain over what he knew of the planet’s history.

“It is too!” Susan retorted, strolling back to the table and dropping the nanoscreen in front of him in an action that pulled off a flawless ‘so there!’.

The Doctor’s frown only grew as he scrolled over the numeric data— once, twice, before he pulled up her images themselves and squinted, scrolling through the planet’s millennia. “You…aren’t wrong,” he said slowly, unaware of how his hands had begun to tremble.

She snorted. “Is that your way of admitting that you were wrong? There’s no need to look so put-out over it.”

“I’m not put-out that you were right,” he murmured, and now his hearts had begun to pound in tandem with the blood rushing in his ears, even as his eyes stayed fixed on the screen. “I’m put-out because we both were, in a way.”

Susan looked even more confused at that, and the Doctor only wished he felt the same. “Xerbos wasn’t an eddie,” he clarified, and his voice must have sounded as hoarse to Susan as it did to his own ears because her eyebrows shot up.

“Well nowhere is meant to be an eddie, isn’t that the point?”

“No, not that it wasn’t meant to, it just wasn’t. When the Master and I were there, it wasn’t, we would have known.”

Susan grabbed the nanoscreen from his hands and scrolled through the millennia as the Doctor himself had done, and he could tell the exact second that she found what he had by the way her hands froze. “The fiftieth century,” she whispered, darting her eyes between the Doctor and the data at a rapid pace. “The eddie starts in the fiftieth century.”

“The year five thousand and three, to be exact.”

“But that’s…isn’t that just a year after you and grandpapa were—”

“Yes,” the Doctor said tightly, and the legs of his chair screeched across the floor as he stood.

“But you said that when you were there it wasn’t an eddie—”

“It wasn’t.” He was already halfway across the room now, numb and tingling with dread.

“Grandfather!”

The Doctor stopped, already half out the door as he pressed his lips tight and turned back to where Susan stood in the kitchen’s dark, still holding the nanoscreen with clear concern stretching across her face. “But then…did you two do something to change it? Do you know what caused it? What did you do?”

“What did we do?” The Doctor swallowed and laughed, something small and hollow as he turned back towards the hall, unable to look her in the eyes. “That’s just it my child— we didn’t do anything at all.”

***

This time the Doctor was hyperaware of every second of his return to the basement, every creak of the stairs, every echo of his shoes against the tiled walls and cluttered shelves. And by the time he reached the TARDIS, his decision was so steadfast that his hands didn’t so much as stutter as they fell onto the navigational controls.

There was no concrete proof of anything. The Doctor was only too well-aware of that, just as he was aware that he could reach out and tap against those psychic barriers of the Master’s and ask him himself, with far more ease than an ambush, if he was so concerned. The altered timecourse of Xerbos could be due to anything, or perhaps nothing! Temporal eddies were a natural occurrence after all. However...

VWORPPP—thud!

The Doctor’s nerves felt too frayed for such a timid gesture, much less one that would expose the emotional overhaul in his own mind. He didn’t want to hear any more carefully crafted half-truths, or circumvential explanations that would pull him from the topic entirely. He needed answers! And his gut instinct told him with hearts-stopping certainty that something terrible was occurring (had occurred, would continue to occur, unless the Doctor caught him in the act).

He'd landed in the year five thousand and three, just as Susan’s metrics had captured. He’d crept from the TARDIS and into the late afternoon suns of Xerbos’s capital city, slinking along the streets towards where he remembered the central palace lay waiting. He slunk along the edges of crowds as they passed, not daring to do more than nod as he moved swiftly towards his goal, noting with some trepidation that they appeared wary of him, far different from the jovial crowd he recalled from their first visit. He stumbled through traffic, dodged a few security cameras that peppered the streetcorners, half-jogged his way through the central plaza, and—

There it was. The central palace, as fortified and foreboding as the Doctor remembered it. Only now there were two enormous banners that certainly hadn’t been there before, artfully strung from between the sentry towers and featuring the holograph of a single throned figure. The figure’s back was straight, facing the camera head-on with a confidence that was nearly combative, and there was the barest hint of a smile playing at his lips that the Doctor knew was far from genuine.

He knew what a genuine smile looked like on that face. He’d seen it, caused it, slept next to it, only too often.

His hearts thudded and stopped. And, as he stood frozen in the central plaza, watching the breeze flutter the banners in a way that distorted the Master’s holographic likeness before him, the Doctor was certain that he’d never been less happy to be proven right.

Chapter 9

Summary:

The Doctor grapples with Xerbos, the Master, and his own moral compass. Meanwhile, even greater trouble looms ahead.

The Master’s security force was (predictably) excellent. But it wasn’t as though the Doctor had bothered with anything like strategy. He’d simply walked straight through the gates, stormed through a host of confused onlookers and staff in the courtyard, and marched directly into the palace’s rear tower, throwing open the doors with a loud bang.

Or, he could only assume it had made a loud bang. Either that, or his expression must have spoken more of assassination attempt than official business, because not two steps into the main building and he was hit with a stun weapon. He tumbled to the ground and was immediately snatched by two guards who hoisted him under his arms and directly to a cell.

The Doctor didn’t say a word. He didn’t bother introducing himself, or demanding to speak to the Master, or pounding on the bars of his ludicrously antiquated-looking cell door (faux antiquity of course, clearly aimed more at creating the theatrical imagery of a prison cell than any real lock or threat). No, the door’s actual lock appeared to be electromagnetic at heart, and the real threat was clearly the static charge he could feel buzzing within the metal reinforcements lining the four walls of his cell.

Speaking would’ve been redundant. The Doctor was certain he wouldn't need to; he had no doubt that the Master would be informed of his presence promptly enough. He was proven correct not four minutes later when two entirely new guard skuttled into the hall to dust him off, in a comical show of attempting to be thorough whilst simultaneously touching him as little as possible.

The Doctor did not want to think about what had happened to the previous guards, to make his new assailants act with such delicacy.

From there they guided him (apologetically, gently, but clearly without option to refuse) into a central study towards the compound’s rear, passing through a throne room on the way that was positively dripping with the Master’s influence; from the narrow entryway (obvious really, designed to be too narrow for an army to storm in en-masse, they’d have to enter single-file) to the throne itself (at the room’s far end and against the wall, no doubt so that no one could walk behind him and attack him unnoticed, and that’s assuming they overlooked the low-range teleportation beam he could see concealed within its armrest). Even the color scheme felt like the Master: decadent, and just on the knife’s edge between tasteful and garish.

The Doctor immediately loathed the room for it.

He stepped into the study to find the Master, mid-pacing with a look of carefully restrained panic on his face that smoothed itself over the moment his escort party entered. The guards were dismissed with a wordless nod, and with the gentle click of the door behind the Doctor, they were alone.

The second, quieter click of what could only be a lock did nothing for his mood.

“I—” The Doctor watched in silence as the Master faltered, mouth falling shut before pulling into a grimace as he made another attempt. “How did you find me?”

“Temporal eddies.” He felt his lips turn up, though it couldn’t have been further from a smile. “Susan noticed it. She’s clever, much like yourself.”

“Much like us both.”

The Doctor’s expression had flatlined, and he could feel a buzzing under his skin that he couldn’t quite place, and an edge to his voice that he couldn’t quite own. “Am I?” he whispered. “I thought I was, once. I’m not so sure anymore.”

The Master must have heard the storm growing behind his words, because now there was something that sounded like fear behind his own. “I was going to tell you—”

“Oh, you were, were you?” The Doctor snorted, watching as the Master flinched. “I suppose you might have been. But then, you have been busy. Did it slip your mind? I have heard that running a dictatorship can take quite the strain.”

“It’s not a dictatorship—”

“No? No, of course not, I’m sure you’re the model of civic duty. Do you hold elections? Represent the people? Hear out dissidents—?”

“I said that I’m not a dictator, not that I’m inefficacious,” the Master snapped before stopping himself, as though he remembered his own delicate footing. He signed, and a dark gloved hand rose to rub over his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose with a huff. “This— well, amongst a range of poor timings for you to find out, this is unfortunately one of the poorest. The trouble on Novos has spilled over to the surrounding empires unfortunately, mine included. It’s nothing of any real danger; they were nothing but a minor player in the sector, and their trade with Xerbos hardly totals a percentage. But my reign here is still relatively new, and any suggestion of uprising can’t be allowed to—”

“Novos was your…trading partner?” the Doctor interrupted with icy disbelief, even as his brain recalled their conversation with the magistrate on Novos. He had said he’d known the Master, hadn’t he? That they’d met before.

“Partner? No, nothing so commiserate, though the magistrate might have wanted to see it as such. Novos was merely a customer of Xerbos, both our ethos and product. And, naturally, they shared some of their technological secrets in payment.”

The worst part was that the Master said it all without flinching too. The Doctor felt as though part of himself was floating meters above their heads, dissociated from the conversation’s substance and simply watching the Master as he spoke. The ease and conviction with which explanations came to his lips; the familiarity with which he paced circles around his desk, clearly hand-crafted. The frescos on the walls were lightly sun-bleached and faded around the edges. The desk was a polished solid oak, and there were near-imperceptible ink stains on its far-left edge that were long-since dry.

In short: nothing in the space appeared new. This couldn’t be written off as some spur-of-the-moment scheme that had been enacted thoughtlessly. No, the room had all the signs of being unavoidably, gut-wrenchingly, and intolerably lived-in.

