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The Master looks up and to be honest, it's a small miracle that he doesn't flinch, because out of all the people he expects to have tracked him down to a dive bar on the fringes of an absolutely insignificant galaxy, Yasmin Khan is not one of them.
"Yasmin Khan," he says. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
If looks could kill, he and his next five regenerations would all be dead on the floor. Yaz takes a deep breath, letting it out in a I can't believe this is happening huff.
"I need your help," she says.
The Master raises an eyebrow and leans back in his chair, throwing an arm over the back of it. "Oh?" he says, feigning innocence.
Yaz just glares at him.
Curiosity wins out. The Master downs the rest of his drink and sits up straight, gesturing at the chair opposite.
Yaz sits on the very edge of the chair, ready to run for it at the slightest hint that this isn't going the way she wants.
"Well, dear?" the Master says, quite enjoying how the pet name makes Yaz shiver. No doubt it makes her think of how shamelessly she and O flirted with each other, before the Master had revealed his true identity. That was a long time ago, maybe a couple of years by human measurement, but humans hold a grudge.
He can respect that.
"The Doctor was kidnapped," Yaz says. "And wherever they took her, I can't get to."
"Some sort of anti-human tech?"
"No," Yaz says. "I mean I don't know how to fly the TARDIS with that level of precision."
"Shame," the Master says, signaling for another drink.
"I don't know anyone else that can get her back," Yaz says. "And when I asked the TARDIS to find someone that could, she brought me here."
The Master can't help but be a little surprised at that. He was certain the TARDIS was still cross with him for…well, for any number of reasons. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on this, love," he says. "I'm trying to destroy the Doctor, why would I ever actively help her?"
Yaz lifts an eyebrow, challenging him. "The Doctor's told me about you," she says. "How many chances you've had to kill her, only to fail at the last minute. She thinks it's on purpose, because it's always such a stupid move for someone so smart."
Oh, that stings. The Master has to look away. He stares intently at the holographic dart board on the opposite wall until he hears Yaz sigh.
"They took her because they think they can use her regeneration energy to make themselves immortal," she says. "They want to use her as a living battery."
The Master isn't prepared for the surge of anger that courses through him, nor the images that flash through his mind.
A young child, lying on an exam table, wide eyes flickering around at all the equipment in the room.
An older woman, leaning over them, smiling, promising that this won't hurt a bit.
Golden light erupting from the child's body, their little screams echoing in the room that's been soundproofed for just this reason—
The Master gets to his feet so quickly that he knocks the chair over. "Take me to her TARDIS," he growls.
There will come a day when he is finally rid of the Doctor. But he will not lose her to that.
Yaz leads the way to the TARDIS, glancing over at him occasionally, doubt written all over her features.
The Master can't blame her, really. And maybe if this whole thing wasn't resurrecting thoughts and feelings he'd done his best to bury after the events on Gallifrey, he might actually enjoy her discomfort. But for now, all he can think about is getting the Doctor away from the people who have taken her.
The TARDIS is silent as he walks in. She may have brought Yaz to him, but that doesn't mean she's happy about it.
"Lovely to see you, too," he says, patting one of the crystalline pillars and chuckling when it flashes red at him.
"I managed to trace her energy trail to here," Yaz says, pointing at a starmap on one of the wall displays. "But then it just disappears."
The Master folds his arms, casually leaning against the console, and studies the map. His eyebrows lift as he looks from the map to the console. "You got this far on your own?" he asks.
"She's been teaching me," Yaz says.
"Hmm." The Master turns to the console. "Looks like they've got a barrier in place to repel artron energy."
"So how do we get through?"
"We aren't doing anything," the Master says, hitting a button on the console to open a slot on the underside. Out pops a vortex manipulator. "You are staying here, out of my way."
Yaz crosses her arms. "And I'm just supposed to believe that you'll actually rescue her?"
The Master shrugs as he fastens the vortex manipulator around his wrist. "Not my problem what you believe, love." And then he hits the button and disappears.
The Doctor is in agony.
She's strapped to some sort of structure, arms outstretched on either side of her, all sorts of cables and wires protruding from the hooks and needles jabbed into her skin. She can't move anything without a horrible stabbing pain shooting through her entire body, on top of the constant searing pain of her body pushed to the brink of regeneration.
