Work Text:
And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.
They step blinking out of the TARDIS into the planet’s harsh summer sunlight. His watery eyes are still adjusting when he hears Susan shriek “Grandfather!” Fast as his old body can move, the Doctor turns, wondering what she’s gotten herself into this time--only to start, to feel his mouth open in a whispered, uncontrollable denial. He realizes it wasn’t him Susan was calling to.
Susan is running across the glen, and before the Doctor can say a word she’s in his arms. He clutches her to him—he’s in a new, fresh body. It’s far younger than the Doctor’s. His identity is still all too obvious. Susan buries her face in his black jacket, and her slick black hair is the exact same color as that of the newly-arrived man. The Master’s eyes, which the Doctor sees in Susan every day, haven’t changed at all in this new body. They glint at the Doctor.
The Master tilts his chin up, daring the Doctor to do something, to call Susan away or rush to her defense or shout at the Master not to touch her. The Doctor’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t believe the Master is so far gone as to harm their own descendant. Neither will he have this fight in front of their grandchild, and the Master suspects it. Is using it to his advantage.
The Doctor has protected Susan from the full extent of his husband’s crimes. It was easy enough to accomplish. Those transgressions had only been the object of horrified whispers in the highest council chambers, and nothing said there could ever have reached her ears. When she’d cautiously asked, after they’d left Gallifrey, whether they might try and find her other grandparent out among the stars, he’d given her a sharp “perhaps” and asked her not to speak of it again. He’d fostered the impression that it was all far too painful to discuss. In a way, it was.
She’d respected his wishes and kept her silence, never knowing that the Doctor obscured every trace of their presence with one single threat in mind. The Master must have heard that they’d been forced out of the safety of Gallifrey. He would have been listening, waiting for any such rumor. He would know that the sole child of his line traveled with his estranged husband. That they were friendless and alone. And so the Doctor knew that the Master would be hunting them.
Exile and hiding had trimmed the Doctor’s excesses. Susan kept suggesting that they visit 20th century Earth, that she resume schooling of some kind—wasn’t Earth, after all, a part of her blood? Couldn’t it be a second home to them, a new start?
No, said the man who had yearned all his boyhood to drive a train engine, who was terribly attached to humans, who wanted deeply to spend time on the island of his mother’s birth and simply rest his old bones a while. Not Earth, Susan. No, we can never go there. He told Susan that 20th century Earth was a foul, barbarous place. Instead he bounced them from one backwater to another, insisting that he was conducting important research on each.
But his researches had been rambling and purposeless, his notes wild, meaningless scrambles that would have frightened Susan, if she’d been old enough to understand them. Even as he had known that he ought to make the best of things, that he ought to regroup and make some proper life for Susan and himself, he could hardly think of anything but the threat that sat at the back of his mind like an appointment unkept, an obligation unmet. And in the end the Doctor’s efforts have been for nothing. Yes, pointless. He has been a fool.
“Show me in, Susan,” the Master instructs, staring over her dark head at his husband. His manner of addressing her is surprisingly unaltered--he might be reminding her to perform any due courtesy. Her elegant, highly articulated bones are so like his, and the Doctor feels comparatively old and clumsy in this worn, tired body. Though the Master’s warped into something mad and foul, the Doctor’s own body still remembers having been Theta. The Master’s regenerated, but the Doctor has no such shield from the immediacy of his past. If one of his hearts is hammering faster from fear, the other is insisting in equally-quickened beats that whatever the man before him has done, whatever else he’s become, this is still Koschei: more home than Gallifrey ever was, and right before him, at last at last at last. If he simply moved, they could touch.
Susan, holding her grandfather’s hand, walks back into the TARDIS. To the Doctor’s sinking horror, she keeps up a rapid patter about everywhere they’ve been, everything they’ve done. The Doctor follows them, wary and cautious and dazed. The Master lets her guide them all to a sitting room, lets her talk, and answers her questions about how he’s occupied himself since they last saw each other. After a fashion. The Doctor can hear lies and omissions in the voice he knows so well like wrong notes, dissonant chords introduced into a favorite song.
Susan and the Master have always been somewhat similar people: it’s no wonder they get along. They are of course both Time Lords, and kin, but beyond that, their minds work along similar lines. Both are highly receptive psychics of immense power, self-willed, with a clinging and intense fondness for those they love, a particularly keen terror of losing them, and an inclination to use violence not merely as a means of self-protection, but as a tool. Under the Doctor's strict guidance, Susan has buried this last tendency effectively--she has been told it’s very wrong to think that way. Guiltily, the Doctor understands that while he loves Susan, he is also a little afraid of her--of what she represents, of what she might do. The Doctor can imagine all too well what would happen to Susan if someone she trusted took it upon himself to tell her differently over the course of many, many years.