“Your empire,” the Doctor reiterated slowly, the Master’s own words tossing around his mind. He stepped closer, causing the Master to take an involuntary half-step back until he nudged the lip of his desk. The bump seemed to reorient him and he straightened, with all the appearance of standing tall and unflapped, other than the panic that grew behind his expression with every foot of the Doctor’s approach. He stopped with less than an arm’s length between them, so close that he could see the Master’s pupils dilate. “Yours. And for some time now, by the looks of it. How long after our previous departure did you wait before returning to Xerbos behind my back? Hours? Minutes? Or was another you already here, hiding behind a pillar here while your younger self walked into my TARDIS and promised me that we’d never come back?”

“I had to—”

“No, you wanted to—!”

“Yes! Yes I did!” The Master leaned in, now only inches from the Doctor’s face as his temper boiled over. And for a petrifying moment, for the first time in his life, the Doctor didn’t feel as though it were the face of his husband he was looking at. His muscles felt coiled to strike, and the Master’s shoulders were shaking in anger as though he was seconds from throttling him.

In that moment it felt as though they were enemies, and it sickened the Doctor to his very core.

Then, just as quickly, the moment was gone. The Master sighed again, leaning back against the desk before sliding out from the Doctor’s encircling posture entirely and walking towards the large window adorning the far wall. “I wanted it! Xerbos, rulership, and empire, all of it! I admit it—there, are you happy now? Of course I wanted it, as though you’d even have to ask. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t also want to fix things, and I have,” the Master pressed. He fiddled with a panel on the wall and a moment later the room was flooded with light.

The Doctor stood a moment, wary of the Master’s hand as it beckoned him closer, but his feet grudgingly did as they were bidden and seconds later, he was bathed in the blinding warmth streaming in from the glass as he gazed at the vista beyond.

“Look,” the Master urged, the vibration of his words tickling in from behind the Doctor’s ear as he pressed in from his left. “Really look at it. Look what I’ve created.”

The Doctor swallowed and looked. Their room must have been situated near the top of the palace’s central tower, because the city below them sprawled out in all directions like a banquet. Beyond the courtyard and the fortress walls stretched a maze of symmetrical streets, swirling like dark calligraphy through greenery and stretching as far as the eastern coast he could see in the distance. Come to think of it, since when did Xerbos have greenery? His last memories of the place, fraught as they were by the rebellion they’d found themselves embroiled within, had been distinctly dingier. It hadn't had any of the streetlights the Doctor could now see peppering the streets amidst the morning’s glow. Nor had the pavement ever looked so scrubbed, or the people so well-kempt as they padded their way towards sleek factories that certainly hadn’t punctuated the skyline a year earlier. The Doctor closed his eyes, grimacing as unwelcome uncertainty eroded the edges of his righteous anger. But even without looking, there were no screams filling his ears, no stomps of boots or trill of weaponry. None of the telltale sounds and sights of an oppressive regime, sounds that would have broken his hearts but also made his decision far clearer.

“You have to admit, it’s pretty marvelous. And built after only a single year.”

“It’s wrong,” the Doctor hissed, his eyes still firmly shut.

The Master’s breath was warm against his ear, and the Doctor couldn’t help but tense as a hand curled around his bicep and the faintest brush of facial hair scraped across the nape of his neck. “It’s better. Better than what Xerbosians would have seen for a thousand more of their years.”

“That wasn’t our— wasn’t yours to decide. And you’ve neglected a key point, regardless.” The Doctor opened his eyes and turned his back on the scene beyond the window to face the Master fully, letting his anger push back against any sense of doubt and reach his tone. “You lied to me. For months!”

Again, the Master’s expression flickered, with something as close to abashment as the other Time Lord would ever achieve. “It wasn’t the right time—”

“It’s never the right time to tell your husband that you’ve gone against his express wishes and unlawfully taken the throne of a planet whose political system you ruined to begin with, irreparably changing their course of history in the process, is it?" the Doctor hissed, trembling with rage and inches from screaming. "There’s not exactly a greeting card for that!”

“No, a planet whose political system you ruined to begin with, Doctor, or had you forgotten?” the Master pressed, circling the desk to resume pacing the room in stiff agitation.

That prickle of uncertainty brushed against the Doctor’s anger once again, combined with the sour edge of guilt. “I…it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’ll be caught. Even the likes of the council can’t tune out whispers of a renegade Time Lord despot for long.”

The Doctor’s eyes had fallen closed again as he said it, but he could hear the sound of the Master’s footsteps coming to a halt between himself and the door. “They might ‘tune it out’, as you say, so long as a member of the council ensures their attention is redirected. Someone of influence…the Keeper, perhaps? And I hardly think I’d be labelled as a despot. Not if I had the help of Gallifrey’s best scientific mind, assisting me in developing Xerbos into a paradise.”

Again, the hair on the Doctor’s neck raised as he heard the Master take a step forward, but he didn’t dare approach as before. He opened his eyes, turned slowly, and locked onto the Master’s face. “I won’t help you,” the Doctor said solemnly. I can’t—” but the Master cut him off with earnest.

“You don’t have to do anything, not until you’re ready.”

“This was a mistake,” the Doctor whispered to himself, ignorant of the way it made the Master flinch as his blood pumped in his ears and the enormity of their situation began to take hold. “Coming here. Coming back to Gallifrey at all…”

“One day.” He must have been too numb to hear footsteps approaching, because now there were fingers around his biceps again, squeezing to the point of pain, and the Doctor could feel the Master fighting back the urge to shake him. “Just twenty-four of this planet’s hours! It’s all I ask of you before making your decision. Stay here with me one day and explore Xerbos at your own speed. See for yourself how they’ve thrived, then you can look me in the eyes and call me a monster, if you so wish.”

The Doctor looked into those eyes now, and immediately wished he hadn’t. “I won’t help you,” he reiterated, but he could feel his own uncertainty growing into something critical with the earnest resolution screaming behind the Master’s expression. “I’ve told you before, I don’t want to rule anything.”

“You don’t have to help, just bear witness. Stay with me.”

The Doctor wasn’t sure if the last sentence had been spoken at all. He felt it in the back of his skull like a plea, or a command. Like something both desperate and unquestionable. He took a deep breath, steeling himself against the self-hatred he knew would pulse through him with his next word.

“…Okay.”

The Master froze, before smiling widely with disbelief, in a way that betrayed his projected self-assurance only moments before. His mouth opened but the Doctor cut him off, not certain that either of them could take whatever the other Time Lord might say next.

“—But only because you’re right about one thing. I did cause their political upheaval, and it’s on me to make sure they’ve restabilized. And, I’m only staying for one day. This is not me agreeing to any part of this, other than a day to bear witness. We can discuss what to do about it all at home afterwards.”

“Of—of course,” the Master stammered, still stunned by the Doctor’s unexpected moment of compliance before clearing his throat and continuing more smoothly than before. “Of course. For that reason only, and none other.”

“Mmm,” the Doctor didn’t trust himself with more than a non-committal noise, nor did he want to give the Master any further leverage, but it didn’t appear to blunt his enthusiasm in the slightest. The hand on his arm had loosened its grip, just enough to slide down to grab the Doctor’s own hand with an excitement that was almost childlike.

“Come then! Let’s not waste any time. Oh, my dear, there’s so much I want you to see—”

“And you can’t kill anyone.”

The Master stopped, raising an eyebrow as the words fell out of the Doctor’s mouth in a rush, but what was left of the Doctor’s moral compass was screaming that this, of all lines, must be irrevocably drawn. “If you kill anyone…if I find out that you have killed anyone, out of anything but absolute necessity—”

“I know, I know.” The Master rolled his eyes, too excited by the Doctor’s acquiescence to do more than wave the idea away with the hand that wasn’t tugging the Doctor’s own towards the door.

The Doctor could only hope he did know. He hoped they both did.

***

It had been early in the morning on Xerbos when the Doctor had landed, and by noon he found himself helplessly, involuntarily, and infuriatingly…

Embroiled.

A small child tapped insistently on his knee, pulling him from his thoughts as he smiled and took the toy he was being offered, only to lob it back through the air with an ensuing shriek of delight as the child scampered away after it. The Doctor found himself smiling despite his efforts; they’d been at it for the better part of an hour as he’d been wandering the city looking for any sign of oppression. He’d almost expected secret police lurking on street corners, excessive security cameras posted over every door, hushed words and fearful looks. And yet, there was nothing. Nothing of concern, nothing noteworthy at all really, barring another tug on his wrist as the child returned, toy in hand and looking expectant once again.

“Having fun?”

The Doctor looked up, squinting at the Master’s silhouette as it cut a path towards him through the blinding afternoon sun. He felt the small hand that had been pulling at his own draw away, and watched out of the corner of his eye as the child took a wide-eyed step backwards. He smiled encouragingly, and the child took a minute step forward again, just far enough to deposit the toy into the Doctor’s hand. “Just taking a look around, making friends, playing catch with a…” he paused, looking down at the toy in his hand, “well, I don’t know what it is, but it looks like a frisbee and makes a rather pleasant wind-chiming noise when thrown.”

The Master peered around him at the child, still standing a wary meter behind the Doctor’s shadow, before pausing and nodding curtly. That was apparently all the reassurance the boy needed; once again he was tugging at the Doctor’s hand until he threw the toy in a loft arc, trilling as it sailed over the treetops with the child hot on its trail.

The Master had reached his side now. “I see. None of the street corner executions or petrified masses you were hoping for then?”

Just like that, the Doctor’s mood re-soured. “Not yet. I’ve spoken to a dozen or so people, and they seem…happy. More or less.