The only thing that's saving her is that her captors seem to understand how much her body can take before a full regeneration is triggered. They've gotten quite good at pushing her to the very brink, harvesting the beginnings of that energy, and then letting her recover enough to avoid a full regen.
Her entire body suddenly jolts, and she has to bite back a cry of pain as she's lowered down to the ground, but only enough for her toes to touch the floor.
The tinted window suddenly turns clear, and she sees her captors standing on the other side.
"You've done us a great service, Doctor," one of them says. "Your regeneration energy has added many years to our soldier's lives."
The Doctor can't lift her head very high, but she still manages to fix them with such a deadly glare that one of them takes an instinctive step back. "So what are you gonna do when you drain me dry, huh?" she says. "You've bought yourself some time. Won't last forever."
The head captor laughs. "You are the progenitor of the Time Lords," he says. "Gifted with infinite regenerations."
The Doctor squirms at that. "You don't know what you're talking about," she says.
"Really, now?"
"Yeah," the Doctor retorts, putting on her best brave face. "I don't have infinite regenerations. The Time Lords stole my abilities then wiped my memory and stuck their twelve-regeneration cap on me." She pulls a face. "Okay, now granted, I did get granted an extra cycle 'cause otherwise I'd be dead now but—"
"Stop talking," her captor growls. "You're lying just to save yourself."
The Doctor raises an eyebrow, meeting his gaze. "Well, I suppose you'll find out."
And then the window goes black again, the Doctor is raised up into the air, and that same burning, searing pain lances through her body once more. This time, she sees golden energy start to dance across her skin.
With her last conscious thought, she sends a plea out into the universe.
Please help me.
The Master hits the ground and for a moment, it's all he can do to lie on his back and stare at the sky above. His stomach churns and his head spins. Oh, how he hates traveling with the Vortex Manipulator.
He staggers to his feet, throwing out a hand to steady himself against a tree, doubling over and breathing heavily through his nose until the urge to vomit all over the place passes.
He finally manages to stand up without the world spinning around him. He checks his pocket and pulls out his TCE, making sure everything is set to maximum.
Then he closes his eyes and reaches out with his mind, searching for the Doctor.
He feels her, but her presence is weak, stuttering in and out of existence.
He doesn't have much time. So he grips the TCE tight in his hand, squares his shoulders, and starts walking.
The first obstacle isn't much of an obstacle at all. Two guards, standing on either side of the entrance. Well, one is standing. The other is sitting up against the wall and appears to have fallen asleep.
Please help me.
The Master physically recoils at the words that echo in his mind. The Doctor is just mindlessly reaching out to anyone who might hear her. Which, in a backwater galaxy like this, full of people greedy to steal Time Lord abilities, isn't likely.
Which means she's in the sort of trouble that even her infuriating tendency to fumble her way out of can't handle.
"Hey!"
The Master snaps back to reality as the standing guard shouts at him. He can't help but to send a cheeky little wave before firing the TCE. He walks over and kicks what remains of the guard away with his toe, then crouches down in front of the sleeping guard. When the guard still doesn't wake up, he decides to do it himself and pokes him right between the eyes.
The guard groggily opens his eyes and gasps in shock.
"Good morning," the Master says in a sing-song voice. "I do believe you've got something in there that doesn't belong to you. If you would kindly tell me where to find her?"
The guard scrambles to bring his weapon up.
The Master rolls his eyes and grabs the muzzle of the gun, yanking it right out of the guard's hands. "Any more fumbled displays of bravado, or are you going to give me what I want?"
"N-never!" the guard practically whimpers. "I'll n-never tell you!"
The Master sighs dramatically. "Not the best choice," he says, and presses the TCE to the guard's forehead—right where he'd poked him before—and fires.
It's only when the guard has shrunken down to nothing that the Master realizes he needs a way in. "Got to work on that trigger finger," he mutters, looking around and spotting a rucksack tucked into a corner.
A quick search of said rucksack produces a keycard, which he tucks into the breast pocket of his coat.
He ignores the rifle he took from the guard in favour of a small sidearm he finds in a pocket, tucking it into another pocket as a backup. Then he ties his shoulder-length hair back to keep it out of his face and approaches the door.