“My dear Susan,” the Master says, after some time, “lovely as it is to find you at last, your grandfather and I would appreciate a moment to catch up in privacy.”
“Oh!” Susan promptly blushes. “Oh certainly, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—Of course!” She scrambles up and out, but hesitates for a moment in the doorway. “Do you think you could put me to sleep tonight?”
She asks very shyly for the treat of her youth—her grandfather hypnotizing her down, dropping her off smoothly into unconsciousness. In such a sleep no terrors from the war that took her parents trouble her, and no restlessness disturbs her in the night. In former days, this heavy sleep freed her grandparents to map each other’s bodies with fresh excitement, secure in the knowledge that the girl was safe and that they wouldn’t be disturbed, as if they didn’t know the routes by long experience. And besides, everyone knew that using hypnosis gave you better dreams.
The Master, framed dark and pale against the deep red couch, smiles. “Naturally. I’ll be in. Run along, my dearest.” Even as she does just that, the Master turns to the Doctor. His soft, paternal look of affection hardens into something cold and frightening.
“You ran from me. Deliberately. Oh, I know what you’ve done. It wasn’t enough not to stand up for me in the Council. You didn’t even come to me when those hypocrites turned their backs on you as well. You know what you should have done—you should have summoned me, and let me come for you. Or sought me out yourself. You know I would have taken you in.”
“I didn’t know anything of the kind,” the Doctor counters evenly.
“Liar,” the Master hisses, leaning over the table and drumming on it with his fingers in that too-familiar tattoo. “Admit it, Doctor. You were afraid of me.”
“How did you find us then, hm? What methods did you employ to track us?” the Doctor scoffs. “Perhaps I have good reason to fear. You didn’t leave with a fanfare of trumpets and my kindest wishes, you know. People died. I can scarcely imagine what you’ve gotten up to out here alone, cut off from society.”
“Alone?” the Master raises an eyebrow. “Yes, I have been terribly alone. But I needn’t have been. You might have come with me and shared my exile.”
“And consented to become what you are?” The Doctor isn’t giving into his own guilt or the Master’s recriminations. There is such a thing as a bright-line rule of morality, and the Doctor refuses to be dragged into the ambiguities of the Master’s endless verbal balancing tests.
“And consented to follow me wherever my time-stream led.” The Master grabs the Doctor’s wrist in his hands. His thumb traces the thin skin over the Doctor’s pulse point, lingering on the soft, papery plane that stretched so very delicately over his vital blood. “It’s no more than what you vowed to do. It’s nothing to what I would have done to keep you.”
The Doctor knows better than to contest that, or even to think it an exaggeration.
“How did you find me?” the Doctor asks instead.
“You were foolish.” The Master smiles indulgently. “My own over-fond, too-trusting Theta. You left witnesses to your presence on several planets. You conversed with too many strangers. You let them discover too much about your true nature, and that of your craft. And I was searching, ready to capitalize on any such errors in judgment, of course.”
The Doctor feels ill. He’s thought himself so careful, so reserved, harsh enough to blunt any curiosity. But it hasn’t been enough, and he has no idea what he might do now to escape the mad, vengeful grasp of his former lover. In tightening his guard he's lost whole chunks of himself, became more cold and intolerant—he's become more like Koschei, in order that he might stand some chance of escaping the man. And it hasn’t been enough. It hasn’t worked. There are still whole parts of his nature that simply give him away, that leave an obvious trail, to one who knows him too well. He will have to go further, to incapacitate both the Master and those elements within himself if he and Susan are to have any hope of remaining free.
“I can tell you’re rueing some trifling indiscretion.” The Master’s affectionate smirk is a little too broad, and the Doctor can see the distempered rage of him lurking just beneath it, ready to snap. This isn’t the man he’d bound himself to. This is a man who’s transgressed too far to easily return. A man who he can’t trust, or dwell peaceably with, or love. A man who would kill just to keep the Doctor and Susan with him, and all in the name of that terrible affection. He’s done it before, and it will only be easier for him, now that he’s grown accustomed to death. Rassilon only knows what evil he’s done out here, in the wilds of space.
The Master chuckles. “Come now. You must try and see your little blunders as the enablers of a greater success, Doctor. The universe itself caught your mistake and corrected it, settling you back where you belong. You never were terribly interested in long term plans. Anyone could see you’re unpracticed in them. You’ll let me make these sorts of decisions in future, won’t you.” It isn’t even a question. “I’ve an interest set up with a War Lord—I hope to take control of his operation within perhaps a score of years. It will amount to a tidy little Empire for us. Merely a beginning, I know. But we will be secure there. Our Susan will be a princess—that will suit her nicely. We can rule rationally, benevolently, just as we planned. Now that we’re together, both finally free of those moribund traditionalists, there’s little we daren’t do. Now that you’re finally here.” The Master grins at him, smoothing his goatee with one hand. “I’m too delighted to have caught up with you to remain angry at your bout of ridiculousness. We can discuss it later. For the moment--right here, do you think, or our bedroom?”