The Master didn’t respond, but from the corner of his eye, the Doctor could see the self-satisfaction stretching across his smile. They continued their walk together, nodding at passers-by who gave them a wide berth with something like shocked deference on their faces. Clearly, it wasn’t every day that the Master deigned to walk amongst his subjects. Intentional or not, the Doctor had a growing suspicion that his presence here was giving de-facto support to the Master’s reign simply by making him appear more personable. He scowled at the thought but didn’t draw his hand away as the Master took it as they strolled.

No, there was little use wondering, the tacit support his presence demonstrated was certainly intentional. It was the exact kind of loophole in the Doctor’s strictly delineated ‘I’m-not-helping’ morals that the Master lived for.

They were drawing nearer to the coast the Doctor had seen from the study window. He could sense it in the salt-drenched winds buffering their jackets. A minute further they’d cleared the buildings and he could see a straight shot towards the waterfront; a vast expanse of glimmering teal that stretched on towards the next continental shelf. He spent a brief second wondering how the other continents on Xerbos had fared under the Master’s rule, but then allowed himself a moment’s peace to close his eyes and listen to the crash of waves, the rustle of wind in the trees, multifarious voices of locals carried on the wind, and…

The Doctor paused, brow furrowing. Amidst the soothing sounds of the beachfront there was a technological whine, and a low susurration of tinned speech that sounded undeniably mechanical. He turned in the direction of the noise and saw the Master staring into thin air and uncharacteristically vacant. The Doctor watched his expression flicker and tense before his eyes darted towards the Doctor’s. “I apologize if I seem distracted, I have to keep an ear to certain internal affairs being discussed this afternoon.” He turned, indicating towards a sleek device curled around the shell of his far ear, expression forced into pleasant neutrality once more.

Much as he strained, the Doctor couldn’t quite make out the words that were being whispered into the Master’s ear. Their tone sounded far from friendly, but that could just as easily be the generic monotone wielded by councilors universally as it could be a threat. “Anything of interest?”

It was warning as much as it was a question, and the Master knew it. He rolled his eyes. “Not every piece of governance is worth scrutiny my dear, it’s simply an obligation that I listen. Rulership never sleeps.”

“Funny, people say the same thing about evil,” the Doctor muttered, but the comment was left unremarked by the Master, barring a roll of his eyes. He turned back towards the ocean as his mind fell back towards its earlier question. “What about the rest of Xerbos?”

He felt the Master still on his right. “What about it? It’s under my rule as well, of course. You can’t think I’d have simply taken change of the capital.”

“Certainly, but how did they take it?” The Doctor learned on the rail separating them from the sand, turning to face the Master with a grave expression. “The capital was in state of flux after our visit, I can understand why they’d have been primed to accept foreign guidance. But the rest of the planet can’t have had word of the political upheaval until it was over, and suddenly they had an alien head of state to contend with—”

“It’s been settled,” the Master interrupted firmly, but there was an edge to his tone that suggested it had been far from easy. “Or rather, it is being settled. These things take time. Even I can’t expect to have won over all the locals after a single year.”

Well, that sounded a far cry less than ‘settled’. The Doctor stared uneasily back across the ocean’s expanse, and only then did he notice the flicker. Or, flickers; thousands of pinpricks of light that the Doctor might have mistook as part of the ocean’s glimmer if not for the fact that they lifted into the sky like parallels of gossamer arcing gracefully above their heads, farther than he could see. “Is that…have you built a peripheral dome?”

“A photon-enhanced shield, made from this planet’s own sand, just like Gallifrey’s own citadel. Better even, nearly invisible and lethal to touch, given enough charge.”

“It’s…surprisingly beautiful.” It truly was. Barring the linear glimmers of photon reinforcement, which seemed to only break their pattern to coalesce atop the waves in sporadic bursts of mesmerizing light, there hardly appeared to be any glass at all.

“Thank you,” the Master replied, looking genuinely flattered. “I have to admit I’m fairly proud of it, I’ve managed to triple the strength of the glass whilst cutting its thickness in two—” he paused, tilting his head as the same tinny static from his earpiece began again, and his expression became hostile.

The Doctor opened his mouth in question but paused as a hollow tapping reverberated through the air, dull and distanced. Immediately, thousands of the glimmering specks above the waves shot upwards. The Doctor tried to follow their trails along the glass as they sped above the cloud line, where a growing glow illuminated the clouds with every tap.

“We need to head back,” A hand on his shoulder redirected the Doctor’s attention towards the Master, whose face had forced itself back into placidity. He let himself be led away from the harbor and back onto the road, trying not to focus on the looks of concern they received from passers-by as eyes darted from their procession and up towards the sky.

Still, it wasn’t until they stepped through the front doors of the palace that he became truly worried that something was wrong. The courtyard was much quieter than it had been when the Doctor had stormed in initially, but it felt far more ominous than the morning’s bustle, all punctuated by that same tapping noise getting louder and louder in tandem with the lights flickering far above the cloudline, almost like a distant lightning storm. From the corner of his eye he watched the Master pause, inscrutable expression dappled by the dim glow before ducking back down and dragging the Doctor along twice as fast as before. He spotted one or two stone-faced advisors hurrying up a grand staircase who looked as though they expected him to join, but the Master ignored them, making a beeline for his study.

As the door swung shut behind them, the Doctor turned and opened his mouth to question why they’d—

“I need you to stay here.”

The Doctor’s question was cut short, but his mouth remained open in surprise, then outrage, as the request fully hit him. “I beg your pardon?” he continued eventually, his voice dripping with the skepticism the idea deserved. “What the devil is going on? Moreover, what makes you think I’d hide in your room whilst you step directly into the action—?”

“Because you said you would.”

“I said no such thing—”

“You said you wouldn’t help me,” the Master interrupted coldly, “so don’t. Just stay here.”

The Doctor stared at him for a moment before throwing a look out the window at the pinpricks of light. “Master, what is happening?”

“Governance,” the Master snapped, before they both flinched as deeper boom pierced through the dull tapping in the sky. He watched the Master exhale, dragging a hand down his face to reset his composure. “It’s fine, it’ll be easily settled. Simply the teething pains of a new regime, we’re not without our enemies.”

“We?”

“Me, we, I’m afraid it’s all very much the same—” another boom, and another flinch. “I won’t be long my dear, I’ll explain everything soon.”

Numerous sarcastic responses rose to the Doctor’s tongue at that, but the door was shut, and the Master was long gone before he could voice any of them. More infuriatingly, he was certain he’d heard the click of a lock behind him. Locking him in a tower, away from the trouble, as though he were some sort of damsel?! Or a prisoner?! He bathed in the moment’s outrage, only too aware that as soon as indignation faded away he’d be hit with a far more worrisome emotion: suspicion. That, and a not-insignificant dose of concern. Fighting back both, the Doctor found himself pacing the flagstones of the office until he’d reached the grand window. The vista towards the sea was no less impressive than it had been before, but now the streets were empty. It appeared as though the entirety of the city had retreated indoors.

Without warning. Without being instructed. Clearly, it wasn’t the first time.

Again, he looked towards the pattern of lights in the sky and tried to find a pattern. The noise was rhythmic, in clustered bursts, and the lights were congregated at the central top of the dome, with three smaller foci further down onto the horizon at equidistant intervals. Equidistant? Hardly a natural anomaly then, and combined with the rhythmic thuds…it was indisputably an attack.

The thought left him uneasy. While the Doctor couldn’t fully condemn the Master for launching a defense on behalf of his own people, he had a sinking feeling that the attack was far from unprovoked. Like a caged tiger, he resumed circling the room in agitation.

An attack was understandable. But why ask that the Doctor remain here, rather than accompany him to the control room? If anything, he’d have thought the Master would have encouraged that, if nothing else to attempt to persuade him to add his two cents into the defense strategy, thus embedding him into Xerbos’s politics further. So, the real question (ergo, the matter of true concern) was…

What was the Master hiding?

Regardless of the answer, one thing was certain: the Doctor had no intention of obeying. Having reached his conclusion, he stopped pacing and began cataloguing the room with his eyes, looking for something, anything, that might be useful for picking a lock. Unfortunately, the room was largely unfurnished, save for the large central desk, chair, and a small settling sofa against the far wall. And even the Doctor’s own ingenuity would find difficulty making a key out of upholstery (at least, not in a limited time frame allotted to him). His scrutiny fell onto the desk once more, and his hearts sped up to see nearly imperceptible lines of a series of drawers in its sleek underbelly.

He shoved aside the chair and slid open the topmost with a heavy thunk, only to deflate at the site of paperwork and a simple toolset. Far, far too simple to be of use on the door’s lock. And worse, it was Gallifreyan paperwork. Matrix schematics, as though the Master hadn’t been able to fully step away from his responsibilities at home, even within his own kingdom. Crestfallen, the Doctor slammed it shut before pulling open the second. The dark reflection of a nanoscreen peered up at him. Useful, if not doubtlessly and impenetrably locked to intruders. The third drawer? A highly sophisticated ear-piece, similar to the one the Master currently wore. The fourth? A small laser weapon, the sight of which made the Doctor’s gut twist. The fifth and final…

The Doctor’s breath caught at the sight of a single small brooch. A composite of dark star alloy embedded with a perception filter to blend into however, or wherever it was worn. He knew it well; he’d given it to the Master himself, on Susan’s first anniversary in their care, just as he knew that if he opened it up, he’d find a small picture of the three of them from that same day. The Master had worn it on his person daily before the Doctor had left, and although he’d noticed its absence upon returning, he’d been too afraid of the answer to ask where it had gone.