The keycard gets him in, but it also seems to trigger some sort of alarm, unless there are always flashing strobe lights in their corridors, which he doubts.
Just inside the door, he comes across some sort of security checkpoint. A few blasts from the TCE and some fancy footwork leaves all of the guards dead and shrunk.
“Right, then,” he says, attempting to climb over the counter before he remembers that while it may look nice, this body was not granted with much physical prowess.
He clears his throat and tugs at his lapels, glad that no one was left in the room to witness that.
He finds a bank of security monitors and flips through them. Whether it's a skeleton crew or some sort of shift change, he doesn't know, but there aren't that many people. That's a good thing, because it means getting to the Doctor will be easier, but it's bad because, well, he wants to kill people.
Especially when he flips over to a monitor and sees her.
The Doctor is currently restrained to some sort of cylindrical device that's glowing an angry reddish-orange. Wisps of a familiar golden energy dance around the Doctor's body before being sucked into the device. She's either weak or unconscious, hanging lifelessly from her restraints.
The sight makes the Master slam a fist into the desk. How dare they.
“Hang on, Doctor,” he growls. “Don't you dare die on me here.”
Skeleton crew or not, making his way through the facility proves to be tricky. Turning the first corner sets off some kind of trap, lighting up the doorway with some sort of laser grid. It's only when he smells singed fabric that he realizes he's lost a chunk of his coat to it. He mutters a few choice words as he slaps at the smoldering edge of the fabric.
Distracted, he doesn't hear the approaching footsteps. Stars erupt in his vision as something cracks him over the back of the head, followed by a blow to the back of his knee. He hits the floor and manages to roll over just in time to jerk his head away and avoid a stomp to the face.
He brings the TCE up and fires, but his vision is blurry from the attack and he misses the first shot. He growls and scrambles to his feet, charging the guard with his shoulder and knocking him into the wall.
"Who are you?" the guard demands.
"I'm the one who's going to take back what you've stolen," the Master says, aiming the TCE at his forehead. "Now do you want to make this easy on yourself and tell me where she is?"
The guard nods, and the Master takes a step back—
—only for the guard to slash at him with a hidden knife. He stumbles back, clutching at his forehead, his fingertips coming away wet and stained red.
He fires the TCE and kicks the guard's shrunken body down the hall, finding at least a bit of satisfaction in the clattering sound it makes.
He uses his sleeve to try and stem the bleeding, slumping back against the wall to try and stop his head from spinning.
He reaches out with his mind again, but he can't pin her down this time. Which means she's either unconscious or—
"No," he says through gritted teeth. He won't entertain that possibility. Not until he's faced with incontrovertible proof.
The bleeding has slowed and he's a bit more steady on his feet, so he continues on—
—and a shrill alarm cuts through the old, rusting bunker.
"Just about out of patience," he mutters as he picks a direction and continues his trek.
"Wake up, Doctor."
The Doctor snaps awake and instantly lets out a cry of pain. Her entire body feels like it's burning up, like she'll look at her hands to see the flesh melted away to the bone.
Someone grabs her chin then and roughly tilts her head up, and she finds herself staring into the face of a woman she recognizes as the second-in-command.
"What do you want?" the Doctor manages to say, even though the effort of speaking makes the throbbing in her head even worse.
Her new tormentor doesn't say anything more. She just starts to yank out the needles embedded in the Doctor's skin.
The Doctor realizes what the woman is about to do. "Don't," she says. "All the regeneration energy they've taken from me and stored in there? It's too much. It'll kill you."
"Shut up."
Those are the last words the woman ever speaks, because as soon as she connects herself to the device, the sheer force of the energy overwhelms her and she drops to the floor, dead.
The Doctor lets out a cry of frustration, then shakes her head to try and clear it. "Stupid woman," she mutters.
Stupid though she may be, her tormentor has given her a gift: the act of violently ripping out all the needles and wires has loosened her restraints, and it's just what she needs to get one arm free, which is all she needs to free herself completely.
Time and space and reality itself is losing all meaning, and when it comes time to explain how she managed to get out of the chamber, retrieve her sonic, and trigger the facility's self-destruct sequence, all she'll be able to do is shrug and mutter something about luck.
For now, though, she has to get out.