The Doctor arches an eyebrow. “Hm?”
“Don’t be coy.” The Master rolls his eyes. “Anyone would think you had no idea what was going to happen when I inevitably got hold of you.”
The Doctor’s expression takes on a distinctly irritated cast. “Don’t mock me. I’m perfectly aware that I’ve remained in a rather decrepit form and you’ve gone out and traded up. I’ve no unrealistic expectations to disappoint.”
The Master looks at him in total confusion and then laughs. “Oh Thete,” he snickers, “my entirely shallow dearhearts. You can’t possibly imagine me to be as limited as that! You are yourself, and thus infinitely desirable to me.” He stands and pulls the Doctor up by his thin black silk tie, marching him towards the door. The Doctor comes protesting and sputtering. The Master seems not to hear. “My one intellectual equal, my greatest stimulation.” He grinds into the Doctor to show the sense in which he means it. “My own husband.”
“I intend to fuck this weary body of your boneless.” The Master licks his lips lasciviously. “I look forward to learning every wrinkle—I’m going to take prodigiously good care of you, darling. You are older, so perhaps a little slower to rise to the occasion, but no matter—I can taste your mind, and underneath all that umbrage and worry and nonsense you’re desperate for me, aren’t you?”
The TARDIS obligingly gives the Master the door to their bedroom. The Doctor curses the unwieldy ship (which it was never his responsibility to pilot until Koschei’s exile) for a traitor.
“I’ve missed you.” The Master navigates him back. The Doctor’s knees fold out from under him, he topples back onto the bed.
“I shan’t do this,” the Doctor insists, his chin jutting stubbornly up. “You’ve done too much, and it’s been far too long to simply—”
“Shall,” the Master corrects, “and it’ll never be too long. Not for you and I. And Theta?” He catches the Doctor’s chin and draws him into a possessive kiss. When he speaks again it is in a low rumble. “You must know I’ve done it all for you.”
The Doctor’s breath catches because of course he knows. That is, by far, the worst of it. Spoken aloud, the long-denied truth rings in his ears like a blasphemy or a death sentence. The Master only smiles beatifically.
“Hurry up—I’ll have you before I go and help Susan with her nightmares. I did promise,” he kisses the Doctor again, as if unable to keep from it, “and I never break my promises to those dear to me. I’ll return as quickly as I can.” The corner of his mouth twitches, and his fond, lively eyes dance. “After all, I plan on putting you to sleep tonight as well.”
*
The Master finally succumbs himself. After some minutes the Doctor, who pretended to pass out minutes before, opens his eyes. He slowly, cautiously, eases his sore limbs out of bed. He returns with a hypodermic needle, full of one of the chemicals he uses to make Susan’s sleeping draught, and stabs it into the flesh of the Master’s shoulder, emptying the needle with a single quick plunge. The Master shoots up, uncomprehending, and knocks the needle to the floor, where it breaks and shatters. Within the space of a few breaths, the Master’s confused struggles give way to a more profound, nigh catatonic sleep.
“Foolish, too-trusting Koschei,” the Doctor mocks in parody. It takes a lot of work--his thin arms, already battered from the night’s exertions, tremble with the effort--but he manages to drag the Master’s body out of bed, over the glinting, shining shards of glass on the floor, and out the TARDIS’s main door. Without letting himself look over his shoulder or turn, the Doctor stamps back in, hits the door control lever, and dematerializes.
In the morning he grimly explains to Susan that her grandfather was being chased by CIA agents in Gallifrey’s employ. Though he very much regretted going, he didn’t dare endanger them by staying on. The Doctor tells her that the Master loves Susan, yes, very much. He’ll send a communiqué when he can. One day, he’ll come back. Until then, they themselves can only go forward, hm?
Susan sniffles, but bears up well when the Doctor tells her that he’s relented: they can go to Earth, in the 20th century. She can even enroll in a school again. The Doctor had brushed the Master’s mind when it was at its most vulnerable, with the Master quite distracted. He knows now that the Master considers that era of Earth’s history too obvious to prove a real possible destination. He’ll look almost anywhere else before searching for them in the Doctor’s favorite haunts. They can, the Doctor hopes, hide in plain sight. And this time, the Doctor grits his teeth, they’ll manage not to leave an evidence trail by getting involved with the locals.