He considered the brooch. The perception filter could provide useful, as could the alloy, and he was sure he could have the brooch dismantled into pieces in under three minutes, before he ultimately closed the drawer entirely, leaving it untouched. Similarly, he ignored the drawer with the weapon, turning his sights to the earpiece instead. With short-lived optimism, he placed the device in his ear before finding it disconnected. There would be no spying on the Master’s communications remotely, that would have been far too simple. However…

Intricate amplification technology. Volume titration. He could integrate the nanoscreen’s computational drive—and there were tools in the top drawer too! All he’d need was a power source…

The Doctor looked up, smiling at the chandelier above the desk as an idea began assembling in his mind, the tentative building blocks of a plan. He could hear it, a low buzz within the walls, easy to overlook under the thudding far above, but it was there. The door’s lock was electromagnetically driven, much like his cell had been on arrival. Perhaps all the palace’s doors were similar. With the right frequency, he might render the whole system inert…not just any frequency, perhaps a high-powered sonic device?

With grim determination and his tongue clenched firmly beneath his teeth, the Doctor got to work.

Notes:

Okay look I know I said this on chapter seven too, but....WE'RE [I'm] BACK [again] BABY!
As if I'd leave any of my works unfinished for good. Let's just call this a really, really, really protracted pause while I un-fucked a few things IRL.

(Are further pauses likely? Very likely.)
(Will any of that stop me from writing for good? Over my dead body. As if my 16 page WIP doc would let me.)

Chapter 10

Summary:

Xerbos is under attack. The Doctor makes a terrifying discovery, and an even more terrifying decision.

It took the Doctor less time to sonic through the lock than he’d feared, yet far more than he’d hoped. Slightly less than an hour later there was a snap as the door slid open, and the Doctor snuck his head around the frame and peered at the throne room beyond. Forebodingly empty. And, even more forebodingly, silent. The room’s central location seemed to be shielding it from the worst of the impacts on dome; impacts that had only increased over the past hour.

No, there was no other explanation. Xerbos was unequivocally under attack.

The Doctor found himself cursing at the Master under his breath, both for locking him away from the action, and getting them into this predicament in the first place. He needed to find him and discover precisely what was being hidden from his attention. But where? The palace had any number of locked doors, and if breaking out of the study was any indication, he’d be searching all week before he found him. Teeth clenched, the Doctor paced across the throne room and out into the grand hall that the guards had marched him down only hours before, only to leap back behind a pillar at the sound of footsteps approaching rapidly. Seconds later, four guards rushed past his position without pause, before disappearing around a corner his right.

With hardly a second thought, the Doctor followed, cognizant of the security cameras he could see dotting the corners of the ceilings and trying his best to remain out of their view. Professional obligation was better than any palace blueprint; wherever they were headed was certain to lead him to the action. And wherever that was, he could only fear he’d find the Master at its heart.

The hall was long and curved, and the Doctor followed as close to the sound of footsteps as he dared. The hallway was eventually punctured by a set of stairs, spiraling up from his left and steeply down along his right. He paused for a moment before picking up the sound of footsteps again towards his left, just managing to glimpse the heel of one of the guards as they stormed up the steps. Again, he followed, throwing himself behind a wall to hide as the guards slowed upon reaching the top landing, directly in front of a set of formidable double doors. The sounds of attack were louder here, by his estimation they were front and central within the palace complex. The ideal spot, were he trying to situate a control room.

Unfortunately, the Doctor realized his error a second too late, as the pneumatic hiss of the doors opened to allow passage for the guards. Concerns about remaining out of sight from the security cameras cast aside, he made a run for it, sprinting up the stairs two at a time. But his hopes were dashed as inches from his nose, the doors slammed to a decisive close.

Panting, the Doctor scanned the doorway for any entry mechanism; any hinge he could loosen, or any entry panel he could hack. But the door must have functioned based on biorecognition, or embedded security card scanning, because there didn’t appear to be a single identifiable point of entry. With increasing desperation and little other option, the Doctor pressed his ear to the door and shut his eyes. Faintly, he could hear the sound of voices beyond, too quiet to identify any specific words amidst the hum of electronics and click of controls, but they were present nevertheless. And at the center of it he could decipher a voice whose resonance he knew all too well.

The castle’s control room, to be sure. With the Master at its helm.

The Doctor needed to find a way inside! Or, his mind added, at very least, to find a way to hear and see what was going on within. He stood there considering the idea for a moment before it hit him – the cameras! He glanced up, before racing down the stairs, thinking it through. There must certainly be a security camera inside, even just one! Privacy aside, the Master was far too much of a control freak to leave his most important room without the means for external monitoring. However, certainly not any old computer system would have access to it – so, where would? He hadn’t seen any surveillance screens in the study, or at least nothing he could access. If he were the Master, what would he do?

The throne room.

He was back down the stairs in a flash. Down the hall, sprinting back into the throne room as he looked around wildly for any access stations, or any screens that looked as though he could program back-access into the control room cameras. But ostentatious as it may be, the room was bare of any real fixtures, barring the throne itself.

Although…

On a hunch, the Doctor approached the throne, looming as golden and monstrous against the far wall as it had looked upon his arrival. With far more trepidation than he’d had whilst storming into the room, he scaled the two grand steps and took a closer look. His hopes swelled when a small holoscreen buzzed to life upon his approach, and he quickly flicked through a small menu until he reached a tab labelled [Surveillance]. A further click revealed a schematic of the palace with glowing indications at each camera, and it was a simple thing to retrace the steps he’d followed towards the control room stairs.

There it is! A single dot, indicating a camera at the room’s center, and the feed was live. With trembling fingers, the Doctor pressed on the dot.

[Access Key Required]

The Doctor’s hearts sunk. Not even he, with his centuries-deep knowledge of the Master, would be able to guess his passcode—or at least, not in time! This time he couldn’t contain his frustration and he lashed out, his fist hitting the armrest of the throne as he let out a low groan.

Wait. Was that…a biostatic shock? The Doctor paused in surprise, staring at his fist where the skin was still tinging faintly, directly where it had made contact with the throne. Gingerly, on instinct alone, he sat himself down— and there it was. Painless prickles of electricity jolted at his forearms where they made contact with the armrests, and the holoscreen went dark.

[Access granted: Code: Welcome Lord Doctor]

So, the Master really had intended on the Doctor’s ruling at his side on Xerbos. And he’d had such confidence in his acceptance that he’d programed the Doctor’s biometrics into the security system. The Doctor let out a single choked sound that was more despair than it was laughter before the screen flared to life, and he cast the thought aside.

He was in!

The room was dark and metallic, sleek and minimalistic in a way that set apart from the rest of the palace’s garish design. There was a wall of display screens which showed the dome from every internal angle, as well as long-range scanners upon which the Doctor could see rough images of fighter ships as they spun to avoid weapon fire. Twenty-odd guards and officials racing around between stations in pursuit of orders, and at the center of those orders and the room itself was the Master. Immobile with concentration and expression flat, his attention appeared torn between the screens and an interactive hologram of the city’s dome that he was spinning around, as though looking for something specific.

“—From the east, you said?”

The sound of the Master’s voice, emotionless and abrupt, had the Doctor jumping in his seat.

“Yes, a contingent of them,” an official replied from a corner of the room where the Doctor could see her peering into a monitor before darting a look back towards the Master, her expression anxious. “They somehow got past our long-range sensors, and they’re headed for the dome. I don’t know how—”

“Betrayal, clearly.” Even through the grainy camera footage, the Doctor could see the Master’s eyes narrow. “Treason. We suspected they’d been working with rebel factions here on Xerbox, and this is as good as proof.”

Another boom echoed from far above the palace, and the Doctor watched the control room tremble as he blinked falling dust from his own eyes.

“Let them come,” the Master stated, finally stilling his holograph of the dome with a look of grim satisfaction. “Their timing is opportune. My weapon might not have finished its final trials yet, but it has been completed for days. Guards, to the missile stations. Target your fire to corral the fleet towards the dome, and don’t let a single ship break formation. We want them as close as we can get!”

The room’s other occupants looked pale, but they were obeying without hesitation. It was then that Doctor noticed details he’d initially overlooked in his haste, such as a holographic projection of Xerbos’s land masses with numbers aligned over their surfaces; numbers which the Master’s fingers skimmed over with ownership as he adjusted each in turn.

And then he saw the other screens.

They lined the far wall, opposite from the high-definition feeds of their attackers and manned by a distinct cluster of officials. The Doctor squinted closer to the holoscreen. These displays seemed to contain a mix of ground footage, arial imagery, and output data, from what appeared to be…

Weapons compounds?! Enormous weapons compounds, dotting the planet at strategic intervals from arial footage, blotting the surface of the charred soil on which they stood.

The Doctor’s blood ran cold as the realization hit him. The Master had made himself a nuclear armada!

“Assailants inbound!” There was nothing he could do but watch, frozen with horror as the Master’s eyes tracked towards the screen where more than fifty ships had swan-dived directly at the dome, his finger poised over his holograph. Five seconds before impact he pressed down, and it was as though time itself slowed before the Doctor’s eyes.

“Four seconds!”

The holograph dulled its light under his hands, all except a crosshatch under the capital’s location which began pulsing a dull red.

“Three!”