The alarm makes things difficult. It feels like he can't progress more than a few meters before anywhere from one to half a dozen guards come storming in out of nowhere, and his TCE is starting to make a very worrisome noise every time he fires it off.
…help…
The Master almost doesn't hear the Doctor's faint plea, pinned down by gunfire. Bit busy now, love, he sends back, even though he has no idea if she can sense him.
Three more blasts from the TCE, and the device is smoking in his hand. He curses and shoves it into a pocket and switches tactics, choosing to sneak down a side corridor.
And there it is. The chamber where they're keeping her couldn't stick out more if they tried, all sorts of danger and warning and hazard signs plastered all over it.
He's just starting to formulate a plan to actually get inside when he hears something clatter to the floor around the corner. He grabs his TCE, checking the settings—low power, but enough for at least one good blast—before bringing it to bear.
And then the Doctor stumbles into view, staggering into the wall and just barely managing to stay on her feet. She squints at him, nose scronched up. "Thought I sensed you," she mumbles, and topples forward.
The Master rushes forward to catch her. She looks like hell. Her skin is about as white as her undershirt, or at least what her undershirt would look like if it weren't stained in blood and dirt and who knows what else. Her hair is greasy and unkempt, bits of it tangled in her ear cuff and the piercing in her other ear. She's visibly lost weight and her entire body trembles in his grasp.
The Doctor mumbles something then, one hand tugging at his shirt.
"Can't hear you, love," the Master replies.
"Gotta go," the Doctor mumbles. "Gotta go now."
The Master is about to ask her what she means when everything plunges into an angry red light.
"Self-destruct system has been activated. Evacuate immediately. Self-destruct system has been activated. Evacuate immediately."
"Huh," is all he can say. Sometimes, she surprises him.
Getting out is a bit easier than getting in, thanks to the Doctor's sonic. Slamming doors in people's faces might not be on the same level of satisfaction as blasting them with the TCE, but if it works, it works.
Plus, he won't have to listen to any of her sanctimonious lectures about unnecessary killing, and avoiding those is always a bonus.
Finally, they make it out of the bunker. The Doctor is barely conscious now, leaning heavily against him, and the tremors from the underground facility tearing itself apart aren't making it any easier.
"Let's hope that took the atron energy repulsion field down," the Master says.
The Doctor mumbles something incoherent and passes out completely.
"Brilliant," the Master says. "Leave me to do all the work, then."
And then, just when he's starting to worry about how they're going to get off this blasted planet, the familiar wheeze and groan of the Doctor's TARDIS fills the air.
The Doctor wakes up, feeling like her body has been replaced by a stone replica. Her mouth is dry, her lips cracked. Her head is pounding. When she finally manages to open her eyes, the bright light sears them.
“Don't try to move,” a gruff voice says from beside her.
The Doctor turns her head just in time to see the Master roll his eyes.
“What did I just say?” he mutters, getting to his feet.
She watches as he leans over her, long hair nearly brushing her nose, and checks the various sensors attached to her body.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asks, pointedly not looking at her.
The Doctor frowns. “Flashes,” she says, her voice hoarse. “Bits and pieces, here and there.”
“Hopefully you remember the part about me saving your life.”
The Doctor wants to reply with something witty but her brain is struggling with basic communication as it is. She groans instead.
“Feeling's mutual,” the Master mutters, finally satisfied with whatever he's looking at.
The Doctor's brain is finally kicking in and she frowns deeply. "You saved me?" she says. "Why?" He opens his mouth and she lifts a hand to wag her finger at him. "None of that no one can kill you but me stuff. Won't believe you if you do."
"You're insufferable."
"Likewise."
For a moment, the Master looks hopelessly out of his depth. Finally, he clears his throat. "What Tecteun did to you was bad enough," he says. "No way in hell I'm letting someone else do it again."
The Doctor grins groggily at him. "See?" she whispers. "You do care about me."
"Don't make me regret saving you," the Master retorts. "Now just…shut up and get some sleep, okay? The sooner you're back on your feet, the sooner I can get out of here."
The Doctor yawns heavily. "Tell Yaz I'm okay?"
"If you insist. Now, sleep already."
The Doctor closes her eyes, and in the moments before she drifts off, she swears she feels a kiss against her forehead.