Finger still pressed, the Master’s thumb swiped precisely at a dial, and the pulsing both quickened and brightened. The Doctor joined the occupants in the control room in watching with increasing fear as a score of ships shot closer to the dome, with such speed that there would be no stopping before impact. Surely they would burst right through the glass!

“Two!”

The only person not watching the screen was the Master, whose attention was rapt on his holograph as the pulsing grid flared brighter before shrinking and buckling upwards until it appeared to arch over the palace’s location, matching the shape of the dome far above the city. And in the throne room the Doctor could swear that the air itself was changing, the hair on his arms standing up as though charged.

In that moment, he knew something far worse than an attack was about to happen. It’s not just a holograph, it’s a trigger!

“One!”

All at once the Master let go, and the holograph emitted a single beep. And then it was though the air around them caught alight, and all other noise was blocked out by a single deafening—

BOOM!

The Doctor hissed, squinting and turning in tandem with the control room’s occupants as the display screens flared with a blinding light, but he focused past the pain to watch in horrifying detail as cords of energy impulse had raced up the dome to converge at the exact spot their attackers’ lead ship impacted. The energy bolt coursing through the craft and rendered it into infinitesimal pieces in an instant, before ricocheting like a chain of lightning through the ships immediately behind it and destroying them in the same manner. And the ships behind those, and the next, and the next, not stopping until the entire fleet had been obliterated to ash.

And all in under a second.

It was a weapon the likes of which the Doctor had never considered. It was casual destruction, on such a scale and speed that he’d never expected. Not from his husband. Not in his worst nightmares.

“…All Novos ships destroyed.” The comment was thin and relieved, arriving from a guard bent scouring the long-range sensor after a full ten seconds of stunned silence in which the room’s occupants rubbed the blinding flash from their eyes and reckoned with the scene in front of them.

On screen, the Master’s face was pulled in harsh satisfaction. “The last of the Novosian resistance,” he drawled, and if the Doctor thought his hearts couldn’t sink further, he was proven wrong. “That is to say, the last of their fleet in its entirety. At very least, that will make the transition of power smoother…”

It had been a resistance. Not attackers, but defenders. The implication struck him like violence. The Master was going to take Novos Six. Or, perhaps he already had!

The Doctor felt numb. He sat back, staring past the screen and unfocused as the audio feed seemed to quiet under the ringing in his ears. His mind had fallen utterly silent, unwilling to think beyond the horror of this very moment, or to face whatever else must come next. The sheer scale of the Master’s betrayal felt unspeakably raw, in a way the Doctor felt woefully unequipped to address.

However…

Tearing down dictatorial regimes? That, he was becoming something of an expert at addressing.  

He steeled himself, pushing his emotions aside as his feet made their way down from the throne and across the room almost of their own accord. It was too late for the Novos fleet, but there was the entire Novos system to consider, and they’d mentioned rebels here on Xerbos as well. So many innocent lives in danger, that still required saving.

And all because of you, the thought whispered venomously across the clinical steel of his resolve, catching in his throat. This is your fault, as much as it is the Master’s. You interfered on Xerbos and Novos, and you never stopped him when you had the chance.

For a moment the Doctor felt grief threatening to overtake him, but pushed back against it with all of his mental strength. Now wasn’t the time to wallow, he needed to think! It was that accursed dome that gave Xerbos leverage above the mid-stage industrial colony it had been before their interference. More than a shield, it was also an energy conduit for the Master’s terrible weapon, assumingly fueled via the planet’s newly installed weapons compounds. But a weapon of that scale needed more than just fuel, there had to be a convergence site in the capital itself! A battery of sorts, more sophisticated than a bundle of wires but the imagery remained the same. And given the size of the weapon, the Doctor could only imagine the battery conduit would be of a significant scale. One wonders how the Master has managed to keep its location secure at all!

But then— where could it be?

The Doctor thought through all logistic possibilities before it came to him, one that would strike at the Master’s loves of aesthetics as much as it held strategic purpose. The dome, so reminiscent of Gallifrey’s own citadel. And every good Time Lord knew that its stronghold, the matrix, and all other essentials of Gallifreyan governance lie at its central core, underground. And so, the weapon’s conduit would be similarly underground, he was sure of it.

The Master has always been such a nationalist in his own right, rebel that he might consider himself. The thought was almost fond, and something close to a smile played at the Doctor’s mouth involuntarily before the reality of the present situation hit him once more.

The Master, who had betrayed him. The Master, his husband, who had killed untold thousands to take this planet, and would likely kill thousands more. Again, the Doctor fought back the urge to scream as he pushed aside his own betrayal and brought his mind back to the task at hand.

Now, where had he seen a stairway underground…

A moment later and the Doctor was running. Back, out of the throne room and along the hallway, down the path he’d traversed only minutes before. Back towards where the control room loomed at the top of a staircase off to his left, and— there! To his right there was a small set of downward stairs he’d hardly so much as glanced at before. Inconspicuous compared to the path to the control room, hardly a third of their width and far steeper.

Any pause he might have taken to reconsider his move was cut short by a noise from the left as the command room door hissed open, and the Doctor dove down the stairs without another thought. Once out of sight he stopped again, hearts racing and breath held as he listened to a steady trickle of boots down stairs, accompanied by the low rumble of murmurs as clusters of officials passed the stairwell where the Doctor hid.

The steps weren’t hurried. The voices, albeit quiet, didn’t sound strained. Victorious, even. Clearly it was assumed the danger had passed. It made the Doctor want to emerge from his hiding and shake them for their passivity. Did they feel nothing for the hostile takeover of their own planet? How could they accept the Master’s dominion with so little complaint – how dare they?! It wasn’t a fair thought, nor was it rational, or kind. The Doctor tried to remind himself of as much with a shake before turning and continuing down the stairs, reminding himself there was still work to be done.

There would be no further destruction, not today. He would make sure of it.

The door at the bottom of the stairwell might have been half the size of the control room’s, but it still managed to appear twice as fortified. Thick, metallic composite plating that was certainly not from Xerbos’s own soil, with a bioaccess system that was equally as alien. The Doctor could easily imagine the door keeping out hoardes, missiles, and any other manner of assault without so much as a dent. But this time he didn’t hesitate before placing his hand over the biosensor, letting the sensory nanodes graze his DNA sequence before pulsing green, and again there it was:

[Access granted: Code: Welcome Lord Doctor]

The blast of heat that emerged from behind the door was sweltering. The Doctor was so furious he wasn’t even aware he’d been crying, not until the hand that rose to protect his eyes came away damp with more than just sweat. But still he pressed on into the room, skin stinging as he approached a glowing column that stood at the room’s center, knotted and ropelike cords of metallofibres that distorted his vision with pulsating heat, stretching from deep below the floor and up through the ceiling as though it were the trunk of a sinister luminescent tree.

He approached as closely as he dared, immediately discarding any thoughts about hacking into the complex series of control panels he could see on the far wall. There simply wasn’t enough time for a graceful dismantling of the system, the Master would notice his absence any minute now. Instead, the Doctor pulled out the sonic device he’d constructed and wrenched the power settings as high as they could go. What he had planned would take far more power than simply unlocking a door.

As he fiddled with the settings and scanned the power conduit for vulnerabilities in its wiring, the Doctor tried his hardest not think. Not about the tumult that would certainly occur with the dome’s protection dismantled, or the further casualties that would result, or that his actions might worsen the cultural damage they’d already wrought on Xerbos, or the danger he’d be directly responsible for placing the Master in…

No, he was particularly adamant about not thinking about that last part.  

So enrapt was the Doctor in his preparation that he didn’t even notice the door shut behind him. Nor did he hear the footsteps as they approached.

“What are you intending to do?”

The Doctor fumbled, almost dropping his device as he reeled around. The Master was standing between himself and the door, his voice neutral as though pretenses of calm might soothe the rage the Doctor knew was apparent on his own face, or the panic he could see brewing behind the Master’s own. “How could you?” he bit out, hoarse with emotion and utterly ignoring the question.

The Master’s mask of calm waivered. “I apologize for having locked you in the study, but you made your opinion on assisting my rulership quite clear. The study is reinforced, and although the threat has been neutralized, I’m afraid there was an attempted attack—”

“I saw everything!” the Doctor snapped, and the Master visibly flinched. “Don’t you dare lie to me, I saw it all! I hacked the security feed from the control room— those weren’t attackers, that was a Novite defense fleet and you—” he shuddered, biting back nausea as he forced the words through bared teeth, “—atomised them!”

There was silence for a moment as the Master’s expression morphed from wide-eyed panic at being caught, into a more familiar frustration. “What was I supposed to do? I had no intention of taking Novos so soon, but after our stunt on Novos Six there was a power vacuum to be filled; the consequences of which would surely affect Xerbos. And I did intend on telling you, on sharing all of it with you— you’ve clearly noticed that yourself, seeing as how you’ve been rifling through my security systems. However, like I keep trying to explain to you, the timing hasn’t been right!”

“Blast your timing, and your empire, and your weapons— all of it!” The Master tried to step closer, but the Doctor took two steps back, wincing from the heat as he drew painfully close to the conduit. The Master slowed, appearing almost guilty at the Doctor’s pain before changing tactics and circling from the left, forcing the Doctor to sidestep his approach until they were equidistant from both the conduit and door.

Adding insult to injury, he felt the Master’s presence creeping into his mind like fog, whispering intimately. If you just let me show you—

“Don’t you dare, get out of my head!” the Doctor spat, raising his mental barriers with such force that the Master startled.

“It’s for us, Doctor! I’ve done this all for you, and for Susan—”

“I don’t want any of it!” The Doctor shouted, his lungs aching from the force. “I don’t want an empire! I don’t want to rule anything! I wanted you!  I wanted our life together, and the freedom for us to see the universe, not rule it! And now you’ve gone and ruined everything!”

This time it was the Master who stepped back, stumbling as though punched. “Theta—” he began haltingly, his eyes wide.

“No, Master, there’s no coming back from this this time, there’s—” the Doctor’s breath caught, strung between speaking and sobbing. “There’s no hiding this from the council anyway, they’ll find out. It’s gotten too big— you’ll be imprisoned, or worse.”

“I won’t, they wouldn’t dare try,” the Master retorted immediately, anger and certainty returning to his face to replace panic. “Not while I have secrets to the Matrix they could only dream of accessing. Not if I control the ebb and flow of information that enters its depths. Why, I could procure damning information on every member of the council in a heartbeat.”

“And how…” the Doctor asked slowly, even though in the depths of his hearts he already knew the terrible answer. “How exactly did you get that access? That’s far beyond even your remit as Underkeeper. You would have needed guidance from the Keeper to access any of that.”

They stared, locked in a silent standoff as the Doctor’s eyes remained fixed on the Master’s face, hardened with the implicit question his mouth refused to voice. The Master’s expression was stony, and for a moment it looked as though he was preparing to speak, but instead he turned wordlessly towards a small display screen on the adjacent wall. “I’ve told you repeatedly, I didn’t kill the Keeper,” he said finally, hands still moving over the screen beyond the Doctor’s field of vision.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I know,” the Master replied flatly, keying in a final command with undue force. Then he stepped aside, beckoning the Doctor towards the screen. “That’s why you should see it for yourself.”

The Doctor inched forward, hardly half a meter, hugging close to the door until he was just close enough to the Master that he could see a figure prone on the screen. The Keeper? His chest was rising and falling, reassuring in its own right, and he appeared to be in a zero-room in deep stasis. Indecipherable shadows flickered on the wall behind him, indicating movement in the room beyond the scope of the footage.

“It’s a recording, not a live feed I’m afraid, although it should be enough to assuage your paranoia.”

“What have you done to him?”

“He’s in a trace at the moment, it’s perfectly safe—"

“But why is he with you at all?” the Doctor cried out, confusion slowly giving way to return to outrage. “Why kidnap the Keeper?!”

The Master’s expression tensed. “Would it soothe your rigid morality to know that the Keeper killed the Underkeeper?” he snapped, circling towards the Doctor once more. That surprised him. The Doctor glanced back at the unconscious figure’s shallow breathing, feeling a mix of trepidation and dismay. “Or that the Underkeeper had been blackmailing him for years, ineffectually attempting to ply him for information and status? Or that without his obtuse and regressive rebuffing, the council has managed more progress in the past few weeks than they had in a decade? Or are you still pretending to not know that this is how political progress is made?”

“So you did what, took over the blackmailing from where the Underkeeper left off? Convinced yourself that it would be kinder— no, I don’t suppose you care about that, but cleaner— if you were to kidnap him and take the secrets straight from his head?” The Master didn’t answer, but his silence spoke volumes and the Doctor knew he’d hit the mark. “Where is he?”

“Safe.” He took another step closer to the Doctor, who side stepped in turn. He watched the Master glance behind him, both noting that their positions were now reversed, and now the Doctor was just two steps from the door while the Master stood between himself and the conduit.

A meager, cowardly part of his mind felt something close to relief at being close to the door, and the Doctor immediately felt flush with shame. Even after the terrible things the Master had done, he couldn’t sink so low as to be afraid of him.

…Could he?

“Master, you have to let him go, this is not…” the Doctor trailed off as he saw another shape enter the video feed, one unexpected enough that it briefly ground all his chastisements to a halt. For a moment he wasn’t sure what to make of the smooth edges of the dark shape as it obstructed the corner of the feed, blotting over the machine to which the Keeper was wired. It appeared entirely featureless, although textured and matte in a way that almost made it look like material. Perhaps there was interference from a curtain?  

That is, until the shape fanned out in a flourish of fingers. It didn’t look like material, it was material. A gloved hand, twice the size of the Keeper himself.

The Doctor glanced from the Master to the video feed and back again, and his face must have blanched because the Master turned to follow his gaze back towards the video feed, before snapping back to the Doctor with an expression that was equal parts guilty and defiant.

They both stood immobile, for what must have been the longest ten seconds of the Doctor’s life. “I have to stop you,” the Doctor whispered finally, breaking the silence. “You’ve left me no choice.”

“There’s always a choice—”

“No, there’s not.” The Doctor’s hand shook as it rose, sonic device still clenched tightly in his fist as he pointed it towards the Master.

…Who immediately pulled a sleek, black, familiar weapon from his pocket and pointed it at the Doctor in return.

The Doctor’s hearts all but stopped. Of course he would have made a copy. He exhaled harshly, incredulously. “So it has come to this.”

“Doctor, put the weapon down—“

“You’d shoot me,” the Doctor continued in slow disbelief. “You would rather kill me than stop this insanity.”  

“It won’t kill you, you’ve just seen so yourself,” the Master snapped back, as though semantics might distract him from the way he flinched at the accusation. “Perhaps some time hidden away will make you see sense!”

“And your plan is to what, shrink me?” And now it was the Doctor who was stepping forward, fighting back bubbling hysteria. “Keep me? Lock me away in the hopes that you could one day talk me into abandoning my very morals and joining this charade?”

“Don’t come any closer!”

“Or else what, you’ll shoot me?” Another step.

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” the Master interrupted him, hoarse with fury. “And it won’t end here. It’ll never end, I swear it. I will hunt you down to the ends of the universe if I have to, until I make you understand!”

The words rang out between them with sincerity, like it was a promise unto time itself.

It gave the Doctor pause, but only for a moment.

“And yet, you still haven’t shot me,” he bit back, resuming his approach. “Haven’t done much of anything to stop me at all, and you’ve had plenty of time—"

“I don’t want to shoot you at all!” the Master cried, and the way his eyes were shining, a naïve part of the Doctor’s hearts could almost believe it. But fear had always had a way of making the Master cruel, and something in his expression hardened. “You idiot, how are you still so short-sighted? My plans will grant us power over the seven systems! We can go anywhere; do anything we desire! No laboratory work, no quartermaster oversight, no TARDIS permits, you will be able to engineer wonders you’ve never dared imagine! How could you even think of taking such an opportunity from us, you’ll be able to help people on a scale you’ve never so much as dreamed!” Not to be cowed, the Master met his approach and now they were scant feet apart, so close that the Doctor could see the fine seam on the nozzle of the weapon, half opened and primed to fire directly at his chest. “Technology, riches, admiration, opportunity, the very heart of the universe itself— I’ll give it all to you, if you just put that weapon down!”

There was a moment of quiet again, wherein the Doctor could do little else but stare at the Master’s chest as he panted, impassioned, still seemingly confident that the Doctor wouldn’t dare refuse such an offer, if only he could find the right words with which to frame it. He swallowed, eyes trailing upwards, taking in every straining feature of face that he’d loved with every inch of his hearts.

Then the Doctor surprised them both by breaking into a laugh. Something cold and scathing, forced from the bottom of his lungs as the farcical horror of the day overwhelmed him. Near doubled over, he cleared the gap between them until the compression weapon was pressing directly into his sternum. His own outstretched hand momentarily lapsed as he braced his hands on his own hips, as though he were holding himself together as the breath left his lungs. “Worthless,” he wheezed, choking out words between guffaws. “All worthless—as though I could want—anything—from you—ever again—after this!”

For the first time in his lives, the Master appeared truly speechless. He’d fallen paler than the Doctor had ever seen him, moreso than he’d appeared whilst looking for the Doctor amongst the ashes of his lab and holding Susan, so many decades ago. Without a single blow, it was as though the Doctor’s words and laughter had bled him dry.

The Doctor was still panting through final peels of mirthless laughter when he raised his hand again. “It’s not even a weapon,” he choked out finally, his vision swimming. “It’s just a tool. More of a screwdriver than anything, really.”

Then he fired.

Two inches above the Master’s shoulder, and directly at the conduit’s most vulnerable wiring.

The sequence of events that followed happened so quickly that, in retrospect, the memories bled together in nightmarish fugue. The Doctor could never have predicted how much power he’d managed to wrangle out of his makeshift tool; he hadn’t damaged the conduit’s wiring, so much as it had been entirely obliterated. Immediately, the conduit let out a scorching wave of heat so powerful that might have lit his hair alight had the Master not tackled him to the floor not a millisecond before.

Then they were grappling.

The Doctor found himself kicking and flailing back with mindless fury, and he hadn’t realized he had anything left to feel betrayed over until the Master’s fist connected with his face, leaving dark spots dancing out over his vision. “Swi’tchi’toff!” he yelled, the words slurred and stuffy from the blood he could taste streaming from his nose.

“Never!” The Master took the opportunity to roll them closer to the door before clambering atop him, and he could feel hands prying at his fingers where they remained locked around the sonic device. “Let go! I can fix it—!”

“No!”

“You’ve blown open the primary capacitor! Damn it all Doctor, I will never forgive you for this— forget the weapon, the entire city will burn!”

But the Doctor cut him off, prying his hand away from the Masters’ and hitting the Master square in the temple with the sonic device, stunning him long enough that the Doctor was able to push him off and clamber to his feet, glancing around. It was only then that he saw the truth of the Master’s words as flames scorched up the walls, licking up towards the ceiling.

He turned, glancing towards the door, only to be knocked flat on his back a moment later as the Master lunged for his knees. This time the Doctor’s arms were trapped between their chests, and he could feel the Master’s hands wrapping around his own, yelling something inaudible over the shriek of melting metal as he pried back the Doctor’s fingers one by one.

Then it happened.

Truth be told, the Doctor wasn’t sure (he would never be sure—no matter how many times he’d replay the scene in his head for centuries to come) who had pressed the trigger. It’d been his fingers that had been slick with blood and sweat, and they’d both been rendered clumsy by fear and fury. All he knew for certain was that suddenly the Master jolted, and his breath caught sharply before he stopped moving altogether, as eyes that mere inches from the Doctor’s own stretched wide with shock and betrayal.

“No! Nononono, hey!” The Master didn’t respond, and his eyes grew unfocused as he slumped. Frantic, the Doctor wriggled out from under his limp weight and he flipped him over, and the remaining breath left his lungs as he saw hole in the Master’s chest, directly over his right heart and pouring out blood. “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t—” he whispered, stuttering at the blood began to pool and the Master grew paler. “Get up!” He smacked the Master across the face to try and reorient him, but all the other Time Lord managed was a hazy blink in return. “Please get up, we have to go!”

BOOM!

The Doctor hunched down further, almost covering the Master as another wave of lethal heat seared over his head. They were out of time! Even the room’s indominable door appeared to be bucking under the heat, any longer now and it might not be able open at all! Still hunched over, the Doctor stood as tall as he dared and hauled the Master back by his shoulders until they were at the door. He slapped a palm across the biosensor, howling as the superheated metal blistered the skin of his hand, but not daring to move it until the door slid open with a blissful wave of cool air. Breath shallow against the pain, he yanked the Master out through the exit and didn’t stop until they’d reached the base of the staircase and the door slid shut behind them.

But they weren’t clear of danger yet. Smoke was still seeping out from underneath the door, and the Doctor could see that the metal was darkening and buckling by the second. There’s no stopping it now, it won’t hold! They had to evacuate the palace! But the impending inferno and the lives at risk felt distant in that moment, as he looked down at the Master in front of him.

He was deathly still, reclined exactly where the Doctor had dragged him, and there was blood was pooling out from under him as though the sonic charge had exited straight through. His breathing was shallow, borderline non-existent and slowing further with every breath. He’s…not healing? While even a Gallifreyan’s high capacity for healing couldn’t have fixed such a severe injury, he had expected the bleeding to stop at very least. The Doctor was on his knees in an instant, shaking the Master’s shoulders as he put pressure over the wound. “Damn it all, wake up please! You need to put yourself into a healing trace, quickly!”

Direct pressure on his wound managed to elicit a low groan of pain from the Master. His eyes opened infinitesimally, but there was little recognition there. “Thete…?”

“Please, if you don’t put yourself into a trance you’ll die!” Whatever else the Master had done, whatever betrayal the day had wrought, the Doctor couldn’t stomach that. From the bottom of his hearts, to the foundation of his very bones, every atom of him screamed against the sight of him on the floor as he continued to bleed out. Wordlessly, the Master’s eyes fell shut once more.

“NO! Wake up— Koschei please!”

This time, no amount of pressure could rouse him, and his breathing had become deathly shallow. The shot must have been too close to his hearts, he’s dying too quickly! Without another thought, the Doctor shut his eyes and gathered his own artron energy together, channeling it in through his palms.

Energy transfers between Time Lords were risky. Moreso in the Doctor’s current state; there was a significant chance that doing so would force him to pass out as well, right there in front of the oncoming inferno, and that would be the end of them both. But the Doctor didn’t pause, breathing in deeply through his nose as the energy began to stretch out between them in swirling tendrils, burying into the wound.

The room spun, vertigo tugging at the Doctor’s stomach as he felt his own lifeforce seeping away, but he stayed resolutely still. He fought back against his own looming unconsciousness until the very last moment, when at last he was forced to rip his hands away from the Master’s chest as he slumped over onto the floor next to him, struggling to prop himself up onto arms that felt boneless. Please, let that have been enough! Aside him, the Master’s eyes were still closed, and his face still looked achingly pallid.

But none of that mattered in the face of the Master’s breathing, which had become even once more, as residual artron energy sparked across his chest with every exhale.

He’d done it—the Master was alive!

The Doctor allowed himself a moment to flop limply to the floor in sheer relief, before grabbing a wall for support and forcing himself onto his feet mere seconds later. He felt exhausted in a way that went further than the significant toll of the evening. Frail, almost, as though he’d been stripped of his own vitality—

CREEEEEK!

He jumped, eyeing the door as its buckling approached what seemed to be terminal levels. They were out of time; they needed to leave now!

Thinking back on the evening, the Doctor would never quite understand where he’d found the energy to drag himself and the Master up the staircase and into the main hall. He simply knew that he had done so, because he must. Upon resurfacing, the Doctor stopped short at the sight of a grand window, horror-stricken at the full extent of the damage they’d wrought. Far above, bursts of artificial lightning appeared to be setting the clouds themselves alight, as untethered energy darted across the dome’s wiring shorted wiring. The hallway itself was already empty, but the Doctor could see that down past the courtyard the streets were filled with panicked residents running for the hills beyond the dome, as fire sprung up around them.

There were already bodies. He could see them, charred and dotted along the streets. There was so much screaming, and the air itself seemed to buzz with unrestrained energy and panic that sickened the Doctor to his core. I didn’t want this! This wasn’t what I’d planned! He wanted to throw rationality aside and scream into the streets that he’d been trying to help them, that he had to intervene, that he’d had an obligation to do what must be done!

His guilt was outmatched only by the anger he felt at the Master for having gotten them into this predicament. The Doctor stared down in renewed rage at where he remained slumped on the floor, only to startle at the sight of artron energy still dancing out from beneath the Master’s skin. Surely the effects from the transfer should have dissipated by now? But, far from slowing, it almost looked as though the artron appeared to be extending down his body and growing in mass.

With a swell of horror, it hit him: the transfer had been enough to keep the Master alive, but not enough to save his body. He was going to regenerate!

Although it felt almost obscene to voice, given the circumstances, there was a small, selfish, intrinsic part of the Doctor’s hearts that felt hurt by that, deeper than any betrayal. It felt unthinkable the Master—his husband, despite it all— would reach his third body, a fourth of his life gone, all before he was even two hundred! That part of his hearts wanted the Doctor to drop to his knees and brush aside the blood and soot, to memorize this face of his before it was lost to him for good. But the Doctor pushed those sentiments down, locking them away in his mind like a wailing child.

He didn’t have the luxury of giving into those feelings. Not now, or likely ever again. The Master had made sure of that.

Still, there was smoke billowing into the halls now, and a slow groan was starting to build within the walls as the building’s foundation took stock of the inferno within, and every moment he wasted strengthening the glow of regenerative energy beneath the Master’s skin. They had to leave— and fast! The Doctor looked around at the empty halls hopelessly before glancing back down towards the Master. He hadn’t a clue where the Master’s own TARDIS was, and his own was beyond the palace courtyard, far further than he could tow the Master all on his own. There was nothing else for it, he’d have to make his own way to his TARDIS and come back for him, or else the palace would take them both.

The Doctor pulled the Master under the relative protection of the grand window’s outpouching frame, allowing himself a last moment to stare. He remained pale, but his breathing was more comfortable now, and if it weren’t for the bloodstained clothing and artron energy sparking under his skin, one could almost think he were asleep.

He opened his mouth before shutting it again, wordless. What was there to say, really? Even if the Master had the faculties to hear it, the Doctor himself was unsure what words could possibly address the severity of his betrayal, much less the sincerity of the Doctor’s own regret and fear. So instead, he turned on his heel and ran, as fast as his aching body could take him. He ran out through the courtyard, past the double doors which remained flung open from palace’s inhabitants as they’d fled, and out past the outer walls. Far above him, the grand banners with the Master’s likeness had gone up in flames, and he dodged falling cinders of material as he wove his way back down towards where he’d landed.

And there she was. Relief welled up in his throat at the sight of his TARDIS, vanishing his unspoken fears that perhaps she’d been damaged or had abandoned him there. A moment later and he was inside, panting against the central console as the door behind him swung to a close.

Silence. Pure, blissful silence that felt whole worlds away from the screaming and burning of the city beyond the doors. Or from the sound of a sonic beam hitting charged metal, or boring a hole through living flesh—

The Doctor straightened up in a flash. There would be time to mourn later, but it was imperative he got back to the palace at once. He didn’t know how long his return to the TARDIS had taken but given the speed of the inferno and his reduced stamina, he already knew the answer was too long. He keyed in the coordinates of the palace interior, grateful that the Master hadn’t though to put any dematerialization restrictions on the building, before stopping himself just has his finger reached the final launch lever.

And then what? Came a whisper from the back of his mind, a place more sinister and shameful than even the sentiment he’d banished less than an hour before. The Master has killed thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. And he’ll never stop, he said so himself. So, you rescue him…and then what? He might even kill you himself. And for every death he causes, you’ll be partially to blame.

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed, embarrassed by his own cowardice as he threw the dematerialization lever with a snarl, ignoring the snide voice entirely.

I suppose I’ll stop him again then, and again, and again, he told himself, striding towards the door. For forever, if I must. For as long as it takes. But I won’t let him die!

He opened the TARDIS’s door, stumbling back at the blistering heat that flooded in from the room beyond. They’d landed in the throne room, where flames were already dancing up the once pristine walls, now burnished and yellowing under the heat. Behind the TARDIS, the throne itself appeared red-hot and softened, as though it were beginning to melt.

Immediately, the Doctor turned on his heel and ran towards the hall, back towards where he’d left the Master unconscious, and every step made his hearts sink further. The heat was worse here, increasing with every step closer as he jumped over cracked stone and dodged falling cinders on his way back towards the window. The Doctor didn’t think he’d ever sleep again if he’d left the Master to burn alive, his imagination running wild with mental imagery as his stomach turned. It can’t be too late, please, please, please—

By the time he reached the window, the Doctor told himself he was braced for any sight, be it the Master slumbering peacefully, or a body burnt beyond recognition. But the one thing he hadn’t expected was:

…Nothing?

He circled, craning his head down the hallway towards where they’d emerged from the stairwell, just to ensure he was in the right spot. But, no, this was certainly the right window, the bloodstains marring its base could attest to that. “Master?” He called out, spinning around desperately before coughing as the action forced him to take in lungfuls of hot smoke. “Master?!”

There was a crash off to his left, and a moment later he was knocked flat by a gust of air as the windowpane cracked under the heat. Above him, the Doctor watched as the flames began stretching closer, fueled by the influx of fresh air. He was gasping now, as much from smoke as from fear and desperation as he squinted into the dark for any sign of the Master, before hissing as his stinging eyes forced him to face the floor and crawl further down the hall.

But…there was something. The Doctor paused his crawling, just long enough to see that there were faint smears of blood along the floor, trailing off from the window. He crawled faster, following them back down the hall in the direction of his TARDIS until all at once, they stopped. He wheeled his head around, looking for any further tracks, or any sign of the other Time Lord at all, but there was nothing, and he screamed in frustration. “Where are you?!” he cried out to the room at large, empty apart from himself and the flames, as his voice was nearly lost under the crackle of the blaze and the crack of stone. Then the cracking changed, deepening, growing louder as dust trickled down through the air, and the Doctor had no choice but to clamber to his feet and dart back into the throne room, throwing himself into the TARDIS just as the ceiling caved down around them.  

There was a thunderous noise above the TARDIS, and her console pulsed a dull yellow in warning, but not five seconds later there was pure silence once more. The Doctor waited, ears straining as he limped over to the atmospheric readout and confirmed his suspicions. The whole palace had fallen, burying them utterly. He felt foolish even doing so, but he couldn’t stop his fingers from reaching out and running a scan over the wreckage for any signs of life, but there was no one apart from himself. No Xerbosians, and certainly no other Gallifreyan. And how could there be, with a million tons of stone and molten steel submerging them?

The Doctor’s breath was coming in gasps as he reeled, trying to make himself see reason. The Master couldn’t be dead. He’d have known if so, wouldn’t he? He’d have felt it! With as much visceral physicality as though he’d lost one of his arms. But he’d been in no condition to escape; the Doctor had hardly made it out himself, and that was without a hole in his chest!

Unless he regenerated there, alone. It was that same shameful voice he’d ignored earlier, oozing through his misery like tar. He might have made it to his TARDIS, or at least out of the palace. Maybe he knew you left him there alone to die? Or maybe he died straight after, because he stuck around looking for you—

“STOP IT!” the Doctor screamed, out loud and echoing around the empty console room as he clutched at his head. There was nothing else for it. Throwing caution to the wind, he closed his eyes and dropped the mental barriers he’d raised so violently earlier, reaching out.

Master?

The Doctor held his breath, hearts pounding in his ears as he waited with terror that grew over every second without a response.

And then…

Doctor.

No other words, simply his name. Backed with a palpable sense of relief that matched the Doctor’s own, as well as a pulse of cold fury that raised the hair on his neck.

But he was alive. That would have to be enough.  

Immediately, the Doctor raised his mental barriers again, using what little energy he had to triple their fortifications. Now that he’d confirmed the Master was alive, fear and relief were melting away, making way for indignation and anger that seeped from deep within his bones. The Master had betrayed him. The Master had disrupted the natural course of multiple planets and killed countless people. The Master had betrayed him! And he didn’t show the slightest bit of remorse, moreover he said he’d do it again—he will do it again. The Master betrayed him!

The thoughts reverberated around his skull, gaining both speed and acrimony. He could still feel the Master’s consciousness now, prowling around the edge of his own like a predator, trying to sniff out a hole in its enclosure. Their proximity was too close; it would be too easy to follow their connection and pinpoint the Doctor’s location.

He had to leave immediately. Leave Xerbos, leave Gallifrey, all of it. And this time, there would be no turning back.

His hands flew over the controls, and seconds later he was free-floating in the vortex with his fingers clacking through the navigation menu, unsure where to turn next. For the briefest of moments, the Doctor let himself ache. He’d rather be angry; there was an action to anger that he required, to override his body’s pain and fatigue. But underneath that anger there was an aching well of sadness for all that he’d lost (was losing—would continue to lose) that ran far deeper than his fury. Could he bear it? After all that had transpired, was he really owed nothing? The Master was lost, or rather, the Doctor could never allow himself to find him again. And now his home would be lost to him too, his planet, his research, Susan—

That gave him pause. And there it was again, that shameful, selfish voice: Do you really have to lose everyone?

It wasn’t defensible, not really. Perhaps it never would be. But the day had been too long, and the Doctor’s hearts were too heavy, and he didn’t have enough self-discipline left to stop himself from keying in the coordinates to his home, bypassing the basement entirely to land directly in their sitting room. Now was the time for speed, not subtlety. He threw open the TARDIS door, uncaring as it slammed into the curio cabinet of earthen goods, shattering it.

“Susan!” he called into the house, leaping over shards of glass.

She appeared a moment later, peering out from the kitchen with dark circles under her eyes, as though she’d been waiting up since his departure. “Grandfather? Rassilon what’s happened to you?! Are you alright?”

The Doctor realized he must look frightful, ashen and singed, dappled with the Master’s blood. He grabbed her hand. “Susan, I’m sorry but we have to leave this instant.”

“Leave?” Her eyes grew wide, but what trace excitement there was in her expression was overshadowed by fear as she took in his panic, scanning him over. “I don’t understand what’s going on. Where’s Grandpapa? And your face— why do you look old?”

For the first time that evening, the Doctor looked down and really studied himself, startling at what he saw. The hand around Susan’s own looked twice his usual age, and even his body appeared smaller as though he’d become frail over the span of a few hours. But how…? Then it came to him: the energy transfer! He’d felt disproportionately frail immediately after, hadn’t he? Saving the Master must have taken decades of this body’s lifespan, maybe more.

“I’ll explain later, I promise,” the Doctor lied, swallowing back bitterness, as he led her—almost dragging her—towards the TARDIS door. “But right now there’s no time!”

“Grandfather please, you’re scaring me!”

The Doctor didn’t answer, his mind was already far away and plotting their next move. He’d send a message to Braxiatel informing him that the Master was on Xerbos, then he’d dismantle that blasted TARDIS transceiver for good. Perhaps they could even recover the Keeper’s body. That would occupy the Master for some time, enough time to hide—

“Please talk to me!”

—But it wouldn’t stop him, not really. The Master’s words from hours before were still ringing in his mind with all the fervor of a prophecy. ‘It’ll never end, I swear it. I will hunt you down to the ends of the universe until you understand!’ No, the Master would come looking for them, as sure as the suns would rise—

“STOP!”

The Doctor snapped out of it, noticing that Susan had ground her heels in and was crying now, with fear and bewilderment that he couldn’t even begin to assuage. “Dear girl,” he began, scolding himself to remain composed for her sake, even as his vision began to swim. “I’m so sorry. For everything that I’ve done, for any distance I’ve placed between us, and for all the difficulties that are still to come. And I’m sincerely sorry that I cannot explain things to you now. All I can promise is that I love you dearly, and I will keep us safe no matter what. And, that I’ll never leave you again.”

She sniffed, pressing her lips together tightly as she regarded him motionlessly before giving him a small nod. All at once, she threw herself into his chest and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing into his shirt. The Doctor knew they were running out of time, but he couldn’t stop himself from returning the embrace with trembling arms, squeezing as tight as he dared

“But where will we go?” Her voice was small and imploring, muffled by the fabric of his ruined shirt.

The Doctor’s mind felt empty with despair, and over her head his eyes roved over the room, peering down the hall, towards the staircase that led towards his bedroom, and out past the windowpanes at the mountainside beyond. So many cherished details that needed to be committed to memory, for he was seeing them for what would surely be the last time.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly, finally allowing his own tears to fall. “I only know that we must go.” Finally, his gaze finally returned to the cabinet of earthen goods, shattered beyond repair from his landing.  

And an idea began to take form.  

Notes:

We've finally reached the end! I sincerely hope you've all enjoyed reading it, as much as I did writing it.

Thank you so much to everyone who has stuck with it this far! I can only apologize for the delay; although there was never a chance I wouldn't finish this fic, the fact that it took me years to get around to is, frankly, ridiculous. And, EXTRA special thank you to anyone who has commented along the way! They were a huge help, and an enourmous part of the reason this thing finally got finished. They make it feel more like a conversation, and less like me going door to door proselytizing about a story I've made up in my own head.

(Not that I'm above that.)